Constructions in Cognitive Contexts: Why Individuals Matter in Linguistic Relativity Research 9783110461343, 9783110459784

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Franziska Günther Constructions in Cognitive Contexts

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs

Editor Volker Gast Editorial Board

Walter Bisang Jan Terje Faarlund Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Amir Zeldes Niina Ning Zhang Editor Responsible for this volume Natalia Levshina

Volume 299

Franziska Günther

Constructions in Cognitive Contexts

Why Individuals Matter in Linguistic Relativity Research

ISBN 978-3-11-045978-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046134-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045986-9 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

| For my family

Acknowledgements This book presents the updated and revised version of my doctoral dissertation submitted to and accepted by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) in 2014. I am deeply grateful to all the people and institutions who supported me in realizing this project. Without them, it would never have been possible. First of all, I would like to thank my main supervisor Hans-Jörg Schmid for his immense support and his valuable and constructive suggestions during the planning and realization of the research reported in this book. My special thanks go to Thomas Geyer and Hermann Müller for making it possible for me to conduct the eye-tracking experiment and for providing me with the expertise and not least with the means and infrastructure I needed to collect and analyse my data. I am also indebted to Helmut Küchenhoff and, in particular, André Klima from the Statistisches Beratungslabor (StaBLab) at LMU Munich for their advice and support with the statistical analysis of the data from Experiment 1. I would furthermore like to extend my thanks to the following people for their support in realizing the two experiments at the core of this book: Sebastian Hoffmann for making it possible to test English native speakers at Lancaster University; Patrick Falb for technical support during the planning and running of Experiment 1; Susanne Grandmontagne for programming the online pre-test to Experiment 2; the IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften for providing the required server space and the Infodienst of LMU Munich for the mailing; Gebhard Grelczak for technical support; Ahu Göckçe and Dieter Drottleff for supporting me in using the labs and in recruiting participants; and, of course, all the many people who took the time and effort to participate in the experiments. I am also very thankful to all those people who inspired the research reported here and/or who provided me with feedback and ideas at different stages of its development: Kenny Coventry, Wolfgang Schindler, Beate Sodian, Thora Tenbrink, Dietmar Zaefferer, my colleagues at the English Department, as well as the members of the Modern Linguistics Colloquium. My special thanks go to my colleagues Kerstin Fuhrich, Judith Huber, Sylvia Jaki and Daphné Kerremans for their support and encouragement during the final stages of this project, to Paul Greenleaf for proofreading the manuscript and to my brother Sebastian for helping me with the layout of the final version. I also want to express my thanks to the reviewers and series editors, in particular Natalia Levshina, for their comments on earlier versions of this book.

VIII | Acknowledgements

Their suggestions have substantially contributed to improving the initial version. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the editorial team at de Gruyter Mouton, in particular Julie Miess, Birgit Sievert, Angelika Hermann and Nancy Christ. I am very indebted to the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for financial support in the form of a PhD scholarship, and for giving me the opportunity to meet many interesting and inspiring people. Finally, my special and very personal thanks go to my family and, in particular, to Christoph, for their love, patience, encouragement and support throughout all stages of realizing this project.

Contents Acknowledgements | VII List of figures | XIII List of tables | XVII Abbreviations | XIX 1  1.1  1.2 

Constructions in cognitive contexts | 1  Introduction | 1  Synopsis | 3 

2  2.1  2.1.1  2.1.2  2.2 

Setting the theoretical scene | 6  Linguistic relativity versus (?) usage-based linguistics | 6  Linguistic relativity | 6  Usage-based cognitive linguistics | 10  Linguistic construal, perceptual attention and the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale | 12  Construal types as analytical tools | 17  Windowing of Attention | 18  Weighting of Attention | 22 

2.3  2.3.1  2.3.2  3  3.1  3.1.1  3.1.2  3.2  3.2.1  3.2.2  3.3  3.3.1  3.3.2  3.3.3  3.3.4 

Construing spatial scenes in German and English | 27  Spatial language and spatial referent scenes | 27  Functions of spatial language | 27  Modelling static spatial scenes for linguistic reference | 29  Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 34  Search Spaces I: Topological spaces | 38  Search Spaces II: Dimensional spaces | 40  Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 48  Transitive non-nominal terms and constructions | 50  Nominal terms and constructions | 52  Intransitive non-nominal terms and constructions | 64  Spatial constructions as [form-degrees of object-focusedness construal meaning]-associations: An overview and analytical tool | 76 

X | Contents

4  4.1  4.2  4.3  4.4  4.4.1  4.4.2 

Attention, ‘ception’ and language: Basic considerations | 83  Construal and cognition | 83  Attention and selection | 84  Perception and cognition, or ‘ception’? | 86  Embodied cognition and language | 89  From specific experiences to perceptual symbols | 91  Perceptual symbols, language and language-cognition relations | 99 

5  5.1  5.2 

Constructions as [form-construal meaning]-associations | 106  Language as a dynamic network of associations | 110  [Form-construal meaning]-associations: Their formation and establishment | 112  Building [form-construal meaning]-associations | 113  Entrenching [form-construal meaning]-associations | 118  Two competing theories of construal meaning: Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory | 134  Construal theory and linguistic relativity | 138  Conventionalizing [form-construal meaning]-associations | 139  Micro-conventionalization of construal meanings | 144 

5.2.1  5.2.2  5.3  5.4  5.4.1  5.4.2  6  6.1  6.2 

7  7.1  7.2  7.2.1  7.2.2  7.2.3  7.2.4 

Spatial language, cognition and perception: Methods and hypotheses | 155  Construal and language-perception/cognition relations: Methodological considerations | 155  Linguistic and non-linguistic forms of interaction with spatial scenes: Hypotheses | 157  Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: Patterns of language- and speaker-specific variation | 162  German and English spatial language in use I: Previous research | 163  German and English spatial language in use II: A director-matcher language game experiment | 167  Method and procedure | 167  Data | 180  Analytical dimensions and parameters | 190  Analysis 1A: Spatial Construction Types (SCTs) | 193 

Contents | XI

7.2.5 

7.2.6  8  8.1  8.2  8.3  8.3.1  8.3.2  8.3.3  8.3.4  8.3.5  8.3.6  8.4  8.4.1  8.4.2  8.5 

9  9.1  9.2  9.3 

Analysis 1B: Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs) and frequency distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs | 244  Summary and discussion | 271  Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: The role of cognitive contexts | 277  Methodological and theoretical inspirations from previous research | 281  Hypotheses and general design features | 288  Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world eye-tracking experiment | 290  Pre-test and participant recruitment | 291  Main test: Method and procedure | 296  Data, analytical categories and steps of analysis | 307  Analysis 2A: Variable Speakers/contrast-inducing cognitive contexts | 321  Analysis 2B: Consistent Speakers/preference-defined cognitive contexts | 353  Summary and discussion (Analyses 2A and 2B) | 386  Analysis 2C: Cognitive context as a determinant of processing strategies? Findings from a post hoc analysis | 395  Analysis 2C-1: Patterns of visual attention allocation I (LO-RO Ratio Values) | 396  Analysis 2C-2: Patterns of visual attention allocation II (LO-RO Abs Values) | 400  Summary and discussion: Main and post hoc findings (Analyses 2A, 2B and 2C) | 404  Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond | 409  Summary of findings | 409  Limitations and perspectives for future research | 412  Final conclusions | 415 

References | 419  Appendix | 459  Author index | 473  Topic index | 481

List of figures Fig. 1: Bottle-on-table scene. | 12  Fig. 2: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. | 15  Fig. 3: Bottle-in-box scene. | 23  Fig. 4: Minimal Spatial Situation Model (MSSM). | 30  Fig. 5: MSSM: The bottle is on the table. | 31  Fig. 6: MSSM: The bottle is in the corner (of the table). | 32  Fig. 7: MSSM: The bottle is in front of me. | 33  Fig. 8: TOP(ological)-schema for English and German. | 38  Fig. 9: Dissociation of source and target of a FoR: The ball is in front of the box. | 40  Fig. 10: The RO as target and source with the intrinsic FoR: The ball is in front of the car. | 42  Fig. 11: Relative FoR-mapping: The ball is in front of the box. | 44  Fig. 12: Conflicting FoRs. | 45  Fig. 13: Non-conflicting FoRs. | 46  Fig. 14: Dimensional preposition use: The bottle is behind the table. | 51  Fig. 15: ROs with natural parts. | 53  Fig. 16: Spaces singled out by nominal DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. | 61  Fig. 17: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: English and German repertoires of spatial referential constructions with nouns and/or adjectives. | 63  Fig. 18: Possible LO-locations singled out by simple dimensional adverb constructions: A car went by with a monkey (=M) in front and a dog (=D) behind. | 71  Fig. 19: The middle of Perception Space as RO. | 74  Fig. 20: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: English and German repertoires of spatial terms/constructions. | 77  Fig. 21: Referent scenes with and without intrinsically oriented ROs. | 79  Fig. 22: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. | 82  Fig. 23: Feedback-loop model I. | 99  Fig. 24: Feedback-loop model II. | 102  Fig. 25: Feedback-loop model III. | 141  Fig. 26: Experiment 1 – setting. | 170  Fig. 27: Experiment 1 – example of a director target set (item T2 – cup on table). | 172  Fig. 28: Experiment 1 – to-be-described pictures (target sets). | 177  Fig. 29: Experiment 1 – example of a matcher distractor set (item D1 – keys). | 179  Fig. 30: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of dimension-replacive utterances by language and target item. | 187  Fig. 31: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs (German versus English). | 199  Fig. 32: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs by RO-shape type (German versus English). | 203  Fig. 33: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types by uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English). | 207  Fig. 34: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs (German versus English). | 255  Fig. 35: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Specific Level SCTs (German versus English). | 256 

XIV | List of figures

Fig. 36: Experiment 1 – ODVs and frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by ROshape types (German versus English). | 260  Fig. 37: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types based on uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English). | 264  Fig. 38: Experiment 1 – individual patterns of use of Intermediate Level SCTs (English-speaking participants). | 266  Fig. 39: Experiment 1 – individual patterns of use of Intermediate Level SCTs (German-speaking participants). | 269  Fig. 40: Experiment 2 – target item 3 (book on shelf) from the pre-test (with sample description). | 294  Fig. 41: Experiment 2 – procedure (main part). | 298  Fig. 42: Experiment 2 – versions of item C4 (bow on wrapped gift) as used in the RECOGNIZE task. | 305  Fig. 43: Experiment 2 – versions of item D33 (giraffes) as used in the RECOGNIZE task. | 306  Fig. 44: Experiment 2 – frequency distributions of space-focused and object-focused referential utterances by RO-shape types. | 308  Fig. 45: Experiment 2 – phase structure of the description process (DESCRIBE task). | 317  Fig. 46: Experiment 2 – phase structure of the viewing process (VIEW task). | 319  Fig. 47: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): BINs 1– 75. | 329  Fig. 48: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers). | 331  Fig. 49: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): BINs 1– 9. | 332  Fig. 50: Experiment 2 – objects in focus during the subphases of DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers. | 336  Fig. 51: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) and Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers). | 340  Fig. 52: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV VIEW/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–75. | 346  Fig. 53: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV VIEW/Variable Speakers). | 347  Fig. 54: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD VIEW/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–75. | 350  Fig. 55: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD VIEW/Variable Speakers). | 350  Fig. 56: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1– 75. | 361  Fig. 57: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1– 9. | 362  Fig. 58: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers versus DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–9. | 363  Fig. 59: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). | 363  Fig. 60: Experiment 2 – objects in focus during the subphases of DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers. | 364  Fig. 61: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1– 75. | 369 

List of figures | XV

Fig. 62: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). | 370  Fig. 63: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE vs. DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75, ODV (DV DESCRIBE) < 1. | 371  Fig. 64: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE vs. DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75, ODV (DV DESCRIBE) > 2.5. | 372  Fig. 65: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV VIEW/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1– 75. | 375  Fig. 66: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV VIEW/Consistent Speakers). | 376  Fig. 67: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1– 75. | 378  Fig. 68: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers). | 379  Fig. 69: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). | 381  Fig. 70: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). | 382  Fig. 71: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types): BINs 1–75, ODV < 1. | 396  Fig. 72: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types): BINs 1–75, ODV > 2.5. | 397  Fig. 73: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types), ODV < 1. | 398  Fig. 74: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types), ODV > 2.5. | 399 

List of tables Tab. 1: Attentional construal types. | 25–26 Tab. 2: German and English repertoires of topological terms. | 36 Tab. 3: German and English repertoires of dimensional terms. | 37 Tab. 4: Schematicity Theory versus Differentiality Theory. | 135  Tab. 5: Experiment 1 – participants. | 169  Tab. 6: Experiment 1 – target items and their features. | 178  Tab. 7: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of dimension-replacive utterances by language and target item. | 186–187  Tab. 8: Experiment 1 – Spatial Construction Types (SCTs). | 195–198  Tab. 9: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs (German versus English). | 200  Tab. 10: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs by RO-shape type (German versus English). | 202  Tab. 11: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types by uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English). | 207  Tab. 12: Experiment 1 – ODV-calculation scheme. | 246–247  Tab. 13: Experiment 1 – estimated regression coefficients for fixed effects (between- and within-languages). | 251  Tab. 14: Experiment 1 – covariance parameters for the random intercept (between- and withinlanguages). | 251  Tab. 15: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs (German versus English). | 255  Tab. 16: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Specific Level SCTs (German versus English). | 255–256  Tab. 17: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by RO-shape types (German). | 260  Tab. 18: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by RO-shape types (English). | 261  Tab. 19: Experiment 2 – speaker types identified from the pre-test. | 295  Tab. 20: Experiment 2 – frequency distributions of space-focused and object-focused referential utterances by RO-shape types. | 308  Tab. 21: Experiment 2 – analytical steps and categories. | 320–321  Tab. 22: Experiment 2 – dataset (Variable Speakers). | 323  Tab. 23: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): ROrelated parameters. | 325  Tab. 24: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): LOrelated parameters. | 326  Tab. 25: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers). | 328  Tab. 26: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers). | 341  Tab. 27: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers). | 341  Tab. 28: Experiment 2 – dataset (Consistent Speakers). | 355 

XVIII | List of tables

Tab. 29: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): ROrelated parameters. | 355–356  Tab. 30: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): LOrelated parameters. | 356  Tab. 31: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). | 358  Tab. 32: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): ROrelated parameters. | 367  Tab. 33: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): LOrelated parameters. | 368  Tab. 34: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). | 368  Tab. 35: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). | 370  Tab. 36: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DESCRIBE tasks/Consistent Speakers). | 373  Tab. 37: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values (DV VIEW/Consistent Speakers). | 376  Tab. 38: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers). | 379  Tab. 39: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). | 381  Tab. 40: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean Response Accuracy data (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). | 381–382  Tab. 41: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). | 382–383  Tab. 42: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean Response Times (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/ Consistent Speakers). | 383  Tab. 43: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Abs Values (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types). | 401  Tab. 44: Experiment 1 – stimuli used in the object identification and naming task. | 459  Tab. 45: Experiment 1 – instruction sample (INSTR) and items used in the training session (TR). | 459  Tab. 46: Experiment 1 – distractor items used in the main task. | 460  Tab. 47: Experiment 2 – stimuli used in the web-based pre-test. | 466  Tab. 48: Experiment 2 – stimuli used in the training session. | 469  Tab. 49: Experiment 2 – target items used in the DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions. | 470–471  Tab. 50: Experiment 2 – distractor items used in the DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions. | 471–472 

Abbreviations spatial language LOC

locative/spatial expression or construction

FoR

Frame of Reference

DIM

dimensional term or phrase e.g. at the front, vorne ‘front-DIM-S-ADV’, etc.

TOP

topological term or phrase e.g. on the table, darauf ‘there-on-TOP-P-ADV’

DIST

distance-denoting term e.g. near, far

DIR

directional term e.g. to, towards, in Richtung ‘in direction’

RO

Reference Object e.g. table in The bottle is on the table.

LO

Located Object e.g. bottle in The bottle is on the table.

SPF

space-focused

OBJF

object-focused

H1

first horizontal/sagittal axis (front-back)

H2

second horizontal/lateral axis (left-right)

V

vertical axis (top-bottom)

syntactic functions and categories SUBJ

subject of a sentence or clause

OBJ

object of a sentence or clause

ADVB

adverbial

PREMOD

premodifier

ADV

adverb

DIM-S-ADV

simple dimensional adverb e.g. vorne ‘front’, hinten ‘back’

TOP-S-ADV

simple topological adverb e.g. inside, innen ‘inside’

P-ADV

prepositional adverb (can be DIM or TOP) e.g. darauf ‘there-on’, davor ‘there-in-front’

DEICT-ADV

deictic adverb e.g. here, there

XX | Abbreviations

bbreviations ADJ

adjective

DIM-ADJ

dimensional adjective e.g. front, vorder- ‘front’

DIST-ADJ

distance-denoting adjective e.g. near, far

N

noun

CPD-N

compound noun e.g. Vorderseite ‘front-side’

PARTN

part- or portion-denoting noun e.g. corner, side

GEN-PARTN

general part- or portion-denoting noun e.g. side, Seite ‘side’

SPEC-PARTN

specific part- or portion-denoting noun e.g. corner, handle

DIM-N

dimensional noun e.g. (the) front, (the) back

DIR-N

direction noun e.g. Richtung ‘direction’

P/PP

preposition/prepositional phrase

P-SURFACE SPACE

surface space-denoting preposition e.g. on, auf

P-BOUNDARY SPACE

boundary space-denoting preposition e.g. an

P-INTERIOR SPACE

containment-denoting preposition e.g. in

CPLX-P

complex preposition e.g. rechts von ‘(to the) right of’

DIR-P

directional preposition e.g. to, towards

TOP-P

topological preposition e.g. at, on

V

verb

V-POSS

possessive verb/possession denoting verb e.g. have

1 Constructions in cognitive contexts It is the concept of linguistic unity which is theoretically problematic; not the concept of linguistic diversity. (Harris 1998: 46)

1.1 Introduction In recent years, interindividual differences have become something of an “in thing” (Birdsong 2012: 255) in linguistics. How individual speakers differ in their language behaviour and, very likely, in their patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge is increasingly turning into a matter of interest for researchers from a whole range of linguistic subdisciplines. What is particularly remarkable in this context is that the focus of investigation has been extended from first and second language learners and speakers with language impairments to healthy adult native speakers. More and more evidence is provided which indicates that no two speakers of the ‘same’ language really share the exact same set of linguistic knowledge, and that this, by far, does not only account for lexical knowledge (e.g. Andrews and Lo 2013; Barlow 2013; Chipere 2009; Dąbrowska 2012; Fernald and Marchman 2011; Fine et al. 2013; Johnstone 2000; Street and Dąbrowska 2014; Verhagen and Backus 2010; Verhagen 2011). Such findings have very strong implications. On the theoretical side they seriously call into question the idea that all mature speakers share knowledge of the same grammar (cf. e.g. Dąbrowska 2012). On the methodological side they identify averaged group data, as they are at the core of the great majority of experimental and corpus research, as subject to considerable limitations of interpretation because they indicate that “in the worst case, group data describe a behavioral pattern that does not occur within a single individual” (Zimmerer, Cowell, and Varley 2011: 492; see also Barlow 2013: 444; Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 61; Dąbrowska 2014). These implications hit particularly hard those subdisciplines and fields of research in linguistics which focus on investigating and defining the relations between language and cognition, since they identify their major sources of linguistic information – data from multi-speaker corpora, elicited group data, as well as information provided in grammar books or gained from introspection – as potentially unreliable. In usage-based cognitive linguistics, which mainly relies on the first two sources of data, interindividual variation is just another (long neglected) factor which marks the following questions as in urgent need of investigation: what is the nature of the relation between the individual speaker and the collective of

2 | Constructions in cognitive contexts

the speech community of which he or she is a member? Or, put differently, how can we best define and investigate language given (a) that it is both and at the same time a form of individual knowledge and a conventional, socio-cultural construct, and (b) that, in usage-based understanding, the linguistic knowledge of an individual emerges from exposure to language use in the speech community of which he or she is a member? While these issues are increasingly coming into the focus in usage-based cognitive linguistics (e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 33–44; Croft 2000: 115, 172 and 183, 2009, 2011; Ellis 2011; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010: 6; Harder 2010, 2011; Hruschka et al. 2009; Kemmer and Barlow 2000: ix; Schmid 2014, 2015; Schmid and Mantlik 2015; The Five Graces Group 2009), other fields of research at the interface between language and cognition have left them largely untouched. This is particularly the case for linguistic relativity or language-and-thought research, i.e. the relatively heterogeneous set of theories and empirical studies that focus on the following questions: can language influence non-linguistic cognition and/or behaviour? If so, how, in which respects, and to what extent (cf. e.g. Boroditsky 2003; Everett 2013; Gentner and GoldinMeadow 2003b; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005; Gumperz and Levinson 1996c; Lucy 1997; Niemeier and Dirven 2000; Pütz and Verspoor 2000; Wolff and Holmes 2011)? Although in many respects a field characterized by considerable “progress on the empirical front” (Lupyan 2012) and by extensive methodological debate (e.g. Bohnemeyer, Eisenbeiss, and Narasimhan 2006; Cardini 2010; Casasanto 2008: 67; Lucy 1992b, 2004; Pederson 2007: 1019–1028; Pourcel 2002, 2009), it is still common in linguistic relativity research to base predictions about language-associated patterns of non-linguistic behaviour by individual speakers on averaged or even grammar book-derived language data that relate to the collective behaviour of speech communities. Differences between individual speakers’ patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge (i.e. their internal or cognitive contexts) have, surprisingly, hardly been taken into account yet in this field, let alone been investigated systematically (cf. Bohnemeyer, Eisenbeiss, and Narasimhan 2006: 15–16; Everett 2013: 272; Kay 1996; Vorwerg and Rickheit 1999b, 2000). The research reported in this volume addresses this issue. For this purpose it brings together recent usage-based approaches to investigating language use in context(s) and to defining the relation between individuals and the collective (e.g. Croft 2009; Schmid 2014, 2015), embodied and simulation-based approaches to cognition (e.g. Barsalou 1999, 2008; Barsalou et al. 2008; Pecher and Zwaan 2005; Zwaan 2004, 2008) and state-of-the-art methodology for identify-

Synopsis | 3

ing language-perception/cognition relations (e.g. Altmann and Kamide 2004; Hartsuiker, Huettig, and Olivers 2011; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010). On this basis it provides empirical evidence which strongly suggests that variation in and between cognitive contexts is a central determinant of the (non-)occurrence of specific correlations between speakers’ use of linguistic constructions and their non-linguistic behaviour towards spatial scenes. In this way this volume contributes to current theoretical and methodological debates in language-cognition research. With regards to theory, it argues that the fields of usage-based cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity research can and should cross-fertilize, and it demonstrates how this can yield new insights into the nature of the relation between language, perception and cognition. On top of this, it opens up new theoretical and methodological perspectives for future work on language-perception/cognition interrelations. In particular, it presents empirical evidence which suggests that the level of manifestation and, eventually, the mode of investigation of language-cognition/perception interactions requires to be (re)defined in more individual- or speakerspecific terms, rather than with a focus on cross-linguistic differences and whole speech communities.

1.2 Synopsis This volume is divided into nine chapters. Chapters 2 to 6 focus on theory. They present and discuss current views on language-cognition relations, propose a model of language-perception/cognition interrelations on this basis and introduce the linguistic structures and hypotheses investigated by the empirical part of this work. This part is presented in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9 integrates the theoretical and the empirical perspectives, discusses their more general implications for modelling and investigating the relations between language, perception and cognition, and provides an outlook on possible future research. More specifically, Chapter 2 provides an overview of approaches to language-perception/cognition relations in linguistic relativity research and usagebased cognitive linguistics, and makes the attempt of arriving at an integrative theoretical position. It identifies the cognitive linguistic concept of construal as a bridging concept between these theoretical frameworks and, accordingly, presents attentional construal types as an analytical tool for the investigation of language-perception/cognition effects. Taking this as a basis, it introduces situated referential uses of German and English complex spatial constructions of the type vorne rechts (auf dem Tisch) (‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV (on the

4 | Constructions in cognitive contexts

table)’)/in the front right-hand corner (on the table) (referred to as DIMDIM(TOP)constructions) as the specific subject of investigation to which this tool was applied. Drawing on concepts from the philosophy of space and the psychology of spatial scene perception, it identifies as a major dimension of variation in spatial scene construal the allocation of attention either to the object-level (object-focused construal) or the spatial-structural level of such scenes (spacefocused construal). Chapter 3 provides an overview of German and English static spatial language constructions and analyses them in terms of their potential degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings. Taking a comparative perspective, it provides the basis for two of the central hypotheses that were tested in the empirical part: firstly, different (German and English) DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types differ in the degree to which they construe their referent scenes in an object-focused (as opposed to space-focused) manner. Secondly, speakers of English tend to construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a more object-focused manner than speakers of German. Chapters 4 and 5 provide the theoretical framework for enabling an investigation of these hypotheses in the first place. Chapter 4 provides essential information on the role of attention in perception and cognition. It models the relations between perception, cognition and language on the basis of simulationbased theories of embodied cognition (in particular Barsalou 1999) and, in this course, (re)defines linguistic constructions as [form-perceptual simulation]associations. Chapter 5 integrates this model into a usage-based cognitive linguistic framework. It proposes two alternative theories of how attentional patterns might become associated with linguistic constructions in individuals, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory, and discusses whether and, if so, to what extent these theories suggest or license cross-linguistic and interindividual variation. Chapter 6 applies these theories to DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions and provides two theory-specific sets of hypotheses. These address the following issues: firstly, (how) do German and English speakers’ manners of linguistically interacting with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes differ? Secondly, are different construction types associated with different patterns of attention allocation to spatial scenes? If so, how and under what external and internal contextual conditions do they become manifest? These hypotheses form the basis of the empirical investigations reported in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 presents Experiment 1, a director-matcher language game experiment (cf. e.g. Brown-Schmidt, Campana, and Tanenhaus 2005; Levinson and Wilkins 2006a: 11; McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005) which

Synopsis | 5

was targeted towards investigating language-specific patterns of use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in German and English as well as patterns of language-internal variation in dependence on (a) external contextual conditions (referent scene features) and (b) internal/cognitive contextual conditions (as indicated by speaker-specific preference patterns). This experiment yielded a picture of marked differences between language-specific patterns of conventionalization, as well as of considerable language-internal variation. Based on this, the level of cross-linguistic comparison was identified as unsuited for investigating construction-associated language-perception/cognition effects. Accordingly, Experiment 2 (Chapter 8) took a language-internal (German only) approach to investigating possible relations between linguistic preferences and patterns of visual attention allocation to, as well as memory for DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes and their features. It used a combination of a visual world eye-tracking paradigm, a scene viewing task and a recognition memory test (cf. e.g. Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008) to investigate under what cognitive contextual conditions differences in construction use are indeed systematically associated with different patterns of visual attention allocation to spatial referent scenes. Counter to previous research, Experiment 2 identifies the absence of a clear preference for a particular construction type, and thus the simultaneous availability of referentially synonymous formal alternatives within the same speaker, as a cognitive contextual environment that is likely to trigger the occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects. Accordingly, it provides evidence indicating that specific construction-associated attentional effects are highly unlikely to occur in speakers with a strong preference for one construction type only. A post hoc analysis of the data from Experiment 2 complements this finding by indicating that differences in preference structures (no preference versus strong preference for one construction type only) might be associated with different, more holistic versus more incremental, processing strategies during the planning and production of referential utterances. Chapter 9 summarizes and sets into relation the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. It conclusively discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings, but also draws attention to their limitations. Based on this, it extends the view to further external and internal contextual factors relevant to the situated use of language that were not covered by the experimental designs, and it provides an outlook on possible future research.

2 Setting the theoretical scene … much of Whorf’s thinking about the internalized linguistic system is compatible with newer paradigms in linguistics and science at large. (Lee 2000: 61)

2.1 Linguistic relativity versus (?) usage-based linguistics Usage-based cognitive linguistic research and linguistic relativity/languageand-thought research are both centrally concerned with the relatedness of language to cognition. More specifically, they hold that particular linguistic forms are, via their meanings, related to particular general cognitive abilities and/or forms of non-linguistic behaviour. These form-to-meaning-to-cognition relations are usually (often implicitly) assumed to be relatively stable across individuals or even across languages, i.e. to constitute a speech-community wide or even cross-linguistically valid phenomenon (cf. e.g. Croft 2009: 397, 2011: 241; Lupyan 2012; see also below). The two theoretical frameworks differ, however, to the extent that they take different perspectives on language-cognition relations. Linguistic relativity approaches focus on how (form-related) linguistic habits can influence cognition, whereas cognitive linguistic theories hold that linguistic form-meaning associations (constructions) are grounded in and even motivated by general cognitive abilities and principles. That is, generally speaking, relativity theories focus on language-to-cognition relations, cognitive linguistic theories on cognition-to-language relations. The aim of this section is to compare and arrive at an integrative position of these two perspectives and, in this way, to lay the ground for a usage-based cognitive linguistic approach to linguistic relativity effects.

2.1.1 Linguistic relativity The field of research that is variably referred to as linguistic relativity research, language-and-thought research or Whorfian research, is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity (cf. e.g. Wolff and Holmes 2011). What theories and investigations from this field have in common is, firstly, that they assume that language influences non-linguistic cognition and behaviour in some way. Secondly, they at least indirectly position themselves in relation to Benjamin Lee Whorf, although there is hardly any agreement as to how Whorf’s writings

Linguistic relativity versus (?) usage-based linguistics | 7

(e.g. Whorf [1940] 1956) are to be interpreted exactly (cf. e.g. Gumperz and Levinson 1996a; Lee 2000). Apart from this rather vague area of overlap, linguistic relativity theories and research projects differ at least along the following dimensions: (1) The theories of language and language learning/acquisition on which they are based: here positions range from generative-universalist via anthropological to cognitive approaches (cf. e.g. Gleitman and Papafragou 2005 versus Everett 2013 versus Pederson 2007). What is remarkable, however, is that in particular many experimental studies do not even explicitly define or state their theoretical position at all (cf. e.g. Lupyan 2012). (2) The types of linguistic structures that are considered as potential triggers of relativity effects: with this dimension a focus is variably on grammatical or lexical-semantic structures (cf. e.g. Bickel 2000: 165 versus Casasanto 2008). In addition, positions differ as to which role is ascribed to language use in general, and to frequency of use in particular (cf. e.g. Bickel 2000: 165; Hays 2000). (3) The semantic/cognitive domains like, for instance, colour, motion, space, etc. that are considered eligible to relativity effects (cf. e.g. Enfield 2000: 150; Everett 2013: 30; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 639–640; Huettig et al. 2010; Pederson 2007: 1036). (4) The dimensions of cognition and/or the forms of non-linguistic behaviour that can potentially be influenced or triggered by language: these include basic processes and abilities like attention, perception, categorization or memory representation (e.g. Athanasopoulos 2008; Athanasopoulos et al. 2009; Bosse and Papafragou 2010; Lucy 1992b; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Strömqvist, Holmqvist, and Andersson 2009) and/or higher-level abilities like causal or social reasoning, problem-solving or inferencing (e.g. Au 1983; Bloom 1981; Papafragou, Massey, and Gleitman 2006). (5) Very crucially, the nature of language-cognition effects: with regards to this aspect, a major point of debate and disagreement relates to how pervasive and, in particular, how permanent such effects are. In fact, whether language-associated effects on cognition and non-linguistic behaviour are assumed to only occur on-line, i.e. during language use (thinking for speaking; Slobin 1991, 1996, 2007; see also Athanasopoulos and Bylund 2013; Guo et al. 2009), or also off-line, i.e. independently of current language use, constitutes a main criterion for classifying language-and-thought theories (cf. e.g. Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 642). The same accounts for whether or not permanent effects have a determinative component, i.e. restrict speakers’ options of conceptualization (weak versus strong version of the linguistic

8 | Setting the theoretical scene

relativity hypothesis; cf. e.g. Au 1983: 155–156; Gumperz and Levinson 1996b; Hunt and Agnoli 1991: 377). (6) The extent to which individual approaches focus on language relative to other contextual factors of influence on non-linguistic behaviour, and the extent to which they consider language to be ‘special’ in comparison to other factors: this entails differences in whether and how carefully possible interactions of language with external contextual factors like setting, referential scene, task, etc. are taken into account (cf. e.g. Coventry, Valdés, and GuijarroFuentes 2010; Feist and Gentner 2007: 293–294; Gennari et al. 2002; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 647–648; Lupyan 2012; Papafragou, Massey, and Gleitman 2006; Pederson 2007: 1022–1028; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010). Apart from dimension (1), much of this heterogeneity explains from the fact that many more recent publications in the field of linguistic relativity research constitute single experimental studies which focus on one particular, testable case and hypothesis. What is remarkable is that, across studies, a picture of considerable diversity and inconsistency of findings emerges, ranging from support for even relatively strong Whorfian views to the complete rejection of even very subtle, non-permanent effects (e.g. Levinson et al. 2002 and Levinson 2003 versus Cardini 2010 and Li and Gleitman 2002). This situation is further complicated because similar findings have been interpreted in radically different ways, depending on how the researchers position themselves relative to dimension (1), i.e. which theoretical linguistic school (if any) they are associated with (cf. e.g. Gleitman and Papafragou 2005; Lupyan 2012; Reines and Prinz 2009: 1022). This has not only given rise to critical voices (e.g. Pollio et al. 2005: 150–151), but also, and in particular, to a major methodological debate on how linguistic relativity effects are best to be investigated empirically (cf. e.g. Athanasopoulos and Bylund 2013; Pourcel 2002). This, again, has contributed to rendering approaches and positions within the field even more diverse (cf. e.g. Wolff and Holmes 2011). Taking this into account, it is impractical for this section to cover all possible facets of linguistic relativity theory and research. Instead, it should be understood that the primary interest of this volume lies in making a substantial contribution to the theoretical and methodological debate in the field by focusing on a factor that has largely been neglected so far: interindividual variation. The research presented in the following chapters is therefore grounded in, and the discussion will largely restrict itself to, the following positions relative to dimensions (1)–(6):

Linguistic relativity versus (?) usage-based linguistics | 9

With regards to language theories (dimension (1)), the research presented in this book takes a usage-based cognitive linguistic perspective on language and language learning. This approach, and its points of contact with linguistic relativity research, will be discussed in detail in the following section. Its methodological consequences for investigating language-perception/cognition relations will be the focus of Chapter 6. Taking a cognitive linguistic perspective also resolves the debate on whether relativity effects are triggered by lexical or grammatical structures (dimension (2)), because cognitive linguists do not draw a clear-cut line between lexicon and grammar. They understand language to be a network of constructions, and thus, by definition, of meaningful units of different sizes and degrees of schematicity (cf. e.g. Goldberg 2003; Langacker 2000, 2008: 18–25; see Chapter 5 for an extensive discussion). With regards to domains (dimension (3)), the research presented in this book focuses on space, and thus on one of the most extensively and controversially investigated domains in the field of linguistic relativity research (cf. e.g. Levinson 2003). Since space constitutes a basic perceptual domain, the cognitive abilities and processes investigated (dimension (4)) are attention, perception and (scene recognition) memory. With respect to the nature of relativity effects, i.e. their pervasiveness and permanence (dimension (5)), no a priori position is taken, except that deterministic positions are rejected (which is in line with all current theories; cf. e.g. Gumperz and Levinson 1996a, 1996b; Lucy 1992a; Pederson 2007; Wolff and Holmes 2011). Apart from that, variation along dimension (5) is catered for methodologically. The experimental design used for investigating languageperception/cognition effects (see Chapter 8) enabled the stepwise, differential investigation of on-line effects and of recency- and habit-induced off-line effects. This marks the experiments presented in this book as in line with what is currently becoming established as the ‘gold standard’ in experimental relativity research (cf. e.g. Athanasopoulos and Bylund 2013; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Pederson 2007; Pourcel 2002; see also Chapter 8). With regards to factors of influence on perception and cognition other than language (dimension (6)), the present project acknowledges and explicitly welcomes the recent interest in external contextual factors (see above) and includes such factors in its experimental design, partly by controlling them, partly by defining them as independent variables (see Chapters 7 and 8). Accordingly, the research reported in this book understands its main focus of interest – to investigate the influence of cognitive contextual conditions on language-perception/cognition effects – as being an extension of or complement to a current

10 | Setting the theoretical scene

trend in the field. As will become clear from the following section, this trend is well compatible with usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches to language and language-cognition relations.

2.1.2 Usage-based cognitive linguistics The following two assumptions are definitional of cognitive linguistic approaches to language and linguistic knowledge: firstly, “[l]anguage is an integral part of human cognition” (Langacker 1987: 12); and, secondly, cognitive abilities – in particular those “found in textbooks on cognitive psychology under the headings of perception, memory and categorization” (Croft 2009: 397) – motivate linguistic structure and meaning. This entails that the use of a particular structure for expressing a particular content always also reflects or realizes a particular manner of conceptualizing this content (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 40). This idea is captured by the concept of (linguistic) construal (e.g. Croft 2009: 409–413; Croft and Cruse 2004: 40–73; Harder 2011: 307; Langacker 2008: 55– 89; Talmy 2000; Verhagen 2007).1 What is at the core of this concept is that a speaker, by his or her selection of a particular structure, also transports information on how he or she has conceptualized and structured, i.e. experienced, the referred entity or event. To give an example, from the perspective of construal theory, the use of sentence (1a) defines the rock as the “primary focus” (Langacker 2008: 70), i.e. attentionally foregrounds it by defining it as the trajector or figure, while defining the tree as the attentionally less prominent landmark or ground. In contrast to this, the use of sentence (1b) defines the tree as the primary focus of attention, and relatively backgrounds the rock accordingly (cf. e.g. Langacker 2008: 76; see Section 2.3 for more examples and a systematic overview of construal types). (1)

a. The rock is in front of the tree. b. The tree is behind the rock.

In most frameworks (e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 69; Goldberg 2003: 221; Langacker 2008: 43; Verhagen 2007: 48–49; see also Chapter 5) every linguistic construction is assumed to carry what will in the following be referred to as a construal meaning. In addition, and of high relevance to the issue of inter|| 1 Alternative terms that can be found in the literature for this phenomenon are schematization (Talmy 2000: 177) or (conventional) imagery (Langacker 1987).

Linguistic relativity versus (?) usage-based linguistics | 11

individual variation at stake, most models and taxonomies of construal hold or at least imply that particular linguistic forms are stably associated with particular patterns of conceptualization, and that the knowledge of these [formconstrual meaning]-associations is shared interindividually within and even beyond speech communities (cf. e.g. Goldberg 2003: 221; Langacker 2002b: 138– 139, 2008: 43; Pederson 2007: 1019). This implies that language can function as a tool for guiding each other’s patterns of conceptualization. In the case of the example just provided, this would mean that the utterance of sentence (1a) could signal to a hearer to attend more to the rock than to the tree, whereas the opposite would be the case for sentence (1b). If viewed in this way, construal meanings constitute an ideal theoretical tool for modelling on-line language-perception/cognition effects, and thus for establishing a link between cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity theory (cf. Croft and Cruse 2004: 72; Pederson 2007: 1029). Furthermore, the usagebased component inherent in most cognitive linguistic theories – which holds that language is learned from experiences of situated language use (e.g. Behrens 2009; Bybee 2006, 2007b, 2010; Bybee and Hopper 2001; Kemmer and Barlow 2000; Langacker 2000; Lieven 2014; Tomasello 2003b) – provides a basis for including off-line and even permanent effects of language on cognition into such a model. In addition, this component has high explanatory power with respect to the question of whether and how particular linguistic forms can become more or less stably associated with particular construal meanings in the first place (see Chapter 5). Somewhat surprisingly, these links between cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity, and their potential theoretical implications, have not yet been elaborated on, let alone empirically investigated. Instead, cognitive linguists have very strongly, if not exclusively, focused on cognition-to-language relations, whereas language-to-cognition relations and their possible relevance for relativity theory have only been taken into account in passing (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 72; Kövecses 2006: 334–335; Talmy 2000: 38) or have even been rejected at least as far as their more permanent versions are concerned (cf. Langacker 1990: 12; Zlatev 2007: 338; see also Section 4.1). This also entails that the origins and nature of construal meanings have hardly been subject to discussion and investigation. The research presented in this book puts these neglected issues into focus. In particular, it takes the question of how linguistic constructions can come to carry construal meanings as a starting point for modelling language-tocognition effects in usage-based cognitive linguistic terms. What will prove a crucial point is how stable [form-construal meaning]-associations can become,

12 | Setting the theoretical scene

and which contextual conditions foster or inhibit their establishment within individuals as well as their conventionalization in or even across speech communities. These issues will be elaborated on in Chapters 4 and 5. Prior to this, it will be illustrated how the considerations presented so far apply to concrete language examples. In the following section, the German and English spatial language constructions against which the predictions made by a usage-based model of linguistic relativity were tested (see Chapters 7 and 8) will be introduced, and the construal types relevant for their analysis will be presented. In the subsequent Chapter 3 a detailed analysis of the different construction types in terms of their potential construal meanings will be provided.

2.2 Linguistic construal, perceptual attention and the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale Figure 1 displays a typical referent scene of those German and English linguistic constructions which served as a test case for the theoretical considerations presented in the previous section. Examples of such constructions are provided in (2a) to (2c).2

Fig. 1: Bottle-on-table scene.

|| 2 A list of the abbreviations used in the examples is provided on pp. XIX–XX.

Construal, attention and the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale | 13

(2) a. The bottle is in the front right-hand corner (on the table). Die Flasche ist in der vorderen rechten Ecke the bottle-LO is in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN (auf dem Tisch). on-TOP-P the table-RO b. The bottle is (on the table) on the right front. Die Flasche ist auf dem Tisch auf der rechten the bottle-LO is on-TOP-P the table-RO on the right-DIM-ADJ Vorderseite. front-side-DIM-CPD-N rechts (auf dem Tisch). c. Die Flasche ist vorne the bottle-LO is front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV on-TOP-P the table-RO These constructions are referred to here as DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, and their referent scenes as DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, because they contain two dimensional terms (front and right(-hand)) and, often optionally, one topological term (on; see also Chapter 3). They have been selected here as a test case for several reasons: firstly, based on the existing linguistic literature on German and English spatial language (see Chapter 3 and Section 7.1), it could be expected that the repertoires of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions available to speakers of these two languages are (a) relatively large and (b) differ cross-linguistically. Secondly, previous linguistic relativity research on spatial language phenomena has demonstrated that spatial referent scenes are particularly well-suited for investigating correlations between language use, non-linguistic behaviour and/or cognitive abilities like (visual) attention and memory, as well as for identifying possible (external) contextual influences on such correlations (cf. e.g. Carlson 2010; CarlsonRadvansky and Irwin 1993; Coventry, Valdés, and Guijarro-Fuentes 2010; Friederici and Levelt 1990; Hayward and Tarr 1995; Landau and Lakusta 2006; Levinson 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 2003; Levinson and Wilkins 2006c; Papafragou 2007). Thirdly, it could be expected that the conceptualization patterns associated with DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions would vary with respect to a very basic and essential aspect of spatial scene modelling: as will be demonstrated, different options of linguistically construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes can be located between the extremes of conceptualizing space in absolute terms, i.e. as an autonomous, inherently structured unit, or in relative terms, i.e. as a function of the relations between objects (cf. e.g. Einstein [1953] 1993: xiii).

14 | Setting the theoretical scene

This differentiation between space-as-an-independent-entity and space-asa-function-of-object-relations has been at the core of a long – and still ongoing – philosophical debate that dates back at least as far as the famous exchange of letters between Newton (as a proponent of absolute space) and Clarke (as a proponent of relative space in the Leibnizean tradition) (Alexander 1956). Importantly, it also has recurred in a somewhat modified form as a topic in more current theories and debates in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroresearch. One example from psychology is the debate on whether, to what extent and under what conditions attention is space-based as opposed to object-based (cf. e.g. Egeth and Yantis 1997; Egly, Driver, and Rafal 1994; Goldsmith 1998; Kanwisher and Driver 1992; Lamy and Tsal 2000; Mozer and Vecera 2005; Soto and Blanco 2004). This differentiation boils down to the following question: what are the basic units of attentional selection – objects or regions in space? A related neuro-research example is Ungerleider and Mishkin’s (1982) functional interpretation of the anatomical finding that information from visual sensation is selectively transmitted via two separate cortical pathways, the occipitotemporal or ventral pathway and the occipitoparietal or dorsal pathway. According to these researchers, the first pathway “is specialized for object perception (identifying what an object is)” (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982: 549, emphasis original), the second one “for spatial perception (locating where an object is)” (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982: 549, emphasis original). These parallels between philosophical debates on the nature of space and theories relating to the perception and neuronal processing of spatial information provide the basis for and, at the same time, license the manner in which the absolute versus relative space dichotomy has been (re)interpreted for purposes of application to the linguistic construal of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in the context of the present project. This interpretation is an attention-based one: in the present understanding, different DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions differ in the degree to which they attentionally foreground the object-level of their referent scenes relative to its abstract spatial-structural level. That is, different construction types construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes either in a more object-focused or a more space-focused manner. This differentiation is seen here as a gradual one. That is, based on their construal meanings, different DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types can be assigned different positions on a scale from extremely space-focused to extremely objectfocused construal. This scale will in the following be referred to as the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale (see Figure 2).

Construal, attention and the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale | 15

SPACE-FOCUSED............................................................................OBJECT-FOCUSED

OBJECTS

SPACE BETWEEN-OBJECTS-RELATIONS

Fig. 2: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale.

This transfer of principles from attention research to the analysis of linguistic constructions, the gradualness of the differentiation between space-focused and object-focused attentional construal and, thus, the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale as such, of course, call for comment. The gradual nature of the scale derives from and is even required by the current state of theory formation in those fields of spatial-perception/attention research that build on the differentiation between objects and locations/space. At present, the general consensus is that space-based and object-based attention are not mutually exclusive. Which pattern of attention allocation occurs is usually seen as a matter of priority of processing (in temporal terms and/or in terms of individual- or context-induced preference; cf. e.g. Egly et al. 1994; Humphreys and Riddoch 1993; Kravitz and Behrmann 2011; Lamy and Tsal 2000; Vecera and Farah 1994). Several theories and empirical findings even call into question that these two modes of processing can be differentiated at all in a clear cut manner (cf. e.g. Logan 1996). Plenty of behavioural and neuropsychological evidence indicates, firstly, that “attention can operate in both a space-based and an object-based manner” (Müller-Plath and Elsner 2007: 599), and, secondly, that which manner is dominant depends on a range of contextual conditions, as well as on the exact mixture of top-down and bottom-up factors by which attention allocation is directed (cf. e.g. Atchley and Kramer 2001; Egly, Driver, and Rafal 1994; Goldsmith 1998: 215; Goldsmith and Yeari 2003; He et al. 2004; Humphreys et al. 1996; Lavie and Driver 1996). The case is similar for the theory of separate neuronal pathways. For instance, Milner and Goodale (2006) call into question Ungerleider and Mishkin’s (1982) functional interpretation and propose a differentiation in terms of a vision-for-perception system (ventral pathway) and a vision-for-action system (dorsal pathway) instead (see also Atkinson 1993; Braddick 1993; McCarty 1993 for similar proposals). Taking this into account, a scalar modelling in terms of

16 | Setting the theoretical scene

degrees of object-focusedness appears as the only useful and theoretically sound option. At the same time, some of the arguments on the basis of which the categorical differentiation between space-based and object-based attention has been called into question also explain for the internal structuring of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. The three main landmarks on the scale – objects, between-objects-relations and space – take into account that space and objects can be conceptualized either in a holistic manner or in relational terms: on the one hand, space can be reified as a (container-like) entity (absolute space; see above) and objects can be conceived of as clearly delimited, “spatially invariant” units (Vecera and Farah 1994: 147). On the other hand, and alternatively, space can be construed as a function of its content (relative space; see above) and objects can be understood to constitute “grouped array[s]” (Vecera 1994: 316) and thus to be no more than a function of their (mutually related) components (cf. also Behrmann and Tipper 1999: 96; Iani et al. 2001: 157; Mozer and Vecera 2005: 131–132). The differentiation between content and components in the relational modelling of space and objects furthermore explains why only relational space but not relational objects are included in the scale: with objects, the components stand in a veritable part-whole relation to the units. For instance, its legs or its front right-hand corner are inherent parts of the table displayed in Figure 2. This also explains why the mention of such object parts usually results in a co-activation of the object-concept as a whole (e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 106, 191; see also the discussion of Focusing/Profiling in Section 2.3 below). The case is different with space. It is highly unlikely that the mention of an object or of an object-to-object relation necessarily evokes the concept of (absolute) space. Put into construal theoretical terms, it can be expected that the use of a part-denoting term for reference to an object (e.g. The bottle is in the corner) activates object-knowledge relating to the referred object (e.g. the table) and, thus, realizes an object-focused construal of the scene, whereas, for instance, the use of a (transitive topological) spatial relational construction (e.g. The bottle is on the table), i.e. a construction which establishes an object-to-object relation, is highly unlikely to generally and automatically activate the absolute space concept and thus to realize a space-focused construal of the referent scene. Instead, the underlying conceptualization seems to be located somewhere in-between the extremes of highly space-focused and highly objectfocused construal. Taking this into account, only between-objects-relations but

Construal types as analytical tools | 17

not within-object-relations were included as a central subrange-defining landmark in the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. On more general grounds, patterns of language-use associated DIMDIM(TOP)scene conceptualization are modelled here in attentional terms because most construal types proposed in the cognitive linguistic literature are based on attentional phenomena, and because, from a usage-based perspective, patterns of (visual) attention allocation are a form of non-linguistic behaviour that is particularly likely to become associated with specific linguistic forms or constructions during situated language learning. The first of these issues will be elaborated on in the following section, in which different attention-based construal types that can be applied to the analysis of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions will be introduced and discussed. The second issue is at the core of Chapter 5.

2.3 Construal types as analytical tools As indicated above, one core assumption of cognitive linguistic theories is that general cognitive abilities and principles motivate the meanings of linguistic constructions and, consequently, become manifest in the form of constructionassociated construal meanings. One such ability, which figures particularly central in construal theory, is attention. It is, however, relatively unclear how relations between linguistic forms and attentional patterns can come about in the first place, and how direct the association between cognitive abilities and linguistic structures really is. Opinions range from the relatively moderate and vague view that language “may have copied, or developed connections to, mechanisms of cognitive structuring already present for other major cognitive systems” (Talmy 2000: 38, emphasis mine) to much more far reaching claims like the following (Croft and Cruse 2004: 45): “If linguistic construal operations are truly cognitive, then they should be related to, or identical with, general cognitive processes that are postulated by psychologists” (emphasis mine). In spite of this rather unclear theoretical situation, attentional construal meanings figure centrally in the great majority of cognitive linguistic frameworks. The literature in the field is full of different, quite extensive construal taxonomies (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 40–73; Langacker 1987: 183–244, 1990: 5–32, 2008: 55–89; Talmy 2000: 40–96, 257–309; Verhagen 2007: 53–58), many of which are based on attentional principles. In this section, a systematic overview of those construal types that relate to attentional patterning is provided. Although the labels used are largely based on Talmy (2000), this account integrates several theories. It focuses in particular on those construal types

18 | Setting the theoretical scene

relevant for the analysis of complex spatial language constructions,3 and, for reasons provided in the following, also includes some construal types that are not generally classified as attentional. If one understands attention as an ability or process that enables selection (cf. e.g. Chun and Wolfe 2001; Johnson and Proctor 2004: 57–94; Müller and Krummenacher 2007; see also Section 4.2), and if one takes into account that (referential) language production involves several steps of selection, the following three general types of attentional referent scene construal can be proposed: (1) the selection versus non-selection of information from the referent scene (and its mental representation) for explicit mention (Windowing of Attention) (2) the weighting of the selected and thus mentioned (and related unmentioned) items and information units (Item-Based Weighting) (3) the weighting of the different features, levels or dimensions of the initially selected information (Level-Weighting).

2.3.1 Windowing of Attention Windowing of Attention refers to the perhaps most obvious form of attentiondriven information selection during utterance planning and production: components or features of the referent scene can either be mentioned or not be mentioned. In Talmy’s words (2000: 257; cf. also Talmy 2007a: 287), … languages can place a portion of a coherent referent situation into the foreground of attention by the explicit mention of that portion, while placing the remainder of that situation into the background of attention by omitting mention of it.

The image of a ‘window’ through which an observer can see the windowed portions of the referent scene particularly clearly while the gapped portions are hardly visible or not accessible at all (see Talmy 2000: 257–258) can be related to the psychological spotlight model of attention, i.e. the idea that attention has a clearly defined focus area which can be moved around in the observed scene like a spotlight (cf. e.g. LaBerge 1983; Posner 1980; Posner, Snyder, and

|| 3 The overview given in this section is thus not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. This seems justified given that none of the taxonomies available to date meets this requirement. In fact, taking into account that human cognition is flexible and adaptive, “it is precisely from a cognitive point of view that one should not expect that classifications of construal operations can be set up that are exhaustive and complete” (Verhagen 2007: 57).

Construal types as analytical tools | 19

Davidson 1980). This parallel illustrates well the central cognitive linguistic principle that construal meanings are motivated by general cognitive abilities and processes, and thus by phenomena that are at the core of cognitive psychological research. The notion of gapped elements highlights another assumption central to cognitive linguistics: the idea that language users, in making or understanding an utterance, activate much more knowledge and make use of much more information than what is explicitly mentioned (e.g. Evans and Green 2006: 206– 247; Langacker 2005b: 36; see Chapters 4 and 5 for a more extensive discussion). This assumption is a precondition for gapped elements to be co-activated to the windowed elements in the language users’ minds despite the fact that they are not referred to explicitly (see Talmy 2000: 258). Put differently, on this understanding the gapped elements constitute parts of the cognitive context in which a linguistic utterance is embedded. The main area to which Talmy has applied the principle of Windowing of Attention is event representations (or event frames; Talmy 2000: 257) in general, and representations of motion events in particular. This is illustrated by the following examples (adapted from Talmy 2000: 266): (3) a. The crate that was in the aircraft’s cargo bay fell [out of the airplane] [through the air] [into the ocean]. b. The crate that was in the aircraft’s cargo bay fell [out of the airplane]. c. The crate that was in the aircraft’s cargo bay fell [through the air]. Example (3a) is an instance of the linguistic realization of a complete path event frame (beginning point – path – ending point) and thus an instance of the “maximal windowing over the whole of the conceptually complete path” (Talmy 2000: 265–266). By means of Windowing of Attention, sentences (3b) and (3c) construe this path event differently than sentence (3a). Sentence (3b) is an example of initial path-windowing. With this sentence the beginning point of the movement of the crate (the airplane) is windowed, the path itself (through the air) and its ending point (the ocean) are gapped (cf. Talmy 2000: 265). Accordingly, sentence (3c) is an example of medial path-windowing, since, here, the path is windowed and the beginning point and the ending point of the motion event are gapped (cf. Talmy 2000: 265–266). As indicated by these examples, Talmy (2000) holds that non-mentioned elements from the path event frame are easier and more readily inferable than other associated or circumstantial units of information. This suggests a view of attention as “com[ing] in degrees” (Croft and Cruse 2004: 46). As a conse-

20 | Setting the theoretical scene

quence, the cognitive context in which an utterance is embedded is structured hierarchically in terms of the accessibility, or cognitive salience (Schmid 2007, 2014), of its components: … the explicitly represented concepts tend to determine the center of a gradient of attention: greatest at the explicitly represented concepts, less over the remaining concepts within the conceptual complex, and radially decreasing over the rest of one’s skein of knowledge. (Talmy 2007a: 287)

This notion of attention as a gradient indicates that the spotlight model does not fully cover the phenomenon of Windowing of Attention, but that a more differential, extended view on the window-metaphor is required. For these purposes, alternative models of attention to the spotlight model can be taken into account: the zoom lens model (e.g. Eriksen and St. James 1986; Eriksen and Yeh 1985), which holds that attention can highlight regions of different sizes, and the gradient model (e.g. Downing 1988; Downing and Pinker 1985; LaBerge and Brown 1989; see also Kramer and Jacobson 1991), according to which the intensity of attention decreases from the centre to the periphery of the attended region. These models suggest an extended view of Windowing of Attention construal, which allows variation in attentional patterning along the following dimensions: (1) Where on the scene are the windows positioned and/or how many windows (cf. Talmy 2000: 258) are imposed on the scene, i.e. which aspects of the situation are windowed and thus attentionally highlighted? (cf. spotlight model of attention) (2) How large are these windows? (cf. zoom lens model of attention) (3) How definite are the boundaries of these windows? (cf. gradient model of attention) (4) How deep a view do these windows yield, i.e. how much of cognitive context can still be ‘seen’ through them? This more differential modelling of the Windowing of Attention-concept allows for it to accommodate a range of further construal operations. Firstly, it reveals that Langacker’s notions of Focusing and Profiling (e.g. Langacker 1987: 183–189, 1999a: 26–27, 2002a: 15–17, 2008: 57–73) cover part of what is defined here as variants of Windowing of Attention:4 Focusing, defined || 4 Focusing and Profiling are not differentiated in this manner in all of Langacker’s writing. The following description of Profiling (Langacker 1991: 297), for instance, comes rather close to Talmy’s (2000) notion of Windowing of Attention as a whole: “… if the scope subsumes the

Construal types as analytical tools | 21

as a process which involves “the selection of conceptual content for linguistic presentation” (Langacker 2008: 57, emphasis original), mainly covers aspects (1) and (2) above. Profiling,5 in contrast, mainly pertains to the (gradual and selective) co-activation of cognitive context (e.g. Langacker 2008: 57) and thus to aspects (3) and (4). To give an example, in Langacker’s understanding (cf. Langacker 2008: 646) a part-term like elbow profiles the concept of ARM because it triggers the co-activation of knowledge about the holistic units in the partwhole relation in addition to the activation of the part-concept of ELBOW as such. Secondly, aspect (4) is additionally covered by the construal types of Level of Particularity (Talmy 2000: 82–84) or (Degree of) Specificity (Langacker 2008: 55–57). These types refer to “the level of precision and detail at which a situation is characterized” (Langacker 2008: 55), i.e. to the fact that a speaker can use either a relatively specific term, like large brown rat, or a more general term, like rodent, for referring to the same referent (cf. Langacker 2008: 55). As an effect, “alternative expressions … can … foreground more particulars of a referent while backgrounding its more abstract generalities, or they can background the particulars while foregrounding the generalities” (Talmy 2000: 82), i.e. can selectively direct attention to different (and differently large) sets of characteristics or features of a referent. Thirdly, the extended view of Windowing of Attention can also, via the size of the imagined window (aspect (2)), accommodate the differentiation between subjective versus objective construal (e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 62–63; Langacker 1987: 128–132, 2008: 77–78). This differentiation and the related construal types pertain to the “relation between the conceptualizers and the

|| Floyd-hammer-glass action chain, three different profiles are possible: Floyd broke the glass profiles the entire chain; The hammer broke the glass designates only the hammer-glass interaction; and The glass broke easily, though it involves the efforts of an agent as part of its base, confines its profile to the thematic change-of-state process undergone by the glass.” 5 Although Profiling is counted here among the construal operations, this view is not shared by all cognitive linguists. Croft and Cruse (2004: 47), for instance, point out that “[s]uch examples are not usually analyzed as examples of construal since the profile is of course central to a word’s meaning and any shift in profile has truth-functional consequences.” 6 Talmy (2007a: 271) describes such cases separately from the event-related Windowing of Attention as instances of the assignment of attentional salience to an entity via “a Morpheme’s Direct Reference versus Associated Concepts”. Since instances of this type are, firstly, clearly grounded in the same principle of co-activating related knowledge as the more prototypical, event-related instances of Windowing of Attention construal, and since, secondly, Talmy (2007a: 271–273) models attention allocation to objects and their cognitive context as a matter of degree, such instances of object-related attentional construal are, in the following, subsumed directly under the notion Windowing of Attention, and are classified accordingly.

22 | Setting the theoretical scene

object of conception” (Langacker 1990: 326). They capture the fact that the speakers/observers, as parts of the communicative context in which an utterance is embedded, can be more or less explicitly present in a (referential) expression.7 Very basically, objective construal involves the explicit mention of the speaker (and/or hearer) in an utterance, as in Vanessa is sitting across the table from me. With subjective construal, by contrast, this information is left implicit, as in Vanessa is sitting across the table (adapted from Langacker 1990: 326). There are several ways in which explicit reference can be made to the speaker and/or hearer(s), the most common being what is traditionally classified as deictic expressions (cf. Langacker 1990: 318–319). Therefore, subjectivity and objectivity are “a matter of degree” (Langacker 1990: 316). The gradualness results from a mixture of (a) variation in terms of mention versus omission of mention of the speaker and/or hearer(s), and (b) variation with respect to the profiles of the selected terms to the extent that some terms more readily coactivate the notion of the speaker and/or hearer(s) than others. This is, for instance, the case with deictic expressions or with spatial expressions such as to the right, which require the taking of a speaker perspective to be interpretable unambiguously (see Section 3.2.2). In sum, an extended view of Windowing of Attention reveals the different construal types introduced so far as closely interrelated and even, to a certain extent, as grading into one another. As a consequence, it can be expected that complete linguistic utterances usually impose a highly complex set of attentional patterns onto their referent scenes. This becomes even more obvious if the attentional processes that apply on a lower level, i.e. within the selected windows, are taken into account in addition.

2.3.2 Weighting of Attention In contrast to Windowing of Attention, Weighting of Attention construal operations apply to the information that has already been selected for explicit mention. Mostly, they impose a hierarchical ordering or salience structure onto this information. Within this scope, weighting with respect to object-like entities in the referent scene (Item-Based Weighting) and weighting with respect to ab-

|| 7 Following Langacker (2008: 21) the term expression is used here for referring to the phonologically specific version of a construction or a set of constructions, i.e. to linguistic units “capable of being spoken, signed, or written down” (Langacker 2008: 21).

Construal types as analytical tools | 23

stract levels of scenes (Level-Weighting) can be differentiated. This will in the following be illustrated on the examples of Focus(ing) of Attention and Levels of Attention (cf. Talmy 2000: 76–77; see also Talmy 2007a), which are prototypical of these two types of weighting operations.

Item-Based Weighting Talmy’s (2000: 76) Focus(ing) of Attention pattern applies within selected windows and effects a relative foregrounding and backgrounding of referred entities or items by establishing an asymmetry between them. Thus, Focus(ing) of Attention imposes a hierarchical ordering onto information that is already active in a speaker-hearer’s mind (e.g. Talmy 2007a: 274–276). In terms of linguistic structures, Focus(ing) of Attention mainly becomes manifest on sentence level, i.e. is realized via the selection of particular syntactic functions and/or variants in constituent order, or, in Talmy’s (2007a: 274) terms, via the “Positioning [of information] at Certain Sentence Locations versus Other Locations”. Examples (4a) and (4b) illustrate different Focus(ing) of Attention construals of the scene displayed in Figure 3. (4) a. The bottle is in the box. b. The box contains a bottle.

Fig. 3: Bottle-in-box scene.

In sentence (4a) the bottle is attentionally foregrounded relative to the box because the nominal phrase the bottle is the subject and thus occurs sentence-

24 | Setting the theoretical scene

initially. This pattern of attentional distribution is reverse in sentence (4b): here the box is attentionally foregrounded relative to the bottle.8 In contrast to the other construal operations introduced so far, the strong grounding of Focus(ing) of Attention in syntactic principles draws attention to the possible limits of the general applicability of construal operations, in particular on a cross-linguistic level: syntactic patterns and constructions in general differ considerably between languages. As a consequence, all claims that go beyond mere order-related focusing effects (which might be based on iconicity; cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 141; Haiman 1985: 237–239; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 300–302) can hardly be considered valid language-independently. Given that German and English syntax differ markedly, in particular as regards word order regulations (cf. e.g. König 1992: 150; König and Gast 2012: 130–131), Focus(ing) of Attention patterns are only of limited applicability to the purposes of the present study. As will be shown in the following, this is not the case for Level-Weighting patterns of construal: how they become manifest linguistically is not or at least less strongly based on language-specific structural patterns.

Level-Weighting Levels of Attention construal processes do not establish a hierarchical relation between two concepts like BOTTLE and BOX (see Figure 3) which, if used in isolation, have different concrete referents. Instead, they foreground one way of conceptualizing the same referent or complex referent scene (Talmy 2000: 77) over another. As an effect, attention is drawn more or less strongly to particular || 8 Such pairs of subject-object reversal can also frequently be found referred to in the cognitive linguistic literature as examples of how the Gestalt psychological principle of figureground segregation (e.g. Wertheimer 1923) and, in the case of sentence (4b), the related principle of figure-ground reversal (e.g. Koffka [1935] 2000; see also Evans 2010b: 31–32) become reflected in language (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 56–58; Evans and Green 2006: 69–70; Schmid 2007: 130; Talmy 2000: 182–219; Tenbrink 2007: 196–197; however, see Pribbenow 1993: 467–468 for a critical discussion of this claim). In these contexts, the differentiation between figure and ground is often (though not always, cf. Croft and Cruse 2004: 56–58; Talmy 2011: 631–633) counted among the attentional phenomena (cf. e.g. Langacker 2008: 57–73; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 163–206). Since the relation between figure-ground segregation and attention allocation is, however, far from straightforward if considered from the perspective of cognitive psychology (in which figure-ground segregation is usually classified as a preattentive phenomenon; cf. e.g. Driver, Baylis, and Rafal 1992), an interpretation of the difference in construal meanings between (4a) and (4b) as different examples of Focus(ing) of Attention construal is preferred here to the modelling in terms of figure and ground.

Construal types as analytical tools | 25

levels or general structural features of these items or scenes. Levels of Attention construal can, for example, “direct … greater attention either to the more integral or general characteristics of a referent, or to its more compositional or particular characteristics” (Talmy 2000: 77). This is illustrated in examples (5a) and (5b): (5a) construes the iceberg as a holistic Gestalt or “meta-Figure” (Talmy 2000: 80), whereas (5b) reflects a conceptualization in terms of “component Figures” (Talmy 2000: 80) made up of several parts (cf. Talmy 2000: 78–80). (5) a. The iceberg broke in two. b. The two halves of the iceberg broke apart. The principle of foregrounding one schematic structure that can be mapped onto a referent scene or entity over another finds its closest psychological correspondent in the notion of dimension- or feature-based attention, i.e. in the idea that attention can be tuned to select information from a particular dimension of a scene only, like, for instance, colour, motion or shape (cf. e.g. Allport 1971; Found and Müller 1996; Müller, Heller, and Ziegler 1995; Weidner and Müller 2009; see also Treisman 1969: 285, 294–296). This, first of all, identifies Levels of Attention construal as another attentional construal type that can be related relatively directly to theories prevalent in current cognitive psychology. Secondly, among the construal types introduced in this section (see overview in Table 1), Levels of Attention construal constitutes the one that most directly captures the differential assignment of attention to the space- versus the object-level of spatial referent scenes. It thus applies most readily to the differentiation between space-focused and objectfocused construal meanings. Tab. 1: Attentional construal types.

main types

conditions/subtypes

traditional construal types

cross-linguistic applicability

Windowing

POSITION OF THE WINDOW

Windowing



SIZE OF THE WINDOW

Focusing (Langacker) Objectivity/Subjectivity



BOUNDEDNESS OF THE WINDOW

Profiling



DEPTH OF VIEW

Profiling Specificity/Particularity



26 | Setting the theoretical scene

main types

conditions/subtypes

traditional construal types

cross-linguistic applicability

Weighting

ITEM-BASED

Focusing of Attention

restricted

LEVEL-BASED

Levels of Attention



In the following Chapter 3, the construal types displayed in Table 1 will be used as a tool for classifying German and English DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in terms of their construal meanings. This application forms the basis for (re)interpreting findings and insights from previous research on German and English spatial language in a way compatible with the present theoretical framework and, eventually, for determining how different DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types can be mapped onto the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale.

3 Construing spatial scenes in German and English The crowning touch of human spatial cognition is our capacity to talk about space. (Landau 2003: 18)

3.1 Spatial language and spatial referent scenes This section focuses on spatial language in German and English. More specifically, it provides an overview of central functions and features of static spatial language in general, and of the ways in which spatial terms and constructions relate to, and can impose structure onto, their referent scenes. In this way, it provides the basic framework for modelling spatial language relative to which language-related parameters were set and could be interpreted in the empirical part of this project (see Chapters 7 and 8).

3.1.1 Functions of spatial language Uses of static spatial language, of which DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions are an example,9 have been ascribed two major functions (cf. Fillmore 1982: 43–45): an informing (or predicating) function and an identifying (or referring) function.10 If used with an informing function, spatial utterances function as “‘find’ instruction[s]” (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 44, 60): they tell a hearer to search for a certain Located Object (LO) in a certain Search Domain (Langacker 1999a: 32–33, 2002a: 25–26; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 384) or Search Space which is ‘singled out’ via reference to a certain Reference Object (RO) (cf. e.g. Carroll and Becker 1993: 121; Svorou 1994: 8–9; Talmy 2000: 182–184). Put in attentional terms, if used in this way “the function of spatial language is to narrow the visual search for an object that a hearer is trying to locate” (Coventry et al. 2010: 202) by “driv[ing] visual attention” towards the location of the LO (Coventry et al. 2010: 204). For instance, example (6a) tells a hearer to search for

|| 9 In the following, all uses of spatial language, spatial utterances or spatial expressions are to be understood as referring to (uses of) static spatial language (unless indicated otherwise). 10 The third pragmatic function defined by Fillmore (1982: 44), the acknowledging (or presupposing) function, is not relevant for the purposes of the research presented in this book and is therefore not discussed here.

28 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

the bottle (the LO) by focusing his or her attention on the Search Space, which is defined as the upper surface of the table (the RO). (6) a. The bottle is on the table. The informing function structures the referent scene into subregions, one of which is the Search Space, and defines the LO, or, more specifically, its location, as the most important element in the scene. The identities, features and functions of the LO and, in particular, the RO, by contrast, play a rather subordinate role. That is, units of information that pertain to the object-level of the scene do not figure centrally with informing uses of spatial language. Although the principle of singling out a Search Space is preserved, this object-level becomes more important with the identifying function (Fillmore 1982: 43–44; see also Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 384; Tenbrink 2005, 2007, 2009). If used in this function, spatial language allows a hearer to identify a particular object from a set of similar objects by way of providing him or her with information about this object’s spatial features, i.e. its structure in terms of regions, locations and spatial relations. As an effect, spatial language establishes “a (qualitative) contrast” between the object to be identified and “competing objects” (Tenbrink 2007: 28, emphasis original). The object characterized in this manner can either be the LO (example (6b)) or the RO (example (6c)). Furthermore, as is illustrated by example (6d), the RO-LO constellation as a whole can be singled out. (6) b. It’s [the [bottle on the table]] (not [the [bottle in the cupboard]]). c. It’s [the [table [with the bottle on top]]] (not [the [table [with the bottle underneath]]]). d. It’s [the scene [in which the bottle is on the table]] (not [the scene [in which the bottle is next to the table]]). A comparison of examples (6b) to (6d) with example (7) demonstrates, in addition, that, with the identifying function, Search Space is conceptualized rather as a (temporary) feature or attribute of the object (or scene) to be identified than as a portion of or region in space in which the LO can be found (cf. e.g. Lutzeier 1985: 97; Tenbrink 2005: 124; Vorwerg and Rickheit 1999a: 153, 1999b: 147, 2000: 19–20; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007: 472): (7)

It’s [the [green bottle]] (not [the [blue bottle]]). / It’s [the [brown table]] (not [the [white table]]).

Spatial language and spatial referent scenes | 29

Uses of spatial language with an identifying function therefore differ markedly from uses with an informing function. They do not only more strongly foreground the objects in the scene in general, but they can also variably assign a high degree of prominence either to the LO (example (6b)) or to the RO (example (6c)). These observations indicate that the functional-pragmatic dimension of spatial language in use can centrally influence how a referent scene is attentionally construed. For the present project, this implies that this dimension requires to be taken into account when investigating variation in the attentional construal meanings associated with different spatial language constructions. This was realized by focusing on one of the two spatial language functions, the identifying function, only. This function was selected for investigation because, as indicated by examples (6b) to (6d), the range of different possible construal options is broader and more varied with identifying than with informing uses of spatial language (cf. e.g. Tenbrink 2007: 185–186; see also Gorniak and Roy 2004). What is important to note in this context is that which pragmatic function is realized does not, however, interfere with the main semantic function of spatial language. Spatial language structures its referent scene into subregions or subportions, independently of whether it is used in an informing or an identifying manner. How this can be realized, and which structures can be imposed onto DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, is the focus of the following section.

3.1.2 Modelling static spatial scenes for linguistic reference How DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions and their components (topological terms, dimensional terms and object-related terms) impose structure onto their referent scenes will, in the following, be illustrated for a Minimal Constellation (Minimalkonstellation; Herrmann 1990: 121), i.e. an abstract model of a spatial referent scene plus its social-communicative context. Accordingly, the model used here does not only comprise the LO and the RO, but also the speaker (S) and the hearer (H). Since the experiments presented in this book only involved situations in which the perspectives of the speaker and the hearer coincide, speaker and hearer (S/H) are jointly represented in this model. It will therefore in the following be referred to as Minimal Spatial Situation Model (MSSM). Figure 4 provides an illustration of it.

30 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

Located Object Reference Object Perception Space

Situation Space

S/H

Speaker/Hearer

Fig. 4: Minimal Spatial Situation Model (MSSM).

As can be seen, one central feature of the MSSM is that it is structured into several embedded (sub)spaces. The most inclusive, external layer comprises the referent scene, the speaker and the hearer. In the following it will be referred to as Situation Space. The portion of space which is in the field of vision of the speaker and hearer at the point in time at which a referential utterance is made will be referred to as Perception Space. With those DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes presently under investigation, both LO and RO are located in Perception Space. In the present understanding, spatial expressions can impose structure onto both of these spaces. They can single out a portion of the scene as their Referent Space and a subspace of this Referent Space as the relevant Search Space.11 Search Space is the portion of space to which a spatial construction like on the table explicitly refers (see example (6a) above). Referent Space is the portion of space which defines the entire scene to which a spatial utterance can be identified to refer. Usually, Referent Space either corresponds to Perception Space or to Situation Space. Figure 5 illustrates the subspaces which the topological spatial expression in example (8a) defines as its Referent Space and Search Space.

|| 11 Cf. Ehrich’s (1982: 49, 1985: 134–136) differentiation between Bezugsraum/denotation space and Verweisraum/reference space.

Spatial language and spatial referent scenes | 31

Located Object = bottle Reference Object = table REFERENT SPACE = Perception Space SEARCH SPACE = surface space of the table

S/H

Fig. 5: MSSM: The bottle is on the table.

(8) a. The bottle is on the table. With this example, the table as a whole functions as the RO. However, Search Space, as it is singled out by the meaning of the preposition on, consists in the surface space of the table, and thus in a subportion of the table (the tabletop), only. Such definitions of RO-subspaces can also take more complex forms. This is illustrated by the sentences in examples (8b) and (8c) in which an inherent part of the table, its corner, is mentioned explicitly and functions as the main referent unit for the definition of Search Space. (8) b. The bottle is in the corner of the table. c. The bottle is in the corner. In cases like this, a differentiation is usually made between a primary and a secondary RO (cf. Talmy 2000: 203–214, 2006: 213).12 With utterances of the type illustrated in examples (8b) and (8c), the referent of the part-denoting lexeme, the corner, can be classified as the primary RO, i.e. the RO to which the preposition in refers: the bottle is in the corner, i.e. surrounded by the boundary of the || 12 The terms primary RO and secondary RO are used here in the way proposed and used by Talmy (2000). These uses are not to be confused with Carroll’s (1997: 145–146) uses of the terms “primary relatum” and “secondary relatum” as labels for what is referred to here as the source and target of Frame of Reference mapping (see Section 3.2.2 below).

32 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

table on at least two of its sides, and not in the table. However, still, and very much in line with the notion of object-related Profiling (see Section 2.3), the mention of this partonymic primary RO can be assumed to co-activate knowledge of, and thus assign attention to, the corresponding whole, the table. Accordingly, the table can function as a secondary RO: it delimits a Secondary Search Space in which the primary RO (which then defines the Primary Search Space) is located. Figure 6 illustrates this for examples (8b) and (8c).

Located Object = bottle Primary Reference Object = corner PRIMARY SEARCH SPACE = space delimited by the corner Secondary Reference Object = table SECONDARY SEARCH SPACE = surface space of the table

S/H

REFERENT SPACE = Perception Space

Fig. 6: MSSM: The bottle is in the corner (of the table).

As can be seen from a comparison of examples (8b) and (8c) with example (8a), which object is selected as the RO influences decisively how efficiently, and potentially effectively, a spatial utterance can function as a search instruction: with example (8a), the Search Space is much larger than with examples (8b) and (8c). Therefore, the larger RO in example (8a) is, as such, easier to detect than the smaller ROs in examples (8b) and (8c). However, the space which remains to be searched for with example (8a) in order to find the LO is considerably more extensive, which might render search more time-consuming. Examples (8b) and (8c) also differ markedly from example (8a) when used with an identifying function. Only (8b) and (8c) could apply to scenes in which there is more than one bottle on a table, or to scenes in which there is more than one table with a bottle on, at least if the exact spatial relations between bottles and tables differed. Which RO is selected for use therefore centrally depends on the potential competitors to the to-be-identified objects or scenes. This shows that which item becomes used as the RO – and, within this scope, also what is

Spatial language and spatial referent scenes | 33

defined as Referent Space – is a decisive factor for ensuring the communicative success of an identifying spatial referential utterance: the RO has to be chosen carefully so as to fulfil its ‘anchoring’-function (Herrmann 1990: 120) with the degree of precision13 required by the communicative situation (cf. e.g. Grabowski and Miller 1995: 7). In addition, what qualifies as a well-suited RO also depends on which kind of spatial expression is used: topological terms like on in example (8a), which indicate contact- or proximity-relations between LO and RO, or dimensional terms like in front of in the following example (9), which can also be used for referring to spatial relations in which LO and RO are more distant from each other (cf. e.g. Levinson and Wilkins 2006a: 4). (9)

The bottle is in front of me.

With example (9), the speaker defines Situation Space as Referent Space by choosing him- or herself as the RO. In this way he or she singles out his or her entire Perception Space as Search Space. Since the hearer’s and the speaker’s positions coincide, choosing oneself as the RO is of rather low informational value to the hearer: the utterance in (9) roughly corresponds to stating I/You can see the bottle (see Figure 7).

Located Object = bottle

SEARCH SPACE = Perception Space REFERENT SPACE = Situation Space

S/H

Reference Object = Speaker/Hearer

Fig. 7: MSSM: The bottle is in front of me.

|| 13 To prevent terminological confusion, the terms specificity and specific are reserved in this book for referring to the opposite of the cognitive linguistic terms schematicity and schematic (see Chapters 5 and 6). Specificity in meaning will be referred to as precision instead.

34 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

Another difference between topological and dimensional terms, and the difference that proves most relevant with references to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in which LO and RO are in a relation of contact or proximity, is, however, that they simultaneously activate and map onto the referent scenes different structural schemas (cf. Talmy 2000: 230; see also Vorwerg and Rickheit 1999b: 154): a TOP(ological)-schema and a DIM(ensional)-schema. These schemas will be introduced in the following section together with an overview of the German and English repertoires of topological and dimensional terms. This overview also forms the basis for illustrating which patterns for attentionally construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are, in principle, available to speakers of German and English, and how these sets of patterns differ crosslinguistically.

3.2 Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English Table 2 provides an overview of the repertoires of topological terms in German and English. Table 3 does the same for dimensional terms.14 Both tables do not claim full comprehensiveness. For instance, spatial relative pronouns and relative adverbs (woran ‘where-at’, worauf ‘where-on’, worin ‘where-in’, etc.) and spatial question words (wohin ‘where-to’, woher ‘where-from’, etc.) have not been included due to their lack of relevance for the present discussion (see Dudenredaktion 2009: 304–305, 577–578 and Eisenberg 2013: 225–226 for an overview and discussion of these forms). What the two sets of repertoires of topological and dimensional spatial terms presented in Tables 2 and 3 have in common is, firstly, that they apply to a limited set of subspaces or subregions. These are indicated in the very left-hand columns of the tables. Secondly, the range of word-class categories by which spatial information can be expressed is overall very similar for the topological and the dimensional repertoires. As can be seen from the upper lines in the tables, spatial information can be expressed either by use of nominal or nonnominal structures. With the non-nominal structures, a further differentiation can be made between transitive or relational terms, i.e. terms like spatial prep-

|| 14 These overviews are mainly based on Becker (1994), Becker and Carroll (1997), Carroll and Becker (1993), Herskovits (1986), Lang (1993: 252), Tenbrink (2007, 2009) and Zifonun et al. (1997).

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 35

ositions that require (nominal) complementation, and intransitive or nonrelational terms like adverbs that do not require complementation. Both of these parameters will be presented and discussed in more detail in the following, with a particular focus (a) on their relevance for spatial scene construal in terms of degrees of object-focusedness and (b) on differences between German and English. To realize this, the following section focuses on the different Search Spaces that can be singled out by the use of topological and dimensional terms. The subsequent section complements this information by elaborating on formal variants and their possible effects on degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings.

(side)

(Seite)

(das) Äußere (the) outside äußer(der/die/das) außen Außen-

neighbouring space/ periphery

exterior space

-------

-------

boundary space -------

------general/ region-denoting

-------

-------

boundary

-------

(seitlich)

-------

-------

innerinnen

(the) inside

(das) Innere (der/die/ das) Innen-

interior space

G

E

G

ADJ

language → subspace ↓

N

nominal

-------

outer outside

-------

-------

-------

inner inside

E

Tab. 2: German and English repertoires of topological terms.

-------

außerhalb (von)

bei neben (nah(e))

an/am

auf

in/im innerhalb (von)

G

P

at

out (of) outside

by next to beside (near) (close to)

-------

on

in inside within

E

-------

draußen

dabei daneben

daran, dran

darauf, drauf

darin, drin drinnen

G

P-ADV

-----

-----

-----

-----

-----

-----

E

E

(near)

------

(on)

------

------

außerhalb (without)

------

------

------

innerhalb (in) within

G

ADV/ADV-LIKE

------

außen

------

------

------

innen

G

S-ADV

------

outside

------

------

------

inside

E

transitive---------------------------------------------------------------------------intransitive

non-nominal

36 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

left

Rechte

Linke

(die)

right

(die)

-------

--link-

recht-

hinterst-

vorderst-

Rückseite

vorder-

front

leftmost

rightmost

right, left

rear

back (AmE)

in back of

behind (BE)

in front of

links von

left of

rechts von right of

hinter

vor

---

rechts davon

daneben

rechts

links davon

links daneben ---

dahinter

davor

in back (AmE)

hintendran/ -drauf/

linkerhand

rechterhand

-------

(BE)

-drüber

-drüber

behind

in front -drauf/

vornedran/

-dran

neath

links

rechts

hinten

vorn(e)

drunten

beneath

-drauf/

droben

on top

untendrunter/ under-

underneath

unterhalb

uppermost

-dran

on top of

oberhalb

topmost

unten

G

oben

E

below

obendrüber/

G

S-ADV

above

---

E

ADV/ADV-LIKE

-drauf/

d(a)rüber

G

P-ADV

above, below d(a)runter

over, under

E

unterst-

hinter-

H2

über

G

upper, lower unter

bottom, top

E

P

-----

-----

-----

E

transitive--------------------------------------------------------------------------------intransitive

non-nominal

oberst-

seite

---

oberunter-

Vorder-

-------

H1

---

G

front

Unterseite

E

ADJ

back

Oberseite

bottom

top

-----

V

G

E

CPD-N

lang. → G DIM ↓

N

nominal

Tab. 3: German and English repertoires of dimensional terms.

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 37

38 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

3.2.1 Search Spaces I: Topological spaces As indicated above, topological spatial terms can be used to define contact- or proximity-relations between ROs and LOs.15 For instance, the topological preposition in as used in example (10a) expresses a containment-relation between the LO (the bottle) and the RO (the box), thus singles out the interior space of the box (RO) as (Primary) Search Space, and locates the bottle (LO) within it. Correspondingly, next to in (10b) expresses a proximity-relation and thus singles out the neighbouring space of the box as (Primary) Search Space. (10) a. The bottle is in the box. b. The bottle is next to the box. Figure 8 illustrates the different topological subspaces that can be singled out by the German and English sets of topological terms (cf. Becker 1994: 1–17; Carroll and Becker 1993: 122; Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1020–1021).

exterior space interior space

neighbouring space boundary/ boundary space

Fig. 8: TOP(ological)-schema for English and German. Boundary space is only relevant in German (cf. Becker 1994: 16).16

|| 15 The terms innen, drinnen, außen and draußen are not always classified as topological adverbs, but are sometimes defined as “schwellen- oder grenzbezogene … Adverbien” (‘boundary-related adverbs’; Zifonun et al. 1997: 1155, emphasis original; see also Zifonun et al. 1997: 1160–1162). This alternative classification is not adopted here. 16 This figure is based on Becker (1994: 15); see also Carroll and Becker (1993: 122) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1020–1021).

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 39

As can be seen, the differences between the German and the English repertoires are not very pronounced: they differ by only one subspace, boundary space, for reference to which only the German (but not the English) repertoire comprises a set of topological terms (an/am and daran as, for instance, in Das Haus steht am Fluss ‘the house is at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE the river’; Becker 1994: 16; see also Becker 1994: 87, 108–109; Carroll and Becker 1993: 123). In addition, as illustrated in Table 2 the English repertoire comprises a general or neutral, region-denoting term (at as in She’s at the station; Becker 1994: 48) for which there is no direct equivalent in German (cf. Becker 1994: 42, 62; Dirven 1993: 74; see also Coventry and Garrod 2004: 119–120). In the present understanding, these differences, however, do not indicate the existence of cross-linguistic differences in options of degrees of objectfocusedness construal. The main reason for this is that topological terms always map onto objects or object-like entities: ROs to topological terms usually have to constitute bounded objects, or at least be eligible to being construed as such (e.g. Becker 1994: 7–8), since the different topological subspaces are defined relative to object boundaries. This principled requirement or usage restriction applies independently of the related fact that the range of possible ROs is very broad with topological terms because the exact shapes and sizes of the objects do not matter (to give some examples, something can equally be on a table or on the roof of a skyscraper, in a small box or in a church; cf. e.g. Carroll and Becker 1993: 122; Talmy 2000: 177–254). The same accounts for more recent empirical findings which have demonstrated that object functions are highly relevant for topological-term selection, as well as for the exact situational interpretation of topological utterances (cf. e.g. Bowerman 2007: 178–180; Carlson and van der Zee 2005; Coventry 1998, 1999; Coventry and Garrod 2004; Coventry and Guijarro-Fuentes 2008; Coventry and Prat-Sala 2001; Feist 2004, 2008; Garrod, Ferrier, and Campbell 1999; Regier, Carlson, and Corrigan 2005; Vandeloise 1994, 2007: 45). Therefore, all topological terms can be claimed to relate to the object-level of their referent scenes to a certain extent, and to do so in a largely comparable manner as regards the exact degree of object-focusedness with which they construe these scenes. Consequently, with DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, the dimensional terms used, and the manners in which they are combined with the topological components, could be expected to constitute the major source of variation in degrees of object-focusedness construal. As will be shown in the following section, one major reason for this is that defining Search Spaces by use of dimensional terms does not necessarily presuppose the existence of a bounded RO.

40 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

3.2.2 Search Spaces II: Dimensional spaces With dimensional terms, there are several options of how structure can be imposed onto the referent scene. These options have been extensively discussed in the literature by the label of Frames of Reference (FoRs). One broadly accepted definition of FoRs is that they constitute “coordinate systems whose function it is to designate angles or directions in which a figure [i.e. LO] can be found with respect to a ground [i.e. RO]” (Levinson and Wilkins 2006b: 541). That is, dimensional expressions structure their referent scenes into subspaces by mapping onto them a coordinate system, or system of directional axes (see also Levelt 1996; Levinson 2003; Herskovits 1986: 156–192). What is particularly relevant in the present context is that these coordinate systems have an origin (Levinson 2003: 35–38) or source, i.e. some kind of entity on the basis of whose features or characteristics the nature and orientation of the axes is defined, and a target, i.e. an entity or point/location in space in which the coordinate system is anchored and/or from which the axes extend. Importantly, source and target can, but do not have to be identical. For instance, with the scene depicted in Figure 9, the man/observer functions as the source of the coordinate system, the box as the target. As will be explained in more detail below, it is the man’s bodily asymmetries that qualify him as a potential FoR-source because they directly define where his front, back, left and right are. These asymmetry-based directions can then, via projection on the box (the target), indirectly define where the front, back, left and right of the box are.

target/RO LO

source

Fig. 9: Dissociation of source and target of a FoR: The ball is in front of the box.

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 41

To avoid confusion of terminology, and to ease the application of traditional terminology to the DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes under investigation in this book, the term RO is in the following used synonymously with the target (i.e. the box in Figure 9) not the source of a FoR (cf. Levelt 1996: 79; Levinson 2003: 35–38). Usually, types of FoRs are mainly differentiated based on what is their source. The taxonomy used here is Levinson’s (2003). It comprises three types of FoRs: intrinsic, relative and absolute.17 Since absolute FoRs, that is, FoRs which relate to fixed bearings like the geo-cardinal points (East, West, North and South) are not usually used in German and English for small-scale spatial relations like the ones investigated in this project (cf. e.g. Carroll 1997: 140; Tenbrink 2007: 143), the following discussion will focus on the difference between intrinsic and relative FoRs only. As is already indicated by Table 3, these two FoRs make use of the same set of directional axes and are, accordingly, realized by the same dimensionreferring linguistic means (cf. e.g. Jackendoff 1996: 15–19; Landau 2003: 22–23; Levinson 2003: xvii, 41–47, 53; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 396–405; Tenbrink 2005: 125–126; see also Section 3.3.4): terms referring to the vertical axis (top-bottom, V), the first horizontal or sagittal axis (front-back, H1) and the second horizontal or lateral axis (left-right, H2). The intrinsic and the relative FoR mainly differ in what they define as the source of the coordinate system, as well as in whether this source is identical to the target or not. As a consequence of the second aspect, the number of entities involved in defining the FoR differs between the two types. With the intrinsic FoR, the target, i.e. the RO (e.g. the car in Figure 10), also acts as the source of the coordinate system.18 || 17 A considerable range of alternative taxonomies of FoRs have been proposed both within and beyond the field of spatial language research (e.g. Amorim and Stucci 1997: 229; Burenhuldt 2008; Brewer and Pears 1993: 27; Campbell 1997; Chilton 2010; Landau 2003: 21–23; Levelt 1984; Mozer 2002; Palmer 2003; Pederson 2003; Pick and Lockman 1981; Retz-Schmidt 1988; Schober 1993, 1995, 1998a, 1998b, 2009; Svorou 1994: 21; Tenbrink 2011), or, as Levinson (2003: 34) puts it, the discussion of FoRs has led to a “forest of distinctions with obscuring undergrowth”. A systematic overview of the most common taxonomies and terminologies across disciplines can be found in Levinson (2003: 24–61). 18 Due to its simpler structure, the intrinsic FoR has frequently been claimed to constitute the FoR that speakers use by default (cf. e.g. Aurnague et al. 2007; Buhl 1996: 56; CarlsonRadvansky and Irwin 1994; Carlson-Radvansky and Logan 1997: 435; Ehrich 1985; Gapp 1997: 144; Levine and Carey 1982: 647; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 398 for a similar view). However, this proposal has been subject to much debate and has frequently been countered by the contrary claim that the (egocentric) relative FoR is most basic (at least in languages like English; cf. e.g. Amorim and Stucchi 1997; Bowerman 2007; Carlson 1999: 369; Kryk-Kastovsky

42 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

RO = target & source

LO

Fig. 10: The RO as target and source with the intrinsic FoR: The ball is in front of the car.

This presupposes that the RO displays stable inherent features which define it as intrinsically oriented or featured, i.e. which clearly identify a particular side of it as its front, back, top, bottom and/or left and right side (e.g. the front side of the car in Figure 10 is marked, among other things, by the presence of the headlights and the windshield; see also below). These directionally defined facets of the RO determine the orientation of the coordinate system, which is anchored in but “radiate[s] out” from the RO (Levinson 2003: 42), i.e. extends beyond its boundaries (e.g. beyond the car’s actual front to the region next to it). As a consequence, LOs which are at distance to the RO can still be located relative to it. Since the directionally marked facets of the RO function as a basis for establishing a binary relation between the RO and the LO (e.g. between the car and the ball in Figure 10; cf. e.g. Herrmann 1990: 126), uses of intrinsic FoRs are viewpoint-independent (e.g. Levelt 1996; Levinson 2003: 54–55; Pederson et al. 1998: 575): no matter from which perspective an observer would look at the scene displayed in Figure 10, the description The ball is in front of the car would always apply (but see also Figure 12 and examples (12a) and (12b) below). Insofar as intrinsic orientedness is a stable feature of the RO, intrinsic FoRs can also be considered applicable situation-independently and interindividually (cf. e.g. Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 398).

|| 1996: 329; Levelt 1982, 1984; Levinson 1996a: 188, 2003: 179; Majid et al. 2004: 108; Robinette et al. 2010 and Vorwerg 2003: 381). To date, there exists, to the best of my knowledge, no convincing piece of evidence which would demonstrate that one FoR functions as a default solution across individuals and contexts, so that this issue remains open for future empirical investigation (cf. Brunyé, Rapp, and Taylor 2008: 419; Carlson-Radvansky and Irwin 1993: 242; CarlsonRadvansky and Logan 1997: 413; Carlson-Radvansky and Radvansky 1996: 59; Ehrich 1985: 153–160; Levelt 1982, 1986: 210, 1996; Logan 1996; Schober 1993: 20; Tversky, Taylor, and Mainwaring 1997: 28).

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 43

However, there are certain restrictions to this assumption. Firstly, there is no closed set of features or criteria which mark an object as intrinsically oriented. Those most frequently referred to in the literature are those proposed by Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976: 394–405). Most of them very probably result from modelling objects analogously to human beings or living things more generally. Examples are the presence of a perceptual apparatus (the front of a car is where its eye-like headlights are) or canonical motion/movability (the side that usually comes first when a car moves is its front). In addition, criteria based on conventions of interaction with specific objects, like the canonical observer/user perspective (when you sit in a car, your front and the front of the car are aligned; cf. Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 401), play a role.19 All of these criteria are, however, subject to intercultural and, very probably, also interindividual variation: which objects are eligible to being construed in analogy to a human being or living thing, and, in particular, what are the conventions of interaction with particular entities is highly likely to differ between cultures, speech communities and individuals (see e.g. Levinson 2003: 41–42, 76–84; Tenbrink 2007: 135). In addition, as will be discussed subsequent to the following presentation of the relative FoR, the dividing line between uses of intrinsic and relative FoRs is not always clear cut. In the case of the relative FoR, an object different from the RO functions as the source of the FoR. Therefore, three entities – the LO, the RO and the source – are involved in relative FoR assignment (e.g. Herrmann 1990: 126): the RO acts as the target onto which the coordinate system is projected and from which the axes extend into (referent) space, but an entity other than the RO acts as the source of the coordinate system and defines the directions along which the LO can be located relative to the RO. This source entity displays inherent asymmetries which allow for the definition of these directions, i.e. is intrinsically oriented. Most prototypically, this entity is the speaker-hearer him- or herself (see example (11)). That is, the relative FoR is frequently realized by the subtype of the egocentric relative FoR (see Levinson 2003: 54). In Figure 11 and example (11), for instance, the speaker projects a coordinate system that derives from his bodily asymmetries and current orientation onto the RO, the box. That is, as indicated above (Figure 9), his body functions as the source of the coordinate system, the box as the target. In this way, the ball (the LO) can be located relative to the box.

|| 19 For a discussion and empirical investigation of further factors, which are, however, not of relevance to the research presented in this book, see Aurnague et al. (2007).

44 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

B L

RO

R

F

LO F L

S

R

B Fig. 11: Relative FoR-mapping: The ball is in front of the box.

(11)

The ball is in front of the box. (relative FoR)

The way in which the intrinsic orientation of the source entity is projected onto the target/RO in the case of example (11) is, however, only one among several theoretical possibilities. According to Levinson (2003: 84–89), three basic types of mapping operations can be differentiated with relative FoRs: the coordinate system can either be projected by way of 180° rotation, by way of transfer (without any rotation) or by way of reflection. The projection strategy common in English (and also in German), which is illustrated in Figure 11, constitutes a mixture of these options (cf. Levinson 2003: 86–89; see also Herskovits 1986: 160–162). The front/back axis is projected through reflection, i.e. the front of the speaker (as the source entity) and the front of the RO (as the target entity) face each other subsequent to projection. In contrast to this, the left and right sides of the RO are simply defined as the sides closest to the source entities’ inherent left- and right-hand sides (cf. Levinson 2003: 85; see also Becker 1994: 20). At least in cases of canonical orientation of the observer,20 the top/bottom axis is usually defined by gravity and thus in absolute terms (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 18; Carroll and Becker 1993: 123; Fillmore 1982: 36–37; Levinson and Wilkins 2006b: 543; Tenbrink 2007: 131).

|| 20 For examples of and research on scenes with non-canonical observer-orientation, see, for instance, Friederici and Levelt (1990) and Levelt (1984, 1986).

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 45

As a result of projection, uses of relative FoRs result in viewpoint-dependent references: the assignment of sides changes with a change of the position and thus of the perspective of the source entity, i.e. of the viewer in the case of egocentric relative FoRs (e.g. Levinson 2003: 54; Levelt 1996; Vorwerg and Rickheit 2000: 11). Consequently, directional features are assigned to the RO only temporarily for the situation given (e.g. Herrmann 1990: 135–136). As indicated above, and as illustrated by Figure 12 and examples (12a–b), this temporal assignment can conflict with and, on many occasions, can override (certain aspects of, cf. Carlson and van Deman 2008) the intrinsic orientedness of the RO (cf. e.g. Carroll 1997: 143; Coventry and Garrod 2004: 9; Landau and Munnich 1998: 267; Levelt 1984, 1986; Majid et al. 2004: 109; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 398). Since intrinsic and relative FoRs can be realized by the same linguistic forms, this has as a consequence that FoRs are a potential source of miscommunication or misunderstanding in contexts of interactive spatial language use (cf. e.g. Grabowski 1994, 1999; Grabowski and Weiß 1995, 1996; Grabowski and Miller 2000; Schober 1993, 1995, 1998a, 1998b, 2009).

Fig. 12: Conflicting FoRs.

(12) a. The ball is in front of the car. (intrinsic FoR; source = car) b. The ball is to the right of the car. (egocentric relative FoR; source = man) If no such conflict occurs, as in Figure 13 and examples (13a–b), it is usually not possible to decide whether a linguistic utterance realizes a relative or an intrinsic FoR (cf. e.g. Grabowski 1999: 134–136; Levelt 1996).

46 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

Fig. 13: Non-conflicting FoRs.

(13) a. The ball is in front of the car. (intrinsic FoR) b. The ball is in front of the car. (relative FoR) Which option (intrinsic or relative FoR) a speaker selects on a particular occasion is not only difficult to identify with certain object constellations; it is also difficult to predict. This accounts even for instances like examples (12a) and (12b), with which the final selection decision becomes obvious from a speaker’s utterance. A range of findings from research on FoR-selection strongly suggest that whether and under which circumstances an object is construed as intrinsically oriented can vary considerably between contexts, as well as between and even within individuals; there is plenty of evidence indicating that the same potentially intrinsically oriented objects (or human beings/interlocutors; cf. Schober 1993, 1995, 1998b, 2009) can variably be selected as ROs with intrinsic and relative FoRs, and can be (and are) linguistically referred to in these different ways even by the same speakers (cf. e.g. Bateman, Tenbrink, and Farrar 2007: 190–199; Carlson 1999; Carlson-Radvansky and Irwin 1993, 1994; CarlsonRadvansky and Logan 1997; Grabowski 1994, 1999, 2000; Grabowski and Miller 1995, 2000; Grabowski and Weiß 1995, 1996; Herrmann 1990: 122; Herrmann and Grabowski 1998; Hill 1982: 25–29; Levelt 1986, 1996; Levinson et al. 2002; Taylor et al. 1999). Another major difference between uses of intrinsic and relative FoRs that becomes obvious and relevant in this context is the following: while the intrinsic FoR applies to a limited set of ROs only, the set of ROs to which the relative FoR applies is largely unrestricted and, importantly, includes intrinsically oriented/featured objects. It is therefore difficult to determine whether or not speakers recognize ROs like the car in Figures 12 and 13 as intrinsically oriented even if they eventually opt for using a relative FoR. This draws attention to a question central to the research presented in this book: is the selection for use of either an intrinsic or a relative FoR correlated

Search Spaces and static spatial language in German and English | 47

with differences in degrees of object-focusedness construal of the referent scene? What suggests a positive answer to this question is that the use of an intrinsic FoR presupposes that speakers recognize the RO as intrinsically oriented, which entails that they assign attention to the RO and its specific direction-inducing properties. The use of an intrinsic FoR could therefore be associated with the realization of a highly object-focused construal of the referent scene. This assumption indeed underlies, or is at least implied by, a range of investigations that address the role of object-attention during spatial language use (e.g. Carroll 1997: 143–146; von Stutterheim 1997: 151; see also Section 7.1 below). However, several findings from research on FoR-selection processes qualify this assumption. There is, for instance, evidence which indicates that speakers initially co-activate several FoRs and only select one for use at a later stage of processing (e.g. Carlson 1999; Carlson-Radvansky and Irwin 1994; CarlsonRadvansky and Logan 1997; Taylor et al. 1999; see also Behrmann and Tipper 1999). This might suggest that speakers routinely assign attention to the RO in order to check whether it is intrinsically oriented or not, and only then decide which FoR to use. This would imply that the RO is assigned attention independently of whether it turns out to be intrinsically oriented or not. Another problem to be taken into account in this context is the blurring of boundaries between the intrinsic and the relative FoR. The intrinsity-criterion of the canonical observer/user perspective (see above), for instance, allows for (certain) uses of intrinsic FoRs to be (re)defined as highly conventionalized or entrenched uses of relative FoRs in which a canonical user or observer functions as the source. An LO can, for example, be in front of a fridge (the RO) because it is close to its intrinsic front side (the side with the door) – which would correspond to the use of an intrinsic FoR – or because it is close to the front side of an imagined canonical user of the fridge (i.e. a human being intending to put something in or take something out of the fridge), which would correspond to the (imagined) use of a relative FoR. The same could, secondly, also be the case for the convention of identifying or marking an object as intrinsically oriented by mapping a living-thing schema onto it (see above); in particular with objects like cars, whose intrinsic orientation is aligned with the intrinsic orientation of their prototypical users, it is often not possible to tell whether or not a process of projection from these (real or imagined) users has taken place (or takes place afresh on each instance of dimensional term use relating to objects of this type). In the present understanding, the situation is as follows: both FoRs have an intrinsically oriented entity as their source and only differ with respect to whether this source entity is also the target of the coordinate system (cf. Levinson 2003: 35–38). Independent of what the source is, the target (RO) is

48 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

eventually assigned an oriented dimensional structure in both cases. Both FoRs thus enable that the RO be divided into directionally defined parts or portions, i.e. license that spatial structure be construed as a feature of this RO. This renders the use of either a relative or an intrinsic FoR a problematic parameter for identifying the degree of object-focusedness with which an utterance construes its referent scene. As will be demonstrated in more detail below, FoR-selection therefore does not constitute a prototypical determiner or indicator of degrees of object-focusedness construal, but is very likely independent of it and/or cross-cuts more reliable indicators of this dimension of variation in spatial scene construal. These indicators will be presented and discussed in the following sections, before the relation between FoR-selection and degrees of object-focusedness construal can and will be readdressed.

3.3 Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal As indicated above, spatial information can be expressed by use of nominal and non-nominal means, as well as by use of transitive/relational and intransitive linguistic structures (see Tables 2 and 3 on pp. 36–37; examples are provided further down in this section).21 This accounts both for the expression of topological and dimensional information. In this section, it will be demonstrated that variation in these formal terms directly and systematically correlates with variation in degrees of object-focusedness construal of referent scenes. More specifically, it will be shown that how dimensional information is formally realized largely determines the degrees of object-focusedness with which DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes can be construed. Prior to this, some principles concerning how object-focusedness is understood and operationalized in the context of DIMDIM(TOP)-scene construal require to be (re-)indicated (see also Section 2.2 above). Firstly, what is understood here as the major defining indicator of ‘objectness’ is an entity’s existence as a reified, i.e. a clearly bounded or delimited, “spatially invariant” unit (Vecera and Farah 1994: 147).22 Secondly, the object-like entity of major interest in the

|| 21 Verbs (see e.g. Ameka and Levinson 2007) will not be taken into account here, but are left as an issue to be investigated by future research. 22 “[G]rouped array[s]” (Vecera 1994: 316; cf. also Behrmann and Tipper 1999: 96; Iani et al. 2001: 157; Mozer and Vecera 2005: 131–132), by contrast, i.e. sets of spatially related or at least

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 49

context of DIMDIM(TOP)-scene construal, and thus the entity in focus in this investigation, is the RO. The reasons for this are as follows: first and foremost, the RO is the target of the language-induced mapping of both topological and dimensional schemas (see above). As such, it is also the object from which structures can be projected onto the scene and/or the object that can itself become structured into subportions or subspaces in the course of defining the Search Space for and, eventually, the location of the LO. The LO, by contrast, is usually not structured by spatial language in the same manner.23 This is the case independently of whether one agrees with the broadly held view that the LO is conceptualized as a “pointlike” unit (Talmy 2000: 183; see also Gapp 1997: 13; Landau and Jackendoff 1993: 228) or “blob” (Carlson-Radvansky, Covey, and Lattanzi 1999: 516), and thus as devoid of any object-specific properties, or with the more recent view that the function of the LO in general, and its (functional) relation to the RO in particular, play a central role during the planning, production and comprehension of spatial language (cf. e.g. Andanova, Tenbrink, and Coventry 2010; Carlson and van der Zee 2005; Carlson-Radvansky, Covey, and Lattanzi 1999; Carlson-Radvansky and Radvansky 1996; Carlson-Radvansky and Tang 2000; Coventry 1998, 1999; Coventry and Garrod 2004; Coventry and GuijarroFuentes 2008; Coventry and Mather 2002; Coventry and Prat-Sala 2001; Garrod, Ferrier, and Campbell 1999; Vandeloise 1994). Based on these assumptions, the degree of object-focusedness with which a DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance construes its referent scene will be assessed by drawing on the following criteria: (a) How strongly does the spatial language construction used draw attention to/foreground the boundaries/boundedness of the RO? (degree of relevance of the RO-boundary)

|| proximate (component) entities (cf. e.g. Goldsmith 1998: 215; Olson 1993) are not classified here as prototypical objects (cf. Vecera 1994: 316; see also Vandeloise 2007). 23 An exception to this view can be found in Burigo and Coventry (2005), who provide evidence which “support[s] the idea that the orientation of the located object affects acceptability ratings for projective prepositions” (Burigo and Coventry 2005: 121) when the LO is intrinsically oriented. Since this has, however, only been demonstrated to hold for the intrinsic orientation of LOs along the vertical (top-bottom) axis, and since it cannot be excluded that Burigo and Coventry’s findings may, eventually, mainly explain from potential motion of the LO (“People perceive objects rotated away from the gravitational plane as falling”, Burigo and Coventry 2005: 121), and thus in functional terms, the evidence provided by Burigo and Coventry (2005) is not in conflict with the line of argumentation in this chapter.

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(b) Which kind of structural schema is (primarily) used – an abstract spatial schema (DIM, TOP) or an object-(type) specific schema, i.e. a schema that relates to the inherent structure of the RO like, for instance, its shape or its functional part-whole structure? (degree of RO-specificity) (c) (How far) do Search Space and Referent Space extend (i) beyond the boundaries of the RO, and (ii) beyond the boundaries of the perceived scene/ Perception Space? (degree of extension of Search Space/Referent Space) As will be shown in the following, how these criteria are realized depends decisively on which word-class category is used for expressing spatial information. Cross-linguistic differences in availability and conditions of use of spatial terms with different word-class category membership will, accordingly, be identified as the main basis on which hypotheses regarding language-specific patterns of spatial scene conceptualization can be formulated. Since prepositions constitute the most prototypical and most extensively investigated form of spatial language, the following discussion will proceed from transitive non-nominal terms (dimensional and topological prepositions) and constructions, via nominal terms (nouns and adjectives) and constructions to intransitive non-nominal terms (adverbs and adverb-like structures) and constructions.

3.3.1 Transitive non-nominal terms and constructions With DIMDIM(TOP)-references, dimensional terms do not fulfil their prototypical function of indicating the location of an LO that is at distance from the RO. Instead, they specify the location of an LO that is located within the boundaries of the RO (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 119, 141–143; Becker and Carroll 1997: 27; Herskovits 1986: 178–181). The relation between LO and RO is thus a relation of close contact (see Figure 1 on p. 12). Such relations of contact cannot, however, be realized by dimensional prepositions. As indicated by examples (14a) and (14b), dimensional prepositions always define Search Spaces which are external to the boundaries of the RO, and do so both in German and in English (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 22; Herskovits 1986: 181). Therefore, these prepositions cannot be part of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions.

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Located Object = bottle SEARCH SPACE = space outside the external back-boundary of the RO Reference Object = table

REFERENT SPACE = Situation Space

S/H

Fig. 14: Dimensional preposition use: The bottle is behind the table.

(14) a. The bottle is behind the table. dem Tisch. b. Die Flasche ist hinter the bottle-LO is behind-DIM-P the table-RO Accordingly, the only spatial prepositions of relevance to the present discussion are topological prepositions. As already indicated in Section 3.2, the sets of subregions that can be defined by use of topological prepositions hardly differ between German and English. In addition, there are no indications that the few cross-linguistic differences that exist with respect to this aspect correlate with differences in the ranges of degrees of object-focusedness with which speakers of these two languages can construe spatial referent scenes. What renders topological prepositions interesting for the present discussion is therefore not so much the topological subspaces they define, but their status as transitive or relational terms, i.e. the fact that they take, and usually require, a complement (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 17). Furthermore, how they are complemented proves highly relevant for determining the degree of object-focusedness with which a spatial utterance construes its referent scene. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, topological prepositions usually require that the RO be explicitly mentioned. Otherwise, their use will be identified and processed as elliptical (see discussion below). Via their transitivity, topological prepositions thus effect that the RO is windowed (see Section 2.3.1)

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and, consequently, is assigned attention. This marks constructions which contain transitive spatial terms as more object-focused in nature than their intransitive correspondents. Secondly, topological prepositions license different ways in which the RO can be mentioned. Depending on which noun or type of noun phrase occurs as their complement, different Levels of Attention construals can be realized: different nominal complements can foreground either the objectspecific structural features of the RO (example (15a)) or can map a more general spatial structural schema, usually the DIM-schema (example (15b)), onto the RO and/or the referent scene as a whole. (15) a. The bottle is in the corner of the table. b. The bottle is at the front of the table. This can again be seen associated with the activation of different sets of (more or less object type-specific) background knowledge about the referent of the nominal construction. In terms of Windowing of Attention, this would indicate potential differences in the size of the window and the depth of the view it provides (see Section 2.3.1 above): with example (15a) the window would very likely include object-specific knowledge pertaining, for instance, to shape-features, whereas this would not be the case to the same extent with example (15b). The exact options of variable construal associated with the use of nominal complements will be presented and discussed in the next section, together with a discussion of the features of nominal terms and spatial adjectives.

3.3.2 Nominal terms and constructions The set of nouns presented and discussed in this section exceeds the set of spatial nouns (topological and dimensional simple nouns and compound nouns) that is presented in Tables 2 and 3 above (see pp. 36–37). It includes object-part denoting nouns in addition, because – as has just been illustrated – these can function as complements to topological prepositions. One basic differentiation that derives from additionally taking into account part-denoting nouns is the following: depending on whether they are objectrelated or spatial in nature, RO-referring nouns can either impose a partonymy structure24 or a partiteness structure (cf. e.g. Svorou 1994: 7; Talmy 2000: 191– || 24 The way partonymy is used here deviates slightly from the traditional meaning of this term (cf. Bußmann 2002: 680; Winston, Chaffin, and Herrmann 1987). Partonymy is understood here

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 53

192; Vandeloise 2007: 37) onto the RO. That is, they can realize different Levels of Attention construals by either referring to the inherent or natural parts25 of the RO (partonymy structure), as in examples (16a–b), or by mapping onto the RO an abstract TOP- and/or DIM-schema (partiteness structure), as in examples (17a– b).26

Fig. 15: ROs with natural parts.

(16) a. b. (17) a. b.

The apple is next to the handle (of the basket). The bottle is in the corner (of the table). The apple is in the interior (of the basket). The bottle is on the (front) right (of the table).

In cognitive linguistic understanding, part-denoting nouns profile the object as a whole (see Section 2.3), i.e. trigger the activation of object-related knowledge, and, in the case of partonymy nouns like corner or handle, derive from the functional features or shape-features specific to a particular object or object type. Therefore, the use of partonymy nouns as in examples (16a) and (16b) defines

|| to refer not only to part-whole relations between (and thus to the division or divisibility of holistic entities into) functional parts (e.g. body > arm), but also includes part-terms that refer to salient shape and contour features of an object (e.g. table > corner). In fact, it covers all kinds of part-whole relations which are connected to the RO as a (mental representation of a) material object with a certain shape and function, or, seen from a different perspective, whose mention is likely to evoke a mental image of the (prototype of the) entire object. 25 The term natural parts is derived from Herskovits’ (1986: 175) partonymy-related concept of “‘natural faces’”. 26 These examples are based on (imprecise) replies provided by the English-speaking participants in Experiment 1 (see Chapter 7).

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inherent object parts as primary ROs. In the present understanding, this corresponds to a foregrounding of the object-level of the referent scene (cf. Evans and Green 2006: 515; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 47). Constructions that contain partonymy nouns can, accordingly, be classified as realizing a highly objectfocused construal of their referent scenes. The degree of object-focusedness associated with spatial utterances that contain a topological or dimensional noun (examples (17a) and (17b)), by contrast, is considerably lower. These nouns do not usually refer to object-specific features, but profile abstract spatial schemas which can either be inherent to objects (in the case of intrinsic featuredness) or be the result of mapping (from an intrinsically oriented source entity) (cf. e.g. Aurnague et al. 2007: 155; Herskovits 1986: 175). This is, however, not to imply that the object-level does not play a role at all with these constructions. Although they do not refer to specific features of objects, spatial nouns and adjectives still – simply by being representatives of their respective word-class categories – are understood here to effect a construal of spatial information in object-like terms. The reasons for this are as follows: from a Cognitive Grammar perspective, different word-class categories encode different construals (cf. e.g. Evans and Green 2006: 554–571; Langacker 2008: 93–127; Radden and Dirven 2007: 41–46, 63–86; Schmid 2000: 365). More specifically, nouns profile THINGS (cf. e.g. Langacker 2008: 98), i.e. objects and perceptual groups, including “places as special cases” (Langacker 2008: 91). In the present context, this means that nouns like (the) interior or (the) right effect a reification of abstract topological or dimensional information, i.e. a conceptualization of spatial information in object-like terms. With static spatial constructions of the type under discussion here, this can also imply that spatial features are construed as features of the RO, or, as Levinson (2003: 80) puts it, that “the figure [i.e. LO] is … at a named part of the ground [i.e. RO].” Since adjectives, by definition, assign attributes to entities, this is particularly obvious with uses of dimensional adjectives in combination with partdenoting nouns (as in example (18a)27). The case is similar for adjective-plusnoun constructions with more general, i.e. less strongly object-feature related part-nouns like side/Seite, half/Hälfte or portion/Teil (example (18b)), and with compounds that are headed by such nouns, like, for instance, the German Vorderseite (‘front-side-DIM-CPD-N’; example (18c)). However, this pattern of con-

|| 27 As far as available, and unless indicated otherwise, the examples are taken from the corpora of spatial referential utterances elicited within the scope of Experiments 1 and 2 (see Chapters 7 and 8).

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struing dimensional spatial information as an RO/object-feature can also be realized by dimensional adjective-plus-dimensional noun constructions (as in example (18d)), as well as by dimensional noun constructions as such (as in example (18e)). (18) a. A table with a cup on it in the … right corner. Ich seh einen braunen Tisch mit einer Tasse darauf, cup-LO there-on-DIM-P-ADV I see a brown table-RO with a die sich in der rechten Ecke befindet. which itself in the right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PartN is-located b. It’s a brown table with a mug on the right-hand side. The tomato is on the left portion of the piece of lettuce. Eine Flasche Wein im blauen Karton … auf der linken a bottle-LO-of wine in-the blue box-RO … on the left-DIM-ADJ Seite. side-GEN-PARTN c. Die Flasche ist an der Vorderseite der the bottle-LO is at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE the front-side-DIM-CPD-N of-the Kiste. box-RO d. It’s a plate with the candle at the top right. e. A plate with the candle on the left. Although they all effect a construal of spatial (dimensional) information in object-like terms, the examples just listed still differ in the exact degree to which they foreground the object-level of their referent scenes. The degree of objectfocusedness can be considered to decrease from constructions of the type represented by example (18a) to constructions of the type represented by example (18e), because the nouns that form the heads of the prepositional complement phrases decrease in object-specificity. Simultaneously, they increase in the extent to which they refer to and thus foreground the boundary structure of their referent entity, and in the extent to which they express abstract spatial information rather than object-related information. With regards to the first of these dimensions of variation, boundaryreference, both the noun and the topological preposition used can suggest an interpretation of the location of the LO either relative to a point-like (corner/Ecke, see example (18a)) or line-like two-dimensional landmark (side/Seite, see example (18b)), or relative to an extended or three-dimensional unit, i.e. a more region-like subportion of the surface of the RO (portion/Teil, see example

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(18b)). Some nouns license several interpretations with respect to this issue. For instance, Seite/side, but also a dimensional noun like front, can either refer to a boundary section of the RO or to a more extended subportion (cf. e.g. Tenbrink 2007: 156–158; see also below). Which interpretation holds on a particular instance of use can be suggested by the linguistic context (cotext) in which these nouns are embedded. In particular, which topological preposition is used can play a central role (cf. e.g. Herskovits 1986: 173–190; Tenbrink 2007: 159). For instance, if used as a complement to the boundary-space denoting German topological preposition an (as in example (19a)), Seite (‘side’) is more likely to be understood as referring to the boundary line or vertically extended boundary surface of the RO28 (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 93) than if used as a complement to the surface-space referring topological preposition auf (as in example (19b)), which is more likely to trigger a reading of Seite as denoting a three-dimensional, extended part of the usually horizontally extended (upper) surface of the RO29 (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 87–89).30 (19) a. Die Flasche ist an the bottle-LO is at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE des Tisches. of-the table-RO b. Die Flasche ist auf the bottle-LO is on/P-SURFACE SPACE des Tisches. of-the table-RO

der rechten Seite the right-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN

der rechten Seite the right-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN

Variation along the second dimension referred to above, the degree to which the nouns in the dimension-denoting phrases express object-related relative to abstract spatial information, has the following, related effect: from examples (18a) to (18e) it becomes increasingly possible to interpret these nouns as referring to the referent scene/Perception Space as such rather than to the RO. They thus increasingly define the location of the LO relative to a subregion of space

|| 28 Cf. Seite, definition 1a) in Dudenredaktion (2003). 29 Cf. Seite, definition 1c) in Dudenredaktion (2003). 30 It is largely unclear whether topological prepositions complemented by dimensional nouns indeed realize their prototypical meanings or whether they carry a more general meaning and mainly function as structural ‘fillers’, and thus semantically relatively neutral linking elements, which primarily enable the expression of dimensional information by the use of noun phrases (cf. e.g. Tenbrink 2005: 134; see also Section 7.2.4, pp. 214–215).

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rather than relative to a subpart of an object (cf. Becker 1994: 33). To give an example, while a construction like in the right corner (example (18a)) can hardly be interpreted differently than as construing ‘rightness’ as a feature of an inherent part of the RO, a construction like on the right-hand side (example (18b)) could also be interpreted as referring to the right-hand subportion of Perception Space as a whole. This can be considered even more likely with simple-noun constructions like at the top right or on the left (examples (18d) and (18e)), because simple dimensional nouns do not comprise a part-denoting element at all. Instead, they only refer to an object-like entity by virtue of their word-class category membership. Put into cognitive linguistic terms, they can be considered to reify ‘directedness’ itself and, as an effect, construe this feature of objects (Carroll 1993: 26) or of space as a THING-like entity (cf. Langacker 1991: 22–23, 2008: 95, 119; Schmid 2000: 363–369; Talmy 2000: 43–47).31 As a consequence, a sentence like the one in example (18d) could either be interpreted as referring to the top right part of the plate or to the top right subregion of Perception Space (cf. Herskovits 1986: 175; Levinson 2003: 106). Similarly to what has been observed above for references to two-dimensional RO-parts versus three-dimensional RO-portions, cotextual factors can, on some (but not all) occasions, suggest whether an RO-relative or a Perception Space-relative interpretation applies. Again, the topological preposition used can effect a shift towards a more object(-type) related interpretation of an utterance. This accounts in particular for uses of in (example (20a)), which usually presuppose that the RO displays features which render it eligible for functioning as a container object (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 9, 15, 65; Coventry 1998: 256; Talmy 2000: 223–224).32 Similarly, the use of an RO-referring of-prepositional phrase as

|| 31 Due to their particular semantics, as well as due to the fact that they constitute a relatively closed set of terms, simple dimensional nouns can also be found referred to as Internal Localization Nouns (ILNs). This label identifies them as a “semi-closed” (Aurnague et al. 2007: 173; Aurnague, Hickmann, and Vieu 2007: 15; Vandeloise 2007: 37) class of nouns which differ in meaning and usage from all other part-denoting nouns: “ILNs refer to space portions and denote stable parts, unlike component nouns that also denote stable entities but cannot refer to space portions” (Aurnague, Hickmann, and Vieu 2007: 15; see also Aurnague 1996, 2004; Borillo 1988, 1999). 32 As Becker (1994: 15, 70–71) points out, which entities can be ascribed an interior space is also to a considerable extent a matter of convention. The possession of a definite boundary, for instance, constitutes a necessary precondition for the ascription of an interior space to a particular entity in many languages. However, this is not the case in German and English: in these languages, factually unbounded entities can be ascribed an interior space (in der Luft/in the air), and can thus become construed as bounded, object-like entities.

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in example (20b) strongly suggests an RO-relative rather than scene- or spacerelative interpretation of simple dimensional noun constructions (cf. Becker 1994: 23). (20) a. That container … with an egg in the right. b. Plate with candle … at the back of the plate. Based on the criteria of object-focusedness introduced in Chapter 2, spatial constructions that can be identified as referring (a) to a three-dimensional, spatially extended portion of an RO rather than to a two-dimensional boundary part, and/or (b) to a subregion of the referent scene/Perception Space rather than to a subpart or subportion of the RO construe their referent scenes in a less strongly object-focused manner than constructions which clearly refer to the RO and which, in particular, draw attention to its status as a bounded entity. Constructions that contain general nouns like Seite/side and, even more, constructions that contain simple dimensional nouns like (the) front or (the) right, can therefore be located further towards the space-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale (see Figure 2 on p. 15) than constructions that contain RO-part-denoting nouns. In addition, as the examples discussed in this section indicate, the different possible meanings and thus scene construals that can be realized by nominal constructions indicate that these constructions cover a relatively broad range in the middle area of the scale. However, nominal constructions of the type just presented and discussed are still considered here to always realize a construal meaning relatively closer to the object-focused than to the space-focused end of the Degrees of Objectfocusedness Scale. The main reasons for this are as follows: firstly, these constructions are topological constructions and, thus, presuppose the presence of a bounded, or construed-as-bounded, RO (see Section 3.2.1). Because of this, and because of the reifying construal meaning of nouns in general, even the Perception Space- or scene-relative versions of these constructions still construe the Search Spaces they single out as bounded or delimited units, and thus in an object- or THING-like manner. One variant of dimensional noun constructions, however, extends their scope of construal meanings further into the space-focused area of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. This variant is illustrated in example (21). What is characteristic of it is that noun phrases headed by simple dimensional nouns (and, occasionally, by general part-denoting nouns like side) occur as complements to the dynamic spatial prepositions to and towards (cf. e.g. Herskovits

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1986: 181–184). That is, with these constructions, a dynamic concept is used to describe a static arrangement. (21)

The bottle is to/towards the right (of the table).

Constructions of this type can, accordingly, be classified as instances of fictive motion constructions (cf. e.g. Dirven 1981: 126; Langacker 1987: 170–171, 2005b: 22–24; Matlock 2004; Matlock, Ramscar, and Boroditsky 2005; Talmy 2000: 99– 175; see also Blomberg and Zlatev 2014).33 More precisely, example (21) is an instance of what Talmy (2000: 136) refers to as (the use of) a fictive access path: An access path is a depiction of a stationary object’s location in terms of a path that some other identity might follow to the point of encounter with the object. What is factive here is the representation of the object as stationary, without any entity traversing the depicted path. What is fictive is the representation of some entity traversing the depicted path … the fictively moving entity can often be imagined as being … the focus of one’s attention …. (emphasis original)

It can be claimed that these constructions primarily focus attention on the path of motion, and thus, eventually, on the dimensional axis along which this path extends. They can therefore be considered to relatively background information on the RO in general and on its boundaries in particular.34 In example (21) the fictive path of motion can be imagined to extend across the boundaries of the RO (cf. e.g. Becker and Carroll 1997: 74) and to continue potentially infinitely into space. Unless context indicates otherwise, each point on this axis-defined path or each vertical line or plane subtending it at any of these points could be the referent of the noun (the) right.

|| 33 There are indications that these fictive motion constructions work best with the lateral axis (left/right; cf. Herskovits 1986: 181). This might be explained based on the following considerations: firstly, fictive motion utterances can be interpreted as imitating the gaze paths of observers; secondly, the travel of gaze along the lateral and also, to a certain extent, the vertical (top/bottom) axis, can be inferred from the movement of the eyes more straightforwardly, and can thus be imagined and simulated more easily, than the travel of gaze along the sagittal (front/back) axis, which corresponds to a ‘zooming in and out’ of the visual focus without eye movements being visible. 34 Drawing on Herskovits (1986), Tenbrink (2007: 217) claims that the English fictive motion constructions can only be used as means of referring to regions external to the RO. As will be shown in Chapter 7, this is, however, at least not the case for their use as parts of DIMDIM(TOP)utterances.

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If considered from this perspective, fictive motion constructions background the boundedness of the RO, i.e., in Talmy’s (2000: 52) terms, exert a debounding effect on the RO. Although the nominal parts of to/towards-plussimple dimensional noun constructions imply the existence of a THING-like referent and thus of a boundary-like goal of the simulated motion, the use of to or towards has as an effect that this “goal … need not be thought of in its concrete shape” (Dirven 1981: 118). It can therefore be assumed to lie somewhere out of Perception Space.35 This, eventually, identifies fictive motion constructions as the most strongly space-focused ones among the constructions involving dimensional nouns or adjectives, and thus among the different preposition-plusnoun construction types that have been discussed in this section. In sum, what has been shown is that dimensional nouns and adjectives, as an effect of their word-class category membership, can be claimed to construe their referent regions as bounded, object-like entities to which dimensional orientedness is ascribed as a feature. Accordingly, uses of dimensional nouns or adjectives effect that subparts or subregions of (object-)ROs or full referent scenes are identified and delimited by way of being ascribed dimensional spatial features. Based on the criteria of (a) how strongly they foreground the boundaries/boundedness of the RO, and (b) whether they primarily relate to a part/ portion of the RO or a region of the referent scene, spatial expressions involving dimensional nouns and/or adjectives can thus, in the order of decreasing degrees of object-focusedness, variably define the location of an LO in the following ways: they can … (1) … explicitly refer to the boundaries/parts/sides of the RO (e.g. in der rechten Ecke ‘in the right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN’/in the right-hand corner; an der rechten Kante/Seite ‘at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE the right edge/side’/at the righthand edge/side). (2) … foreground the boundaries of the RO by exclusively referring to a subportion of the RO and thus to a region within or even coinciding with its boundaries (e.g. auf der Vorderseite ‘on/P-SURFACE SPACE/SUPPORT the frontside-DIM-CPD-N’).

|| 35 Example (21) is more concrete and specific than the ones Talmy (2000: 50–55) gives. Nevertheless, as becomes clear from the following quote, the underlying principle is the same: “When a quantity is understood as unbounded, it is conceived as continuing on indefinitely with no necessary characteristic of finiteness intrinsic to it. When a quantity is understood as bounded, it is conceived to be demarcated as an individuated unit entity. … the boundary ‘encloses’ the bounded quantity and the bounded quantity lies ‘within’ the boundary.” (Talmy 2000: 50, emphases original).

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(3) … foreground the boundaries of an object-RO by referring to a region of space outside of but close to the RO (e.g. an der Vorderseite ‘at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE the front-side-DIM-CPD-N’). (4) … foreground the boundaries and, depending on context, variably either refer to an RO-internal or RO-external subregion of a prototypical RO, i.e. an object (e.g. at the front). (5) … refer to an internal subportion of Perception Space, which is then construed as an object-like RO (e.g. on the right). (6) … background the boundaries of the RO and refer to a spatial region or path which extends from the middle of the RO across its boundaries towards some goal which can, but does not necessarily have to, coincide with the boundaries of Perception Space (to/towards the right). Thus, dimensional nominal constructions can structure their referent scenes either on an RO-boundary related local level (types (1)–(4)) or on a scene-related global level (types (5)–(6)) (cf. e.g. Carroll 1993: 24–26, 1997: 139; von Stutterheim and Carroll 1993: 74). Figure 16 illustrates these options for the right lateral half-axis. B

Perception Space

RO

(1) L

R (6)

(2) (3) (4) (5) F Fig. 16: Spaces singled out by nominal DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. The numbers refer to types (1)–(6) listed above.

As already indicated by the examples for the different types provided above, which of these subspaces becomes singled out by a construction containing a

62 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

dimensional noun phrase depends to a considerable extent on (a) which noun is used, (b) which topological preposition is used, and (c) which co(n)text a particular spatial utterance is embedded in, with factor (a) being the most central one. What the examples discussed in this section indicate is that, additionally, not all options of scene construal can be equally realized and/or are applied with equal commonality in German and English. More specifically, as can be seen from Table 3 (p. 37), the German and English repertoires of dimensional nouns differ in two major respects. Firstly, dimensional compound nouns (e.g. Vorderseite ‘front-side-DIM-CPD-N’) only exist in German. And, secondly, a full set of simple dimensional nouns (e.g. (the) front, (the) back, etc.) is only available to speakers of English. At close consideration, the first difference, the non-availability of dimensional compound nouns in English, proves less relevant for identifying crosslinguistic differences in options of spatial scene/DIMDIM(TOP)-scene construal than might be suggested by the absence of a whole type of spatial nouns in one of the two languages compared. This is mainly because the construal potential of compound nouns like Vorderseite (‘front-side-DIM-CPD-N’) is highly similar to that of constructions containing a dimensional adjective and a general partdenoting noun, i.e. of constructions of the type vordere Seite (‘front-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN’)/front side. This explains from the fact that both the first components of compounds and prenominal adjectives in complex noun phrases usually act as modifiers, i.e. specify the meaning of a nominal head. Therefore, the non-availability of dimensional compound nouns is only of marginal relevance to the present project.36 The situation is very different for the language-specific repertoires of simple dimensional nouns. Firstly, as indicated in Table 3 (p. 37), the German inventory is largely37 restricted to nouns that refer to the two lateral half-axes (die Rechte ‘the right-DIM-N’, die Linke ‘the left-DIM-N’), whereas the English repertoire covers

|| 36 This assumption finds further support by the fact that no single instance of use of dimensional compound nouns occurred in the language data elicited from speakers of German in Experiments 1 and 2. This also suggests that differences that might occur between English constructions of the type at/on the front side and German constructions like an/auf der Vorderseite (‘at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE/ on/P-SURFACE SPACE the front-side-DIM-CPD-N’) likely explain from differences in the meaning potential of German Seite as compared to English side rather than from differences between the structural forms of this construction type and the German dimensional compound noun constructions. 37 Forms like (das) Oben/Unten/Vorne/Hinten (‘(the) top-DIM-N/bottom-DIM-N/front-DIM-N/backDIM-N’) exist, but are not applicable to the contexts under discussion within the scope of this book. They will therefore not be discussed here.

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the full set of six half axes. What cannot be seen from a mere comparison of repertoires is, however, that, in addition to that, the nouns that are available to speakers of German are subject to massive usage restrictions: as Ehrich (1985: 147) points out, in German die Rechte and die Linke refer to the right and left hand of a person in almost all of their uses, and mainly occur as parts of the fixed phrases zur Rechten and zur Linken. In fact, providing a structurally parallel German translation of English simple dimensional noun constructions is not possible (see example (22)). (22)

The bottle is at the front right of the table. *Die Flasche ist an der vorderen-DIM-ADJ Rechten-DIM-N des Tisches.

This indicates that, at least for the manners of spatial language use in focus in this book, only English provides its speakers with a complete and fully functional set of simple dimensional nouns. This has considerable consequences for the options of spatial scene construal available to speakers of the two languages, which are subsumed in Figure 17.

SPACE-FOCUSED............................................................................OBJECT-FOCUSED

OBJECTS

SPACE BETWEEN-OBJECTS-RELATIONS

ADJ-plus-PARTN constructions GEN-N-------------------------------------SPEC-N German CPD-N constr. English noun-constructions fictive motion constr.-----------------------simple DIM-N constr.

Fig. 17: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: English and German repertoires of spatial referential constructions with nouns and/or adjectives.

64 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

As can be seen from Figure 17, and as has already been discussed in more detail above, spatial constructions that contain simple dimensional nouns cover a particularly broad range on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, i.e. are characterized by a particularly high and diverse construal meaning potential. In addition, a considerable part of the mid-range of the scale is exclusively covered by these constructions. This indicates not only that the German repertoire of nominal construction types does not comprise an option of construing spatial referent scenes in an RO-boundary independent and thus relatively highly space-focused manner. It might also indicate that the German repertoire of spatial constructions in general, and of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in particular, displays a gap in the mid-range of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, or at least does not cover this area as densely as the English repertoire does. This second impression will find further support by the following discussion of intransitive non-nominal terms and constructions.

3.3.3 Intransitive non-nominal terms and constructions As can be seen from Tables 2 and 3 above (pp. 36–37), intransitive non-nominal spatial constructions are mainly represented by the word-class category of adverbs. Based on Carroll (1993: 25–29) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1020–1025, 1034), (spatial) adverbs are defined here as constructions which provide spatial information independently of the need of mentioning the RO, and, importantly, also independently of the need of inferring the RO and/or any of its features. That is, intransitive non-nominal constructions can realize highly space-focused construals of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes: they neither window nor profile the RO. As Mary Carroll (1993: 27–28) puts it: Adverbs are the way out of restrictions provided by objects and form the passport to a Cartesian or Newtonian [i.e. absolute] view of space … [since] [a]dverbs do not require discrete correlates in the object domain when structuring space.

That this is not the case to the same extent for all structures classified as adverbs in the literature is already indicated by the use of the label ‘ADV-LIKE’ in Tables 2 and 3. The reasons why not all of these structures are “genuinely intransitive” (Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1023) and thus representatives of the class of “true” adverbs (Carroll 1993: 27) will be provided and discussed in the following. This discussion of the status of adverbs and adverb-like structures will take a contrastive perspective from the very beginning. This is because the sets of

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forms contained in the two language-specific repertoires of intransitive constructions differ considerably. The English repertoire comprises a set of topological and dimensional (alleged) adverbs that are identical in form to the English topological and dimensional prepositions (in, on, in front, behind, on top, below, etc.; cf. also Levinson 2003: 102), as well as a smaller set of what could be analysed as complex topological adverbs (inside, outside, within). The German repertoire, by contrast, comprises a reduced set of simple topological adverbs (innen, außen) and a full set of simple dimensional adverbs (oben, unten, hinten, vorne, rechts, links) that are different in form to the corresponding prepositions (auf, unter, hinter, vor, rechts von, links von), as well as a set of topological and dimensional prepositional adverbs,38 whose form can best be described as a combination of the deictic adverb da-39 and an element that is formally identical to a topological or dimensional40 preposition (daran, darin, darauf, darunter, davor, etc.; see example (23a) below). The following discussion takes a selective view on these structures, their contexts of use and their functions, focusing mainly on those aspects relevant to their use as parts of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. More specifically, the focus will be on those adverbs that can be used to indicate LO-locations within the boundaries of the RO, i.e. can realize what Eschenbach, Habel and Leßmöllmann (2002: 218) label the “sub-region interpretation” of German adverb constructions (cf. also Becker 1994: 145–148, 180–181; Gapp 1997: 67; Tenbrink 2007: 161–162; Vorwerg and Rickheit 2000: 16; Wunderlich and Herweg 1991: 762; Zifonun et al. 1997: 2093; see below for examples). Instances of the opposite case, the “detached” interpretation (Eschenbach, Habel, and Leßmöllmann 2002: 219), will not be subject to extensive discussion in this section. On such an interpretation, utterances like Der Hund ist vorne im Auto ‘the dog is front-DIM-SADV in the car’ (cf. Carroll 1993: 27) would be interpreted as meaning ‘the dog is in front (somewhere)

|| 38 The label prepositional adverb (Präpositionaladverb) is used following Zifonun et al. (1997: 54–55; see also Dudenredaktion 2009: 579–583); these forms can also be found referred to as pronominal adverbs (Pronominaladverbien) (e.g. Eisenberg 2013: 187–190; Helbig and Buscha 2006: 236–239). 39 This morpheme can be assumed to have become reduced in the contracted forms drin, dran and drauf (cf. Dudenredaktion 2009: 580). 40 Monomorphemic forms only exist for the German dimensional prepositions for axes V and H1. The complex constructions rechts/links davon (‘right/left there-of’) are, however, usually classified as functionally equivalent to monomorphemic davor, darunter, etc. (cf. e.g. Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993, 1034).

66 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

in the car’ (detached interpretation) rather than as meaning ‘the dog is in the front part of the inside of the car’ (sub-region interpretation). The present focus on sub-region interpretations has as a consequence that some examples marked by an asterisk (*) in the following are not generally ungrammatical or unacceptable, but are so only if used with the intention to express a sub-region reading. What is also largely excluded from further discussion are those adverbs that can only refer to RO-external locations. An exception to this are the German prepositional adverbs. They deserve comment because they illustrate very clearly a major cross-linguistic difference in construal tendencies that also becomes manifest with those adverb structures that can (and frequently do) become part of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions.

Prepositional adverbs Prepositional adverbs stand out from the set of spatial adverbs listed above because they mainly function as (anaphoric) cohesive elements in texts (cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 33; Carroll 1993: 28–29; von Stutterheim 1990: 112–113). This function is illustrated in example (23a) (Carroll 1993: 28, emphasis mine41). Example (23b) (Carroll 1993: 28, emphasis original) illustrates how the same function is usually realized in English, in which this class of adverbs does not exist. (23) a. Auf dem Boden ist eine Vase, dahinter ist ein Ball. on the floor is a vase there-behind-DIM-P-ADV is a ball b. On the floor there is a vase and behind that is a ball. In both examples the structures in bold refer back to the location of the ball, a region near the back side of the vase. However, they do so in different ways. While the English preposition-plus-pronoun construction contains a nominal element – the pronoun that, which explicitly refers back to the previously mentioned object (the vase) – the use of the German prepositional adverb does not require that the object of the vase as such be referred to anaphorically. Instead, these adverbs, via their deictic element (da-), refer back to a previously mentioned object-location or region. In the case of example (23a) this region can be defined as ‘where the ball is’ (cf. Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1030; Klabunde 2000: 198). Prepositional adverbs thus establish textual coherence

|| 41 Glossing original, word-class markers mine.

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not with reference to the level of objects, but with reference to the level of spatial locations or regions (cf. e.g. Carroll 1993, 1997; Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993; von Stutterheim 1997; von Stutterheim and Carroll 1993). However, prepositional adverbs cannot be used fully independently of referring to an RO: firstly, their use normally presupposes that the RO is explicitly mentioned in their preceding cotext, or is at least present in and unambiguously identifiable from the situational context (and, consequently, the interlocutors’ cognitive contexts; cf. e.g. Becker 1994: 33; Klabunde 2000: 200–203). Secondly, references to the location of an RO are, naturally, also indirect references to the respective RO as such (cf. e.g. Muller 2007: 285). Nevertheless, prepositional adverbs can still be claimed to establish textual coherence in a more strongly space-focused manner than preposition-plus-pronoun constructions, in which the pronouns explicitly refer (back) to a THING-like unit. Since prepositional adverbs are only part of the German but not of the English repertoire, this entails that speakers of German can – and, as previous research on descriptive text production has demonstrated (cf. e.g. Carroll 1993; Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993; von Stutterheim 1997; von Stutterheim and Carroll 1993), also usually do – establish textual coherence in a more spacefocused manner than speakers of English. Although dimensional prepositional adverbs cannot be used to realize sub-region readings of spatial utterances, and thus cannot become part of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, they still illustrate a language-specific preference pattern of spatial scene construal which is of considerable relevance also to the investigation of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances: a tendency towards more space-focused construal in German versus more objectfocused construal in English. As will be demonstrated in the following section, this tendency becomes manifest even more explicitly with uses of simple spatial adverbs.

Simple adverbs As can be seen from examples (24a–e),42 at first sight, all of the German and English simple spatial adverb types seem to meet the first criterion definitional of ‘true’ adverbs; they can be used independently of the explicit mention of the RO.

|| 42 Sources: example (24a): OED Online 2016; examples (24b–c): elicited language data from Experiment 1 (see Chapter 7); examples (24d–e): adapted from Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1021) and Carroll (1993: 27). Emphases mine.

68 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

(24) a. Is Mr. A. in? He is not in at present. Do you know when I shall find him in? [OED 2: 1899 A new English dictionary on historical principles (N.E.D.); 1st edition, 1884– 1933]

b. A basket with an apple inside on the right-hand side on the top. c. Liegt ein Apfel im Korb und zwar rechts vom lies an apple-LO in-the basket-RO namely [right of]-DIM-CPLX-P43-the Henkel also innen. handle that-is in(side)-TOP-S-ADV d. A car went by with a monkey in front and a dog behind. vorne und e. Ein Auto fuhr vorbei mit einem Affen a car-RO went by with a monkey-LO1 front-DIM-S-ADV and einem Hund hinten. a dog-LO2 back-DIM-S-ADV However, at closer consideration, not all of these structures meet the second definitional criterion for ‘genuinely’ intransitive adverbs, the criterion that they also do not necessarily imply the mention of the RO. Instead, as will be demonstrated in the following, some of them can more readily be classified as instances of elliptical uses of transitive constructions than as instances of ‘true’ adverbs. Carroll (1993: 26–29) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1021–1022) propose the following test for determining whether or not the criterion of ‘genuine’ intransitivity is fulfilled, and thus whether a structure is a ‘true’ adverb: “If the relatum [i.e. RO] is explicitly mentioned in conjunction with an adverb [i.e. a ‘true’ adverb], it must occur in a separate phrase that denotes the space intended” (Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1022). More specifically, if an explicit reference to the RO is provided subsequent to a ‘true’ adverb, this referential construction takes the form of a syntactically independent constituent,

|| 43 Because they function analogously to the German prepositions vor (‘in front of’), hinter (‘behind’), über (‘above’) and unter (‘below’), German rechts von (‘right of’) and links von (‘left of’) are usually analysed and classified as complex prepositions (CPLX-P), i.e. as chunks or units (cf. e.g. Grabowski 1998: 11). Since dimensional prepositions are not at the core of the research reported in this book because they indicate LO-locations outside the boundaries of an RO (see pp. 50–51 above), this interpretation is accepted here. The different uses of rechts and links either in combination with a von-PP (which corresponds to the behaviour of English right as in right of) or in combination with a spatial (topological or dimensional) PP as in rechts an (‘rightDIM-S-ADV at’) or in rechts vor (‘right-DIM-S-ADV in-front’) is clearly in need of future systematic investigation and analysis.

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usually a spatial prepositional phrase.44 If the spatial term is not a ‘true’ adverb, but actually constitutes an instance of an elliptically used preposition, subsequent RO-denoting structures take the form of a noun phrase or a non-spatial prepositional phrase (of-phrase) instead. This test exploits the assumption that ‘true’ simple spatial adverbs (most of which express dimensional information, see Tables 2 and 3 on pp. 36–37) should behave in a way analogous to the deictic spatial adverbs here/hier and there/da/dort (see examples (25a) and (25b)45), which can be considered to be

|| 44 In fact, how constructions like hinten im Auto (‘back-DIM-S-ADV in-the car-RO’) or the even more complex hinten rechts im Auto (‘back-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV in-the car-RO’) are to be analysed syntactically poses a major challenge in particular to ‘traditional’ and generative models of syntax. Accordingly, such structures have become subject to a range of alternative analyses and, consequently, to much debate (cf. e.g. Ballweg 1992; Becker and Carroll 1997: 81; Bierwisch 1988; Brandt, Dietrich, and Schön 1999: 87, 2006: 72–75; Breindl 2006a, 2006b; Maienborn 1996; Pittner 1999: 83–92; Sternefeld 2006: 179; Vorwerg 2009: 47; Wunderlich 1984; Zifonun et al. 1997: 1167–1172). The reasons for this are as follows: firstly, the construction-internal dependency structure of hinten im Auto is largely unclear. None of the two spatial elements, hinten or im Auto can be identified to be syntactically dependent on the other. Standard tests of constituency and thus of syntactic independency (cf. e.g. Dudenredaktion 2009: 771–773; see also Aarts 2013: 205–251) can be applied positively to both elements; for instance, the two elements can be separated (Hinten ist der Hund im Auto.), each of them can be moved to the preverbal slot (Vorfeld) (Im Auto ist der Hund hinten. / Hinten ist der Hund im Auto.), and their order can be permutated (Der Hund ist im Auto hinten.). This suggests that hinten and im Auto should be classified as separate sentence constituents. However, doing so would violate a basic principle in a range of syntactic theories, namely the principle that the same (semantically defined) syntactic function, in this case the function of adverbial of place, may not be fulfilled by two different sentence constituents within the same sentence (cf. e.g. Pittner 1999: 88). In sum, the picture that emerges is that hinten and im Auto are obviously not in a relation of clear syntactic dependency, but seem to be merely juxtaposed and thus to constitute two separate sentence constituents, while still jointly fulfilling the same syntactic function. To the best of my knowledge, no one analysis has come to be commonly accepted in the (German) linguistic community to date. The perhaps most broadly accepted solutions to this issue are those that identify structures like hinten im Auto as representative of a separate formal class or category, and label them as such. Thus, for instance, Zifonun et al. (1997: 1167–1170, 2091–2098) classify such structures as adverbial complexes (Adverbialkomplexe), and Pittner (1999: 83–92) uses the label of adverbial combiners (Adverbialkombinatoren). These solutions clearly indicate that structures of the type [DIM-S-ADV + DIM/TOP-PP] can hardly be accommodated in traditional, dependency or generative syntactic frameworks. This, of course, renders these structures a particularly interesting case for investigation from a cognitive linguistic and/or Construction Grammar perspective. 45 These examples have been adapted from Carroll (1993: 27).

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the prototypes of the class of spatial adverbs (cf. Carroll 1993: 27; Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1022). (25) a. Here/There in the corner / *Here/*There the corner. b. Hier/Da/Dort in der Ecke. / *Hier/*Da/*Dort die/der Ecke. The following discussion will mainly focus on simple dimensional adverbs (see examples (24d–e) above), because those occur most commonly in and therefore are most relevant to the formation of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. Furthermore, being representatives of dimensional terms, they could be expected to license even more highly space-focused referent scene construals than their topological counterparts (see p. 39 above).46 As will be shown, how this class of terms is and can be used in German and English is of central relevance to defining the range of options of DIMDIM(TOP)scene construal available to speakers of these two languages. Following Carroll (1993) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993), this issue will be illustrated on the example of the following pair of sentences (examples (26a) and (26b)):47 (26) a. A car went by with a monkey in front and a dog behind. vorne und b. Ein Auto fuhr vorbei mit einem Affen a car-RO went by with a monkey-LO1 front-DIM-S-ADV and einem Hund hinten. a dog-LO2 back-DIM-S-ADV With these examples, the regions of space singled out by the German and English dimensional constructions are largely identical. In both cases, the dog and the monkey could variably either be inside the car or outside the car (see Figure 18; cf. Carroll 1993: 27 and Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1021).

|| 46 A further aspect that renders the dimensional subset of simple adverbs more interesting than the topological subset is that the repertoire of topological simple adverbs does not cover the full set of topological subspaces, but only the (least prototypical; cf. e.g. Zifonun et al. 1997: 1155, 1160–1162) ones of interior and exterior space (see Table 2 on p. 36). What will be revealed to set apart German from English dimensional structures, namely the finding that most uses of what looks like English adverbs are not instances of ‘true’ adverbs but rather realize intransitive/elliptical uses of transitive terms (prepositions), accounts in the same way for topological structures. 47 These examples are adapted from Carroll (1993: 27) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1021). The following passages are largely based on Carroll (1993, 1997 and 2000), Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993), von Stutterheim and Carroll (1993) and von Stutterheim (1997).

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D(a) D(b)

M(a) M(b)

Fig. 18: Possible LO-locations singled out by simple dimensional adverb constructions: A car went by with a monkey (=M) in front and a dog (=D) behind.

Both the German and the English constructions thus realize Search Spaces which are relatively independent of the boundaries of the RO. As Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1021) put it, with these forms “… the extent of the space denoted is left open and is not circumscribed in correspondence with features of the object used as relatum [i.e. RO].” These dimensional terms thus seem to leave it to the speaker to decide, on the basis of context, whether or not “to use the object’s outer surface in interpreting the exact location of the theme [i.e. LO] … but this aspect is not coded in the locative expression” (Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1021). That is, both the German and the English constructions seem to define Search Spaces in a largely RO-detached, boundary-independent way, and thus construe their referent scenes in a relatively highly space-focused manner. These similarities between the German and the English constructions disappear, however, as soon as the RO is explicitly mentioned subsequent to the spatial terms. As can be seen from examples (27a), (27b1) and (27b2), such explicit references to the RO take different forms in the two languages, and, as a consequence, hold different syntactic relations to the dimensional terms (Carroll 1993: 27; Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1021): in the case of English, they occur as nominal or of-phrase complements, in the case of German as independent spatial prepositional phrases. (27) a. A car went by with… … a monkey [in front of the car] and a dog [behind the car]. b1 Ein Auto fuhr vorbei mit … with … a car-RO went by … einem Affen [[vorne] [im Auto]] a monkey-LO1 [[front-DIM-S-ADV] [in-TOP-P-the car-RO]] [im Auto]]. und einem Hund [[hinten] and a dog-LO2 [[back-DIM-S-ADV] [in-TOP-P-the car-RO]]

72 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

(27) b2 Ein Auto fuhr vorbei mit … with … a car-RO went by … einem Affen [[vorne] [vor dem Auto]] …a monkey-LO1 [[front-DIM-S-ADV] [in front-of-DIM-P the car-RO]] [hinter dem Auto]]. und einem Hund [[hinten] and a dog-LO2 [[back-DIM-S-ADV] [behind-DIM-P the car-RO]] These structural differences correlate with differences in semantics. Although, in both languages, the extended versions in examples (27a), (27b1) and (27b2) define more narrow Search Spaces and are thus more specific in meaning than the unextended versions in examples (26a) and (26b), they single out very different Search Spaces: with the English structure in (27a), the inclusion of the RO in the form of a noun phrase or an of-phrase results in the definition of a region of space outside the boundaries of the RO (see locations D(b) and M(b) in Figure 18 above). With the German structure, by contrast, either a region of space inside the boundaries of the RO (example (27b1) and locations D(a) and M(a) in Figure 18) or outside the boundaries of the RO (example (27b2) and locations D(b) and M(b) in Figure 18) can optionally be defined depending on which preposition is selected as the head of the added (spatial) prepositional phrase. This observation can be related back in the following way to the construalrelated overview of spatial-language defined subspaces provided above (see Figure 16 on p. 61): the extended English structure is a structure of type (3), i.e. a structure which foregrounds the boundaries of an object-RO by referring to a region of space outside of but close to the RO. The extended German structure, by contrast, is a structure of type (4), i.e. a structure which, depending on co(n)text, variably either refers to an RO-internal or RO-external subregion of an object-RO. This indicates that, with the English structure, it must be the dimensional terms – as the only spatial structures in the utterance – which define the ROboundaries as a determiner of the limits of Search Space (cf. Becker and Carroll 1997: 44–45; see also Carroll 1993: 28, 1997: 142). The situation is different with the German examples. Here, the meaning of the topological or dimensional preposition in the RO-denoting phrase renders the RO-boundaries a relevant point of reference. The German dimensional adverb as such does not change its meaning. This suggests the following interpretation: the explicit mention of the RO effects a specification of the meaning of the dimensional terms in the English construction, but leaves the meaning of the German dimensional adverbs unchanged. The Search Space in the German examples is, instead, narrowed down in a different way: it constitutes the intersection area of the structures

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 73

imposed on the scene by the simultaneous mapping of a (global) DIM-schema, which is activated by the dimensional adverbs, and either a TOP-schema (im; example (27b1)) or a second, more local DIM-schema (vor/hinter; example (27b2)), which are activated by the RO-denoting spatial prepositional phrases. This suggests, first of all, that the English adverb-like structures very likely cannot become part of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions because they do not readily combine with other spatial constructions. Secondly, the differences in syntagmatic behaviour between these English dimensional terms and the German simple dimensional adverbs indicate that the simple dimensional adverbs and the RO-referring prepositional phrases in the German examples (27b1) and (27b2) do not only constitute two separate syntactic units, but are also relatively independent semantically, i.e. constitute two separate information units. This is not the case for the structures in the English example (27a). Thirdly, and very centrally, the different syntactic patterns in example (27a) as compared to examples (27b1) and (27b2) indicate that only the German dimensional terms, but not the English ones, may still be interpreted as referring to a region of space which extends across the boundaries of the RO. In terms of subspaces (according to Figure 16 on p. 61), only the German structures can single out type (5) (subportion of Perception Space) or type (6) (axis-associated region) Search Spaces. Following Carroll (1993) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993), this, fourthly, clearly indicates that only the German but not the English dimensional structures are ‘genuinely’ intransitive and are thus examples of ‘true’ adverbs. This has considerable consequences for the options of DIMDIM(TOP)-scene construal available to speakers of German as compared to speakers of English. Most crucially, it indicates that only speakers of German can readily make use of dimensional adverbs as a means of expressing dimensional information in a highly space-focused manner, i.e. independently of any mention or even consideration of the RO. In English, by contrast, such uses are, if at all, only possible in a very restricted set of linguistic contexts, like the one in example (26a). At closer consideration, even this seems questionable. There are reasons to doubt that the degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings of the uses of English in front and behind in example (26a) are directly comparable at all to those of vorne and hinten in the seemingly equivalent German example (26b). These doubts are based on the following considerations: given that they function as heads of prepositional phrases as soon as the RO is explicitly mentioned (see example (27a)), it is possible and even seems obvious to classify the instances of English in front and behind in example (26a) as elliptical or “zero anaphor[ic]” (Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1022) uses of the prepositions in front (of) and behind. This suggests the following semantic interpretation for

74 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

example (26a): the Referent Space of the utterance in this example is Perception Space. In front and behind effect a global subdivision of this Referent Space. They license that the monkey and the dog be variably located inside or outside the car because their ellipted complement is an imagined middle line that divides the scene, i.e. Perception Space, into two halves (see Figure 19). Example (26a) would then have to be read as meaning ‘a car raced by with a monkey in front of the middle line of Perception Space and a dog behind the middle line of Perception Space.’

behind (the middle line)

in front (of the middle line)

D(a)

M(a) M(b)

D(b) RO Fig. 19: The middle of Perception Space as RO.

On this interpretation, example (26a) realizes the type of referent scene that is illustrated by subspace (5) in Figure 16 (see p. 61), i.e. it construes Perception Space as an object-like RO, and defines Search Space as an internal subportion of it. A highly space-focused interpretation in terms of subspace (6) (see Figure 16), by contrast, no longer seems possible. It is highly likely that this ellipsis-based interpretation constitutes the most appropriate possible interpretation in the great majority of uses of these English adverb-like structures. What lends strong support to this assumption is that intransitive or space-related, i.e. object-boundary independent, interpretations and even Perception Space-related interpretations of the English adverb-like structures cease to be possible as soon as an entity which displays more prototypical object features than Perception Space and which is suitable to function as an RO has been introduced as a topic in the preceding cotext (cf. e.g. Carroll 1993: 26–27). Examples (28a) and (28b) illustrate this phenomenon and the cross-linguistic (English-German) difference it entails very clearly. They are adapted from Carroll (1997: 142) and Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993: 1025) and constitute descriptions of an abstract object made from coloured building blocks.

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 75

(28) a. Here/In front there is an abstract L-shaped figure, above is a green block. /Vorne ist eine abstrakte L-förmige Figur. b. Hier here-DEICT-ADV /front-DIM-S-ADV is an abstract L-shaped figure-LO Oben ist ein grüner Bauklotz. top-DIM-S-ADV is a green building-block-RO With the English example (28a), the first dimensional term in front can still be interpreted in global, scene-referential terms. This is, however, no longer possible with the second dimensional term, above. This spatial term can hardly be interpreted differently than as referring back to the last-mentioned object, the L-shaped figure. This strongly suggests that an interpretation of complementless uses of English dimensional terms as imposing a global structure on the scene as a whole is not possible when those terms are part of a text or multiutterance discourse (cf. e.g. Carroll 1993: 27). This is, by contrast, not the case with German simple dimensional adverbs. Since they never take nominal complements, they can be used to indicate a global division of Perception Space into directed regions, independently of their co(n)texts of use. In example (28b), oben can be interpreted in global terms, i.e. as referring to some location along the top-axis that extends, for instance, from the centre of Perception Space. The immediately pre-mentioned object-entity, the L-shaped figure, is thus not automatically and necessarily interpreted as the target or anchor of the coordinate system that is projected onto the scene by the use of oben. This illustrates another central feature of the German simple dimensional adverbs. In contrast to the English constructions, their use neither requires nor implies a reifying construal of Perception Space as a bounded, object-like unit. Instead, they can be interpreted as referring more or less directly to the axes of the coordinate system, as well as to the regions of space which surround these axes (cf. Tenbrink 2007: 130). Since these axes potentially extend infinitely into a particular direction, simple dimensional adverbs constitute the spatial terms that come closest to referring to and imposing structure on space as a whole, i.e. on space in the abstract ‘absolute’ sense (see above and Carroll 1993: 27–28), rather than on a delimited portion of Perception Space. Thus, although the coordinate systems projected onto spatial scenes by uses of the German and the English non-nominal dimensional constructions clearly have their sources in an (intrinsically oriented) object – either the speaker (egocentric relative FoR) or an object (intrinsic FoR) – they map onto different target levels, namely the spacelevel in the case of the German adverb constructions and the object-level in the case of the English constructions.

76 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

On this interpretation, the German simple dimensional adverbs come closer to indicating LO-locations by imposing structure on absolute space itself than any of the other German and any of the English structures displayed in Tables 2 and 3 above (pp. 36–37). As a consequence, it can be concluded that the German repertoire of dimensional spatial terms, and also of spatial terms more generally, covers a broader range on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale by extending further into the space-focused direction than the English repertoire. How exactly the different structures presented and discussed in this chapter can be mapped onto the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale will be subsumed in the following section. This will also involve a discussion and explication of how the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale can be operationalized as a tool for analysing and classifying spatial constructions with respect to their construal meanings.

3.3.4 Spatial constructions as [form-degrees of object-focusedness construal meaning]-associations: An overview and analytical tool The pattern of cross-linguistic differences in spatial scene construal that derives from the discussion of word-class specific and related syntagmatic features of spatial terms provided so far is subsumed in the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale displayed in Figure 20 below. This figure also subsumes and illustrates once more the three main criteria for identifying degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings: degree of ROspecificity, degree of relevance of the RO-boundary and degree of extension of the Search Space/Referent Space (see above, pp. 49–50). Based on what has been discussed in this chapter, the following formal features of spatial utterances can be related to these criteria and can thus be drawn on for identifying the degrees of object-focusedness construal meaning of an individual spatial utterance: (a) The manner of referring to the RO:  An explicit mention of the RO effects a more strongly object-focused construal than the omission of mention of the RO.  The selection of a functional or shape-feature of an object (e.g. a corner, handle, etc.) as the primary RO effects a more strongly object-focused construal of the scene than the selection of an object as a whole, or even of (reified) Perception Space (as it is, for instance, possible with simple dimensional nouns).

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 77

(b) The word-class category membership of the spatial terms:  Nominal constructions, i.e. constructions in which dimensional information is expressed by means of adjectives and/or nouns, construe their referent scenes in a more strongly object-focused manner than non-nominal constructions, i.e. constructions that contain dimensional prepositions or adverbs.  Transitive constructions (via their need of complementation) realize more object-focused construals than intransitive constructions. (c) The kind of construction(s) into which the spatial term is embedded: – The embedding of a nominal spatial term into a prepositional phrase headed by a static spatial preposition effects a more strongly objectfocused construal than the embedding into a prepositional phrase headed by a dynamic preposition.

SPACE-FOCUSED............................................................................OBJECT-FOCUSED

RO-specificity relevance of the RO-boundary degree of extension of Search Space/Referent Space

OBJECTS/ROs

SPACE BETWEEN-OBJECTS-RELATIONS

non-nominal structures-----------------------------------------------------nominal structures (topological) P-complements G

E

S-ADV

P-ADV DIM-------TOP

to-plusDIM-N

DIM-

TOP-

Ps

Ps

DIM CPD-Ns

(ADJ-plus-[...]) simple

TOP-N----- GEN-N----SPEC-N

DIM-N

Fig. 20: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: English and German repertoires of spatial terms/constructions.

78 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

As can be seen from criteria (a) to (c) and from Figure 20, the selection of either an intrinsic or a relative FoR is not included in the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. The reason for this is that the discussion in the preceding sections has not provided any information which would indicate that FoR-selection and degrees of object-focusedness construal are necessarily correlated or even mutually inclusive. Instead, what has been discussed lends even further support to the view that these factors are relatively independent from each other (see above, pp. 47– 48). This is in particular the case if one takes into account the following issues: firstly, one precondition for intrinsic versus relative FoRs to be included as an operationalizable parameter in the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale would be that these two different FoRs are clearly and differentially associated with uses of particular linguistic forms, i.e. particular types of dimensional terms. For FoR-selection to be correlated with the indicators of degrees of object-focusedness construal just listed, it would, for instance, have to be the case that intrinsic FoRs are always realized by the use of nominal dimensional terms, and that, reversely, nominal terms are always and exclusively used in association with the use of an intrinsic FoR. The existence of such a correlation would mean that the kind of dimensional term or construction selected would function as an indicator of which FoR has been used (cf. Carroll 1997: 154–155). Indeed, this position has been held by some; it has repeatedly been argued that uses of an intrinsic FoR are correlated with uses of (highly object-focused) nominal dimensional terms. For instance, Landau and Munnich (1998: 268) state that “the region that is ‘on the top of X’ could only apply to intrinsic frames of reference” (see also Becker 1994: 142; Ehrich 1985: 147–148; Landau 2003: 23; Landau, O'Hearn, and Hoffman 2010: 147; Levinson 2003: 74 and Retz-Schmidt 1988: 99–100 for a similar position). This claim is highly controversial, however. Opinions on whether or not uses of dimensional nouns and/or adjectives always indicate the use of an intrinsic FoR cover a considerable range, from the clearly supportive positions just quoted, via different intermediary positions which reject a clear one-to-one mapping of form to FoR, but which take into account that there might exist either an individual-specific (Levelt 1982; Vorwerg 2009: 40; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007: 474) and/or a speech-community wide tendency for uses of certain forms of dimensional terms to correlate with uses of certain FoRs (cf. e.g. Buhl 1996: 61; Carroll 1997: 148–156; Dirven 1981: 113–114; Levinson 2003: 108; Shinohara and Matsunaka 2010: 298; Tenbrink 2007: 236–237), to the view that “specific linguistic forms do not map directly on specific variants of reference

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 79

frames” (Tenbrink 2007: 162; see also Eschenbach 1999: 330; Jackendoff 1996: 18), and thus to a full rejection of a form-to-FoR mapping.48 In fact, as illustrated by Figure 21 and examples (29a) to (32b), examples in which FoR-selection and spatial-term selection are dissociated are rather easy to provide.

RO (non-oriented) LO

RO (intr. oriented)

LO

Fig. 21: Referent scenes with and without intrinsically oriented ROs.

(29) a. The ball is near the front of the car. b. The ball is near the front of the box. (30) a. The ball is near the front side of the car. Der Ball ist nahe der Vorderseite des Autos. the ball-LO is near the front-side-DIM-CPD-N of-the car-RO b. The ball is near the front side of the box. Der Ball ist nahe der Vorderseite der Kiste. the ball-LO is near the front-side-DIM-CPD-N of-the box-RO

|| 48 What is telling in this context is that positions in support of a form-to-FoR correlation are often based on diachronic considerations. An explanation for this is that a very influential and broadly accepted theory of the development of spatial terms holds that dimensional constructions have developed out of TOP-P-plus-PARTN constructions, with the intrinsic FoR being a direct extension of such part-denoting constructions (cf. Levinson 2003: 105–107; see also Becker and Carroll 1997: 38; Heine 1997: 44–45; Levinson and Wilkins 2006b: 543). While this association of dimensional nouns and adjectives with the intrinsic FoR can be considered valid and useful diachronically, this account does not, however, automatically render valid a parallel synchronic analysis of dimensional noun constructions as indicators of the use of an intrinsic FoR. Therefore, in the present understanding, it is not a solid basis for proclaiming the existence of a fixed correlation between object-focused construal and the use of an intrinsic FoR, and, consequently, between space-focused construal and the use of a relative FoR.

80 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

(31) a. A car with a ball in front. Ein Auto mit einem Ball davor. a car-RO with a ball-LO there-in front-DIM-P-ADV b. A box with a ball in front. Eine Kiste mit einem Ball davor. a box-RO with a ball-LO there-in front-DIM-P-ADV (32) a. Der Ball ist vorne vor dem/ the ball-LO is front-DIM-S-ADV in front of-DIM-P the am Auto. at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE-the car-RO vor / an / b. Der Ball ist vorne the ball-LO is front-DIM-S-ADV in front of-DIM-P/ at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE/ in der Kiste. in/P-INTERIOR SPACE the box-RO Examples (29a–b) and (30a–b) indicate that ‘frontness’ (as an example of ‘directedness’) can be construed as an attribute of the RO independently of whether or not the RO is intrinsically oriented (as is the case with the box as compared to the car). They show that ‘directedness’ can also readily be assigned situationally to an unfeatured,49 i.e. non-oriented, object (the box) in combination with the use of a relative FoR (see examples (29b) and (30b)). Examples (29a–b) and (30a–b) thus demonstrate that highly object-focused construals of spatial scenes are possible independently of whether the source of the coordinate system is the RO itself or an external entity like the observer. In both cases the RO is the target of coordinate-system mapping and can, as such, be ascribed dimensional features like a front or front side. Correspondingly, examples (31a–b) and (32a–b) illustrate that uses of nonnominal, space-focused terms can be freely combined with either an intrinsic or a relative FoR. If FoRs, as is commonly done, are defined via the source entity by whose features the orientation of the coordinate system is determined, it can therefore be concluded from examples (29a) to (32b) that the full range of

|| 49 Theoretically, this can also be considered possible with a featured object, i.e. the intrinsic front of a car could be referred to in relative terms as the back of the car. Whether and under what conditions such instances occur, however, constitutes an empirical question. If such instances do not occur at all, as is assumed to be the case by Aurnague et al. (2007: 171), this could be considered as a piece of evidence in support of the claim that – other than maintained here, partly out of a lack of available evidence – there does exist some relation between FoRselection and degrees of object-focusedness construal.

Spatial constructions and degrees of object-focusedness construal | 81

degrees of object-focusedness construals can be realized independently of whether an intrinsic or a relative FoR is used. This clearly supports the view that degrees of object-focusedness construal and FoR-selection are two different parameters of spatial term use, and, as such, require theoretical and analytical differentiation. Therefore, the following position is taken here: differences in form and word-class category membership of dimensional terms indicate only differences in degrees of object-focusedness construal, but not differences in FoR-selection. Conversely, uses of an intrinsic FoR do not automatically and necessarily realize a more strongly object-focused construal of a referent scene than uses of a relative FoR. Accordingly, the specific claim that the use of nominal dimensional terms and the use of an intrinsic FoR are necessarily correlated is rejected. This rejection of a necessary correlation does not, however, categorically exclude more moderate and more differentiated positions on this issue. It might, for instance, well be possible that relatively fixed and stable form-to-FoR correlations exist in the form of individual usage preferences, i.e. as parts of individual entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge, and/or are more or less strongly conventionalized in particular speech communities (cf. e.g. Becker and Carroll 1997: 27). Such claims are, however, still in need of empirical investigation. Taking this into account, and given that the required empirical research for usefully including FoR-selection into this picture is far beyond the scope of the research reported in this book, FoR-selection is not included as a dimension in the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. In line with this, and to account for possible complex interrelations between FoR-selection and degrees of objectfocusedness construal that have not yet been identified, variation in FoRselection was controlled for in the experiments (see Chapters 7 and 8). The only criteria that were thus used as a guideline for classifying instances of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances in terms of their construal meanings and for comparing German and English usage of such utterances are the [form-construal meaning]associations listed above and subsumed in Figure 20 (p. 77). Examples (33a–d) and Figure 22 provide a first exemplary illustration of such an application of these classification criteria to instances of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions. (33) a. The bottle is in the front right-hand corner (on the table). Die Flasche ist in der vorderen rechten Ecke the bottle-LO is in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN (auf dem Tisch). (on-TOP-P the table-RO)

82 | Construing spatial scenes in German and English

(33) b. The bottle is (on the table) on the right front. Die Flasche ist (auf dem Tisch) auf der rechten the bottle-LO is (on-TOP-P the table-RO) on the right-DIM-S-ADV Vorderseite. front-side-DIM-CPD-N c. The bottle is (on the table) towards the right front. d. Die Flasche ist vorne rechts (auf dem Tisch). the bottle-LO is front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV (on-TOP-P the table-RO) SPACE-FOCUSED............................................................................OBJECT-FOCUSED

RO-specificity relevance of the RO-boundary degree of extension of Search Space/Referent Space

OBJECTS/ROs

SPACE BETWEEN-OBJECTS-RELATIONS

non-nominal structures-----------------------------------------------------nominal structures

G

E

vorne rechts

auf der rechten Vorderseite

to(ward)--------------------at/on/in the front right

in der vorderen rechten Ecke

in the front righthand corner

Fig. 22: Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale: DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions.

Before the classification scheme proposed in this chapter can, however, be eventually applied to authentic usage data in Chapters 7 and 8, a range of further theoretical issues need to be discussed. In particular, the origins and nature of [form-construal meaning]-associations as well as their potential behavioural and cognitive effects require theoretical modelling. This is the focus of the following Chapters 4 and 5.

4 Attention, ‘ception’ and language: Basic considerations There … seems to be “theoretical no man’s land” with respect to how language, memory, vision, and attention interact … (Hartsuiker, Huettig, and Olivers 2011: 135) … linguistic structure can only be understood and characterized in the context of a broader account of cognitive functioning … an exhaustive description of language cannot be achieved without a full description of human cognition. (Langacker 1987: 64)

4.1 Construal and cognition As has already been indicated in Chapter 2, the idea that language can direct attention and influence perception and cognition is far from generally accepted by cognitive linguists. Instead, opinions on this issue diverge widely. Croft and Cruse (2004: 72), for instance, take a clearly supportive stance: It appears that the pervasive role of conceptualization in linguistic expression entails a relativistic approach to the relation between language and thought: the way we conceive our experience is determined by the grammatical structure of our language.

The same accounts for Pederson (2007: 1029), according to whom “we can see the work of Talmy and Langacker as sources for linguistic relativity hypotheses to test …”. In contrast to this, Langacker (1990: 12; see also Langacker 1988: 11) takes a much more sceptical view of such options of applying construal theory. He states: “The conventional imagery [i.e. construal] invoked for linguistic expression is a fleeting thing that neither defines nor constrains the contents of our thoughts.” As these statements clearly indicate, the question whether usage-based cognitive linguistics in general, and construal theory in particular, license or even predict the occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects is still in need of discussion, and, eventually, theoretical modelling. This presupposes, first of all, that attention, perception and cognition, as the targets of the potentially influencing power of language, are defined in a manner that is not only theoretically open to linguistic influences, but that is also, at the same time, in line with usage-based cognitive linguistic theories. This endeavour and the

84 | Attention, ‘ception’ and language: Basic considerations

related next step of defining how attention, perception, cognition and language interrelate are at the core of this chapter.

4.2 Attention and selection With the spatial constructions under investigation in this project, construal meanings are attentional in nature (see Section 2.3). Accordingly, the same accounts for possible language-perception/cognition effects that might be triggered by these meanings. Therefore, the concept of attention as such requires modelling. The basic principles and assumptions on which the present understanding of attention is grounded will be sketched in this section. Very basically, attention is understood here to be an ability or process that enables selection (cf. e.g. Chun and Wolfe 2001; Johnson and Proctor 2004: 57– 94; Müller and Krummenacher 2007; see also Section 2.3). This entails that attention-induced selection is a precondition for information to be perceived consciously (selection-for-perception; e.g. Chun and Wolfe 2001: 273; Müller and Krummenacher 2007: 104–105; Schneider and Deubel 2002), to be learned (e.g. Pulvermüller 1999: 258), and, in the consequence, be remembered and recalled well (memory encoding, storage and retrieval; cf. e.g. Chun and Turk-Browne 2007; Craik and Lockhart 1972: 676–679; Logan and Etherton 1994: 1048–1049; Logan, Taylor, and Etherton 1996), and to initiate action or be acted upon (selection-for-action; cf. e.g. Allport 1987, 1989: 648–649; Neumann 1987; van der Heijden 1992, 2004: 36–42; Müller and Krummenacher 2007: 104–105). Importantly, the notions of selection-for-perception and selection-for-action can readily be applied to the processes of selection that take place during utterance planning and production, and thus to those processes which potentially generate differences in construal meanings between utterances. Firstly, speaking and using language more generally constitute forms of action (cf. e.g. Austin [1955] 1980: 109). Secondly, the perception of and thus also the differential allocation of visual attention to a to-be-referred scene or entity constitute inherent aspects of situated uses of referential language (cf. e.g. Hartsuiker, Huettig, and Olivers 2011; Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011; see also Chapter 8). As will be demonstrated in Chapter 5, these assumptions prove essential to modelling language-cognition/perception interrelations. They constitute the basis for explaining how language can influence attentional/perceptual processes on-line. Including off-line/more permanent attentional effects of language into this picture requires that some further ideas on the nature of attention be accepted. These are as follows: firstly, attentional behaviour is primarily

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experience-based and experience- as well as task-driven (cf. e.g. Wilder, Mozer, and Wickens 2011). As a consequence, it can become subject to modification by experience, i.e. is sensitive to experientially triggered processes of habit or preference formation. Secondly, selective attention cannot only apply to externally provided information, but also (and even primarily) to internally represented information, i.e. to knowledge structures (cf. e.g. Iani et al. 2001: 157; see also Awh, Jonides, and Reuter-Lorenz 1998: 783; Chun and Turk-Browne 2007: 177; Theeuwes, Kramer, and Irwin 2011; Vecera and Farah 1994). These assumptions form the basis on which a transfer from initially bottomup triggered patterns of attentional behaviour to top-down directed patterns becomes possible. Accordingly, they also constitute the basis on which the attention-directing potential of bottom-up signals, i.e. ontologically and situationally salient items in external situational context (Schmid 2007, 2014), can become modified or even be overridden by top-down or memory-derived, i.e. cognitively salient (Schmid 2007, 2014), triggers of attentional behaviour (cf. e.g. Schmid 2007, 2014; see also Clark 2013; Friston 2010), one of which is language (cf. e.g. Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.). As will be shown in the course of the following discussion, this transfer mechanism is essential for understanding the nature of language-induced attentional behaviour. Taking this into account, the definition of attention on which this project draws is as follows: Attention constitutes an experience-shaped selection-inducing mechanism that can both apply to and variably be driven by information from external (situational and social) and internal (cognitive) contexts.

This working definition does not yet, however, answer the following questions, which directly derive from the claim that attention equally applies to sensory input and knowledge structures: how do perception (as the process of interaction with externally provided information) and cognition (i.e. internal processes applying to represented/stored information) relate? (To what extent) are they organized in comparable ways and/or based on the same structural principles? Do they draw on and feed into the same representational formats and/or are they subject to the working of the same processes and mechanisms? Can they really be considered to be two separate processes/abilities, and does such a clear-cut differentiation make sense? These questions are the focus of the following sections.

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4.3 Perception and cognition, or ‘ception’? Opinions on whether or not a dividing line can and should be drawn between perception and cognition are manifold. They range from the assumption that perception and cognition are completely separate, via claims that they are interrelated to a more or less strong extent, to the view that they are fully inseparable and thus constitute only one cognitive domain (referred to as “ception” by Talmy 2000: 139–168; see also Meteyard et al. 2012).50 The “view of perception and cognition as separable systems, operating according to different principles” (Evans and Green 2006: 242), and of perceptual and cognitive representations as different “in both their structure and content” (Tacca 2011: 2), is characteristic of modular or “semantic memory” (Barsalou 2012: 247) theories of cognition (e.g. Fodor 1983, 1985; Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Pylyshyn 1973, 2003; see also Firestone and Scholl 2016). According to these theories, perceptual information is represented in an analogous, concrete, episodic format. In contrast to this, the representational format for cognitive information is abstract, decontextualized and symbolic (cf. e.g. Barsalou 2012: 247–248). The main argument brought forward in support of this view is that humans can think of all kinds of possible and impossible situations and scenarios which they have never experienced themselves. Such imaginations cannot, of course, arise from simple “recording[s]” (Barsalou 1999: 581, 2012: 239) of earlier experiences, but must be the result of the combination of symbolic atomic ‘building blocks’ (cf. e.g. Barsalou 2008: 623; Meteyard et al. 2012: 790). Consequently, semantic memory approaches assume that cognition must work on amodal symbolic units if it is to be used productively (cf. Tacca 2011: 2), and they usually define these cognitive symbols as more important than episodic perceptual representations (cf. e.g. Willems and Francken 2012: 1). In line with this, proponents of semantic memory views (e.g. Fodor 2008) focus very strongly on the mind, i.e. internal context, and assign only a relatively peripheral role to sensory input, i.e. external context (cf. Barsalou 2012: 247;

|| 50 Since this book focuses on attentional effects, it can be argued that many of the predictions that will be made and conclusions that will be drawn in the course of the following discussion are also compatible to a certain extent with theories that define perception and cognition as two separate kinds of cognitive abilities and processes (although this view is not shared here). This is due to the fact that many of those ‘separatist’ theories (e.g. Logan 1995; Pylyshyn 2003) hold that attentional processes and mechanisms are central to both perception and cognition, and, actually, constitute a major link or “interface” (Groner and Groner 1989: 13) between them.

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Stöckle-Schobel 2012: 1). In addition, they often take a nativist stance (e.g. Fodor 1981). Modular, semantic memory views of cognition have been very influential for decades, and are still “widespread” (Evans and Green 2006: 242). Therefore, many more integrative theories define themselves as counterpositions to this view. They usually either maintain that one of the two representational formats proposed by semantic memory theories, analogous as opposed to symbolic representations, is unnecessary, or they redefine these representational formats as variants of one single type of knowledge representation. Integrative theories thus differ among themselves in that they either put a very strong emphasis on symbolic representations (e.g. Tacca 2011) or on analogous representational formats.51 Due to their high(er) compatibility with central principles of usagebased cognitive linguistics, the following discussion will focus on the second type. Approaches to cognition which define it as “inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the cognitive and the neural levels” (Barsalou 1999: 577) can variably be found referred to as simulation-based, situated, grounded or embodied (cf. e.g. Barsalou 2008, 2012: 250; Glenberg 1997; Goldstone and Barsalou 1998; Lakoff and Johnson 1999, [1980] 2003: 56–68, 257–259; MacWhinney 1999; Pecher and Zwaan 2005; Shapiro 2008, 2011; Wilson 2002). What is characteristic of all theories in this field is that they put a strong emphasis on modal, analogous and experience-like, i.e. “dynamic and situated” (Barsalou 2012: 251), formats of knowledge representation. This general claim becomes manifest in the form of the following more concrete assumptions: – Perception and cognition draw on the same resources, including “attentional resources” (Connell and Lynott 2012: 1). – Knowledge (and, thus, linguistic meaning) is primarily grounded in perceptual experiences, which means that it is a representation of, or is at least derived from, the different subjective experiences speakers have when acting in and interacting with their physical and social environments (cf. e.g. Barsalou 2012: 240; Gibbs 2006: 9; Goldstone and Barsalou 1998: 232; de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 403). – Knowledge becomes represented in perceptual formats (Barsalou 2012: 250); its activation thus consists in running simulations of perceptual experiences (Barsalou 1999: 586, 2012: 250–251; Pecher, Zeelenberg, and

|| 51 For a more comprehensive overview of cognition models, see, for instance, Barsalou (2012).

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Barsalou 2004). This also involves the working of perception-“associated attentional mechanisms” (Connell and Lynott 2012: 1; see also Holmqvist et al. 2011: 397; Johansson, Holsanova, and Holmqvist 2006; Laeng and Teodorescu 2002). This idea that cognition and perception share common mechanisms and are based on the same kinds of representations has found support by neuropsychological and neuro-linguistic research. Evidence has been provided which indicates that perceptual/on-line and cognitive/off-line processes (including language-mediated ones) “share modality-specific neural substrates” (Connell and Lynott 2012: 1; see also Kosslyn et al. 1995; Martin 2007; Meteyard et al. 2012; Pulvermüller 1999: 260–263 and 268–272, 2008, 2013;52 Rohrer 2007: 26; de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 421–425). This research, accordingly, suggests that the same perceptual and sensorimotor programmes are run independently of whether external or internal contextual information is processed (see Meteyard et al. 2012 and Thompson-Schill 2003 for a review and discussion). In line with this, embodied and simulation-based theories hold that no clear dividing line can be drawn between perception and cognition, and take an emergentist rather than nativist stance on the origins and development of cognitive representations.53 They put forward that input from (and one’s own interactions with) external context, including sociocultural context (cf. e.g. Oakley 2007: 226; Rohrer 2007: 29), drives learning and plays a central part in the shaping and use of cognition (cf. e.g. Oakley 2007: 225–227 and the discussion of Barsalou 1999 below). These assumptions are shared here. As will be demonstrated in the following section, they mark at least a specific subset of embodied cognition theories as highly compatible with usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches to language (cf. e.g. Langacker 2005b: 17, 2010: 120). This identifies embodied approaches to cognition as a well-suited basis for modelling the rela-

|| 52 Pulvermüller (2013) takes a more differentiated view on this issue, “[a]cknowledg[ing] … both grounded embodied and disembodied semantic mechanisms” (Pulvermüller 2013: 467; see also Meteyard et al. 2012 for a critical discussion of this issue and for a classification of approaches to meaning on a range from fully disembodied to embodied). However, Pulvermüller also points out that “sensorimotor semantic activation” (Pulvermüller 2013: 467) is a highly central mechanism, and that this accounts in particular for the realization and processing of referential meaning (see also de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 417–418). This underlines the central relevance of embodied cognition for the present investigation. 53 But see Barsalou (2008: 620) for a critical discussion of this proclaimed correlation.

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tions between perception/cognition and (referential) language use in usagebased cognitive linguistic terms.

4.4 Embodied cognition and language Any claims that perception, cognition and language interrelate and interact, and do so demonstrably, presuppose that the knowledge structures and processes on which they draw, and/or by which they are constituted, are compatible with each other, or are at least translatable into each other (cf. e.g. Hayward and Tarr 1995: 39–40). Embodied cognition approaches provide a framework on which such compatible or even shared representational formats become possible. However, this does not account to the same extent for all theories that have been referred to by this label. Across approaches, the concept of embodiment has been understood and defined in different ways (cf. e.g. Rohrer 2007; Wilson 2002), ranging from the very basic and moderate position that “[c]ognition is situated” (Wilson 2002: 626, emphasis original), i.e. takes place in and becomes manifest through our interaction with the environment, via the view that “how we conceive of our world is grounded in and constrained by the nature of the perception-action systems that we are (our bodies)” (Wilson and Golonka 2013: 8, emphasis mine), to the more far-reaching view that [e]mbodiment is the surprisingly radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole cognitive resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies and their perceptually guided motions through the world do much of the work required to achieve our goals, replacing the need for complex internal mental representations. (Wilson and Golonka 2013: 1, emphasis original)

This shows that embodied cognition theories differ considerably from each other with respect to the exact role they assign to external context and to analogous, perceptual representations of information (cf. also Meteyard et al. 2012). Among the different theories, only the more moderate ones are readily compatible with usage-based cognitive linguistics.54 They also constitute the subset of embodied cognition theories which have been accorded attention (and have partially even been put forward) by cognitive linguists (e.g. Evans 2009;

|| 54 In spite of Wilson and Golonka’s (2013: 8–11) claim that it would be possible, it is unclear to me how language use could work fully independently of stored knowledge and thus cognitive context.

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Evans and Green 2006: 240–243; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 496– 512; Langacker 2005b: 17, 2008: 535–540; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 344–345). In line with this, the following discussion will focus on those theories which understand “embodiment as broadly experiential” rather than “as the bodily substrate” (Rohrer 2007: 31; see also Gibbs 2006). Within this scope, theories which do not fully equate perception and cognition but understand them to be stages or aspects of the same process (see e.g. Barsalou 2012: 250) will figure particularly centrally. Barsalou’s (1999) Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) Theory will be presented and discussed as an example of such a “weak embodiment” (Meteyard 2012: 492–493) theory. It will be shown that PSS Theory is moderate in that it maintains that knowledge, and thus also meaning, is grounded in concrete perceptual experiences, but that the information gained from these experiences becomes interpreted (Barsalou 2012: 239–240) and integrated into an individual’s existing knowledge base. In this course, the memory traces of specific experiences undergo a range of processes of analysis, generalization and abstraction, as a result of which they become available as modal, i.e. perceptual, cognitive tools for the execution of “displaced” (de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 436), “off-line” (Evans and Green 2006: 240, emphasis original) sensationindependent processes of simulation. In this way, these transformed modal representations can come to fulfil those functions ascribed to amodal symbolic representations in modular approaches (cf. Barsalou 1999: 577, 581) without losing the benefits of modal systems. Among those benefits, the following prove of particular relevance to the present project: firstly, modal models “provide … a better interface with the world” (de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 408) and thus readily apply to the investigation of referential meaning (cf. de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 417–418). Secondly, they readily accommodate subjective ways of perceiving and experiencing entities, scenes and situations, which renders them eligible for covering those aspects of experience expressed by construal meanings. How exactly PSS Theory meets the challenge of modelling cognition as grounded in individual situated experiences of the world while still accounting for creative and productive uses of knowledge, for instance in the form of imaginative thought, reasoning and, of course, language use, will be sketched in more detail in the following section. Subsequent to this, it will be demonstrated that those processes proposed by PSS Theory which transform concrete, situation-specific, analogous representations into productively applicable symbollike units establish a strong link between PSS Theory and usage-based cognitive approaches to language, and thus allow for these two theoretical frameworks to

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become integrated. The resulting theory complex will then be established as an ideal basis for modelling language-to-cognition/perception relations on the basis of construal meanings.

4.4.1 From specific experiences to perceptual symbols It is assumed here that for cognitively represented information to become used productively and creatively, it has to display at least the following features: firstly, it has to be readily applicable to a range of different (situational and cognitive) contexts. This presupposes that it displays a certain degree of context neutrality and thus multiple context adaptivity. Secondly, it has to be available in the form of smaller segments or elements which can function as ‘building blocks’ out of whose (re)combination some new, previously unexperienced whole can emerge (cf. above and Barsalou 1999). These two requirements are obviously not fulfilled by memory traces of specific concrete experiences as they result from the perception of and/or interaction with particular entities or situations in the world. Instead, it can be assumed that this kind of stored information is characterized, firstly, by a high degree of subjectivity – including individual attention allocation patterns – and, secondly, by a high degree of context specificity. For such experience-based information to fulfil the criteria listed above, and thus to become available for productive and creative use, it has to become subject to a range of processes of (re)structuring, which effect, firstly, its (relative) decontextualization or desituationalization, and, secondly, its segmentation into (re)combinable elements. If knowledge is to function as a basis not only for linguistic meaning in general, but also for construal meaning, the representational formats resulting from these processes may not take the form of amodal symbols, since such symbols would be stripped of any (perceptual) processingor conceptualization-related information. Instead, a modal representational format is required (see previous section). PSS Theory meets the whole set of requirements just sketched to a high degree. This is mainly due to the fact that the format of knowledge representation it proposes, perceptual symbols, constitutes a highly generalized, productively applicable format (symbols), which is, however, still modal in nature (perceptual). Thus, PSS Theory combines the advantages of both embodied experiencebased and symbolic approaches to cognition. This is achieved as follows: first of all, PSS Theory (Barsalou 1999) displays a range of features which identify it as a primarily experience-based/embodied

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model of cognition. It is, firstly, grounded in the assumption that knowledge derives from (primarily perceptual) experience (Barsalou 1999: 577), with perception being defined rather broadly as comprising not only vision, but also “the other four sensory modalities (audition, haptics, olfaction, and gustation), as well as … proprioception and introspection” (Barsalou 1999: 585). Secondly, PSS Theory holds that information, i.e. knowledge, is exclusively stored and represented in a perceptual format, and thus in a format analogous to the one in which it has been experienced (Barsalou 1999: 577–578, 582–592). And, thirdly, it assumes that memory recall and the productive and creative use of stored knowledge become realized as simulations of real, perceptual experiences. That is, they take the form of modal (usually simulated sensory and/or motoric) (re)experiences of earlier or imagined perceptual and/or bodily interactions with particular remembered or imagined entities or situations (Barsalou 1999: 586–587). In order to still integrate a symbolic dimension into this model of cognition, these typical features of embodied approaches are complemented by features characteristic of statistical, connectionist/network-based and classic representational approaches. To be more precise, Barsalou (1999) offers the following possible (and elegant) solution to the issue of whether and how generalized, symbolic information can still be or, rather, remain modal or perceptual in nature: Firstly, he (following Pulvermüller 1999; cf. also Damasio 1989 and Schwartz, Weaver, and Kaplan 1999) models perceptual and thus modal representations as “configuration[s] of active neurons” in the sensory-motor areas of the brain (Barsalou 1999: 584). Based on this, generalization processes can be defined as involving the reduction of initially highly active patterns of connected neurons to subpatterns of this initial state of activation. This entails that the neural activation patterns, although undergoing change and probably becoming less accessible consciously, still remain located in the same brain region, and thus remain … represented in the same systems as the perceptual states that produced them. The neural systems that represent color in perception, for example, also represent the colors of objects in perceptual symbols, at least to a significant extent. On this view, a common representational system underlies perception and cognition, not independent systems. Because perceptual symbols are modal, they are also analogical. The structure of a perceptual symbol corresponds, at least somewhat, to the perceptual state that produced it. (Barsalou 1999: 578)

If modelled like this, information can remain perceptual even in a highly generalized and abstracted form. This also allows for it to become easily reinstanti-

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ated for running simulations of less general and thus (more) conscious perceptual experiences. Secondly, taking a more representational view on this issue, Barsalou (1999: 583–592) claims that memory traces of concrete perceptual experiences become subject to a range of processes of parsing, segmentation, comparison/categorization and generalization. By undergoing these processes of transformation, they become represented in long-term memory in the form of perceptual symbols. These perceptual symbols constitute a format which is, according to Barsalou (1999: 581), general and abstract enough to be comparable in function to amodal symbols. Thus, one central tenet of PSS Theory is that information apprehended in a receptive, predominantly bottom-up fashion in particular situational contexts can become available for the full range of productive and creative uses after having become subject to a range of processes of structuring and modification. This also includes that this information can function as a standard of comparison and thus as a top-down categorization tool in the course of the processing of new experiences (see below). The steps of transformation and cognitive contextualization to which perceptual information is assumed to become subject, and which render it a structured system of knowledge, are as follows: (1) Information from concrete, specific and contextualized experiences is parsed into components. (2) These components are generalized to the format of perceptual symbols. For this purpose, memory traces from specific experiences are compared to stored information from similar experiences. (3) The newly built perceptual symbols “become organized around a common frame” (Barsalou 1999: 577) together with perceptual symbols that have been extracted from more or less similar experiences. The resulting frames, and the perceptual symbols constitutive of them, form simulators. These simulators constitute schematic complex cognitive structures which can, once formed, function as efficient top-down categorization tools and which can come to be used productively. Thus, Barsalou (1999: 587) models concepts in terms of simulators which enable individuals to run simulations of past experiences and of experiences different from any experiences they have had in their lives before. This, again, becomes possible because perceptual symbols can become (re)concretized and variably (re)combined within and across frames.

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The notion of simulators thus provides at least a partial solution to the problem of how experience-derived knowledge can come to meet the requirements of productive and creative use: the information represented by frames is schematic, since it results from the operation of generalization processes, and it is context neutral and context adaptive, since it consists of recombinable segments that have been isolated from different forms and instances of contextualized experiences. In sum, according to PSS Theory, individuals can arrive at a relatively context independent, relatively highly general state of conceptual knowledge about some kind or type of entity or situation by comparing and generalizing across single instances of experience, and by forming sets of abstract perceptual symbols (simulators) which can be used to run perceptual simulations. What sets PSS Theory apart from amodal theories, and what renders it a particularly well-suited basis for modelling conceptualization and construal meaning, is that this holistic, general information is not the only kind of information that simulators can be assumed to carry. Instead, they very likely also contain (and thus retain in the course of their formation) information about the different ways in which attention has been (and thus can be) allocated to entities or situations of the type represented by a particular frame or simulator (cf. Barsalou 1999: 596). According to Barsalou (1999: 583), this inclusion of attentional patterns in simulators is primarily an effect of the highly central role which attention plays in the context of perceptual symbol formation: The schematic nature of perceptual symbols falls out naturally from two attentional assumptions that are nearly axiomatic in cognitive psychology: Selective attention (1) isolates information in perception, and (2) stores the isolated information in long-term memory.

Consequently, (almost) all central processes of perceptual symbol formation and representation are triggered by and thus dependent on selective attention. Issue (2) in the above quote, the dependence of storage on selective attention, can be explained on the basis of two broadly accepted assumptions: firstly, the assignment of focal attention to a (sub)region in our environment corresponds to the assignment of cognitive salience to (some of) the information contained in this attended region; and, secondly, the assignment of salience to a unit of information heightens the probability of this unit becoming selected for (permanent) memory storage (Barsalou 1999: 583; see also Section 4.2 and Chapter 8).

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Issue (1), the dependence of segmentation processes on selective attention, can be explained by the fact that perception constitutes a process, which is extended and develops over time (cf. e.g. Langacker 1987: 100–101). As, in the course of such a (visual) perceptual process, the observer’s gaze wanders across the perceived entity or scene, different portions or features of it come into his or her focus of attention at different points in time. At each instance of focusing, the information currently in focus becomes stored in memory in the form of a “perceptual component” (Barsalou 1999: 582). Via the operation of comparisondriven categorization and generalization processes, these perceptual components are turned into perceptual symbols. As a consequence of this, “[r]ather than containing an entire holistic representation of a perceptual brain state” single perceptual symbols eventually come to represent “only a schematic aspect” of the originally perceived scene (Barsalou 1999: 583). It can thus be assumed that, as attention wanders across it, a whole set of perceptual symbols becomes extracted from a perceived situation. The information represented by each individual perceptual symbol thus originates from only that subpart of a concrete situation which was the focus of the observer’s attention at one particular point in time during the process of perception. What must be taken into account in this context is that attentional foci can differ in scope and that, within a region focused on, attention can select particular dimensions or features only (dimension- or feature-based attention, see Section 2.3.2, p. 25). Therefore, the information stored in the form of the different perceptual symbols can, and very likely does, differ considerably in amount, nature and degree of specificity. To give an example, as an observer’s gaze wanders across a car, either the whole car, or the silhouette of the car, or the door of the car, or the colour of the car’s door, etc. can come into his or her focus of attention at different points in time during the perceptual process (cf. Barsalou 1999: 586, 590–591). Correspondingly, the perceptual symbols extracted from this process variably represent a whole car, the silhouette of a car, the door of a car, the potential colour of a car’s door, etc. Because all these perceptual symbols become clustered in the same car frame, each perceptual symbol constitutive of this frame represents a particular way of allocating attention to a car. The attentional patterns the viewer has mapped onto the car in the course of the perceptual process thus become reflected in the set of perceptual symbols entered into long-term memory. As a result of this, memory records of concrete entities or situations can be assumed to reflect the perceiving individual’s subjective experience of the respective entity or situation, and to do so even in the highly schematic and abstract format of perceptual symbols.

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Importantly, not only information from one particular experience with one particular car feeds into the same car frame. Instead, it can be assumed that information units from multiple experiences with cars have fed into the same frame in the past and will subsequently feed into it in the future. It can therefore be expected that the frame, as a set of different perceptual symbols, provides a whole repertoire of possible alternative ways of allocating attention to and thus of conceptualizing cars. In addition, as further different perceptual symbols are added through subsequent experiences, the frame as a whole comes closer and closer to representing a holistic memory record of the concept of CAR. The assumption that the different perceptual symbols are retained in the frame has two important implications: firstly, it identifies concepts as dynamic, flexible and, thus, highly context adaptive knowledge structures, because each new experience can and very likely does modify the content and structure of an individual’s existing knowledge base. Secondly, and even more importantly for the present discussion, it can be assumed that “[a] frame is never experienced directly in its entirety” (Barsalou 1999: 586, emphasis mine) despite the fact that a holistic concept emerges from the full set of all perceptual symbols in a frame. This assumption derives from the claim that “simulator[s] contain … two levels of structure: (1) an underlying frame that integrates perceptual symbols across category instances, and (2) the potentially infinite set of simulations that can be constructed from the frame” (Barsalou 1999: 586) by way of (re)combining the perceptual symbols contained in the simulator in multiple and variable ways. This indicates that the activation or conscious access to stored knowledge does not, at one point, involve the frame as a whole, but, instead, takes the form of a (perceptual) simulation. Simulations, again, are processes. That is, they involve the subsequent activation of several perceptual symbols. Accordingly, they can give rise to a state of mind which is comparable to the state of mind triggered by the perceptual experience of a coherent entity or situation in external context. A process of knowledge activation can thus be compared in principle to a ‘real’, i.e. externally triggered, perceptual experience: it can always and exclusively simulate and thus make accessible only one way of conceptualizing the simulated entity or situation at a time. In other words, just as perception only allows for a selective, step-by-step, or, rather, attentional-focus-by-attentionalfocus way of processing information provided by the world, knowledge activation in the form of simulations only allows for a comparably selective, stepby-step, or, rather, perceptual-symbol-by-perceptual-symbol way of processing information available in cognitive context. In terms of access and activation, it can therefore be claimed that knowledge and thus also “meaning is conceptualization” (Geeraerts 2006: 7; see also Langacker 1987: 5).

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PSS Theory clearly indicates that the principle that individuals can conceive of the same situation in different ways does not only apply to alternative ways of perceiving a real world scene, but also to alternative ways of simulating and thus mentally processing, i.e. thinking about, an imagined or remembered scene; both processes are defined as perceptual processes, a real one, and a simulated one. Since the information represented in simulators has been extracted and abstracted from information collected by way of the running of ‘real’ processes of perception, simulators can be claimed to also represent (traces of) particular patterns of perceptual attention allocation. They can thus render available a whole repertoire of such attentional patterns for the running of simulations. This suggests that the process of activating knowledge from memory, as a process of selecting perceptual symbols for reinstantiation, always and obligatorily is at the same time a process of selecting one among a whole set of available attentional patterns. What this implies is that individuals draw on the same (perception-grounded) sets of attentional patterns in the course of running a whole range of different processes, perceptual and cognitive ones. This, again, renders it possible and even likely that (1) these different processes influence each other in some way, and that (2) the set of attentional patterns they draw on comes to be used or activated as well in the course of using language. First points in support of suggestion (1) can already be provided by relating PSS Theory to the broadly accepted principle that the execution of a particular attentional pattern can either be induced in a predominantly bottom-up fashion by ontologically or situationally salient features of a referent scene, or can be triggered in a top-down fashion by existing knowledge structures (see Section 4.2). In PSS Theory terms, these knowledge structures take the form of simulations: it can be assumed that, once they have become sufficiently well established, simulators (and the simulations and related patterns of cognitive salience ascription they enable) enter a competition with ontological or situational salience markers in external context. This implies that active perceptual symbols, due to their modal perceptual nature, can project back onto the world and thus make an impact on the processes of attention allocation run during (visual) scene perception (cf. Barsalou 1999: 588–589). How this might work can, again, be explained best in terms of (neural) networks (cf. e.g. Barsalou 1999, 2012: 248–250; Pulvermüller 1999): firstly, largely independently of the cause of salience ascription, salience can be measured or modelled in terms of a high degree of activation of those knowledge structures (and, allegedly, corresponding neural structures) which represent or realize a particular kind of information (see also Schmid 2007: 119). Secondly, a high

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degree of activation of structures can be assumed to heighten their probability of becoming accessed and used in the course of processing (see Section 4.2). If an observer-thinker encounters a new external situation, and given that he or she has encountered situations of this type before, he or she can (and is even highly likely to) co-activate previous knowledge about this type of situation. That is, he or she can, for instance, run a simulation of such a situation in a very early phase of or even prior to perception on the basis of expectations triggered by preceding context. If modelled in terms of (neural) networks, the running of this simulation would correspond to the activation of a certain pattern of nodes or neurons (cf. e.g. Barsalou 1999: 582–583; see also Pulvermüller 1999; Schwartz, Weaver, and Kaplan 1999). Since simulations are conceptualizations and thus, among other things, also contain information about attention allocation, this network pattern can be assumed to also realize a particular attentional pattern. This assumption, as well as the fact that conceptualization patterns and patterns of perceptual attention are modelled in equivalent terms in PSS Theory, heighten the probability that the already pre-activated pattern will also be used for the processing of the newly incoming perceptual information. In this way, active simulations can function as top-down processing tools and thus as attention-directing devices in (visual) perception (cf. Barsalou 1999: 588–589; see also Zwaan 2008: 168–171). Since each new perceptual experience, no matter whether bottom-up or topdown driven, feeds back into existing memory structures, this interplay between the bottom-up driven formation of new perceptual symbols and the topdown use of existing perceptual symbols as attention-directing devices in perception (including the resulting formation of further perceptual symbols) can be modelled as a self-enhancing feedback loop which constantly strengthens the cognitive salience of those attentional patterns that have been used before, and thus increases the probability of them being (re)used later (cf. e.g. Barsalou 1999: 591; see also Brewer and Treyens 1981: 208; Langacker 1987: 469, 1997: 232–233). In short, once one particular simulator has gained the status of a topdown processing device for a particular type of entity, scene or situation, it is highly likely to be constantly re-used unless a referent scene displays features which are (perceptually) salient enough to attract attention in a bottom-up fashion, and thus to override the established top-down routine (cf. Barsalou 1999: 603–604). This interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes thus ensures that the perceptuo-cognitive system can still dynamically adapt to changing circumstances, in spite of the fact that the feedback-loop mechanism just sketched, and illustrated in Figure 23, exerts a stabilizing and thus unifying force onto subsequent instances of perceptual processing.

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WORLD (external situational context) SOCIETY (external social context)

MIND (internal/cognitive context) LTM (knowledge base) SIMULATOR

PS PS

PS attention/selection SCENE 1

sensation

DIMDIM(TOP)

DIMDIM(TOP)

SIMULATED PERCEPT DIMDIM(TOP)

SCENE 2

PS

perception PERCEPT

generalization/ schematization+ segmentation

PS

PS PS PS

DIMDIM(TOP)

Fig. 23: Feedback-loop model I. Bottom-up formation of perceptual symbols (PS) from experience (perception of SCENE 1) and subsequent use as top-down processing tools (perception of SCENE 2).

As will be shown in the following section, the processes and dynamics illustrated in Figure 23 do not only provide an overview of the working and interaction of bottom-up and top-down driven perceptual and cognitive processes in PSS Theory terms. They also provide a major key to integrating cognitive linguistic models of language with Barsalou’s PSS Theory model of cognition and cognitive processing, and thus, eventually, a key to arriving at a usage-based cognitive linguistic theory of language-perception/cognition effects.

4.4.2 Perceptual symbols, language and language-cognition relations Two central premises of usage-based cognitive linguistic theory require to be accepted for language-perception/cognition effects to be modelled on the basis of the feedback-loop model just proposed (see also Chapters 2 and 6). The first of these is the principle that “[l]anguage is an integral part of human cognition” (Langacker 1987: 12; see also Croft 2009: 396; Langacker 2008: 539). This entails

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that linguistic meaning is encyclopaedic (e.g. Bybee 2013: 64; Croft and Cruse 2004: 30; Evans and Green 2006: 215–222; Langacker 1987: 7, 2008: 36–43), or, put more generally, that language draws on the same general store of knowledge as other forms of cognitive processing and behaviour. The second premise is the principle that linguistic knowledge consists in a network of constructions, that is, form55-meaning or form-function pairs, only, which has as a consequence that no clear dividing line can be drawn between grammar and lexicon (e.g. Evans and Green 2006: 193–194; Goldberg 2003: 223; Langacker 1987: 3 and 12, 2005b: 17). If these two premises are taken together, and if general cognition is modelled in PSS Theory terms, linguistic constructions can be modelled as associations of linguistic forms with simulators. On this interpretation, uses of linguistic forms activate (and thus correlate with) the running of simulations of the entities or situations to which they refer (Barsalou et al. 2008: 250; Glenberg 1997: 12–13; Zwaan 2004).56 This interpretation is well compatible both with cognitive linguistic approaches to meaning and with recent findings from neuro-linguistics. For instance, it accords well with Langacker’s (2005b: 20) claim that … linguistic expressions are not (metaphorically speaking) containers for meaning; they serve as prompts for the construction of meaning … They provide flexible, open-ended access to established domains of knowledge …

It also aligns well with findings from neuronal (fMRT and ERP) research which indicate that, on occasions of language use, “the sensorimotor systems in the

|| 55 As Langacker (2005a: 104–107) points out, the understanding of what constitutes the formside of a construction differs between Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008), which models FORM in terms of phonological structure, and Construction Grammar approaches (Croft 2001; Goldberg 1995, 2003, 2006), which define FORM in terms of grammatical form (plus phonological structure). This issue might partly explain the different predictions made by Langacker (1987) as opposed to Croft (2001) on the possible occurrence of relativity effects which are captured by the differentiation between the Schematicity Theory of construal meanings and the Differentiality Theory of construal meanings introduced in Sections 5.2 and 5.3. 56 Barsalou et al. (2008: 252–253) refer to the “linguistic system” and to the “simulation system”. However, this does not imply that Barsalou et al. (2008) consider these two systems as fully distinct. Instead, they openly state that “[i]f future empirical evidence indicates that the linguistic system contains its own semantics, our position will need revision” (Barsalou et al. 2008: 250), and they point out the following: “… we use ‘linguistic system’ and ‘simulation system’ as simplifications so that we can focus on mechanisms of interest, in particular, linguistic forms versus situated simulations. This usage, however, should not be taken as a commitment to rigid modular systems, nor to the view that the linguistic system is unrelated to the simulation system” (Barsalou et al. 2008: 253).

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brain, which are used in real-world situations, are partially reactivated to simulate the described situation” (de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 418; see also Section 4.3 above).57 On top of this, modelling constructions as form-simulator pairs reiterates the conclusions drawn by many psycholinguistic studies of (spatial) discourse and text processing that linguistically experienced information becomes integrated with related background knowledge and represented and accessed for later use in the form of coherent mental models or situation models (e.g. Barsalou 2008: 628–629; Coventry and Garrod 2004: 130–134; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 336–346; Glenberg 1997: 1; Glenberg, Kruley, and Langston 1994; Johnson-Laird 1983; Tversky 1991; Zwaan 2004, 2008; Zwaan and Radvansky 1998; Zwaan and Rapp 2006). Importantly, it is assumed that that these “mental models [in this case: spatial mental models] derived from text are similar to those derived from direct experience” (Bryant, Tversky, and Franklin 1992: 74; see also Denis 1996). Accordingly, “comprehension is the vicarious experience of the described events through the integration and sequencing of traces from actual experience cued by the linguistic input” (Zwaan 2004: 38; see also Avraamides et al. 2004 and Taylor and Tversky 1992 for more specific information on spatial mental model construction). For contexts of situated referential language use, this also entails that comprehension processes result in “an integrated memory representation derived from visual and linguistic input” (Ferreira, Apel, and Henderson 2008: 406; see also Brunyé and Taylor 2008: 701, 725–726 and Glenberg, Kruley, and Langston 1994: 616). This entails the following for the processing of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances: provided that a language user already has (access to) knowledge about DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, or at least about spatial scenes more generally, he or she can be assumed to execute basically the same cognitive processes as the ones illustrated for direct perceptual experiences in Figure 23 when experiencing a “displaced” (de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 436) linguistic reference to a DIMDIM(TOP)-scene. What constitutes the only difference between these two processing events is that, in the second case, linguistic input constitutes the || 57 Pulvermüller (2008) points out that this is even possible with words or constructions for concepts which have not been “learned in the context of reference object perception and action execution” (Pulvermüller 2008: 101) because “after action-perception learning of aspects of word meaning has taken place for a sufficiently large set of words, it becomes feasible to learn semantic properties parasitically when words occur together in strings, sentences, or texts” (Pulvermüller 2008: 101, emphasis original), i.e. by way of running simulations of novel perceptual experiences or actions on the basis of existing knowledge structures (see also de Vega, Graesser, and Glenberg 2008: 404).

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only external source of information, while scene-related perceptual information originates exclusively from internal/cognitive context, and thus from long-term memory (see also Casasanto 2008: 73–75). This is illustrated in Figure 24.

WORLD (external situational context) SOCIETY (external social context)

MIND (internal/cognitive context) LTM (knowledge base) SIMULATOR

PS PS

PS

UTTERANCE DIMDIM(TOP)

PERCEPT 1

PS

C1

SIMULATED REFERENT SCENE DIMDIM(TOP)

DIMDIM(TOP)

C3 SCENE DIMDIM(TOP)

PERCEPT 2

PS

DIMDIM(TOP)

Fig. 24: Feedback-loop model II. Language as a form of experience that can feed back into non-linguistic behaviour. PS = perceptual symbol; C = (form-side of the linguistic) construction.

As can be seen, Figure 24 constitutes a modified and extended version of Figure 23 (p. 99). It illustrates the assumptions that (visual) perception-induced and language-induced representations take the same format and feed into the same store of knowledge, and that the perceptual symbols activated (a) during the processing of active and passive experiences of language use and (b) during the processing of language-use detached perceptual experiences also become subject to and feed into the same feedback-loop mechanism. Importantly, this is assumed here to also account for the attentional patterns realized by these perceptual symbols. In sum, this suggests the following: very basically, current linguistic experience and behaviour feed back into later linguistic experience and behav-

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iour. And, importantly, given that the same store of knowledge, i.e. set of simulators, is used with linguistic and non-linguistic experiences, linguistic experience feeds back into later non-linguistic experience and related forms of behaviour (and vice versa). Therefore, it can be assumed that (a) habits of language use, i.e. habits of using a particular linguistic construction type for reference to a particular type of scene, become associated with habits of assigning attention to these scenes in a particular manner, and that (b) these habitualized patterns of attention allocation become activated and thus executed even on occasions of non-linguistic interaction with the same type of referent scene. If applied to the use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, this suggests that habits of using a particular construction type might be correlated with the use of particular attentional patterns in the perception of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes not only on occasions of situated language use, but even on occasions of mere perception or other forms of non-linguistic interaction with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Based on this assumption, uses of nominal constructions (in the front right-hand corner), for instance, would give rise to a simulation of the process of viewing a spatial constellation while applying an attentional pattern which assigns a high degree of prominence to the RO. If a construction of this type is used for reference to a visually accessible scene, speakers can, accordingly, be expected to attend to this scene perceptually in this very way, because the object-focused attentional pattern has already been pre-activated during utterance planning and is readily available for use as a top-down processing device.58 If, in addition, nominal constructions constitute the type of constructions a speaker uses preferably (and thus most frequently; see Chapter 5) when referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, it is possible and even likely that he or she will run the attentional pattern associated with this construction even when interacting with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a non-linguistic manner, because his or her preceding (active and passive) experiences of language use have, very likely, rendered this attentional pattern particularly readily accessible for use as an effect of entrenchment processes (in particular processes of routinization; see Chapter 5). In sum, based on what has been discussed in this section, it can indeed be claimed that modelling meaning in cognitive linguistic terms “entails a relativistic approach to the relation between language and thought” (Croft and Cruse 2004: 72): defining language as a network of [form-perceptual symbol/simulator]-relations identifies construal meanings as potential inducers of Whorfian

|| 58 The occurrence of reverse effects like the triggering of the use of a particular linguistic structure by the (bottom-up driven) running of a particular pattern of attention allocation is considered possible as well (see Section 8.5).

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effects, and thus as a key notion for arriving at a theoretically well-grounded integration of cognitive linguistic theory and linguistic relativity theory. More specifically, what has been discussed so far yields the following account of linguistic relativity effects: Effects of language on perception/cognition become possible on the grounds of the following assumptions: – Language consists of form-simulator pairs. – Linguistic forms function as triggers for the running of mental simulations; these simulations realize what is usually referred to as the ‘meaning’ of language. – Simulations correspond to ‘real’ perceptual experiences; this has as a consequence that (a) instances of situated language use are characterized by the occurrence of particular forms of non-linguistic behaviour, like the realization of a particular pattern of attention allocation; that (b) linguistic and non-linguistic experiences feed into the same memory representations; and that (c) linguistic meaning also contains information on subjective aspects of scene perception, including particular patterns of attention allocation. – Each use of a particular form-simulator association for reference to a particular type of scene leaves a memory trace; as an effect of this, each use of a construction increases the chances of its re-use, or, as put by Langacker (2010: 115), “occurrence facilitates recurrence” (cf. also Langacker 1997: 237, 2000: 3 and 7). As a consequence, instances of active and passive language use contribute to the formation of habits in speakers.59 – Since individuals can be assumed to draw on the same set of memory representations independently of whether they interact with a particular scene in a linguistic or a non-linguistic manner, recent and habitual uses of a particular construction (type) can feed back into forms of non-linguistic behaviour (and vice versa; see also Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 48–49; Papafragou and Selimis 2010: 225). – Language-cognition/perception effects are thus likely to occur (a) on-line during (situated) uses of language, and (b) off-line as soon as individuals make use of simulations as topdown processing devices.

This account of linguistic relativity effects forms the basis of the following discussion. However, it has to be pointed out that it is subject to certain restrictions. In particular, it is bound to the acceptance of the following two assumptions: firstly, particular attentional construal meanings are relatively stably associated with particular linguistic forms or constructions. Secondly, attentional construal meanings indeed do consist in patterns of perceptual attention allocation, and are thus highly likely to trigger the execution of par-

|| 59 This form of habit formation can often be found modelled as a form of Hebbian learning in the cognitive linguistic literature (cf. e.g. Lamb 2000: 185; Langacker 2010: 124).

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ticular (observable/measurable) forms of non-linguistic behaviour on each instance (or at least in the majority of instances) of their use. These two assumptions cannot, however, be covered sufficiently well by modelling linguistic meaning in PSS Theory terms, as it has been done in this section. This is because this manner of modelling meaning already starts out from, i.e. presupposes, the existence of relatively stable symbolic [formsimulator]-associations. Therefore, the following questions cannot be answered by the line of argumentation pursued so far: how can linguistic constructions come to be associated with construal meanings and thus, allegedly, with particular patterns of attention allocation in the first place? How centrally does this dimension of meaning figure in the use of particular linguistic constructions? The following Chapter 5 addresses and provides possible answers to these questions by drawing even more extensively on insights and principles from usage-based cognitive linguistics in general, and from research on first and lifelong language learning in particular.

5 Constructions as [form-construal meaning]associations The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive processes. (Ellis 2011: 660) … it is fair to say that more work needs to be done to clearly establish the processes through which relativistic effects come into existence. (Everett 2013: 272)

One central definitional feature of usage-based models of language and language learning is the assumption that linguistic knowledge is generated by and becomes manifest in language use (e.g. Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Bybee 2006, 2007b, 2010; Bybee and Hopper 2001; Croft 2001, 2009; Haspelmath 2002; Hopper 1987; Langacker 2000; Lieven 2014; Lieven and Tomasello 2008; Schmid 2014; The Five Graces Group 2009). This feature – together with the two central tenets of cognitive linguistic theory that language is part of general cognition and that linguistic knowledge consists in symbolic units/constructions only (see Chapters 2 and 4) – will in the following be shown to be of crucial relevance to the definition of construal meanings and, ultimately, to the understanding of language-perception/cognition relations. What will be demonstrated to figure centrally within this scope is the idea that language constitutes a multiply context-embedded phenomenon, i.e. that language use takes place in and is shaped by external (situational and social) as well as internal (cognitive) contexts. In usage-based understanding, linguistic knowledge is generated to a large extent by its contextual environment, or, to be more concrete, by the experiences individual speaker-learners have with and in this environment. Since the external contexts in which speakers’ experiences take place are subject to constant change, knowledge – including knowledge of language – is understood here to be highly context adaptive and thus dynamic itself. Language can accordingly be defined as a system which “is … always in a process of becoming – creating, losing, and re-creating structures that are never absolutely fixed” (Bybee 2007a: 8; cf. also Blythe and Croft 2009: 47; Croft 2001: 8; Diessel 2011: 830; Langacker 1999a: 21; Schmid 2014: 242–247; Steels 2000). If considered from this perspective, language learning is a life-long process (cf. e.g. Bybee 2013: 50; Kaschak and Glenberg 2004; Langacker 1999a: 16; Schmid 2014: 242–243; Szmrecsanyi 2005: 141).

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These considerations eventually yield a definition of language as a system of individual knowledge that consistently re-constitutes itself on the basis of new experiences, i.e. that emerges from consistently (re)adjusting the relations between external contexts (as the main source of new experiential input through perception, communication and interaction) and cognitive context (as the store of earlier experiences in the form of simulators, and thus as the source of new experiences via simulations). This high adaptivity, dynamicity and context-dependence of the ‘language system’ is, however, partly in conflict with the central function of language as a means of interindividual communication. To fulfil this function, linguistic knowledge requires to be relatively constant and stable, and to be relatively similar between individual members of a speech community. To be fully functional, a dynamic ‘language system’ therefore has to hit the right balance between variability/individuality and stability/conventionality. One major challenge in defining the nature of language and linguistic knowledge accordingly consists in defining how this balance is arrived at. In the present view, and in line with a range of usage-based theories (cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 109, 2009; Ellis 2011; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010; Harder 2010; Langacker 2010: 108–109; Schmid 2014, 2015; The Five Graces Group 2009), this becomes possible because linguistic knowledge is constantly subjected to the impact of both stabilizing and variation- and flexibilityinducing forces (cf. also Keller 1982, 1994). On the stabilizing side are, for instance, the laws of physics which invariably determine all external experiences (Casasanto 2008: 74), the possibilities and limits of experience imposed on speakers, i.e. us, by “the species-specific nature of our bodies, and neuroanatomical substructures, which have evolved to the particular ecological niche that we, as humans, inhabit” (Evans 2009: 29; see also Goldberg 2006: 16; Langacker 1997: 233), and, not least, the norms and conventions prevalent in the speech communities of which we are members (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 102; Ellis 2011: 661; Schmid 2014: 244–247; see also Section 5.4 below). On a more local level, speakers align by adapting to the needs of their different individual communicative partners (e.g. Schober 2009; see Section 5.4.2) and to the requirements exerted by different specific communicative contexts and situations (cf. Langacker 2008: 73; see also Talmy 2000: 315–316). Variation and flexibility, on the other hand, can be induced by factors relating either to variation in the input to which individual speakers are exposed or to the manner in which they (can) deal with this input. Examples of factors of the first type are, of course, differences with respect to how and how often individuals have made a particular kind of experience (cf. e.g. Blythe and Croft

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2009: 51–53) and/or with respect to which and how many different speakers they communicatively interact with throughout their lives (cf. e.g. BlumenthalDramé forthc.; Croft 2009). Factors of the second type are, for instance, differences in how individuals subjectively experience or evaluate particular usage events (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 35; Croft 2000: 106), e.g. as a result of differences between their (partly education-dependent; cf. Dąbrowska 2012; Street and Dąbrowska 2010) specific cognitive abilities and preferences (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 35–36, 205–206), including, for instance, their metalinguistic skills (cf. e.g. Dąbrowska and Street 2006; Street and Dąbrowska 2010), their suppression abilities (e.g. Boudewyn, Long, and Swaab 2012; Farmer, Misyak, and Christiansen 2012: 358–360; see also Gernsbacher 1993, 1997; Gernsbacher and Faust 1991), and thus their readiness to adapt to current or recent experiences, and/or their abilities and strategies of statistical learning (e.g. Farmer, Misyak, and Christiansen 2012: 358; Misyak and Christiansen 2012). A further, more situation-inherent, variation-inducing factor is the scope for creative thinking and acting licensed by the human cognitive apparatus and bodily physics: eventually, “nothing dictates in absolute terms … a speaker’s momentary intention” (Langacker 1987: 51). Importantly for the present discussion, the working of all these factors has as a consequence that no two cognitive contexts are exactly alike (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 34; Croft 2000: 105– 106, 2009: 404, 414–415, 418; Taylor 2003: 65–66). Schmid’s (2014, 2015) Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (in the following referred to as EC-Model) centrally addresses these questions of how individuals and the collective relate, and of how flexibility and stability get balanced. Even more, it is essentially built around these issues: the core idea is that the ‘language system’ constitutes a dynamic network of associations which is kept in the right balance between flexibility and stability because it is constantly subject to the working of processes of entrenchment, “defined as the continuous routinization and re-organization of associations, depending on exposure to and frequency of identical or similar processing events, subject to the exigencies of the social environment” (Schmid 2015: 10; see also Blumenthal-Dramé 2012; Croft 2001: 28; Evans and Green 2006: 114; Langacker 1987: 59; Lieven and Tomasello 2008: 171; Schmid 2007: 118–119, 2014: 242– 24360), and of processes of conventionalization, defined as “the continuous

|| 60 A comparison of these references clearly reveals that entrenchment has been defined in different ways in the cognitive linguistics literature (see also Schmid forthc.). Most definitions focus on or even equate entrenchment with routinization, and thus do not fully comply with Schmid’s definition of entrenchment as a meta-process to the subprocesses of association,

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mutual coordination and matching of communicative knowledge and practices, subject to the exigencies of the entrenchment processes taking place in individual minds” (Schmid 2015: 10; see also Hruschka et al. 2009; Kemmer and Barlow 2000: ix; Schmid 2014: 242). What sets the EC-Model apart from most other usage-based models is that it not only acknowledges that the private, individual, cognitive level of linguistic knowledge and the public, shared, social level of language as a means of communication must exhibit “various forms of interaction” (Harder 2010: 6, emphasis original; see also Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 28–33) and, eventually, enter a state of “fundamental convergence” (Levinson 2003: 113) to yield a complete and fully functional ‘language system’, but that it also explicitly models the usage-related processes and dynamics which characterize this interaction and effect this convergence. As such, the EC-Model provides a theoretical basis for (empirically) investigating these phenomena and, consequently, for exploring and closing the gap between modelling language in terms of individual knowledge structures and in terms of its status as a community-wide means of communicative interaction. Importantly, it thus also fits well the present focus on interindividual differences, and it provides important theoretical impulses to the aims of the research presented in this book: modelling and investigating interindividual variation in DIMDIM(TOP)-construction use within the German and English speech communities, and identifying the possible impact of such variation in cognitive contexts on the (non-)occurrence of language-perception/ cognition effects. More specifically, the following issues relevant to these aims derive from the view of language as a dynamic, context adaptive system at the core of the EC-Model, and of emergent/usage-based models of language more generally: firstly, patterns of conventionalization, i.e. degrees and kinds of interindividual variation within speech communities, can differ. In consequence, any investigations of language-perception/cognition effects on a between-languages level presuppose corresponding investigations on language-internal and speakerinternal levels. Secondly, given that language is inherently dynamic, it cannot be taken for granted that particular linguistic forms are necessarily, generally, stably and interindividually associated with particular attentional construal meanings. If applied to the context of the research presented here, what is at the

|| routinization and generalization/schematization. Schmid’s more differential view, however, fits the requirements of the present project best and is therefore used in the following. In addition, recent evidence clearly indicates that “entrenchment is extremely complex, as it encompasses different dimensions” (Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 187; see also Schmid forthc.).

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core of these issues is the following question: what is the nature and status of attentional construal meanings in speech communities and individuals? This question is discussed in Section 5.2, where it will be addressed from a developmental perspective, i.e. with a focus on initial and life-long language learning. Related questions to be clarified are thus the following: how can construal meanings become part of linguistic knowledge at all? And, (how) can they reach the stable status ascribed to them by many cognitive linguistic theories (see also Chapters 2 and 6)? The following Section 5.1 provides the necessary theoretical background to this discussion by elaborating in more detail on the idea of language as a dynamic associative network, as well as on the features characteristic of this network.

5.1 Language as a dynamic network of associations As just outlined, the following ideas are central to usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches: firstly, linguistic knowledge takes the form of a dynamic associative network of form-meaning associations. Secondly, this network is generated from (and maintained by) experience in a primarily bottom-up driven fashion. Langacker (2000: 5), for instance, subsumes this “vision” of the ‘language system’ as follows: The vision that emerges is one of massive networks in which structures with varying degrees of entrenchment, and representing different levels of abstraction, are linked together in relationships of categorization, composition, and symbolization.

Importantly for the present discussion, these core assumptions of usage-based cognitive linguistic theory identify a range of parallels between this theoretical framework and Barsalou’s PSS Theory of cognition (see Chapter 4). One main region of overlap between these theories pertains to the set of processes by which memory traces of specific experiences become integrated into the ‘knowledge base’ as a whole, and through which they become available for later productive use: both usage-based cognitive linguistic frameworks and PSS Theory assume that concrete memory traces become subject to processes of comparison and categorization, which can then trigger the running of processes of routinization and/or of generalization (cf. e.g. Barsalou 1999; Langacker 1999b, 2000, 2008; Schmid 2014: 242–247, 2015: 13–16). Similarly in principle to PSS Theory, usage-based models, firstly, assume that different kinds of associations, i.e. “link[s] between two or more cognitive representations” (Smith and Mackie 2007: 65), are formed as a first step in the

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building up of a ‘language system’, and become stored for later use (cf. e.g. Langacker 2010: 114–115; Schmid 2014: 243–244, 2015: 11–13). Secondly, these associations have to become interrelated and (externally) decontextualized/ desituationalized so as to become available for later productive and creative use. And, thirdly, they have to be deindividualized so as to become applicable as means of interindividual communication. The first two steps, which primarily apply to language in the minds of individual speakers, can, following Schmid (2014: 242–243, 2015: 11–16), be defined as involving and actually constituting the meta-process of entrenchment. The third step, which relates to language as a medium of social interaction, is captured by Schmid’s (2014: 242, 2015: 10) definition of the meta-process of conventionalization. This division into several steps, of course, constitutes a simplification, since, as indicated above, entrenchment and conventionalization are closely intertwined and interrelated (cf. Schmid 2014: 242–247, 2015: 10). However, it is kept up here for matters of convenience of presentation and discussion. The processes of association-formation and storage, and of interrelation, decontextualization and deindividualization will be sketched in the following with a particular focus on the question of which status, role and function construal meanings can be assumed to have in their course, and thus in the course of the meta-process of generating and maintaining the ‘language system’. It will be demonstrated that construal meanings can be considered to emerge at several different stages of and during different subprocesses in this constantly ongoing meta-process. Importantly for the present discussion, it will be shown in addition that, depending on the stage or subprocess one focuses on, different answers can be given to the following questions: (1) If at all, under what external and internal conditions are attentional construal meanings formed? When and how do patterns of attention allocation become associated with linguistic forms? (2) When and under what circumstances do such associations become activated, and do so to a degree strong enough to trigger the execution of particular forms of non-linguistic behaviour? (3) Do particular construal meanings become and remain stably associated with particular forms? Are these associations interindividually valid?

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5.2 [Form-construal meaning]-associations: Their formation and establishment Construal meanings are defined here as facets of symbolic form-meaning associations (see Section 2.1.2) and, thus, as an inherent component of the associative network system of language as a whole. The subset of entrenchment processes which results in the formation of associations therefore constitutes a natural starting point for defining more precisely the status and functions of construal meanings in the ‘language system’. More specifically, following Schmid (2014: 248–254, 2015: 11–13), three basic types of associations are considered here as constitutive of this ‘language system’: (1) symbolic associations, defined as the associations between linguistic forms and knowledge structures/simulators, and thus as those associations by which form-meaning pairs or, in the present understanding, form-simulator pairs, as the basic units of linguistic knowledge, are constituted (2) associations between these basic symbolic units, namely: (a) paradigmatic associations between different form-meaning/simulator pairs present in cognitive context, or between either their form-sides or their meaning-sides only (see also Croft 2001: 28)61 (b) syntagmatic associations between different form-meaning/simulator pairs present in cognitive context, or between either their form-sides or their meaning-sides only (see also Bybee 2013: 54–55) (3) pragmatic associations, defined as the associations between forms or entire form-simulator pairs and (features or aspects) of the social and situational external contexts in which they were experienced (see also Croft 2001: 19; Goldberg and van der Auwera 2012: 115–116). These four types of associations are grouped here into two subsets: one set which comprises symbolic and pragmatic associations, and one set which comprises paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations. These subsets are formed based on the observation that the formation of paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations presupposes the existence of (several) form-meaning pairs, while

|| 61 This claim that the form- and meaning-sides of linguistic constructions can enter processes of association-formation separately can be seen supported by Langacker’s (1991: 552) definition of a schema as “[a] semantic, phonological, or symbolic structure that, relative to another representation of the same entity, is characterized with lesser specificity and detail” (emphasis mine).

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the formation of symbolic and pragmatic associations does not, or at least less so.62 As will be shown in the course of the following section, symbolic and, in particular, pragmatic associations can therefore be assumed to constitute the first types of associations formed in the course of first language learning. What will be shown as well is that, within this scope, pragmatic associations play a particularly central part in explaining how construal meanings can at all become part of a learner’s ‘language system’.

5.2.1 Building [form-construal meaning]-associations Usage-based theories of first language learning (e.g. Behrens 2009; Lieven 2014; Lieven and Tomasello 2008; Tomasello 2003a, 2003b, 2006, 2009) rest on the following central assumptions: firstly, language is learned from experience, or, more precisely, from a whole range of experiences of (passive and active) language use (cf. e.g. Behrens 2009: 384–385). Secondly, just as “[l]anguage is an integral part of human cognition” (Langacker 1987: 12, 2008: 539), language learning processes are subject to the same principles and constraints as general learning processes (cf. e.g. Behrens 2009: 386; Bybee 2010: 78; Diessel 2011: 831–832; Goldberg 2003: 219 and 222, 2006: 1 and 69–92; Tomasello 2003b: 2–4). Thirdly, language learning occurs embedded in environmental/situational and, in particular, social contexts (e.g. Ellis 2011: 656; Lamb 2000: 188; Tomasello 1995). The predominant role which social context plays in the course of language learning can be seen very clearly from the kind of situations in which (at least early) language learning is assumed to primarily occur, and in which first pragmatic and early symbolic associations can therefore be assumed to become established. In these situations, which are referred to in the literature as “primordial sharing situation[s]” (Adamson and McArthur 1995: 206, emphasis original), speaker and hearer – usually infant learner and caregiver – interact face-to-face. The language they use refers to an entity (an object or event) that is situationally co-present with and perceptually accessible to both interlocutors. What proves central for the modelling of construal meanings is that many usage-based theorists hold that primordial sharing situations provide ideal

|| 62 This restriction applies to the formation of symbolic associations, which requires the availability of information units to which newly incoming information can be compared for means of classification (see also Section 5.2.2 below).

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conditions for learners to establish form-function and thus, eventually, formmeaning relations, because these situations constitute the perfect environments for the establishment of a joint focus of attention between speaker and hearer, or, in this case, between mature speaker and infant learner (cf. e.g. Adamson and McArthur 1995; Baldwin and Moses 1996; Butterworth 2003; Campbell 2011; Moll and Meltzoff 2011; Seemann 2011a, 2011b; Tomasello 1995, 1998; Tomasello and Farrar 1986). This assumption is based on the rationale that, in primordial sharing situations, adult speech can be accompanied by the use of a range of attentiondirecting signals different from but largely complementary to language, like pointing to (e.g. Liszkowski and Tomasello 2011), directing the gaze towards or interacting with the referred to and thus to-be-attended entity (e.g. Behne, Carpenter, and Tomasello 2005; Hanna and Brennan 2007; Zwaan 2008: 165; see also Moore, Liebal, and Tomasello 2013 for a more differential discussion of and Pulvermüller 2012 for a neuro-scientific perspective on this issue). In other words, in primordial sharing situations, adult speakers can easily make use of a range of complementary (linguistic and non-linguistic) means for assigning pragmatic or situational salience to the external referent(s) of their utterance(s) (cf. e.g. Baldwin 1995: 141, 148–152; Tomasello 2009: 72–73). This can be assumed to have the following effects: firstly, the use of nonlinguistic means of attention allocation in co-occurrence with a linguistic utterance very likely allows a learner to identify which subregion of a situation a speaker mainly focuses on attentionally at the point at which he or she makes a linguistic utterance. This, again, makes it possible for the learner to join this focus of attention (see e.g. Tomasello 2003a: 49–50). As a consequence, the learner cannot only associate the experienced sound string with the experienced situation as a whole, but can build up an additional and presumably even stronger and more stable association between the interactively established more narrow joint focus of attention on some subportion of the general situation and the simultaneously experienced linguistic form (Baldwin 1995: 131; see also Bruner 1978: 28–36 and 44, 1983: 67–88). This could finally enable him or her to identify the entity or information located in the focused region as the referent of the linguistic expression. In this way, a learner can thus build a form-meaning relation, though still a very specific and strongly situation-bound one (cf. Tomasello 2006: 4–5). And, similarly to what has been presented in Chapter 4 with respect to general learning processes and the formation of perceptual symbols, frames and simulators, attention, again, can be assumed to play a central part in the formation of knowledge structures, in this case (early versions of) linguistic constructions.

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However, the attention-based relation driving language learning differs in one central respect from the relation driving general perception-based learning (see Section 4.4): it is not a binary relation between learner and world/environment, but a triangulate relation between speaker/caregiver, hearer/learner and world/environment (Adamson and McArthur 1995: 206; Campbell 2011: 417; Moll and Meltzoff 2011: 395). This triangulate relation is special because it does not allow the learner’s attentional focus to wander freely over the scene and thus to become primarily guided in a bottom-up mode by being attracted by regions or portions of the scene which display a high degree of perceptual or ontological salience. Instead, the primordial sharing situation requires learners to join the attentional focus of their interlocutors/caregivers and thus to allow for their own focus of attention to become attracted by regions or entities to which the speakers, via their behaviour, assign pragmatic or situational salience (cf. Schmid 2014: 277–278; Croft 2000: 100–102; see also Section 4.2). Entering into a state of joint attention with the speaker which is ‘intensive’ enough to enable the learner to identify the precise referent of the speaker’s utterance requires, however, more from the learner than simply sharing the speaker’s visual focus (cf. Moll and Meltzoff 2011). This is due to the fact that attention can be allocated selectively and differentially to different aspects, dimensions or features of the information available in a visually focused region (cf. e.g. Pulvermüller 2012: 432; see also Section 4.4 and Chapter 8). To take up the example presented within the above discussion of PSS Theory (Barsalou 1999: 590; see Section 4.4), if the scope of the attentional focus is on a car as a whole, the information attended to within this scope can, for instance, still be either on the car’s shape, or its colour, or its state of being clean or dirty, etc. Though located on a more abstract level, the same accounts for the differentiation between space-focused and object-focused patterns of spatial scene conceptualization; as with the example of the car, selection takes place between the different information levels which are co-present in the same region of (perceptual) space. This gives rise to the following question: how can a learner come to associate the ‘right’ kind of information – the information referred to by the speaker in the concrete learning situation in the first place and, eventually, the set of knowledge conventionally associated with the respective form in the speech community of which he or she is (becoming) a member – with an experienced form? The explanation provided by usage-based models is the following: the learner has to be able not only to share the speaker’s visual focus, but also to capture the particular intention the speaker pursues by his or her behaviour, and thus also, eventually, by his or her use of language (cf. e.g. Tomasello

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2003b: 21–28).63 Very basically, learners have to recognize that the speaker intends to direct or “manipulate” their attention (Tomasello 1995: 115). Or, put differently, learners have to recognize that “linguistic reference may be seen as something of the form: ‘I intend for you to attend to X,’ that is to say, ‘I intend for you to intend to perceive X in such and such a way.’” (Tomasello 1995: 115, emphasis original; see also Moll and Meltzoff 2011: 401–404; Tomasello 1998: 235– 237, 2009: 73).64 According to this theory, the first functions or meanings with which linguistic forms become associated are thus the basic pragmatic functions of intentionindication and attention-allocation (Tomasello 2003a: 50). This might suggest that infant learners experience all instances of contextualized language as forms of (primary) deictic language use during the very early stages of the language learning process. Correspondingly, the form-function associations built in this early phase of language learning can be classified as a form of pragmatic associations in Schmid’s (2014: 251–254, 2015: 12; cf. also Croft 2000: 114) terms. The way Tomasello (1995) modifies and extends his initial paraphrase from “I intend for you to attend to X” to “I intend for you to intend to perceive X in such and such a way” (bold emphasis mine), suggests a further extension to this line of argumentation. It can be read as bringing into this picture the differentiation between content (the attended and thus perceived X) and construal (the manner of perceiving X “in such and such a way”), and thus the aspect of construal meaning. In this way it clearly identifies language as a very precise attention-directing and even attention-manipulating device. And it indicates that, for language to be learned successfully, learners have to identify it as such. This suggests that the very first aspects of linguistic meaning which infants learn are situation-specific [form-pragmatic function]-associations and [formattentional pattern]-associations and, thus, eventually, [form-attentional construal]-associations. This, again, clearly indicates that attentional construal meanings can be counted among the earliest and most basic meaning facets of linguistic signs.

|| 63 In how far the concept of joint attention already includes aspects of other-modelling and intention-reading differs between approaches and is subject to much debate (cf. e.g. Leavens 2011; Seemann 2011a: 1–2). In the way used in this book, joint attention does not automatically comprise these social-interactive processes and related abilities. 64 Verhagen (2007: 58–62) holds that this is also the case in adults and, on this basis, proposes an alternative – triangulate, interaction-focused – model of construal meanings to the models commonly used in cognitive linguistics and Construction Grammar.

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Although the early [form-pragmatic function]-association and [form-construal meaning]-association pairs just described only constitute an initial stage in the process of associating linguistic forms with meanings, and, as such, only provide the basis for the development of fully functional, generally and productively applicable linguistic symbols, it can still be expected (and is, for reasons given below, expected here) that the initially very dominant attentional construal meanings do not get replaced or lost in the course of the ongoing learning process. Instead, it is held here that these meanings are retained to a considerable extent. This has as a consequence that attentional construal meanings remain part of the meaning-side of all or at least of most of those linguistic constructions which form the ‘language systems’ of mature speakers. This assumption finds support by the principle that “information can be, and in many cases should be, redundantly represented in the taxonomic hierarchy” of constructions that makes up speakers’ knowledge of language (Croft 2001: 28; see also Croft 1999: 64; Evans 2009: 96; Goldberg 1995: 74; Langacker 1999a: 39, 2000: 1–3). This principle is central to many cognitive linguistic frameworks. It entails that linguistic systems are “maximalist” and “non-reductive” (Langacker 2000: 1), i.e. that each individual instance of an experienced [form-situation/meaning]-pair gets permanently stored in memory alongside the more abstract structures that are derived from it (cf. e.g. Langacker 2000: 2). This redundancy assumption thus also forms a major point of contrast between usage-based cognitive linguistics and PSS Theory, in which memories of specific experiences mainly function as a means to the end of providing highly general and abstract perceptual symbols (see Section 4.4 above and Barsalou 1999: 596). However, important as it is for explaining why attentional patterns can remain associated with linguistic constructions in adult speakers, the redundancy principle does not, by itself, entail that construal meanings constitute a central, stable and permanent meaning facet of all constructions included in mature speakers’ ‘language systems’, and thus a facet which becomes routinely activated by (all) mature speakers on all instances of language use (which is, for instance, more or less explicitly stated in Langacker’s writing, e.g. Langacker 2008: 43, 95). Instead, a more differential view on this issue is required, as will be shown by the construal-focused discussion of entrenchment and conventionalization processes provided in the following sections.

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5.2.2 Entrenching [form-construal meaning]-associations As indicated in Section 5.1, usage-based cognitive linguistic theories assume that learners arrive at a fully productive system of linguistic knowledge by deriving highly general, symbolic form-meaning pairs from concrete, pragmatic form-experience associations. More precisely, they assume that language users, in the course of learning, strip these associations of their context-specific components. This process is referred to here as desituationalization or external decontextualization. For speakers to be able to desituationalize the input they receive they must, first of all, have available a store of experience-derived memory representations in which the required processes of symbol-formation can take place. That is, the cognitive context to which they can relate a newly incoming experience must be sufficiently large to enable the running of processes of comparison between the stored and the incoming units of information (cf. e.g. Langacker 2010: 114–115, 124).65 This, again, constitutes an essential precondition for the running of processes of generalization and symbol formation (cf. e.g. Langacker 1987: 105– 106, 2010: 115). Processes of external decontextualization through generalization thus, firstly and very basically, require that information be stored and be retrievable for later use from memory. And, secondly, they require that processes of internal contextualization be run in parallel. This means that incoming information becomes associated with existing information via the running of processes of comparison and via the resulting establishment in particular of paradigmatic associations between these two types of information. As will be shown in the following, these internal contextualization processes, and the paradigmatic associations which are established in their course, play a core role in defining the origin(s) and nature of construal meanings. In the present understanding, processes of desituationalization and internal contextualization are initiated by the running of processes of comparison. These can be assumed to exert the following effects on specific, situated formexperience pairs: firstly, and very basically, they, by definition, result in the recognition of similarities and/or differences between incoming and stored information (cf. Boroditsky 2007: 1). Secondly, they can result in the establishment of a range of different types of paradigmatic associations. These association types take into account that similarity and difference (a) are no absolute || 65 For a detailed description and discussion of these comparison processes, see Langacker (1987: 101–105, 2010: 111–112).

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opposites, but rather grade into each other along a scale from complete identity to complete incompatibility, and (b) can become manifest on different levels and with respect to different features of the compared items. Which associations are formed also partly depends on which information units from cognitive context are activated and function as the standard of comparison for the incoming information. The exact outcomes of comparison processes are thus highly likely to differ between individuals. As regards the nature of these outcomes, both PSS Theory and most usagebased cognitive linguistic models of language primarily focus on findings of full66 identity or of similarity, i.e. partial identity (cf. e.g. Bybee 2013: 52–53, 65; Goldberg, Casenhiser, and White 2007: 73; Taylor 2003: 48). One main explanation for this is that the recognition of similarity enables the classification of incoming information (Bybee and Torres Cacoullos 2009: 188; Croft and Cruse 2004: 54, 74–75; Evans 2010b: 22), drives processes of generalization, and thus constitutes a necessary step in the process of forming classes and categories in the first place (cf. e.g. Goldstone 1994). From the perspective of usage-based cognitive linguistic theory, the recognition of similarities results in the following patterns of internal contextualization (see also Ellis 2011: 655–656): The recognition of full identity, and thus the recurrent or repeated experience of a particular usage event, results in the strengthening of the memory record of this particular event (e.g. Bybee 2007a: 10). Recurrent experiences thus trigger processes of routinization (and, possibly, automatization; cf. e.g. Bybee 2006: 714–716; Haspelmath 1999: 1058; Langacker 2008: 16; Schmid 2014: 244, 2015: 13–16; see also Smith and Mackie 2007: 68): as a result of repetition,67 i.e. of the token frequency of a particular language use experience (cf. e.g. Bybee 2008: 218–223), a [particular form-particular experience]-pair becomes increasingly more entrenched in the experiencing individual’s mind. This, again, heightens the chances that this particular knowledge structure (rather than any of its potential competitors; cf. e.g. Goldberg 2011: 134, 150–151) will

|| 66 The idea of full identity, of course, constitutes an artefact since “[n]o situation occurs exactly the same way as we have experienced it at any previous time” (Kecskes 2012: 186; cf. also Croft and Cruse 2004: 74). However, full identity is part of almost all existing usage-based theories of learning, within the scope of which it underscores central concepts like the concept of token frequency and proves to be of high explanatory power and usefulness. 67 As already indicated above, many accounts of entrenchment very strongly or even exclusively focus on the routinization component (e.g. Langacker 2008: 16) or the chunking component (e.g. De Smet and Cuyckens 2007: 188) of this process. See also Blumenthal-Dramé (2012: 67–69) and Schmid (forthc.) for a more extensive presentation and discussion of this issue.

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become re-used on later occasions (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 10–12, 38– 39, 104; Bybee 2006: 716; Croft 2008: 52; Goldberg 2006: 93–94; Langacker 1991: 48, 2000: 3–4, 2010: 118; Schmid 2008: 20–21 and 25–26, 2010: 101). Importantly, this can be assumed to also apply to any attentional construal-meaning facets that are part of this structure. With partially identical experiences, i.e. type frequencies (e.g. Bybee 2007a: 14–15), a strengthening of memory traces can occur only with those components of the compared items which are identical. Thus, experiences classified as partially identical can be expected to trigger processes of generalization and schema-formation/schematization (cf. e.g. Cordes forthc.; Langacker 2000: 4, 2008: 17; Schmid 2014: 244, 2015: 13–16; Tomasello 2003b: 122–126, 2009: 75– 79). These processes cause the ‘overlapping’, i.e. identical, components of the different compared constructions to become stored in the form of a separate, superordinate format of knowledge representation, a schema, in which the nonoverlapping components become represented as open slots (cf. e.g. Langacker 2000: 4; Lieven 2014: 12; Lieven and Tomasello 2008: 174; Schmid 2014: 244). Furthermore, it is highly likely that processes of parsing and segmentation take place in this course (cf. e.g. Bybee 2008: 221, 2013: 54; Langacker 2000: 8, 46–48; Tomasello 2009: 73–75, 86). These processes effect that the different experienced ‘fillers’ of the open slots in the schemas become recognized and stored as single information units. It is assumed here that this also involves the establishment (a) of paradigmatic associations between these newly isolated units (via their feature of being able to potentially fill the same slot in a particular schema), and (b) of syntagmatic associations of these filler-units with their superordinate schemas. However, there are indications that segmentation does not have to occur in all instances and/or that the segmented versions do not necessarily constitute the structures which are most readily accessible to a speaker. For instance, it is highly likely that specific items that co-occur frequently become stored and primarily activated in the form of chunks or units (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 10–12, forthc.; Bybee 2010: 33–37; Croft and Cruse 2004: 292–293; Langacker 2008: 16; Schmid 2013, 2014: 248–250; The Five Graces Group 2009: 6). In Schmid’s EC-Model, chunked items are items that are linked by very strong syntagmatic associations, mainly as a result of their frequent cooccurrence in the usage events individuals are exposed to and/or produce themselves (Schmid 2014: 248–250, 2015: 12; see also Blumenthal-Dramé forthc. and Kapatsinski and Radicke 2009). This manner of modelling chunks is thus well in line with the observation that chunking does not exclude the parallel storage and representation of the elements constitutive of a chunk, but rather

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implies that the whole is more readily accessible than its parts (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 4, forthc.; Bybee 2010: 36; Bybee and Torres Cacoullos 2009: 188, 192; Kapatsinski and Radicke 2009). Independently of whether chunked or simple constructions are involved, experiences of partial identity of utterances and constructions can result in the establishment of at least the following types of paradigmatic associations: (1) (hierarchical) hyponymy associations68 between specific experienced items and the full range of more or less strongly generalized schemas abstracted from them (see also Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 9–10; Goldberg 1995: 73; Langacker 1987: 68, 1999a: 26 and 39, 2000: 2–3 and 5; Taylor 2003: 22–24) (2) identity associations between partially identical items, which result in an increased degree of routinization of the schemas shared by these items (see also Langacker 2009: 2; Lieven and Tomasello 2008: 171) (3) relations of similarity in combinatorial features (syntagmatic associations) but relations of contrast in terms of meaning (paradigmatic associations) between the non-overlapping items in the compared experienced constructions (see also Croft 2001: 46). As will be shown in the following, these different association types form the basis for illustrating how a fully functional and productive system of linguistic knowledge can emerge from experiences of language use only, and how construal meanings can become part of this system.

Hierarchical/hyponymy associations The formation of hyponymy associations or, rather, the process of schema abstraction concurrent with the establishment of these associations, figures particularly centrally in usage-based and/or cognitive linguistic theories (cf. e.g. Langacker 2000: 5, 7; Lieven 2014). The reason for this is that Cognitive and Construction Grammar frameworks hold that schemas can be (and are) formed up to a very high degree of abstraction, i.e. up to formats of the type [N V N] or [SUBJ V OBJ] (cf. e.g. Goldberg 2003: 221; Ellis 2011: 656; Langacker 2000: 21). These highly abstract schemas are assumed to fulfil the full range of functions

|| 68 What is referred to here as hyponymy associations largely corresponds to what Goldberg (e.g. 1995: 67–100; see also Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 9) refers to as “inheritance relations” and what Langacker (2005a: 110) refers to as “categorizing relationships.” The term hyponymy associations is preferred to any of these two labels because it highlights that this association type is a subtype of paradigmatic associations.

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assigned to (innate) syntactic rules by nativist theories of language learning (cf. e.g. Langacker 1987: 45–46, 2002a: 22). It is on this basis that usage-based cognitive linguistic theories model the ‘language system’ as a hierarchically ordered or taxonomic network of (hyponymically related) schemas and their more concrete instantiations (cf. e.g. Croft 2001: 25; Langacker 1987: 369–408, 2000: 5, 13). Processes of schema-formation and the resulting schemas as such also play a central role for defining the place and function of construal meanings in this taxonomic network of linguistic knowledge. This is due to the fact that even highly abstract schemas like [SUBJ V OBJ] are defined as symbols, and thus as meaning-bearing units, whose form- and meaning-sides have been abstracted from and thus hold hyponymy relations to the forms and meanings of the more specific symbolic units from which they derive. It can be observed that considerations of what might constitute the meaning-side of such highly abstract constructions constitute one major reason for why the concept of linguistic construal was included in cognitive linguistic theory in the first place (cf. e.g. Talmy 2000: 21). Talmy (2000), for instance, who – tellingly – refers to construal meanings as “schematic systems” (Talmy 2000: 40), defines meaning facets like the different forms of realization of attentional construal patterns (see Section 2.3) as the “semantics of grammar or as closed-class semantics” (Talmy 2000: 22, emphases original). In a similar vein, though rejecting a categorical differentiation between grammatical/ syntactic and lexical items69 (cf. e.g. Langacker 1987: 26, 2005a: 138), Langacker (1987: 40) defines construal meanings as “the semantic contribution of grammatical morphemes and syntactic constructions” (cf. also Croft 2009: 413; Evans 2009: 41–42, 190–191). In more general terms, which, however, can be interpreted as drawing particular attention to perceptual-attentional aspects, Bybee (2013: 65) points out that “[g]rammatical meaning seems to make reference to the speech situation itself”. That highly abstract constructions have become associated with meaning facets like patterns of attention allocation is to a certain extent self-explanatory: these meaning facets constitute the ‘lowest common denominator’ of all the many different specific expressions from which a schema like [SUBJ V OBJ] can be abstracted. When one keeps to the principle of focusing on similarity or partial

|| 69 This view is also shared here. Accordingly, the position held by Talmy (2000) and, following him, Evans (2009: 100–108, 190), that there exists a “universal bifurcation” (Talmy 2000: 21) between grammatical, closed-class and lexical, open-class subsystems of language is rejected.

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identity as the most relevant outcome of comparison processes, it makes sense to speak of attentional construal meanings as highly schematic meanings which derive in a bottom-up fashion from the commonalities of all instances of experienced utterances that feed into the same high-level schema. This theory of how construal meanings become (or rather remain) a central part in mature speakers’ ‘language systems’ will in the following be referred to as Schematicity Theory of construal meanings. If it is accepted, and if the principle of redundancy of storage and the related assumption that “memory traces from the language acquisition process remain in the language system” (Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 29; cf. also Bybee 2013: 52) are taken into account in addition, it can be argued that attentional construal meanings constitute an inherent meaning facet of all constructions, independently of their degree of schematicity. This is indeed what can be inferred to be the position held by the majority of cognitive linguists and Construction Grammarians (cf. e.g. Goldberg 1995: 39; Langacker 2008: 43; Verhagen 2007: 48–49, 52). Furthermore, Schematicity Theory suggests that a high frequency of use of a particular construction or construction type heightens the degree of entrenchment and thus of cognitive accessibility of their construal meanings. Due to the high degree of abstraction of (schematic) construal meanings, this effect can be assumed to occur largely independently of the exact context(s) of use of a construction type. This, again, renders it increasingly likely that attentional construal meanings feed back into general cognition and thus, eventually, into speaker behaviour. Schematicity Theory thus clearly supports the assumption that particular construal meanings are rather stably associated with particular linguistic forms, and that they, as a consequence, become subject to the same processes of entrenchment and conventionalization as other meaning facets of language. Accordingly, hyponymy associations not only define the ‘language system’ as a hierarchical network of associated constructions, but also identify construal meanings as a highly pervasive feature of this network.

Non-hierarchical/polysemy and synonymy associations In contrast to hierarchical hyponymy associations, associations of the types listed under (2) and (3) above, i.e. identity associations between schematic items, syntagmatic associations between schematic constructions and ‘slotfilling’ constructions (e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 8), and paradigmatic associations between different ‘slot-fillers’, can be assumed to establish same-level cross-links within the hierarchically structured language network.

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These types of non-hierarchical associations have been accorded far less attention in usage-based cognitive linguistic frameworks than hyponymy associations (cf. e.g. Goldberg and van der Auwera 2012: 109). As will be shown in the following, taking these associations into account adds considerable complexity to the model of the ‘language system’ sketched so far. In particular, and of high relevance to the research presented in this book, it gives rise to another possible explanation of the origin and nature of attentional construal meanings that contrasts with the generalization-based Schematicity Theory just outlined. Several issues related to the outcomes of processes of routinization and generalization play a role here. Firstly, as identity associations can also be formed on the higher, more schematic levels of the language network (see association type (2)), processes of routinization do not potentially apply only to specific constructions, but also to more schematic constructions. This identifies the level of schematicity at which a construction is most strongly routinized (and thus most readily available for use) as a further possible source of interindividual variation (see also Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 34; Dąbrowska and Street 2006: 612–613), and thus also as a factor that potentially restricts comparability between individuals and/or between speech communities. To give an example, it is hardly possible to tell from a speaker’s utterance of a sentence like The bottle is in the front right-hand corner whether this speaker has activated and instantiated a relatively specific construction of the type [LO is in the DIM-ADJ DIM-ADJ corner], or whether he or she has started from a more highly schematic construction like [LO be LOC] or even [SUBJ V ADVB(LOC)] (cf. e.g. BlumenthalDramé forthc.; Langacker 2000: 3, 2008: 21, 244–245; Schmid 2013: 111–112; see also Chapter 7). This issue proves particularly interesting if approached from a Schematicity Theory perspective. Schematicity Theory suggests that construal meanings become more dominant with more highly schematic constructions, because the overall range of (non-construal) meaning facets associated with a construction becomes reduced with increasing generalization. This entails that from a certain degree of schematicity onwards, construal meanings are all that remains on the meaning-side of constructions. If applied to the analysis of construal meanings, this indicates that construal-related effects might be more pronounced in speakers who draw on highly schematic constructions during language production than in speakers who draw on more specific constructions.70

|| 70 Although Langacker (2000: 16) holds that “lower-level schemas, i.e. structures with greater specificity, have a built-in advantage in the competition with respect to higher-level schemas” (cf. also Dąbrowska 2004: 214; Goldberg 2009: 102) no empirical evidence has, to the best of my

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To render the overall situation even more complex, constructions might differ in their sizes. That is, even seemingly identical utterances can differ in their degrees of complexity (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 4; Dąbrowska 2012: 219; Goldberg 2003: 221; Langacker 1987: 90, 2008: 21; Street and Dąbrowska 2014: 103), i.e. can be composed of many relatively small or only a few larg(er) constructions. This is rendered likely by the assumption that partial identity of specific constructions triggers parsing and thus effects the separate storage of non-identical, potentially slot-filling items (see also above and Section 4.4.1). Accepting this, an utterance like in the front right-hand corner might, for example, either constitute an instantiation of a rather large constructional chunk of the type [in the DIM-ADJ DIM-ADJ corner], or a combination of the constructions [in the LOC] + [the PREMOD corner] + [DIM-ADJ DIM-ADJ], etc. What these examples illustrate in addition is that this issue of size/ complexity cross-cuts the issue of schematicity to the extent that each of the different constructions which come to instantiate a full utterance can be more or less schematic (cf. e.g. Bybee and Torres Cacoullos 2009: 189–190, see also Langacker 2008: 21). As a consequence, processes of production and comprehension are highly likely to differ between individuals with different linguistic usage preferences, and thus, presumably, different cognitive contexts (see also Croft 2009). This gives rise to the following question: how many and which constructions become instantiated when a particular speaker plans and produces a particular utterance? For the following reasons, this question proves highly relevant to the analysis of construal meanings and their potential impact on non-linguistic behaviour: firstly, formally identical utterances may not automatically be interpreted as relating back to the same set of stored constructions in speakers’ minds. Secondly, it has to be assumed that each component construction constitutive of such utterances carries its own construal meaning(s). Thirdly, in Cognitive

|| knowledge, been provided for this claim thus far. The same holds for the position that “[g]eneral patterns dominate networks where more specific patterns can be overpowered unless represented by high-frequency items” (Bybee 2007a: 9; see also D’Andrade 1992: 30 for a similar position). Therefore, I agree with Tomasello’s (2006: 3) claim that “[t]he level of abstraction at which the speaker is working in particular cases may not correspond to the most abstract level the linguist can find; it is in all cases an empirical question that most often needs psychological experimentation”, and with Croft’s (2001: 28) statement that “the degree of generality of construction schemas, and the location of grammatical information in the taxonomic network, is an empirical question to be answered by empirical studies of frequency patterns and psycholinguistic research on entrenchment and productivity of schematic constructions.”

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Grammar, the “compositional path” is defined as “a secondary dimension of meaning” (Langacker 2008: 213; cf. also Langacker 2008: 166–167); that is, the order or manner in which constructions are put together to form a full utterance is very likely construal-meaning relevant. As a consequence of these observations, the construal meaning(s) realized by the same observed linguistic forms of behaviour do not necessarily have to be identical between cognitive contexts and, thus, between speakers. The high relevance of cognitive contexts for the use (and analysis) of language becomes even more obvious if one takes into account that processes of schematization and association do not apply only to whole constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs, but also differentially to either their form- or their meaning-sides (cf. e.g. Langacker 2005a: 138).71 Two kinds of scenarios illustrate this point particularly clearly: firstly, scenarios in which the same forms are used for reference to different but somehow related or similar entities or situations; and, secondly, scenarios in which different forms are used for reference to the same (kind of) entity or situation. The first scenario could, in traditional (structuralist) semantic terms, be described as a polysemy scenario (cf. Croft 2001: 27; Goldberg and van der Auwera 2012: 114). It could have as an effect that the cross-contextually identical formside of polysemous constructions becomes stored with a relatively high degree of specificity, while the meaning-side becomes represented in the form of a hierarchical network which ranges from all different specific usage experiences related to a particular form to very highly schematic representational formats which cover the commonalities of all these different uses. Uses of the same form with very different referential scenes would thus trigger generalization processes on the meaning-side only, and would, consequently, result in the formation of associations between very highly schematic meaning representations and very specific representations of linguistic form. As indicated above, very high-level schematic meaning representations are likely to take the form of attentional construal meanings. Consequently, it can be argued that experiences of polysemous uses of the same linguistic form establish strong associations between specific forms and schematic (construal) meanings. Since construal meaning facets can be assumed to be included in each specific meaning representation from which the schematic representation is abstracted, such polysemy scenarios do not call into question the assumption

|| 71 A prime example of such structures involves what is traditionally classified as free grammatical morphemes, since free grammatical morphemes are highly specific in form but highly schematic in meaning.

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that particular construal meanings are rather stably associated with particular forms. They rather lend support to it by illustrating that schematic construal meanings very likely remain stable even in cases in which the same specific form becomes associated with a range of very different specific meanings. When interpreted in this way, polysemy scenarios are thus well compatible with the Schematicity Theory of construal meanings. The case is very different for the second type of scenarios, uses of different forms as means of referring to the same scene, and thus for those scenarios of language use which are the focus of interest of the empirical research presented in this book (Chapters 7 and 8). In traditional terms, and focusing on referential meanings, these scenarios could be described as synonymy scenarios. In the framework sketched thus far, such scenarios can be assumed to have as an effect that a relatively highly specific meaning representation becomes associated with a hierarchically resolved network of more or less schematic representations of linguistic forms. However, the range of schematization operations applicable to forms as different from each other as, for instance, vorne rechts (‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-SADV’) and in der vorderen rechten Ecke (‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ cornerSPEC-PARTN’) proves to be rather limited. What has just been proposed for variation on the meaning-side with polysemy scenarios, the formation of highly schematic and abstract representations, is hardly feasible for variation on the form-side, which is characteristic of synonymy scenarios. This already indicates that synonymy scenarios prove more difficult to accommodate with the model of linguistic knowledge as a hierarchically structured network of constructions than polysemy scenarios. At least, it does so as long as only the rather mechanically driven processes of comparison and generalization are taken into consideration. On the basis of such an account, the most probable outcome of experiences of synonymy scenarios would consist of an associative pattern in which one relatively specific meaning-side is associated with two different, relatively specific form-sides. This would, however, have as a result that these two forms compete for use during utterance planning and production. In addition – and quite probably partly as a consequence of this – it would run counter to the widely held position that full synonymy hardly ever exists in a language. This position has a long tradition in linguistics (cf. e.g. Bolinger 1968: 127; Bréal 1897: 101–108; Paul [1880] 1886: 208–218), and has found support by and application in research in several linguistic subdisciplines, where it can variably be found referred to as the Principle of Synonymy Avoidance (e.g. CarstairsMcCarthy 1999: 67–69; see also Croft 2000: 175–178), the Principle of No Syn-

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onymy (Goldberg 1995: 67) or the Principle of Contrast (Clark 1987, 1990; Croft 2001: 111–112, 126–130). The Principle of Synonymy Avoidance is frequently referred to in and finds support by research on language change (e.g. Clark 1993: 72–73; Croft 2000: 175–178). It indicates that full synonyms to already conventionalized words are not usually formed or at least do not become established (cf. e.g. Kiparsky 1983), and that states of full synonymy of two or more forms do not usually persist in a speech community for a long period of time (cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 178; Wick 2006). This idea also underlies the concept of blocking that is well-established in the field of word-formation/lexical innovation (e.g. Aronoff 1979: 43; Kiparsky 1983; Schmid 2011: 116–117). The Principle of No Synonymy has been proposed by Goldberg (1995: 67) as part of her Construction Grammar framework. It predicts that syntactic differences, i.e. differences in form between (phrase-level) constructions – including those that can, in principle, be used for referring to the same (type) of referent entity or scene – always go hand in hand with semantic and pragmatic differences. The effects of the working of this principle can therefore be interpreted as largely corresponding to or at least comprising the formation of construal meanings (cf. e.g. Gilquin 2010: 97–99; see also Langacker 1988: 10–11). In addition, processes of preemption (e.g. Clark 1987: 7; Suttle and Goldberg 2011: 1240–1242) are closely interrelated with this principle. As will be discussed below, these processes can, among other things, result in the differentiation of seemingly referentially synonymous constructions according to contexts of use. The Principle of Contrast, according to which “[e]very two forms contrast in meaning” (Clark 1990: 417; cf. also Clark 1987: 10–12, 2010: 24), figures centrally in research on (usage-based) language learning (cf. e.g. Boyd and Goldberg 2011; Goldberg 2011; see also Markman 1989: 187–215; Markman, Wasow, and Hansen 2003). Eve Clark (1990: 423), for instance, observes that [c]hildren will assign unfamiliar words they hear to gaps in their current lexicon. They will treat an unfamiliar word as pertinent to an unfamiliar object or action in a setting where the other objects or actions are familiar and carry known labels.

This principle has been extended to also apply to adult communicative interaction (e.g. Clark 1987: 28). For instance, according to Clark (1990), speakers “assume that addressees make use of the same conventional meanings as themselves in interpreting … expressions” (Clark 1990: 418) and, thus, “assume in using whatever expression they have chosen on a particular occasion that, for their addressees, they are denoting a situation, object, property, or relation that the addressees can readily arrive at or compute on that occasion” (Clark 1990:

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419). According to this view, adult speakers’ ‘language systems’ are characterized by the prevalence of one-form-to-one-meaning associations, and speakers act as if these associations were conventionally the same among all members of their speech community. This claim relating to speech communities as wholes is complemented by findings from research on partner adaptation during communicative interaction. To give an example, Metzing and Brennan (2003: 201) report that, in the course of a particular conversation, interlocutors “converge on [or entrain upon] the same (or similar) referring expressions”, i.e. establish local conventions (see Section 5.4.2 below) and expect that their respective interlocutors “should continue to use an entrained-upon expression unless a contrast in meaning is implicated” (Metzing and Brennan 2003: 201). As can be seen from this short overview, the claim that there are, or can be, no full synonyms in language is (a) very widespread and supported by different kinds of evidence, and (b) seems to be prevalent as a (presumably nonconscious) expectation in language users. However, these assumptions are clearly in conflict with the premise that processes of comparison are primarily targeted towards discovering similarities rather than differences or contrasts (see above). Or, put differently, they indicate that this strategy obviously reaches its limits as soon as full identity or at least a very high degree of similarity of meanings emerges. At this point, the principle of emphasizing similarity obviously conflicts with the declared aim of cognitive linguistics to provide a “psychologically realistic account of language structure” (Langacker 1987: 5; cf. also Langacker 1999a: 15; Schmid 2010: 102; Taylor 2003: 4; see also Chapter 2), because such a psychologically realistic account would require acknowledging the findings on synonymy avoidance just reported. Consequently, for psychological plausibility to be retained, it should be possible to identify factors that induce contrasts between seemingly synonymous items. Two sources of contrast seem likely:72 firstly, contrasts in terms of degrees of routinization and, thus, in terms of readiness of availability for use of one form over another. And, secondly, contrasts in terms of subtle meaning facets. The first source of contrast can still be accommodated readily with the rather mechanical account of routinization processes sketched above. It is based on the assumption that if one of the two seemingly synonymous constructions occurs far less frequently in the input from which speakers build up their ‘lan|| 72 See also Croft (2000: 177–178) for a discussion of similar processes and factors on a speechcommunity wide level.

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guage systems’ than the other construction, then the symbolic association between the more frequent construction and the meaning-side it shares with the less frequent construction will be much stronger and thus more readily activated than the symbolic association between the less frequent construction and the shared meaning-side. As a consequence of this, the paradigmatic relation of synonymy between the two constructions can be assumed to be relatively weak. It can thus be expected that, as a result of these differences in patterns of internal contextualization, the less well entrenched construction will not become activated strongly or quickly enough on a potential occasion of its use to enter a competition with the more strongly entrenched construction. That is, the more entrenched construction, eventually, preempts the use of its potential synonym(s) (cf. e.g. Goldberg 2009: 102; Suttle and Goldberg 2011: 1240–1242; see also Langacker 2000: 15). The second source of contrast, subtle meaning facets, requires taking into account principles beyond the ones which have been drawn on in the discussion so far. These are, firstly, basic pragmatic principles, in particular the Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975; cf. Clark 1990: 419), and, secondly and very centrally, the Saussurean principle of the differential nature of the linguistic sign (de Saussure [1916] 1983: 113). As indicated above, the Principle of Contrast holds that speaker-learners will be induced to search for contrasts in meaning and/or function on occasions on which they experience that different forms are variably used for referring to the same (type of) entity, situation or scene, because they will interpret any divergences from the form-meaning/function association they expect to occur in a particular context as relevant. Or, put in more general terms, language users will assume that their interlocutors pursue a particular intention by using a form which is different from what they expect. Such experiences of divergence between expected and observed linguistic behaviour can be assumed to very strongly involve the pragmatic processes of “intention-reading” (Tomasello 2009: 69) and inferencing. Consequently, they will induce individual language users to search for differences in meanings or functions between the expected and the experienced linguistic constructions (cf. Clark 1990: 418–419). In the course of this search, individuals might draw on external context (see e.g. Boyd and Goldberg 2011: 59–60), namely either on the level of the referent scene as such or on the level of their interlocutors’ (non-linguistic) behaviour towards this referent scene.73 As a result of focusing on the first possible source of || 73 A third option of contrast-establishment constitutes taking into account the linguistic contexts (cotexts) in which the seeming synonyms occur, and thus the syntagmatic associ-

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differences, the referent scene as such, variation in the use of linguistic forms for reference to a particular scene type might become associated with a more fine-grained subclassification of scenes belonging to this type. As a consequence, the scope of application of one or both of the two seemingly synonymous constructions will be narrowed down or specified.74 For instance, trying to establish a contrast between vorne rechts (‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV’) and in der vorderen rechten Ecke (‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN’) as options of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes could result in identifying or establishing vorne rechts as a means of referring to scenes with round ROs and in der vorderen rechten Ecke as a means of referring to scenes with cornered ROs. That is, the referent domain of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes could become split up into two subdomains. As is indicated by this example, the strategy of synonymy avoidance relates rather directly to the Saussurean ([1916] 1983) principle of the differentiality of the linguistic sign. This principle holds that the meaning of a linguistic sign is generated by the ways it differs from the other signs in the language system. This has the following consequences: firstly, the more signs exist in a particular domain, the more specific their meanings become; and, secondly, a change in the number of signs in the system via the addition or deletion of a sign effects a change of meaning of the other signs in the system. This is put in a nutshell by the following quotes,75 which, in addition, illustrate implications of the differentiality principle for language comparison that will also prove central to the research presented in this book: In a given language, all the words which express neighbouring ideas help define one another’s meaning. Each of a set of synonyms like redouter (‘to dread’), craindre (‘to fear’), avoir peur (‘to be afraid’) has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with

|| ations they hold to other constructions. Since in particular high-level syntagmatic associations are difficult to compare cross-linguistically between German and English, mainly because word order is more flexible in German than in English (cf. König 1992: 150; König and Gast 2012: 130– 131), this issue is excluded from discussion and investigation here. However, it would constitute an interesting case for a follow-up study (see Section 9.2). 74 These or at least very similar considerations are also at the core of the following definition of preemption by Suttle and Goldberg (2011: 1240): “Preemption can be viewed as a particular type of indirect negative evidence. It is an implicit inference speakers make from repeatedly hearing a formulation, B, in a context where one might have expected to hear a semantically and pragmatically related alternative formulation, A. The result is that speakers implicitly recognize that B is the appropriate formulation in such a context; this yields an implicit inference that A is not appropriate.” 75 English translation by Roy Harris (1983).

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one another. If redouter (‘to dread’) did not exist, its content would be shared out among its competitors. … If we say that … values76 correspond to certain concepts, it must be understood that the concepts in question are purely differential. That is to say they are concepts defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterises each most exactly is being whatever the others are not … [a] particular concept is simply a value which emerges from relations with other values of a similar kind. If those other values disappeared, this meaning too would vanish. (de Saussure [1916] 1983: 114–116) In the language itself, there are only differences. … the value of a sign may change without affecting either meaning or sound, simply because some neighbouring sign has undergone a change … The entire mechanism of language … is based on oppositions … and upon the phonetic and conceptual differences they involve. (de Saussure [1916] 1983: 118–119, emphasis original)

Using speaker behaviour as a source of contrast-establishment between seemingly synonymous linguistic constructions largely corresponds to applying the strategy just outlined to different manners of attentional scene conceptualization. Drawing on speaker behaviour involves that the meanings of seemingly synonymous constructions are not differentiated via subclassifying referent scenes based on their ‘objective’ features like, for instance, the shape of the RO, but via differentiating between several possible ‘subjective’ manners of experiencing and thus conceptualizing such scenes. Importantly for the present discussion, this strategy of resorting to levels of meaning other than referential meaning constitutes a possible explanation for the establishment and existence of construal meanings that diverges from the explanation provided by Schematicity Theory. This possible explanation comes very close to Croft’s (2001: 112) “conventional universalist” view of construal and linguistic relativity (see also Harré and Krausz 1996: 218; Schlesinger 1993: 212). It yields the following picture of the nature of construal meanings: firstly, it indicates that construal meanings mainly (if not exclusively) become associated with (uses of) particular linguistic forms if they constitute the only meaning dimension along which two different constructions can be differentiated, and on the basis of which speakers can thus make selection decisions. This entails, secondly, that … if … whatever way the language has chosen – ‘I am hungry’, ‘I have hunger’, etc. – is the only conventional way to express this experience (which I will call a BODILY STATE) …

|| 76 De Saussure ([1916] 1983: 112) defines value as follows: “The value of a word is mainly or primarily thought of in terms of its capacity for representing a certain idea.”

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the speakers do not have available to them alternative ways to conceptualize bodily states, and so it may not be the case that the conventional expression encodes any particular conceptualization of bodily states for the speakers of the language. (Croft 2001: 111–112)

If applied to the issue of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions under investigation here, this implies that constructions like vorne rechts (‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV’) and in der vorderen rechten Ecke (‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPECPARTN’) would realize the different attentional construal meanings ascribed to them in Chapters 2 and 3 only if they coexisted as possible alternative options for referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. In contrast to this, neither of these two constructions would carry or, at least, relevantly realize these meanings if it constituted the only available construction for making a DIMDIM(TOP)-reference. To put it more concretely, if vorne rechts constituted the only option of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in German, it would not carry a specific attentional construal meaning facet – or, at least, this facet would not be pronounced in a way strong enough to become accessible or relevant to the speaker and/or would be no different from the attentional construal meaning which in der vorderen rechten Ecke would carry if it was the only available option instead.77 This approach to construal meanings is thus obliged to the (structuralist) principle that “what occurs is only meaningful against the background of what does not occur” (Leech and Short 2007: 107). This view of the origins and status of construal meanings will in the following be referred to as the Differentiality Theory view of construal meanings. It differs markedly from the Schematicity Theory view introduced above:78 from a Schematicity Theory perspective, particular construction types would be claimed to carry specific construal meanings independently of whether or not competing constructions were available in internal and/or socio-cultural context.

|| 77 One seemingly problematic aspect of this line of argumentation is that it presupposes that there is a ‘basic’ or even universal pattern of attention allocation which is associated with uses of all those constructions that do not enter a competition with possible synonyms during language production (and comprehension). This issue is discussed in Sections 8.3.6 and 8.4. 78 Croft and Cruse’s (2004: 40) statement that “[t]he role of conceptualization in language is clearest when a single language provides alternative expressions for what appears to be truthfunctionally equivalent situations” (emphasis mine) indicates that these positions might not necessarily be completely mutually exclusive. However, as will be shown in Chapter 6, in the context of the present discussion, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory clearly yield two different sets of predictions.

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The following quote by Langacker (1987: 47) illustrates this Schematicity Theory view very clearly: If one language says I am cold, a second I have cold, and a third It is cold to me, these expressions differ semantically even though they refer to the same experience, for they employ different images to structure the same basic conceptual content.

In contrast to this, the following quote by Croft (2001: 129) is more in line with the alternative, Differentiality Theory position: [I]f there is no contrast within the language, and the construction is the normal conventional way to express the meaning, it is at least equally plausible to assume that it does not encode any specific conceptualization.

If interpreted in the light of the assumptions that contrast between synonymous constructions can be established by differences in degrees of routinization (see above) and that inclusion in the ‘language system’ is a matter of degree, Differentiality Theory strongly suggests that construal meanings do not become manifest if the degrees of entrenchment of synonymous constructions differ strongly enough for only one of them to be readily available for use. Accordingly, from a Differentiality Theory perspective, whether or not construal meanings become manifest depends strongly on the design of the cognitive context in which an individual’s knowledge of a particular construction is embedded. In contrast to Schematicity Theory, Differentiality Theory thus seriously calls into question the assumption that each construction carries a construal meaning and, in particular, the assumption that particular linguistic forms are stably and interindividually associated with particular construal meanings. These theory-specific differences and their implications for modelling and defining the status of construal meanings in language are the focus of the following section.

5.3 Two competing theories of construal meaning: Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory The discussion so far has yielded two alternative theories of the origin and nature of construal meanings, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. These theories and their implications for the modelling and investigation of language-perception/cognition effects will be compared and discussed in more detail in this section.

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Table 4 subsumes their central claims and most marked differences. Tab. 4: Schematicity Theory versus Differentiality Theory.

Schematicity Theory

Differentiality Theory

Construal meanings … – … become established, or at least considerably strengthened, in the course of the running of processes of schematization. – … constitute the only possible meaning facet of highly schematic constructions, and, consequently, – are a relatively stable and permanent meaning facet that all more specific constructions from which a schematic construction has been abstracted and to which it holds hyponymy relations have in common. – … become subject to the same processes of entrenchment and conventionalization as other meaning facets of language.

Construal meanings … – … emerge as a strategy of synonymy avoidance between different linguistic constructions which can be used for reference to the same (type of) referent scene. – … are activated/accessed only in case they are needed as a means of contrast establishment in cognitive contexts in which referentially synonymous alternatives are equally readily accessible. – … are not a feature of all constructions. – … are not permanently and stably associated with particular constructions.

The differences between the two theories mainly derive from the different perspectives they take on comparison processes and their outcomes. Schematicity Theory emphasizes findings of similarity and identity and thus focuses on the establishment of hierarchical relations/hyponymy associations. In this respect, it is in line with the great majority of Construction Grammar and cognitive linguistic frameworks (see Section 5.2.2). In contrast to this, Differentiality Theory puts stronger emphasis on findings of difference and thus focuses on the establishment of same-level paradigmatic associations of contrast. This marks it as well-compatible with Croft’s typologically oriented Radical Construction Grammar framework (2001). The different foci on either hierarchical or same-level associations also explain why only Schematicity Theory defines construal meanings as stable and permanent features of all constructions. In Schematicity Theory terms, construal meanings are the basic attentional patterns associated with the use of particular construction types. These patterns are common to instances of all constructions that hold hyponymy associations to the same highly schematic construction of which they form the only meaning component. As a consequence, construal meanings become manifest on all instances of construction use: more

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specific constructions feed these meaning facets into the more schematic levels of the network and, at the same time, inherit them back from the higher-level constructions to which they hold hyponymy relations. The symbolic-pragmatic associations between particular forms and particular attentional construal meanings can therefore be considered to be relatively strong and stable. Schematicity Theory, however, also suggests that construal meanings may be differently strongly pronounced for individual constructions. It can, for instance, be assumed that they are particularly prominent with highly schematic constructions, as well as with those specific constructions which hold strong hyponymy relations to their superordinate schemas. In addition, the Schematicity Theory explanation of how construal meanings originate and are maintained through the mutual interrelatedness of specific and schematic constructions suggests that they become strengthened both by a high type frequency and by a high token frequency of use of constructions (see Section 5.2.2 above). Furthermore, it can be assumed that the status of the construal meanings associated with a particular set of hyponymically associated constructions is largely independent of the presence and degree of entrenchment of other, potentially competing constructions or construction networks in their cognitive context. Finally, the picture of a high stability of [form-construal meaning]-associations that derives from the Schematicity Theory perspective suggests that construal meanings become activated independently of whether speakers make active or passive use of language. In sum, Schematicity Theory is thus very highly compatible with the feedback-loop model of language-perception/cognition relations proposed in Sections 4.4.2 and 5.2, which presupposes the existence of relatively stable [formattentional construal meaning]-associations. If one accepts the principle that language is part of general cognition, Schematicity Theory thus also readily licenses that language might function as a top-down attentional processing tool. Accordingly, it renders possible and even likely the occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects. The case is different with Differentiality Theory. This is mainly because, with this theoretical framework, particular construal meanings are neither necessarily stably and permanently associated with particular constructions, nor do they routinely become manifest with all constructions: as a means of synonymy avoidance, construal meanings are primarily (if not even exclusively) a feature of those constructions which cannot be differentiated from similar constructions on the basis of their referential meanings, their conditions of use (defined by external context) or their degrees of routinization. On this view, the realization of construal meanings depends considerably on the structure of

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cognitive context, and therefore on the current state of the dynamic and thus constantly changing ‘language system’ represented in an individual speaker’s mind. This, again, has as a consequence that construal meanings are highly sensitive to all factors that bring about changes in this system, in particular frequencies of occurrence of specific constructions in external context. As indicated above, this sensitivity to input factors also applies, in principle, to Schematicity Theory. However, the kinds of effects and the factors that bring them about differ considerably between the two theories. The information most relevant with Schematicity Theory is the absolute frequency of active and passive uses of a single construction or construction type. The more frequent a construction, the higher its degree of routinization and, consequently, the more prominent its construal meaning. With Differentiality Theory, by contrast, it is the relative frequencies of occurrences of potentially competing constructions which constitute the main factor of interest and potential influence: construal meanings disappear as an effect of the development of a preference for one rather than another construction, i.e. with a weakening of the paradigmatic associations between these linguistic structures. Another aspect characteristic of Differentiality Theory is that it very likely makes a difference whether a construction is used actively or passively. The main reason for this is that conflicts between different quasi-synonymous constructions are established in different ways with these two modes of language use. Consequently, the cognitive environments in which they occur can differ. A strong preference for one particular construction may, for instance, only constitute a disfavourable cognitive environment for the occurrence of attentional construal meanings and possible related behavioural effects on occasions of active language use, which is the mode in focus in the context of the research presented in this book. In contrast to this, construal meanings might play a role with these same cognitive contextual environments on particular occasions of passive language use: if speakers are confronted with the use of a construction which they would not have used actively themselves, they very likely will experience a divergence between what they expected in a particular context (the use of their preferred construction type) and what they actually experience. This divergence between expected and experienced constructions thus creates a situation that is comparable in many respects to the situation of selection conflicts that speakers without preference face in a language production context. Accordingly, it might also result in the formation of attentional construal meanings, because those can resolve or explain the discrepancy between expectation and experience.

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Taken together, what has been discussed in this section indicates that Differentiality Theory is not fully compatible with the feedback-loop model of language-perception/cognition interrelations proposed above (see Sections 4.4.2 and 5.2). The main points of divergence are the following: firstly, on a Differentiality Theory account, the basic precondition of a stable relation between form and attentional pattern/construal meaning is not fulfilled for all cognitive contextual environments. Secondly, those cognitive contexts which are the most favourable for the occurrence of attentional construal meanings are, at the same time, the contexts which are characterized by the absence of strong preferences or habits. Therefore, the principle central to a range of relativity theoretical approaches (cf. e.g. Gumperz and Levinson 1996c), that a strong routinization of the use of a particular construction might result in the formation of perceptual-attentional habits, which, eventually, might become manifest even independently of current language use, can hardly apply from the perspective of Differentiality Theory. Accordingly, Differentiality Theory and Schematicity Theory render different pictures not only of the status of attentional construal meanings, but also of their relation to and relevance for linguistic relativity theory. This relation is reconsidered and discussed in the following section.

5.4 Construal theory and linguistic relativity At this point of the discussion, the following picture emerges of the relations between construal theory and linguistic relativity theory: firstly and very centrally, attentional construal meanings might indeed trigger language-perception/cognition effects. However, secondly, this presupposes that the following claims are accepted: – Experience-derived knowledge becomes represented and (re)activated in a modal format (modelled here, in line with Barsalou (1999), as simulations resulting from the instantiation of perceptual symbols; see Section 4.4). – Linguistic constructions constitute rather stable form-meaning/simulator associations. – Attentional construal meanings are stable and strong enough to be activated on each use of a particular construction and, thus, to trigger a simulated (visual) experience which can feed back into the cognitive system in the way illustrated in Figure 24 (Section 4.4.2). – Patterns of attention allocation become associated with linguistic forms in the course of early language learning. Because of the principle of redun-

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dancy of storage (see Section 5.2.1), these pragmatic associations also form part of mature speakers’ ‘language systems’. In addition, attentional construal meaning facets are highly likely to be retained during processes of generalization. These assumptions are compatible with both Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. However, these two different theories make different predictions as to which attentional construal meanings indeed remain accessible to mature speakers, and why they do so. And, closely related to this, they define different (contextual) preconditions for the realization of construal meanings. Accordingly, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory make different predictions as to when construal-induced language-perception/cognition effects are likely to occur, and why. Very basically, such effects can be expected to be more widespread with Schematicity Theory than with Differentiality Theory. This is mainly because Schematicity Theory holds that construal meanings are a relatively stable feature of all constructions, whereas Differentiality Theory draws a much more varied and much more context-dependent picture of their possible realization, and thus also of related cognitive/perceptual effects. These considerations also form the basis on which predictions regarding possible attentional effects associated with uses of space-focused as opposed to object-focused spatial language construals were formulated within the scope of the project reported in this book. However, formulating predictions that also apply to the ‘classical’ case of cross-linguistic relativity effects presupposed that a further theoretical issue is taken into account: can construal meanings become conventionalized in a speech community, and, if so, how, to what extent and under which conditions? These questions are the focus of the following section.

5.4.1 Conventionalizing [form-construal meaning]-associations As indicated above, usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches to language hold that “language is a social and cultural reality” (Geeraerts 2003: 25). Accordingly, “the grammar of a language represents a speaker’s knowledge of linguistic convention” (Langacker 1987: 36). Since “[c]onventionality implies that something is shared – and further, that it is recognized as being shared – by a substantial number of individuals” (Langacker 1987: 62; see also Croft 2000: 98–99, 2001: 72; Eckert 2000: 45; Schmid 2014: 245–246; The Five Graces Group 2009: 1–5), processes of conventionalization can be assumed to exert a

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unifying force on the habits of language use of members of the same speech community. Consequently, they also, indirectly, exert a stabilizing force on individual speakers’ ‘language systems’ (see above; see also Goldberg 2006: 98; Schmid 2014: 242 and 245–246, 2015: 16–17). In addition, processes of conventionalization constitute a major source of cross-linguistic variation because they are highly unlikely to result in the same patterns in different groups or speech communities (cf. e.g. Langacker 1987: 47). To be able to decide whether conventionalization processes also occur with construal meanings, general theories of and research on conventionalization require to be taken into account, be related to and be (re)interpreted in the light of Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. Very basically, processes of linguistic conventionalization can be defined as processes which effect that individual speakers’ knowledge of language or ‘language systems’ becomes increasingly similar or aligned (cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 97– 98, 174–195; see also Kronefeld 2000: 203). The extent to which and the levels on which these alignment processes have to occur with construal meanings, however, differ between Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. In Differentiality Theory terms, construal meanings only emerge if a construction is embedded into a contrast-inducing network of paradigmatic associations. It can therefore be assumed that for the differentiality-defined construal meaning of a particular construction to become conventionalized, not only the representation of this single construction (and, possibly, its related schema) but larger sections of individual speakers’ ‘language systems’ must become aligned. This is not the case to the same extent with schematicity-induced construal meanings. For inter-speaker alignment to occur at all, information has to be shared between speakers. Or, from a usage-based perspective, speakers have to have highly similar experiences of language use. Since speakers themselves are at the same time the producers and the receivers of linguistic input, this process of assimilation and thus deindividualization of linguistic knowledge can, again, best be modelled in terms of the feedback-loop mechanism proposed in Section 4.4 (Figure 23 on p. 99 and Figure 24 on p. 102): each instance of a passive language use experience can be assumed to contribute to increasing the degree of routinization and thus entrenchment of the particular construction(s) used (cf. e.g. Kerremans 2015: 236; Schmid 2014: 244, 2015: 8, 13–16). Consequently, a speaker who repeatedly experiences the use of a certain construction for purposes of solving a particular task will become increasingly likely to make active use of this construction him- or herself. This active use will then not only feed back into his or her own mind, thus increasing the probability of later use of the

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respective construction even further, but also into the minds of those members of the speech community who passively experience this usage event. This will, again, increase the probability that these speakers make active use of the experienced construction on later occasions, and so forth. In short, the more often each member of a speech community passively or actively experiences the use of a particular construction, the more likely this construction will be reused, and thus the more conventional will it become (see Figure 25).

WORLD (external situational context) SOCIETY (external social context) UTTERANCE 2 DIMDIM(TOP)

MIND (internal/cognitive context) LTM (knowledge base)

PS

SIMULATOR

PS

PS

UTTERANCE 1 DIMDIM(TOP)

PERCEPT 1

PS

C1

SIMULATED REFERENT SCENE DIMDIM(TOP)

DIMDIM(TOP)

C3 SCENE DIMDIM(TOP)

PERCEPT 2

PS

DIMDIM(TOP)

Fig. 25: Feedback-loop model III. Conventionalization of form-simulator associations.

Modelling processes of conventionalization in this way clearly defines the frequency of use of a construction as a major driving force of these processes. Therefore, frequency of use can be (and usually is) used as an indicator of the current state or degree of conventionalization of a particular linguistic structure (cf. e.g. Bybee 2007a: 6–7; Croft 2000: 57; Schmid 2010: 116–117, 2011: 77, 2013: 77). However, if measured against the real-life conditions of language use, the central factors on which this model is based (including frequency) prove to be

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less well defined and/or less well controllable, as well as less well measurable objectively (cf. Schmid 2011: 77), than required for the feedback-loop mechanism to work in the way just sketched. As will be shown in the following, this can be observed to account both for the processes that are assumed to drive conventionalization, and for the structures to which these processes apply. Firstly and very centrally, it is far from clear to which kinds of cognitive structures processes of conventionalization – and also, to a considerable extent, entrenchment (see Section 5.1 above) – actually apply; that is, it is, eventually, far from clear what a construction is (cf. e.g. Taylor 2012: 120–145). This problem follows naturally from the following observations (see Section 5.1): (a) constructions as such primarily constitute units of individual knowledge which can display different degrees of schematicity and size/complexity, and which can hold different kinds and numbers of relations to other constructions; and (b) utterances usually constitute integrated instantiations of several constructions (cf. e.g. Goldberg 2003: 221; Langacker 2000: 21). Consequently, as illustrated above (Section 5.2.2) even formally identical utterances can be the product of a number of different processes of combination and instantiation of different constructions (e.g. Langacker 2008: 213, 2009: 17; see also Section 5.1). For instance, with an utterance like The bottle is at the front right, it is largely unclear whether this utterance was (re)activated as a single specific chunk, or whether it is the result of the integration of the specific units [the bottle] and [the front right] into the schematic construction [LO be LOC], or of the specific item [the bottle] into the semi-specific construction [LO is at the front right], etc. Similarly, it is largely unclear whether and to what extent the processes of segmentation and generalization that are presumably operative in the receiver(s) of such an utterance correspond to the processes operative in the mind of the producer of this utterance. One major challenge in using frequency as a measure of conventionalization therefore consists in determining “what to count” (Bybee 2007a: 17).79 The difficulty inherent in interpreting frequency data is further complicated by the fact that

|| 79 This can best be seen from the following facts: firstly, in the usage-based literature, a considerable range of different types of frequencies which, accordingly, predict different outcomes of conventionalization and entrenchment processes have been proposed and put to application with (corpus) data (cf. e.g. Hoffmann 2004; Schmid 2007: 119, 2010, 2014; see also Bybee 2007a: 9–19); secondly, there, still, exists marked disagreement as to which frequency count(s) to use best for which purposes (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 28–44; Schmid 2010).

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… frequency interacts with other factors, such as phonological and semantic similarity, categorization, and semantic/pragmatic change. It is often difficult to discern which factors are the most important in determining linguistic behaviour. (Bybee 2007a: 17)

Taking this into account, it is hardly surprising that the exact interrelation between frequency and degree of conventionalization constitutes a much debated issue which is still far from entirely clear (cf. e.g. Hoffmann 2004: 189; Lieven and Tomasello 2008: 172–173; Pierrehumbert 2006: 527; Schmid 2010, 2014). A further source of complexity that potentially interferes with the simple feedback-loop mechanism sketched in Figure 25, and one that is highly central to the research presented in this book, is therefore that speech communities are not homogeneous. Single members of a speech community do not interact in equal ways and equally frequently with all other members of this community. Instead, the groups of speakers from whom a single individual speaker receives input, and, in particular, the groups of speakers who receive input from a single individual speaker, are, of course, considerably smaller. In addition, it is likely that the same input might not have the same effects in all speakers due to, for instance, differences in previous knowledge/language proficiency, cognitive abilities and/or processing strategies (see pp. 107–108). This indicates, firstly, that the relation between frequencies extracted from group data and processes of entrenchment in individual speakers is an at least very indirect and complex one (cf. Schmid 2010, 2014, 2015; see also Chapter 1). Secondly, it indicates that the differentiation between the level of the individual speaker and the level of the speech community is far too coarse-grained to function as the sole basis for an empirical investigation of the feedback-loop mechanisms displayed in Figures 24 (p. 102) and 25 (p. 141). When investigating how and to what extent individual speakers’ ‘language systems’ might become aligned, one strategy of at least partly compensating for these problems is to focus on groups of more limited size and scope than whole speech communities. Taking this into account, a differentiation is made in the following between local processes of micro-conventionalization and speechcommunity wide global processes of macro-conventionalization. Since the feedback-loop mechanism presupposes that individuals interact directly, it applies more readily to the level of micro-conventionalization. The spread of micro-conventions to the macro-level of the speech community can be assumed to be subject to related but slightly different dynamics. This difference is captured in Schmid’s (2014, 2015) EC-Model by the differentiation between (micro-)processes of co-adaptation, alignment or accommodation and (macro-) processes of diffusion (or propagation) (Schmid 2014: 245–246; cf. also Blythe and Croft 2009, 2012; Croft 2000: 4–5, 98, 166–195; Granovetter 1973, 1978;

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Keller 1982, 1994; Kerremans 2015: 60–68; Milroy 1992; Milroy and Milroy 1985; Rogers 1962; Rogers and Shoemaker 1971; Taylor 2012: 212–216; Valente 1995). The following discussion will mainly focus on the micro-conventionalization of construal meanings. The reason for this is that construal-meaning related conventions are assumed here to be built up in a bottom-up fashion mainly from experiences of direct, situated, interactive language use (see Chapter 2 and Sections 5.1 and 5.2). Consequently, it only makes sense to ask how conventions can emerge on the macro-level of entire speech communities, and can thus function as the basis of cross-linguistic relativity effects, if it can be demonstrated that processes of alignment indeed occur on the micro-level of interindividual interactions. Put differently, with construal meanings, the occurrence of processes of macro-conventionalization presupposes that the following questions are answered to the positive: can construal meanings and, eventually, habits of assigning attention to particular scenes become shared among individuals at all? If so, what are the contextual conditions under which they do so?

5.4.2 Micro-conventionalization of construal meanings There is a whole range of different terms for the phenomenon that speakers, through conversation, come to adapt to each other. To name just a few, this phenomenon and its related processes have variably been referred to within and across linguistic subdisciplines as alignment (e.g. Garrod and Pickering 2004, 2007; Pickering and Garrod 2004; Watson, Pickering, and Branigan 2004), (interpersonal) accommodation (e.g. Auer and Hinskens 2005; Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991; Trudgill 1986: 1–38), co-adaptation (e.g. Ellis and LarsenFreeman 2009: 92), syntactic/structural priming (e.g. Bock 1986; Branigan et al. 1995, 2000; Branigan, Pickering, and Cleland 1999, 2000; McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005), syntactic/structural persistence (Bock 1986, 1989; Bock and Griffin 2000; Bock et al. 2007; Dell and Brown 1991), (lexical) entrainment (Brennan 1996; Metzing and Brennan 2003), syntactic adaptation (Fine et al. 2013) or as the establishment of conceptual pacts (Brennan and Clark 1996). These labels and related theoretical concepts differ in how central a role they ascribe to the cognitive processes relative to the socio-interactive processes involved in arriving at a state of interindividual agreement. Accordingly, approaches to micro-conventionalization differ in the extent to which they take into account other-modelling and common-ground establishment (cf. e.g. Metzing and Brennan 2003; Watson, Pickering, and Branigan 2009: 9–10). As a

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consequence, they make different predictions as to how, why, under what conditions and with respect to which forms of behaviour speakers adapt to each other, and as to how and how strongly they eventually come to share knowledge and the habits of its use. Positions located at the extremely strongly cognition- and thus ego-focused end of this spectrum hold that priming effects can explain why and how interlocutors come to make use of the same constructions or construction types in the course of an ongoing conversation (cf. e.g. Bock et al. 2007; McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005: 195; Pickering and Garrod 2004: 172). That is, they model processes of micro-conventionalization in terms of a relatively simple, automatic, non-conscious and non-intentional general cognitive mechanism which triggers a “tendency to imitate” (Pickering and Garrod 2004: 215; cf. also McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005: 194) in both interlocutors individually. Importantly for the question of habit-formation, Bock et al. (2007: 440, 455–456) assume that this tendency can also trigger processes of routinization in speakers, i.e. hold that recurrent priming can result in “implicit learning” (Bock et al 2007: 456). This mechanistic explanation of what looks like the mutual adaptation of communicative partners, is, for example, central to Bock et al.’s (2007) structural priming account and also, to a considerable extent, to Garrod and Anderson’s (1987) Input-Output Coordination Principle. The main argument advanced in support of this position is that socio-interactive processes of other-modelling and common-ground establishment are resource-consuming, whereas primingplus-imitation is not. Therefore, the argument goes, other-modelling and common-ground establishment do not routinely occur (cf. e.g. Garrod and Anderson 1987: 208). Theories which occupy the ‘middle ground’ between the extremes of simple mechanistic priming and extensive other-modelling (e.g. Bard et al. 2000; Brennan and Hanna 2009; Horton and Keysar 1996; Keysar, Barr, and Balin 1998; Keysar et al. 2000) take into account this aspect of the presumed cognitive cost of establishing a common ground as well. Horton and Keysar’s (1996) Monitoring and Adjustment Model, for instance, can be described as a model which “defaults to speaker knowledge first and pays later – if necessary” (Bard and Aylett 2004: 177). That is, Horton and Keysar (1996) assume that speakers start off by using a default construction without making the effort to model their interlocutors’ minds, and only resort to doing so if their initial default strategy proves unsuccessful and/or if they receive negative feedback from their interlocutors (cf. also Brennan and Hanna 2009: 276–277). In a similar vein, Pickering and Garrod (2004: 179), in their Interactive Alignment Theory, consider

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simple priming mechanisms the default case at least in early/initial processing; however, they assume that speakers can and do occasionally resort to using more strongly socio-interactive strategies during a later “monitoring stage” (Pickering and Garrod 2004: 179) in the course of an ongoing conversational interaction. Theories located closer to the socio-interactive end of the scale (e.g. Clark 1996: 92–121; Jucker and Smith 1996; see also Clark and Marshall 1981; Smith and Jucker 1998), by contrast, define the “modelling of a partner’s mental state” (Watson, Pickering, and Branigan 2009: 9) and/or of the partner’s social and individual identity more generally (cf. e.g. Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991: 43–44), as well as the consequent establishment and continuous updating of an elaborate common ground80 as a central determinant of the success of a communicative interaction. What all models, no matter whether predominantly cognition-focused or interaction-focused, have in common is that they explain rather well the occurrence of recency effects (cf. e.g. Baddeley 2007: 103–115; Smith and Mackie 2007: 67–68; Taylor 2012: 208–218; see also Blythe and Croft 2009: 60 for a more usage-based perspective on these effects), defined here as effects that occur as a relatively immediate consequence of experiencing each other’s manners of using language within an ongoing conversation (cf. e.g. Brennan and Clark 1996: 1483–1484; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 649; Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou 2004; Schmid 2010: 116; Szmrecsanyi 2005; Vorwerg 2009: 55; see also Chapter 8). All concepts and related theories thus primarily and readily model the establishment of local conventions. What matters most for the present discussion, however, are the following issues: firstly, do the processes proposed by these models also apply to attentional construal meanings? And, secondly, (under what conditions) can local conventions of construal persist beyond a specific communicative interaction, and thus develop into global speech-community wide conventions?

|| 80 Common ground constitutes a much debated concept. Many authors differentiate several types of common ground, which they assume to become formed under different kinds of circumstances and conditions (cf. e.g. Kecskes 2012: 190–192). Accordingly, no single definition of this concept can be provided. What complicates issues even further is that common ground is, in the last resort, a knowledge structure emerging in individual speakers in the course of a conversation. It centrally involves that interlocutors take into account their own individual background knowledge. As a consequence of this “[t]wo people may have conflicting information about what is common ground between them … In the end it is our individual beliefs that count” (Clark 1996: 97). For elaborate and critical treatments of common ground and related concepts, see, for instance, Jucker and Smith (1996) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009).

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The answer to the second question depends to a considerable extent on whether local conventions constitute partner-specific conventions or not (cf. e.g. Barlow 2013: 471–474; Fine et al. 2013). The state of evidence with respect to this issue is, however, largely unclear. Brennan and Clark (1996: 1491), for instance, report that adaptation does not usually persist from one interlocutor to the next (cf. also Garrod and Anderson 1987: 195; Metzing and Brennan 2003), while Garrod and Doherty (1994) demonstrate that shared habits can develop within a larger group of speakers on the basis of occurrences of different pairwise interactions only (cf. also Auer and Hinskens 2005: 336; Pickering and Garrod 2004: 218). Taking an even more global view, Loebell and Bock (2003) and Hartsuiker, Pickering, and Veltkamp (2004) present evidence indicating that structural persistence might even occur cross-linguistically. Taking this into account, it is highly likely that conventions might become stored independently of information on particular interlocutors on many occasions of language use. Accordingly, the spread of local to global conventions seems well possible given the right contextual conditions (cf. e.g. Pickering and Garrod 2004: 218). To be able to answer the first question asked above (Do the principles identified by alignment research also apply to construal meanings?) one has to take into account a further set of differences between existing theories on interspeaker alignment. These differences pertain, firstly, to the forms of language (use) with respect to which speakers adapt to each other, i.e. to whether their use of vocabulary (as implied by Metzing and Brennan’s (2003) concept of lexical entrainment) and/or their use of syntactic structures (as with the notion of structural or syntactic priming in Bock et al. 2007; see also Pickering and Branigan 1998, 1999) is becoming increasingly similar. Secondly, and of particularly central relevance to construal meanings, different theories take different views on the question of how ‘deeply’ alignment processes affect speakers’ ‘language systems’ and/or habits of language use: does alignment consist in the largely automatic imitation of forms or, more generally, linguistic/articulatory behaviour only? Or does the production of aligned language indicate that speakers’ “underlying linguistic representations also tend to become aligned” (Pickering and Garrod 2004: 173), and that speakers thus arrive at shared situation models of their topic of conversation (cf. Watson, Pickering, and Branigan 2009: 9–10)? In general, theories which strongly background the socio-interactive component, and which, thus, model alignment processes in terms of priming or implicit learning, tend to define the effects of alignment in a more strongly form-related manner than theories which place a strong emphasis on other-

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modelling. Consequently, theories of the first type also tend to consider different formal variants as irrelevant or only marginally relevant to the meaning of an utterance. Theories of the second type, by contrast, assume that alignment processes apply on a ‘deeper’ level than the surface level of linguistic form and, thus, feed into speakers’ situation models of the referent entity, scene or situation. This indicates that the different types of theories referred to in this section apply differently well to modelling the conventionalization of construal meanings, both on a micro-level and, consequently, on a macro-level. Accordingly, they can also be accommodated differently well with the feedback-loop model proposed in Figure 25 (see p. 141). Those theories which strongly emphasize automatic priming mechanisms comply well with this model in that they assume that priming occurs automatically, and, thus, in each speaker and with each instance of experienced construction use. In addition, they indicate that these processes occur largely independently of the exact contexts of use and of related aims and intentions of the speakers/interlocutors (cf. e.g. Bock et al. 2007). As a consequence, the effects of repetition on speakers’ ‘language systems’ and routines of language use can be predicted with a high degree of reliability; since these approaches assume that little interindividual variation occurs with respect to the relation between the input and its cognitive effects, they allow that rather definite speaker-general predictions can be formulated. However, these models, on the other hand, tend to de-emphasize possible meaning-relevant effects of variation in the use of (referentially largely synonymous) linguistic forms/constructions. They are therefore only of limited applicability to modelling construal meanings: since priming effects can only result in the conventionalization of construal meanings if it is assumed that the imitation of a particular form always correlates with the imitation of one (and the same) particular construal meaning in all individuals involved in a communication, the conventionalization of construal meanings on the basis of automatic priming mechanisms presupposes that stable [form-construal meaning]pairs are already part of the linguistic knowledge of all participants in a conversation prior to their interaction. This assumption, however, poses a range of problems if considered in the light of what has been discussed in Section 5.2. It presupposes that stable [formconstrual meaning]-pairs are established in strikingly similar ways in different individuals during child language learning. This would, again, indicate either (a) that which forms become associated with which construal meanings is motivated to a considerable extent, and/or (b) that the processes of learning through communicative interaction in infants (see Section 5.2.1 above) differ

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considerably from the processes of interactive alignment in adults, to the extent that processes of intention-reading and other-modelling are routinely operative in infants, but not in adults. This is, however, in conflict with “the usage-based hypothesis that children and adults rely on the same cognitive processes in language use” (Diessel 2011: 841). This problem does not occur with those theories that strongly emphasize the socio-interactive level of communicative interaction. Here, the availability of highly stable [form-construal meaning]-pairs does not constitute a basic requirement. Socio-interactive theories hold that interlocutors identify rather strongly with one another, and are thus particularly prone to enter a state of joint attention. As discussed in Section 5.2, this renders it likely that the imitation of forms co-occurs with the imitation of attentional patterns. This can, again, result in the establishment of shared [form-attentional construal meaning]-pairs. These considerations thus identify socio-interactive models as wellsuited for modelling the micro-conventionalization of construal meanings. However, there are limitations to this conclusion. The occurrence of processes of other-modelling central to socio-interactive models might also indicate that speakers act in a more strategic manner, and, thus, in more subjective and more conscious ways than is characteristic of processes of priming (cf. e.g. Clark 1996: 97; Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991). The effects of a particular kind of input or a particular interactive language use experience on speakers’ ‘language systems’ and linguistic habits might thus vary more strongly between individuals than would be the case with priming, because, on socio-interactive accounts, individuals are more likely to take into account and to be influenced by socio-pragmatic factors like their social status and their degrees of membership in social networks (cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 180; Milroy 1992; see also Kerremans 2015), their own intentions and goals, or differences in abilities (cf. e.g. Schober 2009) and/or social relations between them and their interlocutors (cf. e.g. Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991). This might have an impact on how motivated individuals are to adapt to their interlocutors’ manners of using language (cf. e.g. Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991: 6). In addition, in running a strongly other-oriented strategy, individuals might be more likely to establish partner-specific conventions which, quite probably, do not carry over to interactions with other interlocutors, and which are therefore unlikely to feed into or trigger processes of diffusion and thus macro-conventionalization. In sum, the comparison of models of micro-conventionalization provided in this section clearly indicates that those factors which figure particularly centrally in defining the origins and nature of construal meanings from an individualbased entrenchment-focused perspective also constitute the central deter-

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minants in defining processes of conventionalization of construal meanings. These factors are, firstly, the degree of stability of [form-construal meaning]associations; and, secondly, the cognitive contexts into which such association pairs are presumably embedded (see Section 5.3). This yields the following assumptions: the more instable the symbolicpragmatic associations between particular forms and particular construal meanings are, and the more strongly cognitive contexts differ between individuals, the less likely it is that construal meanings become subject to conventionalization in the manner predicted by the feedback-loop model sketched in Figure 25 (p. 141), and, consequently, the less likely it is that the imposition of a particular attentional construal pattern onto a particular type of referent scene becomes increasingly routinized and automatized in parallel with the routinization and automatization of the use of a particular linguistic construction for reference to the respective scene. Taking this into account, it can be concluded that Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory render the occurrence of speech-community wide linguistic relativity effects differently probable. As elaborated on above, Schematicity Theory holds that [form-construal meaning]-relations are relatively stable, and that their realization is mainly dependent on the degree of entrenchment, i.e. routinization and schematization, of single particular constructions independently of their cognitive contexts. This renders it possible and even likely that a high degree of agreement in construal habits is achieved between speakers of the same speech community. Accordingly, speech-community wide linguistic relativity effects are possible, and even probable, from the perspective of Schematicity Theory. The situation is different with Differentiality Theory. With this theory, whether or not construal meaning facets are realized or activated in association with the use of a particular construction depends on how strongly entrenched the potential paradigmatic competitors to this construction are in a speaker’s cognitive context (see Sections 5.2 and 5.3 above). As a consequence, [formconstrual meaning]-associations are relatively instable. This renders the establishment of global, speech-community wide conventions of scene construal rather unlikely, because it would require that speakers’ cognitive contexts become aligned not only with respect to the degree of entrenchment of a particular construction, but also with respect to the pattern of paradigmatic associations into which this construction is embedded. Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory thus yield clearly different predictions as to whether or not construal conventions can be established on a speech-community wide level. Consequently, they also differ in whether or not

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they license or even suggest the occurrence of construction-associated language-perception/cognition effects within whole speech communities, and, importantly, in whether they license the prototypical case of potential ‘Whorfian’ scenarios, i.e. differences in cognition induced by cross-linguistic differences. To clarify this, all different levels on which language-perception/cognition effects might occur require to be taken into account jointly. These are: – the level of individual speakers (Level 1) – the within-language(s) level (Level 2) – the between-languages level (Level 3). Effects on these levels are closely interrelated in several respects. Firstly, and very essentially, linguistic knowledge, including knowledge of construal meanings, primarily constitutes a form of knowledge, and thus an individual-speaker phenomenon (Level 1). Accordingly, occurrences of more global, speechcommunity wide (Level 2) or even cross-linguistic relativity effects (Level 3) presuppose the presence of speaker-specific effects. Level 1-effects have already been discussed rather extensively above (see Section 5.2). It was concluded that occurrences of language-perception/cognition effects in individual speakers are possible in principle both from the perspective of Schematicity Theory and of Differentiality Theory. However, only Schematicity Theory provides a basis for predicting construal meanings and possible construal-induced language-perception/cognition effects to occur regularly, frequently and largely cross-contextually. With Differentiality Theory, by contrast, (relevant) realizations of construal meanings and of their possible more pervasive non-linguistic effects can be predicted to occur only under specific cognitive contextual conditions, namely those conditions which require that construal meanings establish a contrast between two (or more) competing constructions (see Sections 5.2.2 and 5.3). In addition, and of immense relevance for making predictions concerning Level 2- and Level 3-effects, Differentiality Theory only licenses on-line effects of current linguistic behaviour on concurrent non-linguistic behaviour and comparable off-line, language-use detached recency effects. Frequency-induced permanent or habitual effects, by contrast, are highly unlikely to occur from the perspective of this theoretical framework because the occurrence of habitual effects would presuppose that one particular construction type functions as the preferred or standard option of solving a particular communicative task. The establishment of such a preference would, however, in Differentiality Theory terms, result in the fading and eventual disappearance of the construal meaning

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facets associated with the respective construction, and thus in the disappearance of possible construal-induced forms of attentional behaviour. Accordingly, Level 3-effects, which are based on the formation of speech-community wide conventions, and, thus, interindividually shared habits, are only clearly licensed by Schematicity Theory, which maintains that particular construal meanings are rather stably and fixedly associated with particular linguistic constructions, become increasingly entrenched with increasing entrenchment of the constructions as such, and can become subject to processes of conventionalization. A similar picture emerges for speech-community wide Level 2-effects. Although they are theoretically possible from the perspective of Differentiality Theory, they are highly unlikely to occur. This is because a conventionalization of construal meanings in Differentiality Theory terms would require that individual speakers’ cognitive contexts become aligned to an extent far beyond the representation of the single construction under investigation as such (see Sections 5.2 and 5.3). Given that each experience a speaker has will leave a memory trace and that no two speakers have exactly the same set of experiences throughout their lives (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 34; Croft 2000: 105–106; Hudson 1996: 10–11), this can hardly be expected to occur, let alone to do so on a regular basis. Unless it can be demonstrated that the degree of agreement between individual speakers’ ‘language systems’ is far more extensive than has been assumed thus far, this also entails that the Principle of Contrast might not apply on a speech-community wide level. Whether or not this is the case (cf. e.g. Croft 2001: 111), however, eventually constitutes an empirical question. This issue will therefore be (re)addressed in the course of the empirical studies presented in Chapters 7 and 8. The picture that emerges at this point of the discussion is that only Schematicity Theory, but not Differentiality Theory, provides a solid basis for predicting the occurrence of speech-community wide effects (Level 2). Accordingly, it is also only on the basis of Schematicity Theory that cross-linguistic relativity effects (Level 3) can be considered possible in principle. A scenario in which such effects are particularly likely to occur is one in which two different constructions constitute the standard solution for a particular type of communicative task in two different languages, for example, German and English. This means that cross-linguistic effects might occur with cases in which one construction type is very strongly conventionalized in German, while another construction type is very strongly conventionalized in English. Since Schematicity Theory holds that [form-construal meaning]-associations are rela-

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tively stable, whether or not alternatives to the respective most strongly conventionalized construction types exist in either of these two languages can be considered negligible. However, this presupposes that the same or at least very similar construal meanings are associated with particular construction types in both speech communities. This, again, presupposes the following: firstly, constructions must be comparable across languages; secondly, [form-construal meaning]associations must be motivated to a certain extent; and, thirdly, the source of motivation of these associations must be valid cross-linguistically and, perhaps, even universally. As indicated by the obviously cross-linguistically applicable taxonomies of construal meaning types discussed in Section 2.3, most cognitive linguistic construal theories seem to take such a motivation for granted. They suggest (e.g. Talmy 2000: 37) or at least imply (e.g. Croft 2001: 108) that construal is grounded in general (and thus human-universal) cognitive abilities. In addition, “ICONICITY of form with respect to meaning” (Croft 2001: 108, emphasis original; see also Haiman 1980 and Section 2.3.2 above) might play a role. Whether the existence of a shared set of human cognitive abilities and principles indeed constitutes a sufficiently solid basis for the formulation of universal [formconstrual meaning]-patterns, however, still constitutes an open empirical question. Disregarding this fact for a moment, it can, nevertheless, still be argued that the occurrence of cross-linguistic differences in construal conventions and, consequently, of cross-linguistic relativity effects, would in principle be possible from the perspective of Schematicity Theory, whereas this is not the case from the perspective of Differentiality Theory. This follows from the central premise of Differentiality Theory that highly conventionalized (and entrenched) structures do not carry any specific attentional construal meanings at all; since ‘classical’ cross-linguistic relativity effects presuppose that one structure is very highly conventionalized in each of the two (or more) languages compared, this structure would lack a language-internal competitor. Thus, the Principle of Contrast would not apply – and, in fact, cannot apply by definition – across different speech communities, and thus across two largely separate conventional systems (cf. Croft 2001: 111). Taking all this into account, it can be concluded at this point that the question of whether and on what level linguistic relativity effects can be predicted to occur mainly hinges on how the following related questions are answered: – How stably are particular forms associated with particular construal meanings?

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– – – –

How dominant and thus how accessible are these construal meaning facets to speakers? Under what conditions are they indeed activated? How strongly motivated and thus how human-universal are [form-construal meaning]-associations? What role do individual speakers play relative to the speech communities of which they are members?

These questions clearly indicate that defining and, eventually, reliably predicting language-perception/cognition interrelations and interactions requires that the full range of internal (cognitive) and external (situational and social) contexts of language use be considered. Consequently, the general question of possible language-perception/cognition effects needs to be split up into a range of sub-questions. In the case of the present investigation, this furthermore includes that these sub-questions differentiate between the predictions made by Schematicity Theory and those made by Differentiality Theory. Which predictions are yielded by these theories for the issue of spacefocused versus object-focused spatial referent scene construal will be indicated in the following Chapter 6. Their presentation will also involve a report of general methodological considerations for their empirical investigation.

6 Spatial language, cognition and perception: Methods and hypotheses … many studies have been carried out in order to try and give solid scientific grounding to the hypothesis [of linguistic relativity]. Most of them have sadly run into methodological pitfalls, and hardly any may be considered a true contribution to linguistic relativity, in that those studies remain inconclusive … (Pourcel 2002: 126)

How the nature of language-perception/cognition relations can be determined and how language-perception/cognition effects can best be investigated constitutes a crucial and much discussed issue in linguistic relativity research and beyond (see also Chapter 2). While methodological debates in the field of linguistic relativity research mainly focus on how to test language-use associated forms of non-linguistic behaviour, the testing of linguistic behaviour has been accorded comparably little attention so far (but see Pederson 2007: 1024). However, it proves an essential component in the context of the theoretical perspective taken on language-cognition relations in this book. If one takes into account the possibility of considerable speech-community internal interindividual variation in linguistic usage preferences, and, eventually, patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge, determining what these patterns are like proves essential.

6.1 Construal and language-perception/cognition relations: Methodological considerations Previous research (e.g. Bohnemeyer, Eisenbeiss, and Narasimhan 2006; Pourcel 2002, 2009) and the picture of language-perception/cognition relations drawn in Chapters 4 and 5 suggest the following methodological guidelines for investigating language-perception/cognition relations: (1) It has to be defined clearly how particular linguistic constructions relate to external context. More specifically, the following questions require to be addressed: are the constructions of interest indeed referentially synonymous? How many referentially synonymous alternatives exist in the language(s) to be investigated? (To what extent) do speakers indeed make more or less interchangeable use of these different options in the context(s) of use to be investigated?

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In the process of answering these questions, insights might be gained into the following issues: do different alternative constructions have different scopes of application, and/or are they specified as means of referring to a particular subtype of the referent entity or scene of interest only (see Section 5.2 above)? (To what extent) does usage differ between individuals? (2) As much information as possible requires to be collected on the status held by the constructions under investigation in individual speakers’ cognitive contexts. In particular, it has to be determined how well-entrenched and thus how readily accessible these constructions are to individual speakers, and how likely they are to compete for use during language production and comprehension.81 (3) As much information as possible should be collected on the status which the constructions to be investigated hold in the speech community or communities investigated, i.e. on their status in larger social context. Accordingly, the relative degrees of conventionalization of these constructions should be identified. Thus, in the present understanding of this issue, any investigation of languageperception/cognition effects requires that the different contexts of language use be taken into account carefully: external situational context (in particular the referent scene as such), social context (i.e. factors pertaining to the communicative situation, as well as to the speech communities as wholes) and cognitive context (i.e. individual speakers’ patterns of entrenched knowledge as indicated by their usage preferences). In addition, the levels of individual speaker knowledge and of speech-community wide conventions require to be addressed differentially under consideration of their close and complex interrelatedness. From the theoretical perspective taken here, an additional prerequisite is that this information be available prior or at least simultaneously to the investigation of language-use associated forms of non-linguistic behaviour (see Chapter 8). Apart from that, the methodological requirements just outlined form the basis on which hypotheses pertaining, firstly, to the use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions by speakers of German and English, and, secondly, to possible language-use related perceptuo-cognitive effects could be formulated. This set of level- and theory-specific predictions will be presented and discussed in the following section.

|| 81 Ideally, the notoriously difficult issues of degrees of schematicity and size/complexity of constructions (see Section 5.2.2 and Chapter 7) should be taken into account as well to ensure as high a degree of comparability between single instances of language use as possible.

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6.2 Linguistic and non-linguistic forms of interaction with spatial scenes: Hypotheses The research presented in Chapter 7 (Experiment 1) investigated patterns of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-construction use in German and English under careful consideration of external and internal contexts. The investigation reported in Chapter 8 (Experiment 2) took the findings from Experiment 1 as a starting point. It differentially investigated correlations between speakers’ linguistic usage preferences, as indicators of entrenched knowledge patterns in their cognitive contextual environments, and their ways of attentionally interacting with spatial referent scenes in a non-linguistic manner. That is, Experiment 2 was targeted towards identifying possible perceptual and cognitive correlates of different linguistic preference patterns. The hypotheses which formed the starting point of these two experimental investigations will be presented in this section. They are based on the following observations, theoretical considerations and assumptions, which have already been reported and discussed in more detail in the preceding chapters and sections of this book: (1) Spatial scenes can be attentionally structured, i.e. conceptualized, in different ways. One dominant dimension of variation is variation in terms of degrees of object-focusedness, i.e. variation with respect to the amount of attention assigned to the ROs in the scenes, including their object-specific features, relative to the general spatial layout and structure of these scenes (see Chapters 2 and 3). (2) Cognitive linguistic construal theory suggests that variation along the lines of degrees of object-focusedness might become reflected in variation in how, i.e. by use of which construction types, DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are referred to linguistically. On this view, different DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types realize different degrees of object-focusedness construals of their referent scenes. They can, accordingly, be assigned different positions along a Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, that is, along a continuum from highly space-focused to highly object-focused scene construal options (see Chapter 3). (3) A comparison of the repertoires of German and English spatial terms, as they have been described in the literature, suggests that the options of linguistic DIMDIM(TOP)-scene construal available to speakers of these two languages cover different ranges on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. In particular, the German repertoire extends further into the space-focused direction than the English repertoire, whereas the English repertoire covers

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the mid-range of the scale more densely. This difference mainly explains from the observations that ‘true’ simple dimension adverbs (e.g. vorne ‘front-DIM-S-ADV’, rechts ‘right-DIM-S-ADV’) are only part of the German repertoire, whereas simple dimensional nouns ((the) front, (the) right) only exist in English. (4) The presence versus absence of simple dimensional adverbs in German as opposed to English has further implications. Since adverb constructions of the type vorne (‘front-DIM-S-ADV’) or vorne rechts (‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-SADV’) obviously are not subject to object-related restrictions of usage, they are readily applicable to a broad range of contexts. In addition, they combine very readily with each other and with other kinds of spatial constructions. This might suggest that dimensional adverb constructions constitute the preferred manner of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in German. In addition, it might implicate that it is generally more common in German than in English to provide complex spatial utterances, of which DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances are an example. Taking them together, and (provisionally) accepting that the [form-construal meaning]-associations suggested by the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale are a relatively stable and general feature of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions and occur with all their uses in all speakers (Schematicity Theory), these considerations yielded the following set of hypotheses to be tested by Experiment 1 (Chapter 7): Hypothesis 1: Cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in the construal of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes Hypothesis 1a: Usage preferences and potential construal preferences – Speakers of German make preferred/most frequent use of simple dimensional adverb constructions, and thus of constructions from the space-focused end of the Degrees of Objectfocusedness Scale. – Speakers of English make preferred/most frequent use of dimensional (adjective-plus-)noun constructions, and thus of constructions closer to the object-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. Consequently, … … speakers of German tend to construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a more strongly space-focused manner than speakers of English. … speakers of English tend to construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a more strongly object-focused manner than speakers of German.

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Hypothesis 1b: External contextual influences When referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, the construction selection decisions made by speakers of German are less strongly influenced by features of external context, in particular by the shape and part-whole structure of the RO, than the construction selection decisions made by speakers of English. Hypothesis 1c: Degree of conventionalization Complex spatial utterances like DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances are more commonly and thus conventionally used in German than in English. Consequently, speakers of German agree more strongly which construction types to use than speakers of English.

These hypotheses on patterns of spatial construction use and consequent spatial scene construal formed the basis on which predictions on related languageperception/cognition effects were made. As discussed elaborately in the preceding chapters of this book, these predictions are grounded in the following theoretical considerations: (1) In line with cognitive linguistic theory, linguistic knowledge is considered (a) to be “an integral part of human cognition” (Langacker 1987: 12), and (b) to consist in (complex networks of) form-meaning pairs only. (2) Taking Barsalou’s (1999) Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory as a basis, linguistic form-meaning pairs can be (re)defined as form-simulator pairs (cf. also Barsalou et al. 2008; Zwaan 2004). Accordingly, linguistic forms are defined here as structures which trigger the running of simulations, i.e. of cognitive processes which correspond to those processes run during ‘real’ perceptual events. This suggests that different patterns of linguistic scene construal, as they are captured by the construal-type taxonomies proposed in the cognitive linguistic literature (see Section 2.3), directly reflect patterns of perceptual attention allocation. Consequently, construal meanings can be defined as the basis on which language-perception/cognition effects (linguistic relativity effects) may occur. (3) A close consideration of dynamic usage-based cognitive linguistic models of language and language learning suggests two different theories of the nature and origins of construal meanings, and of possible related relativity effects: Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. These theories make different predictions with respect to the regularity with which and the external and, in particular, internal contextual conditions under which (attentional) construal meanings become manifest. Accordingly, they also yield different predictions regarding the occurrence of construal-induced relativity effects. These predictions are covered by Hypotheses 2 and 3.

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Hypothesis 2: Speaker-related construal-induced language-perception/cognition effects Hypothesis 2a: Language-use concurrent on-line effects Situated referential uses of highly object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions co-occur with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to the RO in the referent scene than situated referential uses of highly space-focused constructions. According to Differentiality Theory, these According to Schematicity Theory, these effects … effects … … occur only in those speakers who have both … occur in all speakers of German and/or construction types readily available for use, English. and in whom these types presumably com… are particularly strongly pronounced in pete for use. speakers who display a strong preference for the use of one of these two construction types. Hypothesis 2b: Recency effects The construal-induced patterns of attention allocation which were activated during the (referential) use of a particular DIMDIM(TOP)-construction recur in subsequent non-linguistic interaction(s) with the same or a similar DIMDIM(TOP)-scene.82 More specifically, they become reflected in … … individuals’ visual attentional behaviour towards DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes when solving a nonlinguistic task. … individuals’ memory for object-related versus space-related DIMDIM(TOP)-scene information. Hypothesis 2c: Habit-induced effects In completely language-use detached contexts, i.e. independently of current or recent language use, speakers’ patterns of attentional interaction with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are as follows: According to Schematicity Theory, … … they reflect speakers’ linguistic preference patterns; that is, even independently of

According to Differentiality Theory, … … they do not reflect speakers’ linguistic preference patterns; that is, in language-use

|| 82 Based on Slobin (2003; cf. also Hunt and Agnoli 1991: 381; Kronefeld 2000: 208), it might even be the case that observable effects only occur in the form of recency effects, or that they do so independently of the occurrence of language-use concurrent effects. This becomes possible if it is accepted that language plays a role in memory consolidation. As Slobin (2003: 176– 177) puts it: “It is unlikely that people experience events in their lives differently because of the language they speak. But events quickly become part of a personal narrative, and then language can begin to shape those memories.” (emphasis mine)

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current or recent language use … speakers with a strong preference for using highly object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)constructions will habitually make use of a highly object-focused pattern of attention allocation. … speakers with a strong preference for using highly space-focused DIMDIM(TOP)constructions will habitually make use of a highly space-focused pattern of attention allocation.

independent contexts, even strong linguistic preferences do not have an influence on speakers’ forms of non-linguistic interaction with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes.

Hypothesis 3: Speech-community wide effects and consequent cross-linguistic differences If the patterns of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions differ between German and English in the way predicted by Hypothesis 1, the following can be predicted: According to Schematicity Theory, … … speakers of English tend to attend to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in an object-focused manner independently of whether they interact with them in a linguistic or in a non-linguistic way. … speakers of German tend to attend to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a space-focused manner independently of whether they interact with them in a linguistic or in a non-linguistic way.

According to Differentiality Theory, … … these differences do not have any systematic speech-community general effects on how speakers of these two languages assign attention to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes.83

In line with Langacker’s (1999a: 15) statement that “linguistic claims must at some point be confronted with actual psychological evidence” (see also Langacker 1987: 5–6 and Talmy 2000: 103), the hypotheses presented in this chapter were tested experimentally. The experiments and their results will be presented and discussed in the following Chapters 7 and 8.

|| 83 The “conventional universalist” view (Croft 2001: 112) of construal and linguistic relativity, which is, in many respects, highly compatible with Differentiality Theory, suggests a possible alternative prediction for the case that Hypothesis 1 proves incorrect. If this is the case, and if both highly object-focused and highly space-focused constructions are conventionalized in the German speech community to a sufficiently equally strong degree, language-use concurrent (Hypothesis 2a) and recency effects (Hypothesis 2b) could be predicted to occur in all speakers of German – at least given that this pattern of speech-community wide conventionalization was representative for the patterns of entrenchment in all speakers of this language.

7 Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: Patterns of language- and speaker-specific variation … diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. (Evans and Levinson 2009: 429)

Experiment 1 provided a detailed linguistic analysis of contextualized referential uses of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions by speakers of English and German (see also Günther 2014). Its particular focus was on identifying, firstly, the conditions of use of these constructions relative to external context, and, secondly, possible patterns of cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation. That is, Experiment 1 complemented the general information on German and English spatial language repertoires provided in Chapter 3 by contextualized usage data. In doing so, it relied on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale (see Section 2.2 and Chapter 3) for determining the construal meanings associated with the individual utterances constitutive of these data. Based on this, it developed analytical tools for making information on degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings eligible to statistical investigation. Experiment 1 started from a view of [form-construal meaning]-associations as being relatively stable units. It did so in spite of the fact that the contrastive discussion of Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory provided in Chapters 5 and 6 clearly suggests the need of taking a more differential view on this issue. The reason for this is as follows: taking such a differential view and operationalizing it for empirical investigation presupposes that information on language-internal patterns of conventionalization and speaker-specific patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge is already available. One main purpose of Experiment 1, however, consisted in providing this information in the first place. Experiment 1 thus mainly prepared the ground for the differential investigation of the Schematicity Theory and the Differentiality Theory positions reported in Chapter 8. In addition, it laid the foundation for investigating construction-associated language-perception/cognition effects (see Chapter 8/Experiment 2) by (a) drawing a detailed picture of variation in usage conventions and preferences, and by (b) identifying the role external and cognitive contextual conditions play in shaping observable usage patterns. In pursuing these aims, Experiment 1 partly relied on previous investigations of German and English spatial language in use, as well as on earlier contrastive studies. Although none of these studies fully fitted the aims of Experi-

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ment 1, they constituted a major source of methodological inspiration. In addition, some of their findings, though relating to different construction types than DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, could be related relatively directly to Hypotheses 1a–c, i.e. to the predictions that (a) speakers of German prefer spacefocused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions, that (b) speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features than speakers of English, and that (c) the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is higher in German than in English (see Section 6.2). This marked these studies as important to the planning of Experiment 1, as well as to the interpretation of its results. Their findings will therefore be selectively reported in the following Section 7.1, before Experiment 1 will be presented and discussed in Section 7.2.

7.1 German and English spatial language in use I: Previous research In contrast to the majority of investigations of language in use, research on the (literal, non-metaphorical84) use of spatial language is not usually based on language material from existing large-scale corpora. Instead, most studies rely on elicited language data (cf. e.g. Tenbrink 2007: 6). The reason for this is as follows: the great majority of studies have focused on (situated) referential uses of spatial language. If used in this manner, spatial language can usually only be interpreted properly and unambiguously if the referent situation, and the external context more generally, is known and currently accessible to hearers (cf. e.g. Coventry and Garrod 2004: 12–13; Coventry and Guijarro-Fuentes 2008: 125–126; Tenbrink 2007: 6, 125, 257), including, of course, linguists aiming at an analysis of such utterances. With elicitation studies, this accessibility of referent scenes is ensured. In addition, such studies allow for imposing a high degree of control on external situational context because the same set of referent scenes can be (and usually is) used with different speakers. Therefore, elicited spatial language data also constitute a very good basis for comparing spatial language use between individuals and languages, and allow for collecting detailed information on the participants, including information that might provide insights into their cogni-

|| 84 For investigations of non-spatial and metaphorical uses of spatial language see, for instance, Boroditsky (2001), Casasanto (2008, 2010), Fuhrmann and Boroditsky (2010) and Evans (2010a).

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tive contextual environments. Accordingly, in contrast to data from large-scale corpora, the problem “that individual differences in usage tend to be obscured” (Barlow 2013: 443) can be considerably reduced and compensated for with elicited data. In the context of investigating referential spatial language in use, the advantages of using elicited language datasets thus usually clearly outnumber their potential drawbacks like their comparably small(er) size, the relatively restricted range of different communicative contexts they cover and the danger of including language material that is not representative of linguistic behaviour in ‘natural’, real-life contexts (see also Section 7.2.1 below). These are also the main reasons why Experiment 1 aligns with this methodological tradition. The most important findings from previous studies using elicitation methods will be summarized in the following. Although they did not take into account DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions specifically, previous investigations of referential spatial language in use jointly cover almost fully the usage of the set of German and English spatial terms listed in Tables 2 and 3 (pp. 36 and 37) and discussed in Chapter 3. As this discussion has shown, those elements that prove most relevant to defining degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings of spatial utterances are dimensional terms. The following summary will therefore focus on dimensional term uses. More specifically, it will highlight the following central sets of findings from previous research, which together set the scene for Experiment 1: (1) findings on the conventions and conditions of use of the different dimensional terms theoretically available to speakers of German and English (2) findings pertaining to the conventions and conditions of use of complex spatial expressions by speakers of these two languages. As regards issue (1), a range of different studies have yielded similar results. An investigation of German and English data from a web-based elicitation experiment by Tenbrink (2007; cf. also Tenbrink 2005, 2009; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007) revealed that, when producing spatial referential utterances with an identifying function (see Section 3.1.1), speakers of English made use of a broader range of different spatial construction types than speakers of German (cf. Tenbrink 2007: 246, 2009: 112). In particular, speakers of German displayed a strong preference for using dimensional adverbs (Tenbrink 2009: 112). This second finding is paralleled by the frequency distributions for different German spatial constructions in a spatial language corpus elicited by Vorwerg and Rickheit (1999a, 1999b, 2000). In this corpus, 86% of the dimensional terms used were simple (60%) or prepositional (24%) adverbs (Vorwerg and Rickheit 2000, 13). A similar pattern of frequency distributions of German spatial terms

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and construction types is also reported by Becker (1994) and Becker and Carroll (1997; see also Carroll and Becker 1993). This obvious preference of speakers of German to make use of (spacefocused) adverb constructions finds further confirmation by the findings from a series of investigations of spatial language use in (descriptive) discourse conducted by Carroll and von Stutterheim (1993, 2003; Carroll 1993, 1997, 2000; von Stutterheim 1997; von Stutterheim and Carroll 1993). Carroll and von Stutterheim found marked differences in how speakers of German as compared to speakers of English establish coherence in descriptive texts. While their English-speaking participants relied on the object-domain to link sentences, their German-speaking participants relied on the space-domain (see Section 3.3). This preference pattern went hand in hand with the imposition of either a more local, point-by-point structure (English) or a more global structure (German) onto complex referent scenes. Carroll and von Stutterheim relate these findings back to what has already been discussed in Chapter 3, namely to the obvious fact that ‘true’ simple and prepositional dimensional adverbs are only available to speakers of German but not to speakers of English.85 In sum, this indicates that the findings from previous research, though reporting mainly on contextualized uses of single dimensional terms, i.e. noncomplex spatial constructions, are well in line with Hypotheses 1a and 1c; they suggest a clear tendency for speakers of German to indeed prefer using adverb constructions, and for speakers of English to rely more strongly on nominal constructions (Hypothesis 1a). In addition, some of their findings indicate that speakers of English generally make use of a broader, more varied set of different constructions, which might point towards a lower degree of conventionalization of how to refer to spatial referent scenes (Hypothesis 1c). As regards issue (2), the use of complex spatial constructions, previous studies provide a rather diverse and therefore inconclusive picture which, if at all, only allows for the drawing of first, tentative conclusions concerning language-specific conventions and cross-linguistic differences. This picture will be sketched very briefly in the following. In contrast to what is usually predicted by the more theoretical German and contrastive linguistic literature (e.g. Becker 1994: 180; Becker and Carroll 1997: 81; Berthele 2006: 15; Breindl 2006b; Freksa 1999: 236–239; Gapp 1997: 67–68, 85), Tenbrink (2005: 139) does not find from her data that “modifications and

|| 85 Carroll and von Stutterheim even interpret their findings as reflecting a more general typological difference between these two languages (cf. Carroll and von Stutterheim 1993: 1036, 2003: 369; von Stutterheim 1997: 154–155; see also Los 2012: 29–32).

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combinations of projective [i.e. dimensional] terms” occur more frequently in German than in English. Instead, she reports that complex spatial expressions were, overall, used rather rarely by her German participants and occurred only under very specific (otherwise ambiguous) contextual conditions (cf. Tenbrink 2007: 227–229, 237–239). These conditions of use are defined more specifically by Vorwerg and Rickheit (1999a, 1999b, 2000). They find that uses of complex (DIMDIM-)constructions systematically increase in frequency the stronger the location of the LO diverges from “the nearest extended edge of the reference object” (Vorwerg and Rickheit 1999a: 152). In addition, they suggest that which spatial term is used might also to a considerable extent depend on which and how many alternative categories a speaker takes into account when planning and producing a spatial referential utterance (Vorwerg and Rickheit 1999b: 157). Although they do not elaborate on it, this latter issue in particular might also be a source of interindividual variation. The pattern of using complex dimensional constructions identified by Tenbrink and by Vorwerg and Rickheit differs considerably, however, from findings reported by Zimmer, Speiser and Baus (2001). In their elicitation study, speakers of German made very ready and frequent use of complex spatial expressions, and did so on more or less all occasions on which the LO was not located directly on one of the dimensional axes (top, bottom, right, left) projecting from the RO. Zimmer, Speiser and Baus’ (2001) German participants even continued producing complex expressions when put under time pressure and when performing a secondary resource-consuming task. Although pointing into this direction at first sight, these findings may not, however, be interpreted as indicating that the ready use of complex constructions is particularly typical of speakers German, as is implied by Hypothesis 1c. This is because a highly similar behavioural pattern was found with speakers of English in a study by Hayward and Tarr (1995: 51), who made use of almost the same experimental design as the one used by Zimmer, Speiser and Baus (2001). As this short summary indicates, the patterns of conventionalization of complex spatial terms in English and German and the internal and external contextual conditions of use of these terms are still largely open to empirical investigation. Experiment 1 realized this for situated referential uses of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, taking into account systematically the different factors of influence on spatial-term selection that were identified by the studies just reported and/or that can be derived from their findings, as well as from what has been discussed in the previous chapters of this book. The factors of relevance are thus, firstly, external contextual factors, like the design of the referent scene,

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the communicative task to be solved and the communicative context more generally, as well as the linguistic context (cotext) in which the spatial terms are embedded; and, secondly, internal/cognitive contextual factors, i.e. differences in individual patterns of entrenched knowledge, as they are, in usage-based understanding (see Chapter 5), indicated by differences in usage preferences.

7.2 German and English spatial language in use II: A directormatcher language game experiment 7.2.1 Method and procedure As already indicated, Experiment 1 pursued two related aims: providing a detailed and structured account of the patterns of conventionalization of using DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in German and English, and investigating Hypotheses 1a–c on this basis. To achieve these aims, German and English DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances were elicited using a tailor-made interactive communication task. This task, the participants, the stimuli used and the experimental procedure will be described in detail in the following.

General design Experiment 1 used a variant of the director-matcher language game paradigm (cf. e.g. Brennan 2005; Brennan and Clark 1996; Brown-Schmidt and Tanenhaus 2008; Hanna and Tanenhaus 2005; Levinson 2003: 122; Levinson and Wilkins 2006a: 11–13; McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005; Pederson et al. 1998: 561– 565; Senft 1994: 417–418; Swets, Jaconiva, and Gerrig 2014). This paradigm produces a task-based communicative purpose for two (or more) participants by way of creating a state of disparity of knowledge between them. In a twoparticipant design, one participant, the director, is provided with information which the second participant, the matcher, needs to obtain so as to be able to successfully solve a particular task. To achieve this aim, the matcher necessarily has to communicate (verbally) with the director. This communication-focused task-based design allows participants to engage in a real interactive task and to solve it by using their own words; i.e. participants are usually encouraged to formulate freely (cf. Vorwerg 2009: 46). As a consequence, the language data elicited by director-matcher language games display a high degree of naturalness. The different options of how to design the task to be solved still allow, however, for controlling and systematically ma-

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nipulating the contextual conditions. Director-matcher language games therefore hit a very good balance between achieving a high degree of naturalness of language data and guaranteeing a relatively high degree of control (cf. e.g. Levinson and Wilkins 2006a: 11; McLean, Pickering, and Branigan 2005: 198– 200). Experiment 1 used a rather highly controlled, two-participant, one-sided (same director all the time) variant of this paradigm. As will be explained in more detail in the following, this variant involved a picture selection and identification task which was designed to trigger the production of full DIMDIM(TOP)utterances by exploiting the identifying function of spatial terms (see Section 3.1.1).

Participants 24 pairs of native speakers of German and 24 pairs of native speakers of British varieties of English took part in Experiment 1 (see Table 5 for details86). All participants were students at the universities at which the experiments took place (LMU Munich for the German part and Lancaster University for the English part). They were invited via university-internal mailing lists and received an expense allowance for their participation. All of them provided informed consent prior to participation.

|| 86 In the post-experiment questionnaire, participants indicated their places of origin. Regional variation was, overall, not very pronounced, and no noticeable regional differences in spatial language use were identified. Therefore, no information on this factor will be provided in the following. Random assignment of the roles of director and matcher to the participants in each session resulted in the following distribution of director-matcher pairs in terms of gender: in the German test group, eleven pairs (45.8%) were mixed pairs (among them three pairs with a female director and a male matcher and eight pairs with a male director and a female matcher), and thirteen pairs (54.2%) were all female pairs. In the English group nine mixed pairs (37.5%; one female director and eight male directors), eleven all female pairs (45.8%) and four all male pairs (16.7%) took part. Although no specific predictions were made with respect to gender, gender was, in line with standard procedures in psychological research, included as a general potential confound in the statistical models devised for the analysis of the data from Experiment 1 (see Section 7.2.5).

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Tab. 5: Experiment 1 – participants.

gender

language age average age age range German

English

21.5

20.2

18–27

18–26

all participants directors male

11 (22.9%)

9 (37.5%)

female

37 (77.1%)

15 (62.5%)

total

48 (100%)

24 (100%)

male

17 (35.4%)

12 (50%)

female

31 (64.6%)

12 (50%)

total

48 (100%)

24 (100%)

Setting Participant pairs were tested in silent, low-stimulus environments (rooms with just a table and chairs) in the students’ home universities. Experiment sessions took about 20–30 minutes each. This time span also comprised the time needed to fill in the informed consent forms and a questionnaire asking for relevant person-related information (age, gender, native language(s), second/foreign language(s) including level of proficiency, region in which participants grew up) prior to the main part of the experiment, as well as the time needed for debriefing subsequent to the experiment. In each experiment session, two participants, both native speakers of either German or English, took part. They were randomly assigned the roles of director (D) and matcher (M). Each of them was seated in front of a computer screen (laptop computers with 15.4" screens). To prevent reliance on non-verbal means of communication, they were screened off from one another so that they could not see each other’s gestures, nor could they see what was displayed on each other’s screens (see Figure 26 below). Seated in this way, the participants solved two different tasks: a preparatory object identification and naming task (Task 1) and the main task, a directormatcher picture description and selection task (Task 2).

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computer screen

screen

computer screen

D Task: Describe the highlighted picture from the set precisely enough for the matcher to be able to identify it unambiguously and as quickly as possible.

M Task: Identify the picture the director describes as quickly as possible and click on it.

Fig. 26: Experiment 1 – setting.

Task 1: Object-identification and naming In the object identification and naming task, 34 slides with pictures of single objects (edited colour photographs; see below for details) were shown to both participants. These pictures were presented in a randomly ordered sequence in the middle of the computer screens. The objects depicted were those objects which later reappeared as parts of more complex pictures in Task 2. A full list of these objects is provided in the Appendix (Table 44 on p. 459). The task of the director was to name each of these single objects in the presence of the matcher. The task of the matcher was to simply listen, and to interfere only in case he or she disagreed with the way the director had named and thus categorized the objects. Eventually, director and matcher were supposed to agree on one label for each object shown. The speed of the presentation of the slides was controlled by the experimenter. A new slide was shown as soon as director and matcher had agreed on a label. The function of this task was to prevent the occurrence of the following events in the main task (Task 2): firstly, object-identification and/or categorization problems on the side of the director; and, secondly, communication problems between director and matcher as an effect of disagreement with respect to how to categorize and/or label a particular object, and/or as an effect of differences in familiarity with the displayed objects or object types. The rationale behind trying to avoid such events was that both labelling problems and related

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communication problems would highly likely attract the participants’ attention to the object-level of the spatial scenes to be described. The function of Task 1 was thus to induce director-matcher pairs to establish a temporary situation-specific micro-convention (see Section 5.4) of how to label the objects presented in the course of (the main) Task 2. A high degree of consistency in the use of labels between the two task conditions, as well as the fact that many speakers used definite determiners, and thus markers of givenness or familiarity (cf. e.g. Quirk et al. 2010: 265–272), when referring to the objects displayed in the course of Task 2,87 indicated that Task 1 fulfilled its intended function successfully. Since making directors and matchers agree on object-labels was the only function of Task 1, all analyses, discussions, interpretations and conclusions presented in the following relate to (the main) Task 2 only.

Task 2: Picture description and matching Participants solved Task 2 immediately after having taken part in Task 1. In this second task, they were presented with (target and distractor) slides which showed sets of pictures. The target slides were intended to elicit the production of full DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances. They thus each presented pictures of eight similar DIMDIM(TOP)-arrangements of the same (intended88) RO and LO. The pictures in these sets were selected so that each depicted arrangement differed from the seven others with regard to information on exactly one of the three constitutive elements of DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions: the sagittal dimension (DIM1, in this case H189), the lateral dimension (DIM2, in this case H2) and the type of topological relation (TOP, in this case support/containment versus close proximity). The slides presented to the director and the matcher were identical except that on the director’s slides one of the pictures in each set was highlighted by a red frame (see Figure 27).

|| 87 In the German subcorpus, 61.8% of all references to LOs and ROs were by use of a definite determiner, in the English subcorpus 67.1%. 88 As reported in Section 7.2.4, participants occasionally resorted to using other objects (the computer screen, themselves or their interlocutors) as ROs. 89 Locations along this axis were frequently referred to by use of vertical dimensional terms. For more details on this use of dimension-replacive utterances and for a discussion of possible reasons, see Section 7.2.2 (pp. 185–189).

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Fig. 27: Experiment 1 – example of a director target set (item T2 – cup on table). In the pictures used in the experiment the background colour was light blue, the table was brown and the cup white. The bold frame of the to-be-described picture (in this example: the middle one in the top row) was bright red.

The director’s task was to describe the highlighted picture precisely enough to allow the matcher to identify it from the entire set, and to do so unambiguously and as quickly as possible.90 The matcher’s task was to identify the picture the director described as quickly as possible and to indicate that he or she had done so by clicking on it using the computer mouse. The matcher was encouraged to ask the director questions if the director’s description did not allow him or her to successfully solve the identification task. As can be seen from the example screen in Figure 27, the directors’ description could only reach the required degree of precision if the director provided either (a) a complete DIMDIM(TOP)-expression – i.e. an expression which includes two dimensional terms and, in most cases (see Section 7.2.4 below), one topological term or phrase – or (b) an alternative expression (constructional variant) which is comparable in function to prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions (see Sections 7.2.2 and 7.2.4 below for details). The presentation of the

|| 90 The exact wording of the instructions can be found in the Appendix (pp. 461–464).

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pictures in the fashion illustrated in Figure 27 and the task the participants had to solve thus reliably elicited the production of full DIMDIM(TOP)-references.

Procedure All trials were presented under the control of the experimenter. A new picture set was presented as soon as the matcher had clicked on one of the pictures in a set. All sessions were audiotaped.91 Participants were instructed orally in a standardized way by the experimenter (see Appendix, pp. 461–464 for full instructions). They were not informed about the purpose of this study beforehand, but were told that the experiment aimed at investigating cooperative communicative behaviour. To familiarize participants with the task, an example (distractor) set and a sample solution to this set were provided together with the instructions. Subsequent to this, participants solved three training trials (see Appendix, Table 45 on p. 459) before starting the main experiment. Each participant group was presented with 24 trials (plus three training trials). To prevent participants from inferring the actual aim of the experiment and to prevent the occurrence of (self-)alignment effects (cf. e.g. Vorwerg 2009: 55; see also Section 8.5), this set of trials comprised eight target sets and sixteen distractor sets, i.e. sets with pictures that differed from each other with regard to features other than dimensional and topological spatial information (see below for details).92 To ensure a high degree of comparability of the elicited language data, care was taken to prevent unwanted strategic behaviour on the side of the participants, in particular the director, and to reduce order effects, repetition effects and (self-)alignment effects. This was achieved in the following way (see also Table 6 on p. 178): firstly, to counterbalance effects that might have occurred from a director’s use of a

|| 91 In addition, the matchers’ selection responses were documented. Due to the focus of the present investigation on language production, findings from this dataset are only reported here to the extent to which they proved explanatory to the directors’ speech production behaviour. 92 Sessions were kept intentionally short. Any expected benefits that would have resulted from the introduction of further trials (and, possibly, additional within-subject variables) were considered to be in no reasonable relation to the disadvantages this might have caused. Longer trials might have introduced a range of further, partly hard-to-control potentially confounding factors like, for instance, recency effects caused by the same participant being repeatedly shown the same target item, and, as observed in the course of piloting, would very probably have led to fatigue and/or loss of motivation in many participants.

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particular strategy or preferred order of scanning through the set of pictures, the highlighted picture occurred equally frequently in all of the eight possible positions (see Figure 27 above). Secondly, across all target sets, each possible combination of dimensional relations (front and right, back and right, front and left, back and left) occurred equally frequently as the relation to be described. Thirdly, the topological relations to be specified were always contact-relations of support or containment; the to-be-contrasted alternatives were always instances of proximity-relations.93 To prevent order effects and to further reduce the possible occurrence of (self-)alignment effects, the order of presentation of the slides was pseudorandomized for each session. Distractor items and target items were arranged in such a way that no session started with a target item and that each target item was separated from all other targets by at least one distractor item.

Stimuli I: Targets Target items were selected and designed so as to be as natural as possible (cf. Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 2–11). Care was taken, however, to ensure that they still allowed for the required degree of controlled manipulation of conditions (cf. e.g. Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 2). As will be discussed below, this involved the deletion of visual background or context information. Therefore, the pictures used can best be described as “scene sketches” (Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 8–9, 15). More specifically, the targets were designed as follows: all pictures displayed on the target screens were edited colour photographs.94 They depicted two common real-life objects, which were spatially arranged in a functionally plausible manner (see Figure 28 and Table 6 on p. 178). That is, participants were presented with relatively highly natural(istic) scenes. To still achieve a sufficiently high degree of control, and to allow for the introduction of RO-shape variation as an independent variable for the investigation of Hypothesis 1b (the prediction that speakers of English are more strongly

|| 93 The overall number of target items did not allow for randomizing the kind of topological relation to be described. For the same reason the directions to be specified remained the same for each stimulus across all participants. This had as a consequence that possible differences in the ease of referring to the different axes (front vs. back vs. right vs. left; cf. e.g. Franklin, Henkel, and Zangas 1995) could not be taken into consideration. 94 Photos were made using a Kodak EasyShare Z710 camera and edited using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, version 2.6; https://www.gimp.org).

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influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features, in particular RO-shape, than speakers of German), the following aspects were taken into consideration in addition: As regards object-selection, the range of ROs was, firstly, restricted to nonfeatured objects, i.e. to objects which are not intrinsically oriented (according to the criteria presented and discussed in Section 3.2.2) with respect to the dimensions under investigation (i.e. the sagittal dimension/H1 and the lateral dimension/H2). One reason for excluding intrinsically oriented objects was that these objects would have allowed for the use of more than one Frame of Reference (FoR; see Section 3.2.2). In keeping with the literature (e.g. Grabowski and Weiß 1995, 1996; Levelt 1984: 325; Schober 1998a, 1998b: 147–148 and 155–156; see also Section 3.2.2 above), this was rated as a possible source of communication difficulties between director and matcher, and thus as a possible confound to the aims of the experiment. Furthermore, as discussed above (see Sections 3.2.2 and 3.3.4), it is still largely unclear how the (preferred) selection of relative as opposed to intrinsic FoRs and the (preferred) use of object-focused as opposed to space-focused constructions (inter)relate. Therefore, it could not fully be excluded that featured objects might attract a higher degree of object-related attention than non-featured objects, and might, as a consequence, trigger the use of object-focused constructions. Secondly, objects with functional parts which occupy the subspaces to be referred to, like a stove with four hotplates, were excluded on the basis of the assumption that such parts might strongly offer themselves to be used as (primary) ROs for means of localizing the LO. Accordingly, it was expected that objects like a stove might promote the use of highly object-focused referential expressions of the type auf der vorderen rechten Herdplatte/on the front righthand hotplate in both languages investigated. In addition to these exclusion criteria, a set of criteria was devised which defined the features which suitable ROs were supposed to possess. These criteria were mainly dictated by Hypothesis 1b, which predicts that, as a result of their preference for the use of object-focused constructions, the shape of the RO should have a strong influence on English speakers’ construction selection options and decisions, whereas it should not play a central role with speakers of German. For purposes of investigating this issue, the shapes of the ROs were varied in a controlled manner. ROs were selected in a way that rendered the referent scenes more or less readily eligible for being referred to by use of a highly object-focused construction.

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To realize this, the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 4 served as a basis. In line with this framework, the presence of (a) salient and thus referable RO-shape features like corners, and of (b) a clearly delimited THING-like RO were defined as the ideal conditions for the use of object-focused constructions of the type the LO is in the front right-hand corner of the RO. Taking this into account the ROs displayed on the target slides differed with respect to the following features: (1) their degree of corneredness (2) the degree of definiteness and clearness of their boundaries. Since only photographs of everyday objects were used, the controlled manipulation of these features had to be realized by way of finding a set of real objects in which their forms of manifestation differed systematically. To meet both the requirements of naturalness of target scenes and of controlled variation of ROshapes as well as possible, and to keep the experiment at a reasonable length, objects were selected based on the following considerations: Firstly, although the parameters of corneredness and of clearness and definiteness of boundaries are understood as constituting gradients, the limited number of target items used required that they be operationalized in a categorical manner. This was realized as follows: – Variation in corneredness was operationalized by including objects with prototypical 90°-angled95 corners (cornered objects) and different kinds of odd-shaped objects and round objects (sometimes collectively referred to as uncornered objects in the following) in the set of target items. – With clearness of boundary, a differentiation was made between clearly bounded ROs, fuzzily bounded ROs and ROs without boundaries (or, rather, widely extended ROs whose boundaries were not visible on the photographs). – The parameter of definiteness of boundaries, i.e. of the ease with which an object’s boundary could theoretically be crossed, was operationalized by including an equal number of flat ROs and of (container-like) ROs with high boundaries.

|| 95 The assignment of prototype-status to 90°-angled corners derives from the view that corners can be considered as constituting parts of rectangles or squares, which, again, are defined as constituting particularly good Gestalts (“gute Gestalten”, Wertheimer 1923: 329, 333) in Gestalt psychology (see also Koffka [1935] 2000 and Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 37).

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Figure 28 displays an example picture from each target set. Table 6 provides an overview of the objects used and the ways they fit the three parameters just introduced.96

T1

T2

T3

T4

T5

T6

T7

T8

Fig. 28: Experiment 1 – to-be-described pictures (target sets). The original pictures were coloured.

|| 96 As can be seen from Table 6, care was taken that all three parameters were cross-combined with each other. However, the need of operationalizing corneredness, as the presumably most central factor of influence on construal selection decisions, with a relatively high degree of gradation resulted in the inclusion of an overall higher number of clearly bounded than more or less clearly unbounded objects. This misbalance in frequencies, which partly resulted from the premise of keeping the number of targets used and thus the length of the experiment clearly limited, was, however, taken into consideration within the scope of the statistical analyses (see Section 7.2.5).

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Tab. 6: Experiment 1 – target items and their features.

RO intended

LOintended

topological relations contact non-contact next to/ in/in neben

Set 1

box/Kiste

bottle/Flasche

Set 2

table/Tisch

cup/Becher

on/auf

under/unter

Set 3

bowl/Schale

orange/Orange

in/in

next to/ neben

Set 4

lettuce leaf/ Salatblatt

tomato/Tomate

on/auf

next to/ neben

Set 5

basket/Korb

apple/Apfel

in/in

next to/ neben

Set 6

plate/Teller

teelight/Teelicht on/auf

Set 7

puddle/Pfütze leaf/Blatt

in/in

next to/ neben

Set 8

field and lake/ swan/Schwan Feld und See

in/on the field/auf dem Feld

on the lake/ auf dem See

next to/ neben

boundedness degree of definiteness

degree of definiteness

degree of corneredness

degree of clearness

degree of definiteness

Since all LO-RO relations displayed were supposed to be functionally plausible, LOs differed in kind between the scenes. This was considered unproblematic because the participants had already been familiarized with all LOs during their participation in Task 1 (see above, pp. 170–171). Care was taken to keep the ratio of the size of the ROs to the size of the LOs and the degree of perceptual salience of LOs as constant as possible across scenes. In addition, LOs were selected so that they were small enough for their exact locations (spatial relations to the ROs) to be determined unambiguously. All arrangements of objects were photographed from as similar a perspective as possible so as to achieve a high degree of uniformity and comparability between items. The resulting photographs were edited so that they had a blank, uniform background (white for dark objects and blue for light objects). Though reducing the degree of naturalness of the depicted scenes, this manipulation was necessary to ensure a high degree of comparability of utterances because, otherwise, the pictures would have contained contextual features which could have been used as (additional or alternative) ROs, and/or which could have influenced construal decisions in a range of other ways. The same standards and criteria were applied during the selection and production of distractor items. Stimuli II: Distractors To create the illusion that all items presented, i.e. targets and distractors, are of equal relevance to the study, the distractor items were very similar in design

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and function to the target items. The distractor screens displayed sets of eight edited photographs of real objects and/or common shapes (like cubes or triangles), each of which differed from all others in the same set with respect to one out of three features. An example is the set in Figure 29, in which the items differed systematically in colour (blue or white keyring pendant), background colour (green or yellow) and shape of key. An overview of all distractor items and their features is provided in the Appendix (Table 46 on p. 460).

Fig. 29: Experiment 1 – example of a matcher distractor set (item D1 – keys). In the original pictures, the keyring pendants were either white or blue and the background colour of the individual pictures was either green or yellow.

As with the target sets, directors had to provide three different information units to enable the matchers to successfully select a picture from a distractor set. The only difference between the distractor sets and the target sets thus consisted in the kinds of features with respect to which the items in a set differed from each other, and therefore in the kinds of features which the directors had to refer to explicitly. A post-experiment questionnaire revealed that none of the participants had guessed the real purpose of Experiment 1, and that none of them had identified spatial language as the main focus of interest of this experiment. Experiment 1

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thus triggered the production of fully precise DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions with a high degree of reliability without drawing participants’ conscious attention to the use of spatial language.

7.2.2 Data In this section, an overview will be given of the dataset that resulted from Experiment 1 (main Task 2 only) and the steps of analysis to which this dataset was subjected. This overview will start with a description of the data, including a discussion of a range of unexpected findings that led to the partial exclusion of a subset of it. It will proceed with a detailed description of the analytical tools applied to the remaining data and of the results of their application.

Unexpected findings I: Exclusions The set of language data elicited within the scope of Experiment 1 (Task 2) comprised 384 elicited references to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. From this set, a subset of 243 utterances, among them 123 German and 120 English utterances, was used for the main analysis. The reduction of the original dataset explains from the exclusion of data from the analysis on the basis of one or several of the following criteria: – Criterion 1: utterances by participants who turned out not to be a (typical) member of the speech communities tested – Criterion 2: references to target scenes which turned out to display confounding features – Criterion 3: insufficiently precise utterances. On the basis of Criterion 1 the data from one German participant pair was excluded because the director in this pair turned out to be a German-French bilingual speaker. He spoke with a French accent and his utterances differed markedly from the utterances produced by all other (monolingual) speakers of German tested,97 which suggested a considerable influence of his second native language on his construction selection decisions.

|| 97 More specifically, this participant made use of constructional variants of a type hardly used by any other German participant (distance variants and metaphorical clock-face variants; see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-2) in three out of the eight instances in which he provided fully

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Criterion 2 led to the exclusion of all references to target items T3 (orange in bowl) and T5 (apple in basket) (see Figure 28 on p. 177). The reasons for excluding them were as follows: – The odd and point-asymmetrical shape of the RO in item T3 (see Figure 28 on p. 177) allowed for information on shape-features of the RO (example (34a)) and/or for distance information (example (34b)) to fulfil a function equivalent to dimensional information (front versus back). (34) a. A dish with a ball in the right-hand tip. b. Egg’s in the far right corner of the thing.

–

This option was used in 79.4% and thus in the great majority of instances, and occurred with comparable frequencies in both language-specific subcorpora (English: 78.9%/German: 80% of all utterances). This indicates that the shape-features of the RO were highly salient to the majority of speakers, and were so independently of their native language. This marks item T3 as clearly different in inherent features from any of the other target items. Item T5 (see Figure 28 on p. 177) turned out to display a functional feature (the handle of the basket) whose presence triggered the frequent use of referential structures other than DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. These structures occurred in 40.6% of all references to this item and involved using the handle (and not, as intended, the basket) as the RO for indicating the location of the LO (the apple) (examples (35a–b); see also Carlson et al. 2006: 298– 299). In addition, and often in combination with this strategy, information on the second relevant dimensional axis (sagittal axis/H1) was omitted (example (35b)). Overall, more than half of the references to T5 (68.1%) were imprecise (which means that imprecise references to T5 were considerably more frequent than imprecise references to the other, included target items; see below for details).

(35) a. Basket with apple inside it on the right-hand side of the handle at the top. Apfel liegt im Korb rechts vom apple-LO is-lying in-the basket-RO1 [right-of]-DIM-CPLX-P-the Henkel oben. handle-SPEC-PARTN-RO2 top-DIM-S-ADV

|| precise DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances. In addition, he was the only speaker in the German group who did not use any simple dimensional adverbs at all.

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(35) b. The apple is just to the right of the handle. Ein Apfel im Korb und der Apfel befindet sich an apple-LO in-the basket-RO1 and the apple-LO is-located itself rechts vom Griff. [right of]-DIM-CPLX-P-the handle-SPEC-PARTN-RO2 These findings indicate that the handle, as a functional feature of the RO, was highly salient – and actually more salient than the exact location of the LO – to many of the participants. The language-specific frequencies of occurrence of such handle-related references to T5 (English: 31.3%/German: 50%) indicate, in addition, that this effect was even more pronounced with the German-speaking than with the English-speaking participants. In sum, the pattern of references to items T3 and T5 indicate that many of the participants classified these items differently than the other target items, which were referred to by use of the intended DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in the great majority of cases (see below). This difference highly likely resulted from the specific shape-features and functional features of the ROs in T3 and T5. In the present understanding, this marks these items as unsuited for investigating the conventions of use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in general, and Hypotheses 1a–c in particular. The patterns of construction use just reported for T3 and T5 thus legitimate the exclusion of references to these items from further analysis and discussion. One finding relating to these items, however, still deserves mentioning, because it proves at least indirectly relevant to the investigation of Hypothesis 1b, i.e. of the claim that speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by features of the RO than speakers of English: counter to what would have been expected on the basis of this assumption, the object-features of the dish in T3 and of the basket in T5 obviously were highly salient to and, consequently, triggered very similar forms of linguistic behaviour in speakers of both English and German. And, at least with item T5, this effect was even stronger with speakers of German, who had been predicted to display a tendency for backgrounding or even ignoring RO-related information. The implications of this observation for Hypothesis 1b (and, in the consequence, also Hypothesis 1a, i.e. the prediction that speakers of German have a strong preference for space-focused constructions, speakers of English for object-focused constructions) are as follows: this finding might indicate that speakers of German do not routinely background the object-level of referent scenes but (at least) cease to do so as soon as the ROs in these scenes display highly salient features. This high degree of salience might either be an effect of

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the unusualness or unexpectedness of object-features (as is the case with T3) or of functional relevance (as with T5). On this interpretation, Hypotheses 1a and 1b do not seem to apply to scenes with salient ROs at the least. Instead, the findings just reported suggest that these hypotheses might require to be (re)defined as applying only to referent scenes which do not contain ROs with highly salient features. As a consequence of these considerations, all references to T3 and T5, including the few ones which were representative of prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)utterances, were excluded from further analysis. Finally, the application of Criterion 3 led to the exclusion of 39 utterances (13.1% of all utterances except the ones excluded on the basis of Criteria 1 and 2) from the main analysis. These utterances were classified as imprecise on the basis of the fact that they did not provide enough information so as to enable the matcher to unambiguously identify the right picture in the selection task. This usually involved that they lacked one or several of the three spatial information units constitutive of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, i.e. one or both units of dimensional information and/or the topological information unit, and that speakers did not compensate for this by using sufficiently precise constructional variants (see below, pp. 216–223 and 236–238). As with the scene-related exclusions, some aspects about the set of excluded imprecise utterances deserve mention and comment, because they reflect issues that will emerge as major themes in the main analysis. Given the small set of only 39 imprecise items overall, the following discussion of language-specific frequency distributions will remain descriptive, and can do no more than point out tendencies in the data. One of these tendencies is that imprecise utterances were only slightly more frequent in the English than in the German dataset: in the English subcorpus (all utterances except those excluded on the basis of Criteria 1 and 2), 16.7% of all utterances were imprecise, in the German subcorpus 10.9%. In absolute terms, this corresponds to a difference between English and German of only 9 imprecise utterances. It suggests that having to provide highly precise information on spatial scenes did not constitute a far more challenging task for speakers of English than for speakers of German. This might carefully be interpreted as indicating that Hypothesis 1c, according to which the degrees of conventionalization of using complex spatial expressions should differ markedly between German and English, might not hold. A second finding worthy of mention is that the different imprecise utterances provided by speakers of German and English differed in quality; the kind of information most frequently omitted by speakers of English was topological information (79.2% of all imprecise English utterances), the kind of information

184 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

most frequently omitted by speakers of German, by contrast, was dimensional (mainly sagittal) information (53.3% of all imprecise German utterances). This might point towards the existence of different, language-specific conventions on the level of syntagmatic associations. Taking this into account, the languagespecific characteristics of imprecise utterances just reported might indicate that possible differences between German and English do not so much pertain to the overall degrees of conventionalization of using DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (as predicted by Hypothesis 1c), but rather to the conventionalization patterns characteristic of these two speech communities. This interpretation finds further support by the finding that the distribution of imprecise utterances across scene types differs between the languages. For instance, item T6 (tealight on plate; see Figure 28 on p. 177), as the representative of a scene with a round RO, was clearly more frequently referred to in an imprecise manner by speakers of English (25% of all references to this item) than by speakers of German (4.3% of all references to this item). If it is taken into account that scenes with round ROs are among the scenes which can be least well referred to by use of object-focused constructions, this finding can be interpreted as a point in support of Hypothesis 1a: it might indicate that speakers of English prefer using highly object-focused constructions and, in the consequence, face more problems than speakers of German when confronted with a referent scene that does not readily lend itself to being referred to in an objectfocused manner. In sum, the findings that led to the exclusion of data from the main analysis at the same time set the scene for this analysis in several respects. They already address some issues that will recur as themes in the main analysis. One such issue are the complex interactions between the factors of language and scene or scene type (external context). In the course of the main analysis, this pattern of interactions was complemented by including language-internal variation, i.e. differences between individual speakers’ preferences, as a further factor. That is, the main analysis systematically took into account the following three different dimensions and their potential interactions: (1) the dimension of (wide) social external contexts, i.e. of different speech communities and possible cross-linguistic differences (German versus English) (2) the dimension of situational external contexts, i.e. of different referent scenes and scene types (3) the dimension of (narrow) social external contexts, i.e. of language-internal variation, and thus, at least indirectly, also the dimension of internal/ cognitive contexts.

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Which analytical categories were applied to these dimensions will be presented together with the results of the main analysis in Sections 7.2.3 to 7.2.5. Prior to this, a further unexpected finding, the use of dimension-replacive utterances, will be commented on in the following subsection.

Unexpected findings II: Dimension-replacive utterances Dimension-replacive utterances are defined here as utterances in which speakers used a vertical dimensional term (top, bottom) for referring to a position on the sagittal axis (front, back). For instance, the bottle-on-table scene (Figure 1 on p. 12) would be described in a dimension-replacive manner by using an utterance of the type The bottle is in the bottom right-hand corner of the table. Instances of such utterances occurred rather frequently in the data from Experiment 1: they make up for 62.8% of the precise utterances (excluding metaphorical variants; see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-2) in the German subcorpus, and for 77.9% of precise utterances in the English subcorpus. This high overall frequency, and the even higher frequency of use of dimension-replacive structures in English than in German, of course, require discussion.98 First of all, it has to be pointed out that dimension-replacement is not a phenomenon exclusive to this study. It has repeatedly been described (by different labels) in the literature (cf. e.g. Freksa 1999: 234; Levelt 1996: 83–88; Vorwerg and Rickheit 2000: 23–24), and different possible explanations for its occurrence have been offered. Among those, the following ones are relevant to the data from Experiment 1: Firstly, and most simply, dimension-replacement might to a considerable extent be an effect of the use of pictures, i.e. of two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional scenes, and of the presentation of these pictures on a computer screen, i.e. on a vertically oriented plane. This very likely caused a conflict between attending to the two-dimensional picture-level, for the description of which a vertical dimensional term would be appropriate, and to the threedimensional scene-level, which would require description by use of a sagittal dimensional term. Since the dimension-replacement strategy, however, has also occurred in previous studies that involved different experimental settings (e.g. Levelt 1996: 83–88), other possible (and mostly complementary) explanations require to be taken into account in addition.

|| 98 Given the post hoc nature of this finding, and given the primarily explorative nature of the research reported in this book in general, only a descriptive analysis of dimension-replacive constructions is provided in this section.

186 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

One of those is Levelt’s (1996: 83) proposal that the dimension-replacive strategy is “characteristic for deictic perspective, because it is viewer-centered. It essentially tells you where the gaze moves …”. On this view, the use of dimension-replacive utterances in Experiment 1 would be suggestive of a highly addressee- or other-oriented strategy: the director instructs the matcher where to direct his or her gaze. This interpretation also offers an explanation for why dimension-replacive utterances were more frequent in the English subcorpus. It would mark their occurrence as in line with findings from previous contrastive research (e.g. House 1996: 347) which identified a general tendency of speakers of English to pursue highly addressee-oriented communicative strategies. Furthermore, the special status of verticality in the directional system might play a role in explaining the occurrence of dimension-replacive utterances. Verticality is usually easier to identify and label than the two types of horizontality because its orientation is clearly indicated by gravity (cf. e.g. Levelt 1996: 88; Levinson 2003: 35, 75–76; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 58, 63, 397–398; Rinck 2003: 627; Vorwerg and Rickheit 2000: 23–24, 29–30; Wunderlich 1985: 347; see also Levelt 1986: 205–209). This ease of identification might have rendered vertical relations more ontologically salient (in Schmid’s (2007) terms) than sagittal relations to many of the participants, and might thus explain the frequent selection of vertical terms for linguistic reference. Two further possible explanations derive from patterns in the data. They become visible as soon as external and speaker-related contextual factors are taken into account. A close consideration of the frequencies of distribution for the different scenes (see Table 7 and Figure 30) revealed that, across languages, the expected sagittal terms (H1), i.e. non-replacive structures, were used particularly frequently with item T2 (cup on table). In addition, a tendency can be observed for such uses to also occur more frequently with T1 (bottle in box) and T6 (tealight on plate) than with the remaining items. Tab. 7: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of dimension-replacive utterances by language and target item.

items

criterion

across languages

German

English

T1

V

24 (61.5%)

11 (47.8%)

13 (81.3%)

H1

15 (38.5%)

12 (52.2%)

3 (18.7%)

total

39 (100%)

23 (100%)

16 (100%)

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items

criterion

across languages

German

English

T2

V

10 (37%)

6 (35.3%)

4 (40%)

H1

17 (63%)

11 (64.7%)

6 (60%)

27 (100%)

17 (100%)

10 (100%)

32 (78%)

17 (81%)

15 (75%)

9 (22%)

4 (19%)

5 (25%)

total

41 (100%)

21 (100%)

20 (100%)

V

21 (61.8%)

10 (50%)

11 (78.6%)

H1

13 (38.2%)

10 (50%)

3 (21.4%)

total

34 (100%)

20 (100%)

14 (100%)

V

35 (85.4%)

17 (85%)

18 (85.7%)

H1

6 (14.6%)

3 (15%)

3 (14.3%)

total

41 (100%)

20 (100%)

21 (100%)

V

35 (81.4%)

15 (75%)

20 (87%)

H1

8 (18.6%)

5 (25%)

3 (13%)

total

43 (100%)

20 (100%)

23 (100%)

total T4

V H1

T6

T7

T8

Fig. 30: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of dimension-replacive utterances by language and target item.

188 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

These patterns can be interpreted as indicating that the selection of either H1 (sagittal axis) or V (vertical axis) might at least to a certain degree constitute a systematic effect associated with and thus triggered by particular objectfeatures, i.e. features of external context. However, a closer look at items T2, T1 and T6 reveals that none of the three criteria with respect to which the ROs varied systematically (corneredness, definiteness of boundary and clearness of boundary, see above, pp. 176–178), can explain the relatively more frequent uses of sagittal terms (H1) with these items. Instead, a function-related explanation may be applicable: one feature shared by all three items is that they display LOs which can be easily reached for and manipulated by a person when interacting with the depicted arrangements of objects. It is therefore possible that the scenes displayed in T1, T2 and T6 triggered a simulation of performing such interactions in many participants (see Section 4.4 above). This might, again, have increased the perception of T1, T2 and T6 as (photographs of) three-dimensional scenes rather than as two-dimensional pictures only, and thus as scenes prone to be referred to by use of sagittal terms. This suggests that function-related scene features might have to be added to the list of possible factors of influence on speakers’ selection decisions between a dimension-replacive versus a non-replacive structure. In addition, the findings that non-replacive structures were relatively frequently used for referring to T1, T2 and T6 by both speakers of German and English, and that this tendency was even more pronounced with speakers of German for items T1 (frequencies of H1-uses: 18.7% in English/52.2% in German) and T6 (frequencies of H1-uses: 21.4% in English/50% in German) readily agree with what has been discussed above in relation to imprecise referential utterances. Both findings might indicate that speakers of German perceive functional scene- and object-features as salient and are therefore influenced by them in their construction selection decisions. This underlines, once more, that Hypothesis 1b, i.e. the prediction that only speakers of English are relevantly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-shape features, quite definitely does not apply to the dimension of functional object-features (see also discussion of item T5 above). A further, final, factor that may be explanatory of the generally rather frequent occurrence of dimension-replacive utterances, particularly in the English subcorpus, relates to the cognitive contextual dimension, i.e. to patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge. There are several indications that the combination [VH2], i.e. vertical dimensional term plus lateral dimensional term, is accessed as a chunk by many speakers of English, whereas this is not the case to the same extent for the combination [H1H2]. These indications are as follows:

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firstly, 14 out of the 24 English participants (but only 3 out of the 23 German participants) did not make use of sagittal dimensional terms at all; secondly, split utterances, i.e. utterances in which the two dimensional spatial information units are provided in two separate phrases or information units (as in The bottle of wine is inside the box [at the front] [towards the left-hand side]) were far more frequent (in the English subcorpus) with the combination [H1H2] (55.6% of all instances of [H1H2]) than with the combination [VH2] (4.4% of all instances of [VH2]). In addition, the order of dimensional terms seems to be more fixed with [VH2] than with [H1H2]. Only 15% of all English dimensionreplacive utterances were of the type [H2V], whereas this H2-first order variant occurred in 43.8% of the non-replacive utterances. Taking this into account, one factor that might have contributed to the frequent use of constructions with vertical dimensional terms by speakers of English in particular might be their (more) ready availability in the form of relatively large chunks. Taking that the use of chunks is less resource- and time-consuming than more compositional processes of language production (e.g. Bybee 2010: 34; see also above), uses of dimension-replacive constructions might simply have overridden uses of nonreplacive constructions in the course of utterance planning and production despite the fact that the non-replacive variants would have matched the referent scenes better. Which of these and possible further factors of influence have eventually led to the frequent use of dimension-replacive utterances by the participants in Experiment 1, or rather which and how many factors caused their occurrence on individual instances, cannot be conclusively decided on the basis of the available data. What this discussion indicates, however, is that the contrast between dimension-replacive and non-replacive constructions is highly unlikely to be a main effect of, or directly related to, the difference between space-focused and object-focused spatial referent scene construal. Also, it does not directly interrelate with the independent variable of RO-shape variation (in terms of corneredness and definiteness/clearness of boundary), which, in the present understanding, constitutes a major determinant of the ready applicability versus non-applicability of object-focused constructions. Therefore, and in line with general practice (cf. e.g. Levelt 1996), dimensionreplacement did not lead to the exclusion of items from the dataset for the main analysis. Also, it was not included as a separate factor. Which factors were used for classifying and analysing the data will be reported in the following Section 7.2.3.

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7.2.3 Analytical dimensions and parameters As indicated by criteria 1–3 above (p. 180), the dataset against which Hypotheses 1a–c were tested (n = 243) comprised all those references to the target scenes that were sufficiently precise to have enabled the matchers to successfully solve the picture selection task. It thus included both prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances and functionally comparable constructional variants (see pp. 216–223 and 236–238 for examples). This dataset was subjected to two complementary analyses, which used two different measures for the factor of degrees of object-focusedness of scene construal: – Analysis 1A is a descriptive, frequency-based categorical analysis. With this analysis, each individual construction in the dataset was classified as an instance of a particular Spatial Construction Type (SCT) and was assigned a specific position on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale based on the criteria introduced in Chapters 3 and 4. This analysis thus provided a construction- and form-focused descriptive overview of the linguistic structures used by the participants in Experiment 1 and of their frequency distributions in dependence on language and external and internal contexts. – Analysis 1B is based on a metrical measure, Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs), which indicates the construal meanings of individual utterances in a more precise and more differential way than the categorical measure of SCTs. This analysis explores the data and, eventually, addresses Hypotheses 1a–c by use of statistical models that take into account in parallel several potential contextual factors of influence on construction selection and, thus, scene construal decisions (including the factor of individual cognitive context). Analysis 1A and Analysis 1B were complementarily applied to the data from Experiment 1 because each of them compensates ideally for the shortcomings of the respective other. Analysis 1A, i.e. classification in terms of SCTs, provided an overview of linguistic construction types and their frequency distributions, and thus lines in with established conventions of data analysis and presentation in cognitive (corpus) linguistics and Construction Grammar (see e.g. Bybee 2007b; Hoffmann 2004; Schmid 2010; see also Chapter 5). Using constructions, i.e. form-function/meaning pairs, as the basic analytical units, Analysis 1A proved particularly well-suited for identifying and systematically describing patterns of similarity and variation in construal mean-

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ings on a relatively strongly form-based, low-level of abstraction or schematicity. More precisely, it enabled the following analytical steps: firstly, determining and comparing which different kinds of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions are used by speakers of German and English and what are their (contextual) conditions of use; and, secondly, identifying possible differences in the degrees of entrenchment and/or conventionalization of these DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions on a relatively specific level of representation. Accordingly, Analysis 1A yielded very detailed, comparative, descriptive insights into patterns of conventionalization for referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in German and English. However, Analysis 1A is subject to a range of limitations characteristic of categorical and frequency-based methods. These include, in particular, the very essential problem of what to count, i.e. of how to actually define and operationalize the concept of CONSTRUCTION, and, closely related to this, the problem of how to count, i.e. which frequency measures to use (see pp. 142–143 above). For the following reasons, these issues weigh relatively heavily with the analysis of the data from Experiment 1: firstly, Experiment 1 takes a contrastive (German versus English) perspective. It thus faces the problem that constructions are not necessarily readily comparable across languages (cf. e.g. Croft 2001: 50; see also Section 2.3 and Chapter 5). Secondly, it is based on an understanding of constructions as individual knowledge structures. As has been discussed in Chapter 5, this includes that the same observable language behaviour does not necessarily correlate with sameness in the cognitive structures (including constructions) and/or in the cognitive processes that led to this behaviour. Accordingly, arriving at a suitable (working) definition of constructions as countable entities proved particularly challenging with the data from Experiment 1 (see below). Thirdly, the participants in Experiment 1 could formulate their utterances freely, i.e. there were no constraints as to which constructions or combinations of constructions participants could use. Also, the lengths of the descriptive utterances were not predefined. As a result, the degree of variation in the dataset was very high and could, therefore, not be covered to the full by any classification scheme. Accordingly, it could not be avoided that the SCTbased analysis would generalize across a range of differences between individual utterances, including some which are potentially relevant for degrees of object-focusedness construal (see Analysis 1A-2 below for details and examples). Fourthly, the data from Experiment 1 are not comparable in size with the datasets commonly used in frequency-based corpus linguistics. Furthermore, instances of some SCTs only occurred very rarely. As a consequence, the frequency measures and statistical models used in corpus linguistics did not

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readily apply to the SCT-data from Experiment 1. Analysis 1A is therefore mainly of a qualitative, descriptive nature. As indicated above, statistical modelling and explorative statistical analysis are at the core of Analysis 1B, which is based on the measure of Objectfocusedness Degree Values (ODVs). This ODV-based analysis compensates to a considerable extent for the problems and drawbacks inherent in and just reported for the frequency-based SCT-analysis. ODVs are metrical values which were assigned to each individual DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance. As such, they are a very precise measure which accounts for even slight differences between the construal meanings of individual utterances, as well as for the fact that even seemingly minor differences in form (which are unavoidably generalized within the scope of categorical analyses like the SCT-analysis) might have an influence on the degree of object-focusedness with which these utterances construe their referent scenes. In addition, ODVs differ from SCTs in that they relate to a more highly schematic and thus less strongly form-focused level of knowledge representation. As a consequence, the ODV-based analysis could readily account for the fact that formally different utterances might still have relatively similar construal meanings; and, even more centrally, this feature of ODVs identifies them as particularly well suited for cross-linguistic comparison. Using ODVs as an indicator of degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings thus allowed for a very precise interindividual and cross-linguistic comparison of construal preferences, and, eventually, for an evaluation of Hypotheses 1a–c. In sum, making complementary use of the measures of SCTs and ODVs thus proved ideally suited for capturing, with a high degree of comprehensiveness and under consideration of several (more specific/form-focused and more schematic) levels of representation, the patterns of conventionalization of referring to and thus, potentially, of attentionally construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in German and English. Since the SCT-based Analysis 1A provided a detailed descriptive overview of the range of different DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types used by the German and English participants in Experiment 1, some general findings and, in particular, the sets of different construction types resulting from this analysis will be presented first in the following Section 7.2.4. This report will be complemented in Section 7.2.5 by a joint presentation and discussion of the findings from Analysis 1B and of a range of more specific findings from Analysis 1A which could best be interpreted in the light of the results from Analysis 1B.

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7.2.4 Analysis 1A: Spatial Construction Types (SCTs) As has just been indicated, Analysis 1A involved the following steps: firstly, classifying each DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance in the dataset as an instance of a particular Spatial Construction Type (SCT); and, secondly, identifying patterns of frequency distributions of SCTs across and within the language-specific subcorpora. Based on their formal and related semantic features, different SCTs could be assigned different locations on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. The frequency distribution data presented in this section thus also allowed first insights into construal tendencies between and within the language groups tested. For the reasons provided above, the distribution data presented are of a descriptive nature only. Still, as will become clear in the following, many of the frequency patterns identified by Analysis 1A reveal very clear between-groups and between-items differences, i.e. differences that are rated here to be strong enough to serve as a solid basis for drawing first preliminary conclusions relating to Hypotheses 1a–c (at least as far as the subset of hypotheses based on Schematicity Theory is concerned; see Section 6.2). Taking this into account, this section is structured as follows: first, the principles on the basis of which SCTs were identified and related to the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale will be introduced and discussed. Subsequent to this, a detailed overview of the different SCTs identified from the German and English subcorpora will be provided. Finally, the results of a series of frequencybased analyses of the classified data will be reported. These will be further elaborated in Section 7.2.5, where they will be complemented (and, eventually, largely confirmed) by the findings from Analysis 1B.

Spatial Construction Types (SCTs) As indicated in the previous Section 7.2.3, an SCT-based analysis faces the problem that a particular utterance cannot unambiguously be related back to one particular (set of) cognitively represented constructions only. Instead, the knowledge structures that were accessed for producing this form of linguistic behaviour can be more or less strongly schematic and can differ in size and, accordingly, number (see also Section 5.2.2). This issue is accounted for in two ways: firstly, by the complementation of Analysis 1A by Analysis 1B; and, secondly, by taking into account three differently specific sets of Spatial Construction Types within the scope of Analysis 1A: a General Level set (G), an Intermediate Level set (I) and a Specific Level set (S).

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Construction types were identified based on the criteria introduced in Chapter 3, with the number of criteria taken into account increasing from the General Level to the Specific Level. To ensure inter-utterance and, in particular, crosslinguistic comparability, SCTs were not defined on a sentence- or full utterancesize level. Instead, they only cover the subpart of referential utterances by which dimensional and topological information is provided, i.e. sections of the type in the front right-hand corner (on the table). Variation with respect to other elements of the utterances (in particular references to LOs and ROs) was covered only to the extent to which it could be considered to be the direct consequence of the selection of spatial terms. In line with the principles outlined in Chapter 3, how dimensional information was provided figured particularly centrally in the procedure of SCTclassification. More specifically, SCTs were defined in the following ways for the different levels of analysis: General Level (G): with this highly schematic level, only the word-class category membership of the dimensional terms was taken into account. This led to the formation of three subclasses: – object-focused constructions (G-A): provision of dimensional information by use of nominal structures (adjectives or nouns), or use of functionally comparable constructional variants – mid-range and mixed constructions (G-B): provision of dimensional information by a combination of nominal, non-nominal or fictive motion constructions, or use of functionally comparable constructional variants – space-focused constructions (G-C): provision of dimensional information by use of non-nominal constructions (adverbs and adverb-like structures) and/or fictive motion constructions, or use of functionally comparable constructional variants. Intermediate Level (I): with this level, those structural features whose inclusion and formal realization constitute a direct effect of the selection of dimensional terms of a particular word-class category were taken into account in addition to the word-class category of the dimensional terms as such. For instance, a differentiation was made between three different dimensional adjective construction types – I-1 (adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions), I-2 (adjective-plus-GENPARTN constructions) and I-3 (adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions) – on the basis of which type of part-denoting noun they contain: a natural or specific partnoun (SPEC-PARTN, e.g. corner), a general part-noun (GEN-PARTN, e.g. side) or a simple dimensional noun (DIM-N, e.g. (the) front). In this way, seven different

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classes of Intermediate Level constructions were formed (see Table 8 below for an overview). Specific Level (S): this more fine-grained level takes into account additionally a relatively extensive set of features and/or components of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances which could be expected on the basis of existing construal taxonomies (see Section 2.3 and Chapter 3) to effect differences in the degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings realized by these utterances. Due to their diversity, these criteria will be introduced and discussed in detail in the following sections on the basis of concrete corpus examples. Table 8 provides a first overview of the classification criteria for all three levels and lists all subclasses that could be identified in the data from Experiment 1. The construction types are presented in order of decreasing degrees of objectfocusedness; that is, on the Intermediate Level, adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) constitute the most strongly object-focused construction type, simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) the most strongly space-focused construction type. Those SCTs for which just a German example is provided only occurred in the German subcorpus, those for which just an English example is provided only occurred in the English subcorpus. Three-digit labels (e.g. S-101) indicate constructional variants (see below for details). Tab. 8: Experiment 1 – Spatial Construction Types (SCTs).

S

G I

DIM

A 1

DIM-ADJ + 11 SPECPARTN

example P + PARTNpoint

G Die Weinflasche steht in dem Karton in der linken unteren Ecke. ‘the bottle of wine is in the box in the left bottom corner’

E It’s a bottle of wine inside the blue box and it’s in the bottom left-hand corner. 12

P + PARTNline/plane

G Ein Schwan, der am unteren rechten Bildrand auf einer Wiese sitzt. ‘a swan which is sitting at the bottom right edge of the picture on a meadow’

13

P + PARTNchunk/section

G Der Schwan ist aufm Feld … im unteren rechten Bildausschnitt. ‘the swan is in the field … in the bottom right picture section’

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G I

DIM

S

LOvariant

101

example G Eine Flasche Wein im blauen Karton … dessen Etikett man nicht mehr sehen kann … auf der linken Seite. ‘a bottle of wine in the blue box … whose label can no longer be seen … on the left side’

DISTvariant 2

111 I-1 + DIST

DIM-ADJ + 21 GEN-PARTN

P + Seite/sideface/line

E The bottle of wine is in the near left corner of the blue box. G Es ist das Keramikding, … mit der Orange an der vorderen rechten Seite von der Schale. ‘it’s the ceramic-thing … with the orange at the front right-hand side of the bowl’

E It’s a blue box with a bottle of red wine at the front left-hand side of the box. 22

P + Nplane/chunk

G Eine blaue Box mit einer Weinflasche in der linken unteren Hälfte der Box. ‘a blue box with a wine-bottle in the left bottom half of the box’

E The tomato is on the left portion of the piece of lettuce. 23

P + sideplane/chunk

G Die Tomate liegt auf der unteren linken Seite des Salatblattes aber auf dem Salatblatt. ‘the tomato is on the bottom left side of the lettuce leaf but on the leaf’

E A table with a cup in the right-hand top side. It’s on the table. 24 metaph. variants

P + sidechunk + P + DIM-N

201 clock-face

E In the basket, the apple is on the righthand side at the back and in it. G Wenn das ne Uhr wäre würds auf neun Uhr liegen. ‘if this was a clock it would be at nine o’clock’

E The candle is at about eleven o’clock on the plate. 202 compass (card)

E A candle on a plate and it’s in the sort of north-west direction of the plate but it’s sitting on the plate.

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G I 3

DIM

S

DIM-ADJ + 31 DIM-N 32

B 4

5

example P + DIM-Nface/line

E It’s a table with a white tea cup at the top right of it.

P + DIM-Nchunk

E A blue box with a bottle of wine on the bottom left inside it.

RO-mix

410 DIST-variant

E Lettuce leaf with the tomato on the lefthand side nearest to you.

I-mix

51

I-2 + I-6 Nface

E The cup’s on the table and towards the back at the right-hand side.

52

I-2 + I-6 Nchunk

E The tomato is on the lettuce leaf and towards the front on the left-hand side.

53

I-3 + I-6 Nface

E A puddle with the leaf in it towards the left at the top.

54

I-3 + I-6 Nchunk

E The wine in inside the box and it’s towards the bottom on the left.

55

I-1 + I-7

G Flasche ist drin … links im unteren Eck. ‘bottle is inside … left in the bottom corner’

56

I-2 + I-7

G Die Weinflasche ist in der blauen Kiste auf der linken Seite vorne. ‘the bottle of wine is in the blue box on the left-hand side front-DIM-S-ADV’

C 6

fictive motion

61

DIR + side

E It’s a dish with the orange in towards the front right-hand side and it’s actually in the dish.

610 DIST-variant

E The lettuce leaf has a tomato on it to the left-hand side of the lettuce leaf and towards us.

62

DIR + DIM-N

E Tealight towards the top left of the plate.

63

DIR-N + DIM-S-ADV

G Auf dem Bild hier hast du nen grünen Teller mit nem Teelicht Richtung links hinten auf dem Teller stehn. ‘in the picture you have a green plate with a tealight in direction left-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-SADV standing on the table’

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G I 7

DIM

S

DIM-SADV

70

example DIM-S-ADV + TOP-PPPARTN

G Die Tasse befindet sich auf dem Tisch rechts oben in der Ecke. ‘the cup is located on the table right-DIM-S-ADV top-DIM-S-ADV in the corner’

71

TOP-PPinitial + DIM-S-ADV

G Schwan vor ner Wiese. Der Schwan ist rechts unten. ‘swan in front of a meadow. The swan is rightDIM-S-ADV bottom-DIM-S-ADV’

E It’s a swan on the field bottom right. 72

DIM-S-ADV + TOP-PPintermediate

G Es ist das Blatt, das links in der Pfütze oben liegt. ‘it’s the leaf that is left-DIM-S-ADV in the puddle top-DIM-S-ADV’

73

DIM-S-ADV + TOP-PPfinal

G Es ist die Pfütze mit dem Ahornblatt links oben in der Pfütze. ‘it’s the puddle with the maple leaf left-DIM-SADV top-DIM-S-ADV in the puddle’

E Lettuce leaf with a tomato bottom left on it.

In the following sections, a detailed presentation and discussion of all classes and subclasses of SCTs, as well as of their context-general and context-relative frequency distributions will be provided.99 This presentation will start with the General Level (G) and will then proceed with a detailed presentation and discussion of the SCTs for the more specific variants (Levels I and S) of objectfocused (G-A), mid-range/mixed (G-B) and space-focused (G-C) constructions. For each level and analysis, the discussion of findings will proceed from a more global to a more local perspective, i.e. from a focus on cross-linguistic variation via language-internal inter-speaker differences to intra-speaker variation, and will differentially take into account the external contextual parameter of RO-shape variation. All findings will be discussed with respect to their relevance for Hypotheses 1a–c.

|| 99 Differences between individual utterances which are not reflected in this schema since they occurred too rarely and/or were too specific to result in the formation of further (sub)classes will also be presented and discussed where applicable. These differences were accounted for by ODVs and thus included in Analysis 1B (see Section 7.2.5).

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Analysis 1A-1: General Level SCTs (G) On the General Level (G), instances of DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions were classified relatively globally as construing their referent scenes in either an object-focused (G-A) or a space-focused (G-C) manner, or as expressing an intermediate (or mid-range) degree of object-focusedness (G-B). When calculating frequency distributions, the following factors were taken into account: – cross-linguistic differences – external context – cognitive context/language-internal variation. This allowed an interpretation of the distribution data with regard to their relevance for Hypotheses 1a–c, i.e. the predictions that (a) speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions; that (b) speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features than speakers of English; and that (c) the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is higher in German than in English. The results of the frequency-based analyses and their interpretation are provided in the following.

Cross-linguistic differences Figure 31 and Table 9 provide an overview of the relative frequencies with which the three General Level SCTs occurred in the two language-specific subcorpora.

Fig. 31: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs (German versus English).

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Tab. 9: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs (German versus English).

General Level SCTs

German

English

G-A

30 (24.4%)

87 (72.5%)

G-B

6 (4.9%)

17 (14.2%)

G-C

87 (70.7%)

16 (13.3%)

total

123 (100%)

120 (100%)

As can be seen, the analysis in terms of frequencies of occurrence yielded the following findings: (1) The distributional patterns in the German and English datasets differ considerably with respect to the frequencies of object-focused constructions (G-A) relative to space-focused constructions (G-C): the most frequent construction type in the German set are space-focused constructions (70.7% of all utterances are instances of G-C), the most frequent type in the English set object-focused constructions (72.5% of all utterances can be classified as G-A). (2) Mid-range and mixed constructions (G-B) were about three times as frequent in the English (14.2% of all utterances) than in the German data (4.9%). Both findings can carefully be interpreted as lending support to Hypotheses 1a and 1c: – Finding (1) strongly suggests that space-focused constructions indeed constitute the preferred and thus presumably most strongly conventionalized means of making DIMDIM(TOP)-references in German, whereas objectfocused constructions constitute the construction type with the highest degree of conventionalization in English. This finding is thus clearly in line with the prediction that speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions (Hypothesis 1a). – Finding (2) can be interpreted as lending support to Hypothesis 1c, which predicts that providing full DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions is generally less strongly conventionalized in English than in German, and that speakers of English should therefore agree less strongly as to which particular construction type to use for making DIMDIM(TOP)-references. While the first conclusion directly derives from the observed frequency distributions, the second conclusion requires further explanation. It is based on the

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following considerations: firstly, as can be seen from Table 8 above (pp. 195– 198), the set of (Intermediate Level and Specific Level) construction types which are classified as mid-range or mixed constructions (G-B) is highly varied and heterogeneous with respect to the formal features definitional of the different types included in this set. The more frequent occurrence of structures from this set in the English subcorpus might therefore indicate that speakers of English do not agree as strongly as speakers of German on which (specific) form DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions usually take (see also Chapter 6 and Section 7.1). This might indeed indicate that DIMDIM(TOP)-construction use is not very strongly conventionalized in the English speech community, at least as far as specific, low-level constructions are concerned. Secondly, most instances of mid-range and mixed constructions (G-B) are instances of split constructions, i.e. provide lateral and sagittal/vertical dimensional information in the form of two separate phrases and thus as two separate information units (example (36); see also p. 189 above): (36)

The tomato is on the lettuce leaf and [towards the front] [on the lefthand side].

The relatively higher frequency of mid-range/mixed constructions in English might suggest that many speakers of English do not provide several spatial information units in one utterance or utterance unit as routinely as speakers of German do. This finding thus constitutes another indicator that a strong convention of how to give full DIMDIM(TOP)-references might be absent in English. In sum, the frequency distribution data subsumed in Figure 31 and Table 9 can be interpreted as supportive of Hypothesis 1a and Hypothesis 1c. However, they cannot be related to Hypothesis 1b, which predicts that speakers of English are more sensitive to RO-shape variation than speakers of German. This issue will be addressed in the following section, which focuses on the factor of external context, i.e. reports the construction frequencies for the different target scenes.

External situational contexts (RO-shape types) As indicated in Section 7.2.1, external context was operationalized in Experiment 1 by systematically varying the shape-features of the different ROs in the target scenes. This manner of operationalization is based on the assumption that scenes with cornered and bounded ROs are particularly eligible for being referred to by use of highly object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, whereas

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this is hardly possible for scenes with uncornered/round and unbounded ROs. It was therefore predicted that differences in RO-design with respect to these parameters would have an influence on (a) which SCTs English speakers would select, and (b) whether and how readily they could make a full DIMDIM(TOP)reference at all. No such effects of RO-shape variation were predicted to occur with speakers of German (Hypothesis 1b). To investigate these predictions, the target scenes (except the excluded targets T3 and T5) were grouped as representative of one of four different RO-shape types: cornered ROs (T1 and T2), odd-shaped ROs (T4), round ROs (T6) and unbounded ROs (T7 and T8). Figure 32 and Table 10 indicate the frequencies of distribution of General Level SCTs by these different shape-types for the two language-specific subcorpora.100 Tab. 10: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs by RO-shape type (German versus English).

German G-A cornered

English G-B

G-C

total

G-A

G-B

G-C

total

17 3 (42.5%) (7.5%)

20 (50%)

40 (100%)

28 (80%)

6 (17.1%)

1 (2.9%)

35 (100%)

odd-shaped

4 (19%)

0 (0%)

17 (81%)

21 12 (100%) (54.5%)

4 (18.2%)

6 (27.3%)

22 (100%)

round

2 2 18 (9.1%) (9.1%) (81.8%)

22 10 (100%) (55.6%)

4 (22.2%)

4 (22.2%)

18 (100%)

unbounded

7 1 (17.5%) (2.5%)

32 (80%)

40 37 (100%) (82.2%)

3 (6.7%)

5 (11.1%)

45 (100%)

all shapes

30 6 87 (24.4%) (4.9%) (70.7%)

123 87 (100%) (72.5%)

17 (14.2%)

16 (13.3%)

120 (100%)

|| 100 For a comprehensive statistical evaluation, in particular of speaker-group internal distributions, see the ODV-based Analysis 1B in Section 7.2.5.

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Fig. 32: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of General Level SCTs by RO-shape type (German versus English).

As can be seen from Figure 32 and Table 10, the relative usage frequencies of the different General Level SCTs are distributed differently between scene-types in the English and the German dataset. This runs counter to Hypothesis 1b, which predicts that external context should only relevantly influence construction selection decisions in speakers of English. What can be seen from the data as well, however, is that variation in ROshape features did not have the same effects in the two language-specific groups tested. In the English data, the predicted tendency of using highly object-focused constructions can be observed to hold for references to all object types. However, uses of mid-range/mixed (G-B) and space-focused constructions (G-C) increased with a decreasing degree of corneredness of the ROs. A decrease in boundedness, by contrast, did not have a comparable effect: unbounded objects were described in a way similar to cornered objects.101 This distributional pattern can be interpreted in at least two ways: firstly, it might reflect a conventionalized strong preference for using highly objectfocused constructions. On the basis of this interpretation, the differences between references to cornered as opposed to uncornered scenes (i.e. scenes with odd-shaped and round ROs) would be an effect of the fact that object-focused dimensional adjective-plus-PARTN constructions are difficult to apply to un-

|| 101 The comparably high frequencies of use of space-focused constructions (G-C) for reference to odd-shaped and round items in the English subcorpus are explained to a large extent by the overall small number of utterances included, which results from the fact that references to items T3 (orange in odd-shaped bowl) and T5 (apple in basket) were excluded from the main analysis (see Section 7.2.2).

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cornered scenes (see Section 7.2.2). On this view, the increase in uses of midrange/mixed (G-B) and space-focused constructions (G-C) with uncornered scenes would indicate that the design of these scenes induced some speakers of English to diverge from their preference of using object-focused constructions (G-A), i.e. ‘forced’ them to make use of a less conventionalized and/or entrenched construction type, because, otherwise, they would not have been able at all to make a precise DIMDIM(TOP)-reference to the uncornered target scenes. Alternatively and secondly, the observed distribution pattern in the English dataset might reflect the existence of one main convention of how to refer to cornered scenes (including unbounded scenes, which might also have been construed as cornered via the use of the cornered picture or screen as an RO) and the absence of a clear convention for how to refer to uncornered scenes. Both interpretations do not contradict Hypotheses 1a (the prediction that speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions) and 1b (the prediction that speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by ROfeatures than speakers of English). However, the second interpretation indicates that these hypotheses might not hold for all scene types alike. Which interpretation accounts best for the patterns of distribution in the data can, however, not be decided by focusing on the highly schematic General Level SCTs only. Instead, it requires lower levels of schematicity to be taken into account. This issue will therefore be taken up again in the course of the presentation of the results from the Intermediate Level and Specific Level analyses in Section 7.2.5. What can be concluded at this point for the English dataset is that, as predicted, speakers agreed quite strongly in preferring the use of highly objectfocused constructions on all those instances in which this was licensed by the external context, i.e. by the presence of ROs which (a) are or can readily be construed as bounded entities, and which (b) display features like corners that are suited to serve as primary ROs for localizing the LO. If one defines conventions as the state of high agreement in behaviour between members of a group (see Section 5.4.1), this equals the finding that there exists a strong convention in the English speech community as to how to make precise DIMDIM(TOP)references, at least as far as the high level of schematicity captured by General Level SCTs is concerned. If interpreted in this way, the data just reported are therefore not in line with Hypothesis 1c, which predicts that the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-construction uses is higher in German than in English. Instead, the situation seems more complex: the finding that not all speakers of English di-

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verged to using mid-range/mixed (G-B) and space-focused constructions (G-C) with uncornered scenes might indicate that the prediction of a low degree of conventionalization of how to make DIMDIM(TOP)-references might still hold for this type of referent scenes. In addition, it might also still be confirmed for a lower level of schematicity of constructions. That the patterns of conventionalization in the languages investigated are obviously more complex than predicted also becomes clear from the frequency distributions in the German dataset. As indicated by Figure 32 and Table 10, the predicted general preference for using highly space-focused constructions becomes clearly manifest only for references to scenes with odd-shaped, round and unbounded ROs (81%, 81.8% and 80% of space-focused references, respectively). With cornered scenes, by contrast, space-focused and object-focused General Level SCTs were used with almost equal frequency (G-A: 42.5%; G-C: 50%). Object-focused constructions (G-A) were thus also used more frequently with cornered scenes than with any of the other target scene types. These patterns in the data indicate that speakers of German are sensitive to and do adapt to external contexts: the German-speaking participants in Experiment 1 obviously made a categorical difference between cornered and uncornered/unbounded scenes. Accordingly, the scene-type specific patterns of frequency distributions just presented can be interpreted as running counter to what was predicted by Hypothesis 1b, i.e. counter to the idea that speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features than speakers of English. Furthermore, the almost equal frequencies of object-focused (G-A) and space-focused (G-C) references to cornered scenes in the German dataset suggest that the individual speakers of German tested disagreed markedly with respect to their entrenched preferences of how to refer to this type of scene. This might indicate either that how to refer to cornered DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes is not very strongly conventionalized in the German speech community, or, alternatively, that there exist at least two parallel subconventions of how to refer to such scenes. If this is considered in the light of the finding that the English participants did agree on using as object-focused constructions as possible for referring to all object-shape types (see above), this contradicts the prediction that providing full DIMDIM(TOP)-references is more strongly conventionalized in German than in English (Hypothesis 1c). However, again, these conclusions only relate to the level of the highly schematic General Level SCTs. A more definite and more reliable interpretation of the language-specific patterns of conventionalization requires taking into account in addition levels of schematicity more specific than the General Level.

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Furthermore, the tendencies identified so far are still in need of statistical verification. Both will be provided in Section 7.2.5 below. Prior to this, the present description and discussion of General Level SCT-frequencies will be completed by a closer look at patterns of speaker-group internal variation.

Cognitive contexts (individual usage preferences) Information on speaker-specific patterns of language use is notoriously difficult to provide in a systematic manner, because it cannot but take the form of a qualitative, close-up description of individual speaker behaviour. However, taking this level into account proves essential to identifying patterns of conventionalization in speech communities. It provides more detailed answers to the questions of whether and to what extent overall frequency-distribution patterns on the levels of speaker groups or whole speech communities are representative of individual speaker behaviour, i.e. may be interpreted as indicators of a high degree of agreement between members of the same group or speech community (cf. e.g. Barlow 2013: 444; see also Section 1.1). Usage patterns from individual speakers are compared here based on the following criteria: (1) Did speakers make consistent use of structures belonging to one particular General Level SCT only, or did they switch between using structures from several different General Level SCTs? (2) Are the individual tendencies in line with or do they differ from the patterns identified on group level? Question (2) directly addresses the relation between individual and group. Answers to question (1), by contrast, provide more detailed information on individual speakers’ cognitive contextual preference patterns. Answering this question therefore constitutes an essential precondition for evaluating the predictions made by Differentiality Theory, which holds that construal meanings generate from contrasts between potentially (referentially) synonymous constructions in speakers who do not have a strong preference for the use of one construction type only (see Section 5.3 and Chapter 6). Speakers who made use of one construction type only throughout the experiment were classified here as Consistent OBJF-Speakers and Consistent SPFSpeakers depending on which General Level SCT they preferred (none of the participants in Experiment 1 made use of mid-range and mixed/G-B constructions only). Speakers who switched between using different construction types were classified as Variable Speakers. Within this second group, a further differ-

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entiation could be made between speakers who still had an identifiable preference (Mixed-OBJF Speakers and Mixed-SPF Speakers), here defined as those speakers who diverged from their main tendency in no more than one third of (precise) instances of DIMDIM(TOP)-construction uses, and speakers who did not display any general preference at all (Mixed-Mixed Speakers). Figure 33 and Table 11 present an overview of the distribution of the different speaker types in the two language-specific subcorpora.

Fig. 33: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types by uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English).

Tab. 11: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types by uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English).

speaker types Consistent SPF Consistent OBJF Mixed-SPF Mixed-OBJF

German

English

5 (21.7%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

12 (50%)

8 (34.8%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

4 (16.7%)

Mixed-Mixed

10 (43.5%)

8 (33.3%)

total

23 (100%)

24 (100%)

All in all, the overview of different speaker types presented in Figure 33 and Table 11 reveals a relatively clear tendency towards using object-focused constructions in the majority of individual speakers of English. Only eight out of the 24 English participants (directors) did not display a clear preference for the use

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of object-focused constructions, and half of the English participants made exclusive use of object-focused constructions, i.e. generalized this construction type even to those referent scenes to which it is not readily applicable. In contrast, the (predicted) preference for the use of space-focused constructions is less strongly pronounced in individual speakers of German. Only five out of the 23 German participants (directors) consistently and exclusively made use of space-focused constructions (G-C). A cross-linguistic comparison of the distributions of speaker types in the participant groups reveals in addition that more German than English speakers fall into the category of Mixed Speakers in general, and of Mixed-Mixed Speakers in particular. This finding is in stark contrast to the assumption that space-focused constructions are universally applicable and constitute the default manner of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in German. Thus, the individual-speaker data do not comply with Hypothesis 1a, which predicts that (all) speakers of German habitually make preferred use of space-focused simple dimensional adverb constructions. Accordingly, these data also qualify the finding from the cross-linguistic analysis provided above; despite the fact that all speakers of German tested made use of space-focused constructions (G-C) on at least two occasions (which explains the overall high frequency of this construction type in the German dataset102) the number of speakers who did so consistently and exclusively remains behind expectation. Although they are highly frequent on group level, and thus on the level traditionally used as a basis for determining the degree of conventionalization of a construction type, highly space-focused constructions, still, do not seem to be very deeply entrenched in many speakers of German. At least, they obviously do not constitute the single, most deeply entrenched construction type with most speakers of German. That is, the seemingly high degree of conventionalization of using space-focused constructions indicated by the group-level analysis is not met by an equally high degree of entrenchment of using this construction type in all speakers of German tested. In consequence, the high overall, i.e. group-level, frequencies do not indicate a high degree of agreement between individual German speakers’ entrenched preferences for referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Interestingly, this does not account in the same way for the English dataset. Instead, the majority of speakers of English displayed a strong individual preference for using object-focused constructions. That is, with the English data,

|| 102 See Figure 31 and Table 9 above (pp. 199–200).

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individual speaker patterns largely complied with the overall group-level pattern of frequency distributions reported above. This suggests the following: in the English dataset the observed high degree of conventionalization of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in an object-focused manner co-occurs with a high degree of agreement in entrenched patterns between many of the speakers of English tested. Consequently, in contrast to speakers of German, the level of highly schematic General Level SCTs can be identified to constitute not only the level on which ways of construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are strongly conventionalized in English, but also the level on which they are strongly entrenched in many English speakers’ minds. At least as far as General Level SCTs are concerned, speakers of English thus behaved more consistently than speakers of German both as a group and as individuals. Taking into account that conventions can be defined via a high degree of similarity between individual speakers’ entrenched patterns of knowledge (see Section 5.4.1), it can, accordingly, be claimed that construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in an object-focused manner constitutes a stronger or at least more clearly defined convention in English than construing these scenes in a space-focused manner does in German. This interpretation and the data on which it is based seriously call into question Hypothesis 1c, which predicts that the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions should be higher in German than in English. This has considerable theoretical and methodological consequences. Firstly, as regards methodology, the findings just reported indicate that frequency distributions on a speech-community or group level may not constitute the best and most reliable indicators of the strength of a convention of using a particular construction or construction type. They thus underline the need to acknowledge that conventionalization is complexly interrelated with entrenchment (see Chapter 5). Secondly, they reveal conventionalization to be strongly sensitive to contextual factors, both internal/cognitive and, as will be demonstrated in even more detail in the following sections, also external/situational.

Summary and discussion In sum, and also taking into account the theoretical dimension, the findings reported and discussed so far can (preliminarily) be related to Hypotheses 1a–c in the following ways: (1) Hypothesis 1a (speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions) is supported by the finding that instances of object-focused constructions (G-A) constitute the most fre-

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quently used construction type in the English subcorpus, while instances of space-focused constructions (G-C) constitute the most frequently used construction type in the German subcorpus. However, this supportive conclusion has to be qualified for the German dataset because dimensional adverb constructions only constitute the construction type that was used most frequently for referring to scenes with uncornered and unbounded ROs, but not for referring to scenes with cornered ROs. Instead, scenes of the second type were referred to about equally frequently by use of space-focused (G-C) and object-focused (G-A) constructions. This might suggest that there exist several context-dependent subconventions within the German speech community. An analysis of individual speaker patterns revealed that the number of speakers of German who made exclusive use of space-focused constructions is lower than expected. This was interpreted as being in stark contrast with the assumption that speakers of German would generally and contextindependently make use of space-focused constructions (G-C) because these constructions are most broadly applicable. This finding can therefore be interpreted as calling into question the very theoretical basis of Hypothesis 1a. In sum, the findings reported so far suggest the following: strong tendencies in support of Hypothesis 1a could be identified to exist on a global level. However, a more differential view on patterns of conventionalization and entrenchment under consideration of variation within the two language-specific speaker groups compared indicates that it is not possible to draw very definite conclusions from overall frequencies. Instead, these findings indicate that Hypothesis 1a might be based on too simple a notion of conventionalization. (2) Hypothesis 1b (speakers of English are more strongly influenced in their construal selection decisions by external contextual factors than speakers of German) did not meet with clear support either. Instead, many of the German-speaking participants resorted to using object-focused constructions (G-A) when referring to scenes with cornered ROs and thus very likely were influenced by variation in RO-shape features. In addition, quite a number of the German-speaking participants displayed a preference for using constructions from the extreme ends of the scale, depending on whether they referred to cornered or uncornered scenes. This might even indicate that these speakers differentiated between scene types in a more categorical manner than (most of) the English-speaking participants, who could be observed to only gradually reduce the use of object-focused constructions

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(G-A) with decreasing corneredness of the target scenes, but who did not categorically switch to the use of different construction types. (3) Hypothesis 1c (the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is higher in German than in English) could not be unambiguously confirmed by the findings presented in this section either. Instead, the evidence provided is rather mixed: the higher overall frequency of uses of midrange/mixed constructions (G-B) in the English subcorpus is interpreted here as pointing towards a low degree of interindividual agreement between speakers of English. On this interpretation, this finding thus accords well with Hypothesis 1c. However, in contrast to this, an analysis of entrenched preference patterns under consideration of RO-shape types revealed that the great majority of the speakers of English tested displayed a clear preference for using object-focused constructions, whereas a comparably high degree of inter-speaker agreement on the use of space-focused constructions (or any other construction type) could not be identified to exist between the German-speaking participants. This indicates that the English-speaking participants actually agreed more strongly among each other than the German-speaking participants. A definite interpretation of this finding with respect to Hypothesis 1c therefore requires a more detailed investigation of the (inter)relations between external and internal contextual effects. Such an investigation will be provided in the following Section 7.2.5. In sum, the analysis based on General Level SCTs presented in this subsection has yielded different and partly conflicting findings depending on which factor – language, RO-shape or individual speakers – was focused on. This has a range of methodological implications: firstly, it seriously calls into question the validity of simple speech-community or group-based frequencies of use as indicators of degrees of conventionalization of a particular construction. Secondly, and partly as a consequence of this, it suggests that a thorough investigating of degrees and patterns of entrenchment and/or conventionalization necessarily requires that the data be analysed in a highly differential manner, both as regards levels of language representation and as regards contexts of language use. In particular this second implication finds further support by the patterns of distribution revealed for the more specific construction types (Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs), which will be presented and discussed in the following. What this discussion will reveal in addition is that cross-linguistic differences in construction repertoires and use might have different possible

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causes and therefore require to be interpreted with caution. Firstly, they might indeed indicate a categorical, systematic cross-linguistic difference, i.e. reflect general convention-based differences between German and English. Secondly, however, what appears to be such categorical differences might also actually only be a result of differences in frequencies of use of constructions in combination with the limited size of the corpus. As will be shown, this accounts in particular for constructions which are, overall, used rather rarely. The structuring of the following sections into a comparison of repertoires of construction types in the next subsection and a comparison of their frequencies of use in Section 7.2.5 explains from these considerations. It is not intended to indicate (a) that the repertoires of constructions available to speakers of German and English are comprehensively captured by the present study, and (b) that knowledge/repertoires and usage of constructions are understood to be clearly separable (see also Chapter 5).

Analysis 1A-2: Repertoires of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs As explained above, and as illustrated in Table 8 (pp. 195–198), Intermediate Level SCTs (I) and Specific Level SCTs (S) are more specific subtypes of the General Level SCTs (G) just discussed. Accordingly, a range of additional features to the feature of word-class category membership of the dimensional terms were taken into account for their definition. These features differ considerably between object-focused (G-A), mid-range/mixed (G-B) and space-focused (G-C) constructions, because dimensional adjectives and nouns (as indicators of G-A class membership) behave very differently syntagmatically than adverbs (which indicate G-C class membership). Therefore, the different subtypes of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs will be described separately for each General Level SCT in the following sections. Within this scope, the ranges of different construction types from which the German and English participants in Experiment 1 drew will be outlined, and cross-linguistic differences with respect to these ranges will be discussed. Since most instances of mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) combined elements typical of object-focused (G-A) or space-focused (G-C) constructions (see Table 8 on pp. 195–198), the findings for mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) will be presented subsequent to those for object-focused (G-A) and space-focused (G-C) constructions. As indicated above, the repertoire of constructions used by the participants also included a range of constructional variants. Since those can best be defined

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and classified on the basis of how they differ from prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)constructions, the presentation of subtypes for each General Level SCT proceeds from prototypical to variant structures.

Types of object-focused constructions (G-A) When defining the more specific subtypes to the General Level class of objectfocused constructions (G-A), the focus of attention was extended from the wordclass category of the dimensional terms only to the whole prepositional phrases in which the dimensional adjectives and/or nouns were contained, i.e. to constructions of the type in the front right-hand corner. Two components of these prepositional phrases proved particularly central to subtype definition. These are, firstly, the type of RO-referring part-denoting noun (RO-PARTN) they contain and, secondly, the (kind of) topological preposition by which they are headed. In line with what has been discussed in Chapter 3, the uses of different partdenoting nouns were evaluated as follows: DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions which contain a highly object-specific SPEC-RO-PARTN, i.e. a noun which refers to a natural part of the RO and thus assigns a high degree of attention to boundaryand shape-features of the RO, are classified as realizing a more strongly objectfocused construal of their referent scenes than constructions which contain a very general, more unspecific GEN-RO-PARTN like, for instance, side. Constructions containing simple dimensional nouns (DIM-Ns) like (the) left are classified as those G-A constructions with the least highly object-focused construal meanings. Accordingly, utterances containing a noun referring to a specific/natural part (example (37a)) were classified as instances of I-1 (adjective-plus-SPECPARTN constructions), utterances containing a general part-denoting noun (example (37b)) as instances of I-2 (adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions) and utterances with a simple dimensional noun (example (37c)) as instances of I-3 (adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions). (37) a. A bottle of wine in a blue box in the bottom left-hand corner. Die Weinflasche steht in dem Karton in der linken the wine-bottle-LO stands in-TOP-P the box-RO in-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ unteren Ecke. bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN

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(37) b. A candle placed on the left back side of the plate on it not behind it. Eine blaue Box mit einer Weinflasche in der linken a blue box-RO with a wine-bottle-LO in-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ unteren Hälfte der Box. bottom-DIM-ADJ half-GEN-PARTN of-the box-RO Ein Stuhl mit einer Schale auf der rechten a chair-RO with a bowl-LO on-TOP-P the right-DIM-ADJ Seite. oberen top-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN c. It’s a box with a wine bottle in it at the bottom left of the box. Within the resulting classes I-1 to I-3, a further subdifferentiation was made depending on the kind of unit to which the nouns refer. The nouns in I-1 constructions can, for instance, either refer to a point-like boundary feature of the RO (S-11, e.g. in the front right-hand corner), to a two-dimensional, line-like feature (S-12, e.g. am unteren rechten Bildrand ‘at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE the bottomDIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ edge-of-the-picture-SPEC-PARTN’), or to a three-dimensional section or chunk (S-13, e.g. im unteren rechten Bildausschnitt ‘in the bottomDIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ picture section-SPEC-PARTN’) (see Table 8 on pp. 195–198 for the Specific Level subtypes to I-2 and I-3). The rationale behind this differentiation is that degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings can be assumed to be highest with the first type (S-11) and lowest with the third type (S-13), since this type assigns the least prominence to the contours and thus the boundary of the RO (see Chapter 3). Based on this system, example (38a) constitutes an instance of S-11 and realizes a more strongly object-focused construal meaning than example (38b), which is an instance of S-13: (38) a. Ein Schwan auf der Wiese … in der rechten a swan-LO on-TOP-P the meadow-RO … in-TOP-P the right-DIM-ADJ unteren Ecke. bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN b. Der Schwan ist aufm Feld … im unteren the swan-LO is on-TOP-P-the field-RO … in-TOP-P-the bottom-DIM-ADJ Bildausschnitt. rechten right-DIM-ADJ picture-section-GEN-PARTN The considerations that led to this subdifferentiation also constitute the basis on which the different topological prepositions introducing these phrases were

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classified as instantiating different degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings within G-A. Prepositional phrases like in the front right-hand corner usually do not define which kind of general topological relation holds between the RO and the LO.103 Instead, they define which kind of relation holds between the LO and the referent of the RO-PARTN. In doing so, they often contribute to specifying the meaning of vague RO-PARTNs. With nouns like side/Seite, for instance, they can identify the respective noun as referring to a line-like boundary of the RO (as in example (39a)) or to a chunk of the RO (as in example (39b)): (39) a. It’s a blue box with a bottle … at the front left-hand side of the box. Es ist das Keramikding … mit der Orange an it is the ceramic-thing-RO … with the orange-LO at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE rechten Seite von der Schale. der vorderen the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN of the bowl-RO b. A table with a cup in the right-hand top side. It’s on the table. Die Tomate liegt auf der unteren linken the tomato-LO lies on/P-SURFACE SPACE the bottom-DIM-ADJ left-DIM-ADJ Seite des Salatblattes aber auf dem Salatblatt. side-GEN-PARTN of-the lettuce-leaf-RO but on-TOP-P the lettuce-leaf-RO It is assumed here that the use of an/at in example (39a) has as an effect that side/Seite refers to the RO-boundary (see also Chapter 3). Therefore, the utterances in this example construe their referent scenes with a slightly higher degree of object-focusedness than the structurally very similar utterances in example (39b); the use of auf/in suggests that they can be interpreted as referring to an extended three-dimensional chunk of the RO rather than to (a subsection of) its boundary. In sum, all prototypical instances of G-A constructions could be subclassified in a systematic and graded manner on the basis of the features and criteria

|| 103 The semantic status of the topological prepositions in these phrases is not fully clear. This is due to the fact that object-knowledge plays a central role in defining whether or not these prepositions contribute to indicating the general topological position of the LO relative to the RO. To give an example, a construction like in the corner of the box can hardly be interpreted differently than as meaning ‘inside the box’.

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introduced so far. The resulting set of Intermediate Level and Specific Level constructions is subsumed in Table 8 above (pp. 195–198).104 One further factor of variation, the presence versus absence of an of-phrase as a postmodifier to a SPEC/GEN-RO-PARTN or a DIM-N (examples (40a–b)), did not, however, result in the formation of additional subclasses. This is because this optional feature occurred across instances of almost all classes. (40) a. Eine blaue Box mit einer Weinflasche in der linken a blue box-RO with a wine-bottle-LO in-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ unteren Hälfte der Box. bottom-DIM-ADJ half-GEN-PARTN of-the box-RO b. It’s a box with a wine bottle in it at the bottom left of the box. It is assumed here that the use of an additional RO-denoting phrase shifts construal meanings more towards the object-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. It does so because it explicitly refers to the RO and, consequently, draws attention to it as well as, indirectly, to its boundedness. In particular if combined with rather general part-denoting nouns (example (40a)) or with dimensional nouns (example (40b)), these of-phrases thus considerably reduce the relatively object-detached effect associated with the use of these noun types. The fact that this effect could not be included in the SCT-system for the reasons just provided is compensated for by its inclusion in the definition and calculation of ODVs. It is therefore accounted for by the ODV-based statistical models at the core of Analysis 1B (see Section 7.2.5).

Constructional variants Among the constructional variants to prototypical object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)constructions, a differentiation can be made between two general types: – partial variants, which still contain some spatial terms – metaphorical variants, which completely differ in form from prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions.

|| 104 Among the resulting subtypes, S-24 (e.g. on the right-hand side at the back) constitutes a special case insofar as it combines an element from I-2 (adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions) and an element from I-3 (adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions). SCT S-24 thus constitutes a construction type at the threshold between I-2 and I-3. It is counted here among the adjectiveplus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2) on the basis of the fact that its I-2 element precedes the I-3 element.

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The instances of partial variants that occurred in the data from Experiment 1 were mainly instances of partial DIM-variants. That is, they differed from the observed non-variant structures in that they expressed the information provided in the form of dimensional spatial terms in prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions by use of alternative, but functionally largely equivalent structures. In contrast to this, clear cases of partial TOP-variants, i.e. of utterances in which a functionally fully equivalent structure to topological terms was provided, did not occur in the data from Experiment 1, although the (nature of the) topological relation between LO and RO could be inferred from linguistic context on several instances in which the topological information unit was formally missing. This was made possible, for instance, by the use of relation-indicating verbs (example (41a)) or of containment-indicating prepositions as heads of the dimensional term phrases, often in combination with an RO-denoting of-phrase (example (41b)). (41) a. Lettuce leaf with a tomato balanced on the bottom left of that leaf. It’s got the cup in the top right-hand corner of it. Eine blaue Kiste, die eine Weinflasche in der linken a blue box-RO which a wine-bottle-LO in the left-DIM-ADJ Ecke hat. unteren bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN has-V-POSS b. Eine blaue Box mit einer Weinflasche in der linken wine-bottle-LO in-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ a blue box-RO with a unteren Hälfte der Box. bottom-DIM-ADJ half-GEN-PARTN of-the box-RO These structures, however, may not generally be considered to be functionally fully equivalent to topological information units. They mostly worked with the items in Experiment 1 because the directors always had to indicate that the relation to be identified is one of contact and not of proximity. However, they are unlikely to work for differentiating, for instance, a support relation from a containment relation. Taking this into account, utterances of the type illustrated in examples (41a) and (41b) were not included in the set of partial variants. This strategy seems particularly justified given that structures of this type were not equally accepted as fully precise by all matchers, but triggered requests for more precise information on several occasions (e.g. example (42)).

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(42)

D: The dish thing … and the orange is right in the right hand-side corner of it. M: in the dish? D: yea, in the dish.

Taking this into account, the following discussion focuses on partial DIMvariants only. With these variant structures, two subtypes occurred in the data: LOvariants, which draw on LO-specific information to specify the position of the LO, and distance variants with which this function is realized by use of distancedenoting terms like near or far. LO-variants occurred only very rarely in the data from Experiment 1. In fact, only one precise instance of such a structure was observed. This instance is provided in example (43). (43)

Eine Flasche Wein im blauen Karton ähm dessen Etikett man a bottle-of wine-LO in-the blue box-RO erm whose label you der linken Seite. nicht mehr sehen kann … auf no longer see can … on-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN ‘A bottle of wine in the blue box whose label can no longer be seen … on the left side.’

As can be seen from this example, with LO-variants the function fulfilled by sagittal dimensional terms (front, back) in prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is realized by information on the degree of visibility of the LO. This was possible with item T1 (bottle in box), because, naturally, more of the label of the wine bottle was visible when the bottle was in one of the back corners of the box than when it was in one of the front corners. Since they explicitly draw on LOinformation, and therefore on object-specific information (other than LOlocation), constructions of this type were classified as realizing a relatively highly object-focused construal of their referent scenes. Accordingly, they were classified as construction type S-101. In contrast to LO-variants, distance variants were used more frequently. The sentence in example (44) constitutes an instance of this construction type. (44)

The bottle of wine is in the near left corner of the blue box.

Such distance variants are classified as S-111 constructions (see Table 8 on pp. 195–198). This label was devised based on the fact that they are usually parallel

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in structure to prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (S-11/adjective-plus-SPECPARTN constructions of the type in the front right-hand corner) except that they contain an adjective which denotes distance from the observer (near, far) instead of a sagittal or vertical dimensional adjective (front, back, top, bottom). Since, with distance variants, distance always means distance from the speaker and/or hearer, i.e. from the observer(s) of the scene, these constructions can be interpreted as foregrounding the observer in general, and his or her possible function as (an additional) RO in particular, more strongly than prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. In the case of S-111 constructions, the observer is, however, not referred to explicitly. Nevertheless, the speaker is still more prominent and thus construed in a more objective mode (e.g. Langacker 1987: 128–132, 2008: 77–78) than is the case with S-11 (in the front right corner) constructions (see also Section 2.3, pp. 21–22). As will be discussed below on the example of constructional variants included in the class of mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B), this marks S-111 constructions as different from other types of distance variants. Based on this interpretation of distance variants as observer-focusing constructions, the construal meanings specific to this type of constructional variant cross-cut the differentiation between object-focused and space-focused construal patterns. Therefore, the degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings realized by these constructions are difficult to define. In keeping with the working strategy pursued with respect to the aspect of addressee-orientation with dimension-replacive structures (see pp. 185–186 above), distance variants are interpreted here as comparable in degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings to the prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions they resemble the most (see also Section 7.2.5). While the classification criteria used for instances of prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions could at least partly be applied for classifying instances of partial variants, this was not possible with metaphorical variants. Metaphorical variants use different structural schemas than the system of dimensional axes to impose structure on spatial scenes. As the label for these variants already indicates, how these structures are arrived at can best be modelled in terms of metaphorical mapping:105 structured entities (as source

|| 105 This account of the conceptual metaphor behind the use of metaphorical variants in terms of mapping, i.e. in terms of “understanding the target in terms of the source” (Lakoff 2008: 31), is used here for reasons of simplicity and clear illustration of the meaning of metaphorical variants. I am aware that this traditional approach to conceptual metaphors glosses over a range of complexities inherent in the use and processing of figurative language, as they have,

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domains) are metaphorically mapped onto the ROs or the referent scenes as wholes (target domains) (cf. e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004: 194–204; Lakoff 2008: 30; Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 114–162). Metaphorical variants thus make use of an object-type specific referent system instead of one of the Frame of Reference-systems which underlie the use of dimensional terms (see Section 3.2.2), and structure the RO and/or the entire scene accordingly. As can be seen from examples (45a) to (45c), the systems and source domains used by the participants in Experiment 1 were either the face of a clock (examples (45a) and (45b), clock-face variant), or a compass or compass card (example (45c), compass (card) variant). (45) a. The candle is at about eleven o’clock on the plate. dem Teller ist das Teelicht wenn man im Uhrzeigersinn b. Auf on-TOP-P the plate-RO is the tealight-LO if you clockwise geht ungefähr auf Nummer zehn. go about at number ten ‘If you go clockwise, the tealight is at about 10 o’clock on the plate.’ c. A candle on a plate and it’s in the sort of north-west direction of the plate but it’s sitting on the plate. In line with the principle that metaphors are usually based on a relation of similarity between source domain (source object) and target domain (target object) (cf. e.g. Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 115), instances of metaphorical variants occurred with a restricted set of target items only. In keeping with the usually round shape of a clock’s face, clock-face variants were only used as a means of referring to target scenes with round ROs. Compass (card) variants were used somewhat more flexibly, i.e. were used with ROs of different shapes like the round plate in T6 and the odd-shaped, fuzzily bounded puddle in T7. An explanation for this might be that the compass (card) system, which mimics the absolute system of cardinal directions,106 is not projected onto the RO only. In-

|| for instance, been exemplified by blending theory approaches to figurative language (cf. e.g. Fauconnier and Turner 2008; see also Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003: 252–264). 106 The use of directional terms referring to the geo-cardinal points North, South, East and West as parts of compass (card) variants is not to be (mis)interpreted as an instance of the use of an absolute Frame of Reference as defined by Levinson (2003; see Section 3.2.2). Instead, uses of compass (card) variants draw on the convention that, on a map, north is up.

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stead, it rather maps onto the whole referent scene or picture, just as compass card directions are projected onto a map as a whole. Very likely because they are based on markedly different manners of scene structuring than prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions and partial variants, metaphorical variants also enjoyed a particular status with respect to their use in interaction in Experiment 1. More than any other construction type, directors’ uses of metaphorical variants provoked irritated reactions on the side of the matchers and thus needed to be explained or commented on by the respective directors. Example (46) illustrates such an instance: (46)

D: Ok, das Teelicht liegt ähm naja, wenn das ne Uhr wär würds D: ok the tealight-LO lies erm well if this a clock was would-it auf neun Uhr liegen. Neun Uhr da wo der Stundenzeiger on nine o’clock lie. nine o’clock there where the hour-hand wär. would-be M: Auf neun Uhr ach so ja mhm. M: at nine o’clock well so yes mhm D: genau {pause, 1.22 s} D: exactly {pause, 1.22 s} M: Moment jetzt hab ich au- un- es liegt auf dem – M: just-a-moment now got I o- un- it lies on the – D: Sozusagen es wär auf dem Studenzeiger wenn er auf neun D: as-it-were it would-be on the hour-hand if it at nine Uhr liegen würde. o’clock lie would ‘D: Ok, the tealight is erm well, if this was a clock it would be at nine o’clock. Nine o’clock where the hour hand would be. M: At nine o’clock well yes erm D: exactly {pause, 1.22 s} M: Wait now I got it on u- it is on the – D: As it were it would be on the hour hand if this was at nine o’clock.’

Such instances of meaning negotiation occurred in both the German and the English datasets. They are interpreted here as indicating that metaphorical variants do not constitute a highly conventionalized construction type in either of these two languages. This can be seen further confirmed by instances in which the directors, by themselves, provided these constructions together with an explanation (ex-

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ample (47a)), or complemented their presumably preferred metaphorical variant construction choice with the additional use of a prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)construction (example (47b)): (47) a. Der Apfel liegt … da nehm ma wieder die Uhrzeit, er würde, the apple-LO lies … let’s take again the clock-time it would wenn sozusagen die Unterfläche vom Korb ne Uhr wär, as-it-were the bottom-surface of-the basket-RO a clock was, if würde er auf ein Uhr liegen … im Korb drin would it at one o’clock lie … in-the basket-RO there-in-TOP-P-ADV auf ein Uhr. at one o’clock ‘The apple is … let’s take the clock time again, it would be, if, as it were, the bottom of the basket was a clock, it would be at one o’clock … inside the basket at one o’clock.’ b. In the puddle the leaf is positioned sort of north-west it’s like to the top and then to the left. Such instances very likely indicate that the directors anticipated possible comprehension problems and used meta-statements to prevent them. On more general grounds, the instances of use of metaphorical variants illustrated in examples (46) and (47a–b) indicate that these structures are, on the one hand, only weakly conventionalized in both the German and the English speech communities, but, on the other hand, still seem to constitute the preferred way of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in some speakers. Metaphorical variants are thus another example illustrating that patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge in individuals and speech-community wide patterns of conventionalization can diverge. Furthermore, meta-statements as in examples (47a) and (47b) might indicate that the directors were aware of the fact that the construction type that comes first to their minds (i.e. presumably the most deeply entrenched one) does not necessarily have to be (equally) familiar to their interlocutors. From a more global point of view, this might indicate that speakers are (at least unconsciously) aware of possible differences between individual patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge and/or of the possible divergence of their individual linguistic habits from the conventions prevalent in their speech communities (see e.g. Taylor 2012: 178). The two subtypes of metaphorical variants, the clock-face and the compass (card) variant, were classified as instances of S-201 (metaphorical clock-face

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variant) and S-202 (metaphorical compass (card) variant). As indicated by these labels, and as can be seen from their position in Table 8 (pp. 195–198), metaphorical variants were thus interpreted as construing their referent scenes in a relatively highly object-focused manner.107 This classification decision is based on the following considerations: metaphorical variants emerge from the process of metaphorical object-to-object mapping. This entails that selecting a suitable source concept to fit the target concept requires that similarities between these two object concepts be identified. It is assumed here that this process of similarity identification involves the assignment of a high degree of attention to the RO as the target concept. In the present framework, this corresponds to (or at least comes very close to) the running of an object-focused strategy of referent scene conceptualization. An exact evaluation of the degrees of object-focusedness with which the metaphorical variants construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, however, still awaits separate empirical investigation.

Cross-linguistic differences As can be seen from Table 8 (pp. 195–198), the size and variety of repertoires of object-focused constructions (G-A) differ markedly between the German and the English subcorpora from Experiment 1: instances of S-111 (in the near left corner), S-24 (on the right-hand side at the back), S-31 (at the top right), S-32 (on the bottom left) and S-202 (metaphorical compass (card) variant) only occurred in the English subcorpus, instances of S-12 (am unteren rechten Bildrand ‘at the bottom-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ edge-of-the-picture-SPEC-PARTN’) and S-13 (im unteren rechten Bildausschnitt ‘in the bottom-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ picture-section-SPECPARTN’) and S-101 (LO-variant) only occurred in the German subcorpus. As already indicated above, these findings are open to different explanations. In some cases, the non-occurrence of a particular construction type in one of the two language-specific subcorpora can rather clearly be related back to the differences between the conventionalized English and German repertoires of spatial terms reported in Chapter 3. This is highly likely the case for S-24 (on the right-hand side at the back), S-31 (at the top right) and S-32 (on the bottom left): all these constructions contain simple dimensional nouns ((the) front, (the)

|| 107 As illustrated above, the scope of application of clock-face variant constructions is restricted to round ROs, and is thus even more clearly defined by object-features than the use of compass (card) variants. Accordingly, metaphorical variants of the clock-face type were classified as more strongly object-focused (S-201) than metaphorical variants of the compass (card) type (S-202).

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back, (the) left, (the) right, (the) top, (the) bottom). Since these terms are, according to the literature, not part of the German repertoire of spatial terms (see Section 3.3.2), it is not surprising that the Specific Level SCTs (S) just listed only occurred in the English subset of utterances elicited within the scope of Experiment 1. What is remarkable in this context is that those German spatial terms which are usually reported to come closest in meaning and function to the English simple nouns, the compounds die Vorderseite, die Rückseite, die Oberseite and die Unterseite (‘the front-side-DIM-CPD-N’, ‘the back-side-DIM-CPD-N’, ‘the top-sideDIM-CPD-N’, ‘the bottom-side-DIM-CPD-N’; see Section 3.3.2), were not used at all by any of the German participants in Experiment 1. This might indicate the following: even if one accepts the claim that the German compound nouns are largely comparable in meaning (and even construal meaning) to the English simple dimensional nouns, they are clearly not comparable to them with respect to their degree of conventionalization (see also the frequency data in Section 7.2.5, Figure 35 and Table 16 on p. 255). This once more underlines that such differences between the German and English subcorpora may not exclusively and not even mainly be interpreted as the effect of structural systematic differences between the languages compared. Instead, it indicates very clearly that differences in repertoires cannot usefully be differentiated from differences in use. This usage-based principle (that drawing a strict dividing line between structure and usage is hardly possible, let alone useful; see also Chapter 5) becomes even more obvious from the following finding: as indicated in Table 8 (p. 196), S-111 constructions, i.e. object-focused distance variants (in the near left corner), were only used by English-speaking participants but not by Germanspeaking participants in Experiment 1. However, examples (48a) and (48b) from the German subcorpus show that the non-use of distance concepts for indicating LO-locations in German is by far not the reflection of insurmountable restrictions to such uses and, thus, of categorical differences between German and English: although they did so in cotexts different from those typical of uses of S-111 constructions, some German participants still did indicate the location of the LO by the use of distance terms (example (48a)) or by the use of hearerrelative terms (example (48b)). (48) a. D: Die Tasse befindet sich auf dem Tisch rechts D: the cup-LO is-located itself on the table-RO right-DIM-S-ADV oben in der Ecke. top-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P the corner-SPEC-PARTN

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M: Ist die Ecke nah bei mir? M: is the corner-SPEC-PARTN near by me? D: Hinten. D: back-DIM-S-ADV ‘D: The cup is on the table towards the right top corner. ‘M: Is the corner close to me? ‘D: It’s towards the back.’ b. D: Also Flasche is drin und zwar links D: well bottle-LO is there-in-TOP-P-ADV namely left-DIM-S-ADV im unteren Eck, in-TOP-P-the bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN {signs of hesitation on the side of the matcher} also an dir dran that-is at/P-BOUNDARY SPACE you there-at/P-ADV-BOUNDARY SPACE links. left-DIM-S-ADV M: mhm danke. M: mhm thanks ‘D: Well the bottle is inside and it is towards the left in the bottom corner {signs of hesitation on the side of the matcher}, that is, it is close to you towards the left. ‘M: Mhm thanks.’ This clearly identifies the non-use of object-focused distance variant constructions (S-111) in German as a matter of usage conventions rather than of categorical structural restrictions. This, again, indicates that the non-occurrence of a particular construction type in one of the two language-specific corpora does not necessarily indicate that this construction type does not exist at all in one of the two languages. Instead, it may only be interpreted as indicating that this structure is very likely not conventionalized strongly enough in the respective speech community to occur in the dataset collected. This has the following methodological consequences: firstly, and rather generally, it indicates that a highly differential, multi-level analysis is required for alleged cross-linguistic differences in repertoires of constructions, like the presence versus the absence of simple dimensional nouns in English as compared to German, to be interpreted properly. Secondly, it suggests that the (relative) frequencies and contextual conditions of use of particular constructions are more informative also from a contrastive point of view than absolute differ-

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ences, i.e. the occurrence of particular constructions in one of the two languages investigated and their non-occurrence in the other. The following discussion of the different types of space-focused constructions (G-C) and mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) demonstrates the more general validity of these considerations. What it will show in addition is that a direct cross-linguistic comparison in terms of frequency distributions proves difficult with subtypes to these two General Level SCTs (G) because the sets of subtypes that have been used by speakers of German and English hardly overlap at all. For this reason, no frequency distribution data will be provided together with the description of the different construction types in this and the following sections. Instead, as indicated above, frequency distribution data for the whole set of specific constructions (i.e. subtypes to G-A, G-B and G-C) will be provided and discussed in combination with a presentation of the findings from Analysis 1B in Section 7.2.5. Analysis 1B is based on OVDs and thus applies on a relatively highly schematic level of construction representation. It therefore provides a picture of language-specific patterns of conventionalization relative to which cross-linguistic differences on the specific levels of representation and language use covered by Intermediate Level SCTs (I) and Specific Level SCTs (S) can be contextualized, and can be interpreted in an adequate manner.

Types of space-focused constructions (G-C) As indicated in Section 2.2, the differentiation between space-focused and object-focused construal meanings constitutes a matter of degree. The same, accordingly, also accounts for the differentiation between object-focused (G-A) and space-focused (G-C) linguistic constructions. The main criterion used here for drawing a provisional line between those classes of constructions is the following: to be categorized as (an instance of) a space-focused construction (i.e. as belonging to class G-C), a DIMDIM(TOP)-expression has to contain at least one morpheme or lexeme which can be classified as attracting attention to (features of) ‘empty’ space. In line with what has been discussed in Chapter 3, two types of structures fulfil these conditions: firstly, dynamic spatial prepositions (to and towards; see Section 3.3.2) and other lexemes which draw attention to movement in space; and, secondly, ‘true’ simple dimensional adverbs (e.g. vorne, rechts; see Section 3.3.3). The occurrence of the first type of structures identifies an utterance as belonging to the Intermediate Level SCT I-6 (fictive motion constructions), the occurrence of the second type marks it as belonging to the Intermediate Level SCT I-7 (simple dimensional adverb constructions).

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Since fictive motion constructions (I-6) and simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) display very different formal features, their subtypes will, in the following, be presented and discussed separately. The class of fictive motion constructions (I-6) comprises all those DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in which dynamic concepts are evoked, i.e. which make use of fictive motion as a means of static localization. In this way, structures of this type assign a relatively high degree of cognitive salience to the denoted path of (fictive) motion through space, and eventually to the dimensional axes and to the regions of space that surround them (see Section 3.3). What illustrates this focus on the path particularly clearly is that different types of paths can be differentiated with fictive motion constructions (I-6). This can be seen from examples (49a) and (49b): with example (49a), the path is construed sequentially, as movement along the vertical axis first and then with a change of directional orientation and movement along the lateral axis. Example (49b), by contrast, construes the path of motion additively, i.e. simulates (gaze) movement along a diagonal axis that is located in between the two axes denoted by each of the combined spatial dimensional terms. (49) a. In the puddle the leaf … is … like to the top and then to the left. b. A lettuce leaf with a tomato on it towards the bottom left of the leaf. As indicated by these examples, split constructions, i.e. constructions in which dimensional information is provided in the form of two separate phrases, tend to imply sequential access paths, integrated one-phrase constructions additive access paths. The exact implications of this difference for determining degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings are still in need of empirical investigation. It is assumed here that the main difference between these construction types does not, however, pertain to this dimension of construal meaning at all, but consists in variation in terms of degrees of other-orientedness rather than objectfocusedness (see also Section 7.2.2). This assumption is based on the observation that split constructions might be more strongly other- or addressee-oriented, because they are easier to process in a step-by-step manner. This also suggests a second, complementary explanation of why speakers might make use of either a split or an integrated construction: differences in construction selection decisions might be associated with differences in whether or not speakers can access integrated constructions in the form of chunks. That is, the use of split constructions might be an indicator that a speaker pursues a more strongly incremental strategy of utterance planning and

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production. Since he or she might have simple dimensional constructions like to the top and to the left readily available for use, combining them might be less resource-consuming than preplanning an integrated construction which this speaker would have to produce in a more compositional manner (see Chapter 5). Although this issue cannot be investigated systematically on the basis of the data available, and must be left for future investigation, there are indications that some speakers routinely pursued a more incremental planning strategy for DIMDIM(TOP)-referential utterances: three among the English-speaking participants made exclusive (one speaker) or highly frequent (all but one utterance, two speakers) use of split constructions across all SCTs and stimuli. If viewed from this perspective, the variable use of either integrated or split constructions might indicate the existence of interindividual differences in the routines or strategies of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance planning and production, as well as the existence of related differences in patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge. This interpretation suggests itself particularly strongly given that split and integrated versions also occurred with a range of object-focused constructions (G-A), and are even the rule for mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B; see below). Being a processing-related aspect to a considerable extent, this issue cannot, however, be clarified on the basis of the data from Experiment 1. Processing-related issues (i.e. issues pertaining to utterance planning and production) will be taken up again in the discussion of the data from Experiment 2 (see Sections 8.4 and 8.5), which comprise on-line measures and thus enable more informed insights into the processing level of spatial-term use. Taking this into account, the difference between split and integrated constructions did not result in the formation of further subclasses to the class of fictive motion constructions (I-6). The same accounts for the provision versus non-provision of an additional RO-denoting of-phrase (example (50)), which was accounted for within the scope of Analysis 1B only. (50)

A yellow maple leaf and it’s in the puddle towards the top left of the puddle.

However, given the obvious parallels in form between adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1), adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2), adjective-plusDIM-N constructions (I-3) and fictive motion constructions (I-6; all provide spatial information in the form of dimensional adjectives and part-denoting nouns; see also above and Section 3.3.2), subclasses to the class of fictive motion constructions (I-6) were formed on the basis of the same criterion that led to the proposal of subclasses to its object-focused correspondents. Instances of fictive

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motion constructions (I-6) which refer to the RO by use of a part-denoting noun like side were classified as instances of S-61 constructions (example (51a)), and utterances which contain a simple dimensional noun like (the) left as instances of S-62 constructions (example (51b)). Uses of natural part-denoting nouns like corner did not occur with these constructions in the data from Experiment 1. Therefore, only two different Specific Level SCTs to fictive motion constructions (I-6) could be identified to exist. (51) a. The leaf is inside the puddle to the top left-hand side of the puddle. b. The half tomato is to the bottom left of the lettuce leaf. As is already indicated by examples (51a) and (51b), instances of the nominal fictive motion constructions S-61 and S-62 only occurred in the English subcorpus (see also Table 8 on pp. 195–198). In the German subcorpus, a different type of construction which evoked fictive motion concepts was (occasionally) used. With this type, classified as S-63, dynamicity is introduced by the use of a direction-denoting noun (example (52)). (52)

Auf dem Bild hier hast du nen grünen Teller mit on the picture here-DEICT-ADV have you a green plate-RO with nem Teelicht Richtung links hinten auf dem a tealight-LO direction left-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-S-ADV on-TOP-P the Teller stehen. plate-RO stand ‘In the picture here you have a green plate with a tealight that is located in the left back direction on the table.’

Importantly, S-63 constructions contain dimensional adverbs in addition to the direction-denoting noun element. Other than the English S-61 (towards the righthand side) and S-62 (towards the top left) constructions, which are formally similar to object-focused constructions (G-A), the German S-63 constructions are thus rather close in form and also construal meanings to simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7).108

|| 108 This high similarity draws attention to a second aspect of the use of dynamic/directiondenoting constructions for reference to static arrangements. Since the dimensional adverbs used here already indicate that Search Space is unbounded, decreasing the degree of objectfocusedness and thus the scope of contextual applicability of DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions cannot

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As just indicated, the class of simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) comprises all those construction types in which adverbs are the only terms used for expressing dimensional spatial information. As discussed in detail in Section 3.3.3, dimensional adverbs do not refer to or draw on any features of the RO. As a consequence of this, they do not explicitly define any boundaries of Search Space. With simple dimensional adverb constructions, these boundaries can therefore only be (and usually are) defined by the way in which topological information is provided (see Section 3.3.3). Put into Cognitive Grammar terms, with simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) the topological information unit defines the scope for the interpretation of the adverb (e.g. Langacker 1990: 9). For this reason, the topological part was taken into account in the definition of subclasses to I-7. One subclass, S-70, was devised for expressions in which dimensional information is provided in the form of adverbs, i.e. is construed as a feature of space, but in which a natural/specific or general RO-PARTN is included as the head of an additional topological prepositional phrase (example (53)). (53)

Die Tasse befindet sich auf dem Tisch rechts the cup-LO is-located itself on-TOP-P the table-RO right-DIM-S-ADV oben in der Ecke. top-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P the corner-SPEC-PARTN Die Weinflasche steht in der Box links am the wine-bottle-LO stands in-TOP-P the box-RO left-DIM-S-ADV at-TOP-P-the Rand unten. edge-SPEC-PARTN bottom-DIM-S-ADV

As a consequence of this use of RO-PARTNs, S-70 constitutes the most strongly object-focused construction subtype among the simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7). Simple dimensional adverb constructions that do not contain RO-PARTNs were subclassified based on the following principled assumption: the later topological information is provided in an utterance, the longer Search Space remains unbounded. Accordingly, the later topological information is provided, the lower the degree of object-focusedness with which a construction construes

|| be the main, or at least not the only, function such expressions fulfil. Rather, on close consideration, the use of direction-denoting terms can be interpreted as resulting in an increase of the degree of observer-orientedness, and thus other-orientedness, of the constructions because fictive access paths might imitate the direction of the gaze of an observer searching for the LO.

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its referent scene. Based on this criterion, three subclasses were formed, which realize increasingly space-focused construals: S-71 (topological information initial; example (54a)), S-72 (topological information after projective information for one dimension; example (54b)) and S-73 (topological information final; example (54c)). (54) a. Die Weinflasche steht in der Box und zwar vorne the wine-bottle-LO stands in-TOP-P the box-RO namely front-DIM-S-ADV links. left-DIM-S-ADV in der Pfütze b. Es ist das Blatt, das … links it is the leaf-LO which … left-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P the puddle-RO oben liegt. top-DIM-S-ADV lies c. Die Tasse steht hinten rechts auf dem Tisch. the cup-LO stands back-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV on-TOP-P the table-RO Among the simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) identified by Experiment 1, S-73 constructions thus realize the least strongly object-focused construal meanings. Since simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) contain ‘true’ simple dimensional adverbs, it was expected that they would only occur in the German subcorpus. However, counter to this expectation, and counter to what can be found reported in the literature (see Sections 3.3.3 and 7.1), some utterances in the English subcorpus (e.g. examples (55a) and (55b)) can hardly be classified differently than as instances of S-71 (example (55a)) or S-73 (example (55b)) constructions, and thus as instances of simple dimensional adverb constructions. (55) a. It’s a swan on the field bottom right. b. Lettuce leaf with a tomato bottom left on it. This finding, of course, gives rise to a number of questions: (1) (To what extent) are uses of these structures indeed directly comparable to the German ‘true’ simple dimensional adverb constructions? (2) Are these structures perhaps only an artefact of the experiment, and as such not indicative of real-life speaker behaviour? (3) If (2) is not the case, what might be an alternative explanation for their occurrence?

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The first question will be discussed in the following for the two most central and most characteristic features of German ‘true’ adverb constructions: (a) ‘true’ simple dimensional adverbs can refer to space or spatial regions under disregard of RO-boundaries, and (b) readily combine with each other and with other kinds of spatial constructions (see Section 3.3.3). As regards the first feature, the English constructions in examples (55a) and (55b) indeed appear to be direct equivalents to the German simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7). As indicated by example (55a), the English structures can be used to define the location of the LO relative to an unbounded RO (the field in T8); similarly, with example (55b), it is quite probably only the topological phrase (on it) which draws attention to the boundaries of the RO. However, the English (alleged) simple dimensional adverb/I-7 constructions display a clearly different syntactic/combinatorial behaviour from (prototypical) German instances of these constructions: the two spatial dimensional terms in the English examples can neither be split into subphrases (example (56a)), nor can they be modified by way of reduction/elimination (example (56b)) or extension (example (56c)). In addition, the order of occurrence of the two dimensional terms and the kinds of dimensional axes which can be referred to in this way seem to be highly fixed (example (56d)). (56) a. E. *The swan is bottom on the field right. *The swan is right bottom on the field. *Bottom is the swan right on the field.109 G. Der Schwan ist unten auf dem Feld rechts. the swan-LO is bottom-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO right-DIM-S-ADV Der Schwan ist rechts unten auf dem Feld. the swan-LO is right-DIM-S-ADV bottom-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO Unten ist der Schwan rechts auf dem Feld. bottom-DIM-S-ADV is the swan-LO right-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO b. E. *The swan is bottom on the field. *The swan is right on the field. auf dem Feld. G. Der Schwan ist unten the swan-LO is bottom-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO Der Schwan ist rechts auf dem Feld. the swan-LO is right-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO

|| 109 The unacceptability of some of these sentences is, in addition, caused or further enhanced by contrasts between English and German general word-order regulations (cf. e.g. König 1992: 150; König and Gast 2012: 130–131).

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c. E. *The swan is bottom very (far) right on the field. ganz (weit) rechts auf G. Der Schwan ist unten the swan-LO is bottom-DIM-S-ADV very (far) right-DIM-S-ADV on dem Feld. the field-RO d. E. *The swan is right top on the field. ? The swan is front right on the field. oben auf dem Feld. G. Der Schwan ist rechts the swan-LO is right-DIM-S-ADV top-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO Der Schwan ist vorne rechts auf dem Feld. the swan-LO is front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV on the field-RO A comparison of the German and English structures in examples (56a) to (56d) indicates that the observed English dimensional adverb(-like) constructions very likely constitute relatively specific chunks rather than free combinations of two adverbs (see also Section 5.2.2). That is, these constructions might have become activated in the form of highly specific constructions in those few English-speaking participants who made use of them. A further discussion of this observation and possible interpretation only makes sense, however, if utterances of the type illustrated by examples (55a–b) are highly likely not artefacts of the experimental situation, i.e. elliptical utterances produced under time pressure (see question (2) above). Although it cannot be fully excluded, several aspects speak against this option. Firstly, none of the English-speaking participants who uttered (alleged) simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) used strongly elliptical structures with those pictures to which they referred by use of other construction types. Accordingly, the time pressure imposed on the participants (directors) cannot fully explain the occurrence of utterances like the ones in examples (55a) and (55b). The same accounts for the situational context created by the experiment more generally. Secondly, the use of dimensional adverb(-like) constructions by English-speaking directors did not trigger any reactions in any of the English-speaking matchers which might be interpreted as signs of surprise, irritation or confusion. Thirdly, when asked about the acceptability of these structures subsequent to the experiment, those director-matcher pairs who had made use of these constructions in the course of the experiment, and most director-matcher pairs who had not used them, did not categorically classify these structures as straightforwardly wrong or unacceptable. In addition, a cursory corpus search for structurally parallel instances in the OEC (Oxford English Corpus), the BNC (British National Corpus 2007) and the

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UKWaC (Baroni et al. 2009; http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it) using Sketchengine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014; http://www.sketchengine.co.uk) revealed some, though very few, hits, among them examples (57a–c). (57) a. The Perth Show Forrest Medal went to Cyril Lafong for his superb plant of Sebaea thomasii (front left in the photo). [UKWaC #1197940182, http://www.srgc.org.uk/shows/forrest2004/forrest.html, emphasis mine]

b. The PSSRI is headed by Professor Colin Pillinger FRS (front right in photo) who, in addition to holding a personal chair in Planetary Sciences, was until very recently Gresham Professor of Astronomy. [UKWaC http://pssri.open.ac.uk/about-us/abt-con.htm, emphasis mine]

c. … what was Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen (back left in photo) doing on the roof of his synagogue Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) … ? [OEC unknown, unclassified, mixed, 00893, 9999, emphasis mine]

The dimensional terms in examples (57a–c) behave like ‘true’ adverbs to the extent that they directly combine with an RO-denoting topological prepositional phrase (see Section 3.3.3). However, as can be seen as well from these examples, such uses only occurred in the form of insertions, not as parts of complete sentences, and only occurred in the particular contexts of referring to the location of an entity in a picture or photograph. These observations, of course, do not yet suffice to demonstrate that ‘true’ dimensional adverbs do indeed exist in English, and do so in a form and with functions comparable to the German adverbs. However, they indicate the clear need for further empirical research on this issue. Possible starting points for a more systematic investigation of these structures might be of the following kind. One option is that these structures constitute very lowly conventionalized remnants of (Old English) Germanic structures in the English language.110 This can be considered likely given that (a) simple dimensional adverbs, primarily right and left, are still commonly used in modern English for expressing dynamic meanings like ‘change of state’ or ‘motion’ (example (58a))111 and occur as parts of fixed expressions (example (58b)); that

|| 110 I would like to thank Natalia Levshina for this suggestion, and Judith Huber for her support with finding Old English examples. 111 Examples (58a) and (58b) are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online (sentences in (58a): OED Online 2015a, 2015b; sentences in (58b): OED Online 2015a, 2015b). Example (58c) is taken from van Staden, Bowerman and Verhalst (2006: 481; glossing mine), the

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(b) the option of using simple dimensional adverbs for indicating static spatial relations is not specific to German, but also exists in other Germanic languages, for instance in Dutch (example (58c)), which is “one of the closest linguistic neighbours of English” (van Staden et al. 2006: 475); and that (c) such static uses – at least of single dimensional terms – can also be found attested in Old English sources (example (58d)). (58) a. ‘Which way’s the station now?’ ‘Down there, turn right.’ [OED 3: 1963 T. Parker Unknown Citizen i. 21]

She … Looked left and right to rise and set of day. [OED 2: 1885 R. BRIDGES Eros & Psyche I. xxiii. 10.]

b. Or at least it was until the War of Independence when people started getting shot right left and centre. [OED 3: 1995 P. MCCABE Dead School (1996) 45]

Mr. Gladstone was supported right and left by Lord H. and Sir W. H. [OED 2: 1886 Manch. Examiner 14 Jan. 5/6.]

in de kaast. c. Het staad boven it-LO stands top-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P the closet-RO. ‘It is above [us] in the closet [i.e. on a higher floor].’ d. Her is fyr micel, ufan and neoðone. here-DEICT-ADV is fire much top-DIM-S-ADV and bottom-DIM-S-ADV ‘Here is much fire at the top and the bottom.’ [DOEC: GenA,B A1.1 0135 (374)]

Seo is ufan open & unoferhrefed. She is top-DIM-S-ADV open and un-over-roofed ‘It [the church] is open at the top and roofless.’ [DOEC: HomS 46 (BlHom 11) B3.2.46]

Alternatively, or complementarily, it might be the case that simple dimensional adverb-like structures are currently in the course of becoming (re-)conventionalized in the English language and are therefore not (yet) attested in the existing literature on English spatial language. One factor which might have fostered or be fostering this – allegedly merely hypothetical – current development is that RO-less structures like bottom or top are, for instance, part of demands in commonly used languages for programming graphic user interfaces and might

|| examples in (58d) from the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC) (2007). The original sources are indicated above in the formats used by the respective dictionaries and corpora. The bold emphases are mine.

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therefore have become established in IT- or technical jargons.112 This might also explain why dimensional terms of non-Germanic origin, like the French-derived front (cf. OED Online 2015c), can be found used in an adverb-like manner in the data from Experiment 1 (see example (59)). (59)

Piece of lettuce with the slice of tomato on top and towards the front … sorry it is front and left.

Disregarding these possible (diachronic) explanations, the very occurrence of simple dimensional adverb constructions (or at least of adverb/I-7-like structures) in the English subcorpus indicates that these structures seem to have some place in the English language, though obviously a rather subordinate one which is still in need of future systematic investigation. Independently of the possible outcome of such investigations, the occasional occurrence of such constructions in the English data from Experiment 1 underlines once more that cross-linguistic differences require to be classified as more or less strongly pronounced differences in usage conventions rather than as principled ‘structural’ differences between German and English (see also pp. 223–226). This principle also forms the guideline for interpreting cross-linguistic differences between the observed uses of space-focused constructional variants, which are reported in the following section.

Constructional variants Space-focused constructional variants were used rather rarely by the participants in Experiment 1. The only space-focused (G-C) Specific Level SCT that could be identified from the data is S-610 (see Table 8 on pp. 195–198). Constructions of this type provide information on one spatial dimension by means of a fictive motion construction, i.e. in a form parallel to S-61 (towards the front right-hand side) and S-62 constructions (towards the top left), but indicate the distance of the LO to the observer instead of providing sagittal/vertical dimensional information. This distance information is also provided in terms of a fictive motion expression. Example (60), for instance, locates the LO towards rather than away from the observers (i.e. speaker and hearer). (60)

The lettuce leaf has a tomato on it to the left-hand side of the lettuce leaf and towards us.

|| 112 Patrick Falb, personal communication.

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Apart from that, S-610 constructions share the distance-component with S-111 constructions (object-focused distance variants like in the near left corner; see above, pp. 218–219). However, they refer to the observer(s) of the referent scene even more explicitly, i.e. impose a more objective construal onto this scene, because they use the speaker/observer (us in example (60)) as a second RO. Accordingly, S-610 constructions very likely construe their referent scenes in an even more strongly other-oriented manner than their more object-focused counterparts. However, as with S-111 constructions, it is assumed here that this dimension of the construal meaning of S-610 constructions is largely detached from their degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings. In terms of degrees of object-focusedness, instances of S-610 constructions are therefore not classified differently than prototypical instances of fictive motion constructions (I-6).

Cross-linguistic differences In sum, and as displayed in Table 8 above (pp. 195–198), the sets of different space-focused constructions (G-C) that were used by the German- and Englishspeaking participants in Experiment 1 hardly overlap at all on the more specific construction levels (I and S): nominal fictive motion constructions (S-61, S-62 and S-610) were only used by speakers of English, instances of non-nominal/adverbal fictive motion constructions (S-63) only occurred in German. The picture for simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) is similar: with the exception of very few instances of unclear exact status (see discussion of examples (55a–b) above), this construction type was only represented in the German subcorpus. As will be shown in the following section, a similar pattern of divergences in language-specific repertoires also emerges for mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B).

Types of mid-range and mixed constructions (G-B) Mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) can be ‘mixed’ in several respects. Speakers using instances of this general construction type either used different ROs for providing information on the sagittal or vertical axis (H1 or V) than for providing information on the lateral axis (H2); or, more frequently they provided some spatial information in the form of structures comparable to objectfocused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (G-A) and some information in the form of structures comparable to space-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (G-C). Structures of the first type are classified here as instances of RO-switching construc-

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tions (I-4), structures of the second type as instances of hybrid constructions (I-5). Since these subtypes to G-B differ considerably both in nature and in scope of applicability, they will be presented separately in the following. Prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types and constructional variants are presented together because instances of precise RO-switching constructions (I-4) occurred in the form of constructional variants only.

RO-switching constructions (I-4) The main defining feature of RO-switching (I-4) constructions is that two different ROs are used for the provision of the two different spatial dimensional information units. With the exception of the excluded references to target item T5, with which the handle of the basket was frequently used as a second RO (see Section 7.2.2), instances of such uses were rather rare (five instances overall) and only occurred in the English subcorpus. All of these instances can, in parallel to S-610 (to the left-hand side of the lettuce leaf and towards us; see above, pp. 236–237), be classified as instances of an other-oriented constructional variant. They are therefore classified here as S-410. As is illustrated by example (61), speakers who made use of constructions of this type provided information on the lateral axis in the form of an adjective-plus-noun construction, i.e. in a manner typical of adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (G-A/I-2) (see above, p. 213), and provided distance-to-observer information as an alternative to including sagittal/vertical dimensional terms. (61)

Lettuce leaf with the tomato on the left-hand side nearest to you.

In line with what has been stated for S-610 constructions (to the left-hand side of the lettuce leaf and towards us; see pp. 236–237), the degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings of these S-410 constructions are assumed to be comparable to those of structurally largely parallel and functionally equivalent prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. Overall, given their generally rather rare occurrence in the corpus, ROswitching constructions (I-4) proved to be of only marginal relevance to the present project. As will be shown in the following, the situation is different for hybrid constructions (I-5).

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Hybrid constructions (I-5) Hybrid constructions (I-5) combine elements from object-focused (G-A) and space-focused (G-C) constructions. They have been subcategorized according to the construction types to which the expressions they combine have the closest resemblance. On this basis, six different types of hybrid constructions (I-5) could be identified: – S-51 and S-52 constitute combinations of adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2) and fictive motion constructions (I-6). They are differentiated on the grounds that their adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN/I-2 elements either refer to a face (S-51; example (62a)) or a chunk (S-52; example (62b)) of the RO. (62) a. The cup’s on the table and towards the back at the right-hand side. b. The tomato is on the lettuce leaf and towards the front on the left-hand side. –

S-53 and S-54 constitute combinations of elements similar to fictive motion constructions (I-6) and adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions (I-3). Again, the adjective-plus-DIM-N/I-3 components can either refer to a face of the RO, as is the case with S-53 constructions (example (62c)), or to a chunk, as is the case with S-54 constructions (example (62d)).

(62) c. The puddle with the leaf in it towards the left at the top. d. The wine is inside the box and it’s towards the bottom on the left. –

Construction types S-55 and S-56 combine simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) and adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) (S-55; example (62e)), or adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2) and simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) (S-56; example (62f)).

(62) e. Die Flasche ist drin und zwar links im the bottle-LO is there-in-TOP-P-ADV namely left-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P-the Eck. unteren bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN f. Die Weinflasche ist in der blauen Kiste auf der the wine-bottle-LO is in-TOP-P the blue box-RO on-TOP-P the linken Seite vorne. left-DIM-S-ADV side-GEN-PARTN front-DIM-S-ADV

240 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

These different Specific Level SCTs were assigned different degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings on the basis of their either more space-focused or more object-focused constitutive elements. These differences are reflected in their labels; higher numbers indicate lower degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings (see also Table 8 on pp. 195–198). However, although considered here as the most probable case, this classification in terms of construal meanings is subject to certain limitations. These limitations derive from the fact that hybrid constructions (I-5) are, by definition, spilt constructions. They pertain to processing-related issues, which cannot be clarified on the basis of the data from Experiment 1. More specifically, they derive from the following observations: there are indications that not all speakers access hybrid constructions (I-5) in a chunked or holistic format. Instead, at least with a certain number of speakers and instances of hybrid constructions (I-5), more incremental, compositional planning and production strategies seem to dominate. This can, for instance, be seen from the fact that the two spatial information units constitutive of hybrid constructions (I-5) were separated by pauses (examples (63a) and (63b); cf. also Erman 2007), fillers (example (63b)) or even a considerable amount of linguistic material (example (63c)) on several occasions.113 (63) a. The puddle with the leaf in it towards the left {pause 1.50 s} at the top. b. Also der Apfel ist schonmal im Korb drin well the apple-LO is already in-TOP-P-the basket-RO there-in-TOP-P-ADV und der ist auf der rechten Seite {pause 1.57 s} and it is on-TOP-P the right-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN {pause 1.57 s} und weiter oben. and further top-DIM-S-ADV c. Ein Teelicht das links auf einem Teller steht plate-RO stands a tealight-LO which left-DIM-S-ADV on-TOP-P a und zwar oberer Bereich des Tellers. namely top-DIM-ADJ region-GEN-PARTN of-the plate-RO However, on the other hand, a closer look at the internal structures of the different instances of hybrid construction uses reveals a range of consistencies. These

|| 113 It cannot be excluded that such occurrences might to a certain extent be a consequence of the task requirements. For example, speakers might only have noticed in the course of speaking that they need to specify two instead of only one spatial dimension. A follow-up (corpus) study could provide further insights into this issue.

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might indicate that some speakers accessed at least relatively highly schematic versions of these constructions in the form of chunks. An indicator of chunked access, is, for instance, that the two dimensional information units were provided in the same order with almost all subtypes of hybrid constructions (I-5). With only one exception, the first phrase always provides information on the lateral axis (H2). This might indicate that the two dimensional information units are linked by strong syntagmatic associations. However, alternative interpretations of this finding are possible. The lateral dimensional term might, for instance, have been referred to first because it was situationally more salient to many speakers. This might, for instance, have occurred in association with the use of an egocentric relative Frame of Reference (see Section 3.2.2). Which interpretation (if any) holds can, however, hardly be decided conclusively on the basis of the available data, in particular given that the number of instances of uses of hybrid constructions (I-5) by participants in Experiment 1 is rather limited (18 items overall). What this discussion exemplarily illustrates in any case is that both aspects pertaining to the representational dimension of cognitive context and aspects pertaining to the processing dimension of utterance planning and production strategies require to be taken into account when identifying degrees of objectfocusedness construal meanings. In the present case, this implies the following: depending on how holistically or incrementally individual language users plan and process hybrid constructions (I-5), they might either indeed immediately construe the referent scenes with an intermediary degree of object-focusedness (in the case of holistic processing) or they might diverge from realizing one construal strategy to realizing another in the course of producing an utterance. For instance, when producing an S-56 construction (auf der linken Seite vorne ‘on the left-hand side front-DIM-S-ADV’; see example (62f)), a speaker might start off with a highly object-focused construal when producing the first part of the utterance and then diverge to a more space-focused manner of conceptualizing the referent scene during the production of the second part of the full DIMDIM(TOP)-expression. Taking this into account, and given that Experiment 1 only provides off-line behavioural data, the exact status of hybrid constructions (I-5) cannot be definitely determined. Focusing on the outcome rather than on the stepwise production process of using constructions of this type, the interpretation based on holistic processing is provisionally accepted here and used as a working solution. The processing-related issues raised will be taken up again in Section 8.4, and are definitely prone to become subject to future, more systematic investigation (see Section 9.2).

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Cross-linguistic differences In sum, among the three General Level SCTs, the German and English sets of mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) identified from Experiment 1 overlap the least. In fact, the picture is one of two completely separate language-specific sets of Specific Level SCTs. One main reason for this is that hybrid constructions (I-5) always contain at least one element which is only, or only sufficiently strongly conventionalized in either German or English: adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions (I-3; e.g. at the front right) and nominal fictive motion constructions (I-6; e.g. towards the front right) only occurred in the English dataset. Consequently, this also accounted for instances of the Specific Level SCTs S-51 (towards the back at the right-hand side) to S-54 (towards the bottom on the left). Largely in line with this, the nonoccurrence of S-55 (links im unteren Eck ‘left-DIM-S-ADV in the bottom-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN’) and S-56 (auf der linken Seite vorne ‘on the left-hand-DIM-ADJ side-GEN-PARTN front-DIM-S-ADV’) constructions in the English data adds to the above observation that English simple dimensional adverb/I-7-like constructions (in the field bottom right) are not comparable in structure and function to their German counterparts (see discussion of examples (55a–b) on p. 231); it indicates that the dimensional adverb-like elements of the English constructions are obviously not available for compositional use, i.e. for use as parts of other construction types. Taking this into account, a cross-linguistic comparison of frequency distributions on the level of more specific construction types (Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs) seems hardly useful independently of taking into account the more schematic level of abstract degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings by which the divergent sets of English and German construction types are bound together – and can jointly become subject to statistical analysis. Therefore, a detailed, descriptive analysis of the frequency distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs is provided in Section 7.2.5 as a complementation to the statistical patterns emerging from the analysis of the data in terms of Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs; Analysis 1B). To set the scene for this second analysis, the following section attempts a first evaluation of Hypotheses 1a–c based on the descriptive findings from Analysis 1A as they have been reported so far.

Summary and discussion The set of spatial construction types identified from Analysis 1A-2 and subsumed in Table 8 (pp. 195–198), as well as its discussion with a focus on crosslinguistic differences, can be related in the following way to Hypotheses 1a–c,

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i.e. to the predictions that (a) speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions; that (b) speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features than speakers of English; and that (c) the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is higher in German than in English: (1) Despite a considerable lack of overlap on the more specific levels, the sets of different Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs which the speakers of English and German tested made use of cover about the same range of degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings on a scale from highly object-focused to highly space-focused. This usage-derived finding runs counter to the more theory-based assumption that the German repertoire of spatial terms extends further into the space-focused direction on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale than the English repertoire. Accordingly, it also runs counter to what could have been expected on the basis of the existing contrastive literature (see Chapter 3 and Section 7.1). (2) The German- and English-speaking participants made use of a considerable range of different and differently strongly object-focused constructions for solving the task of having to provide a precise DIMDIM(TOP)-reference. The observed English set of constructions is even larger than the German one. In particular, the English set covers the mid-range of the Degrees of Objectfocusedness Scale more densely. This greater variety of construction types in English might indicate that the degree of conventionalization of making precise DIMDIM(TOP)-references is lower in English than in German (see Chapters 3 and 6). On this view, the observed cross-linguistic differences in numbers of different construction types would lend support to Hypothesis 1c, i.e. to the idea that the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions is higher in the German than in the English speech community. However, given the descriptive nature of Analysis 1A, these conclusions can only remain preliminary. Any more definite conclusions pertaining to degrees and patterns of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions require statistical evaluation in combination with a detailed descriptive report of the frequency distributions of the German and English specific construction types. Accordingly, a discussion of how the data from Experiment 1 relate to Hypotheses 1a (the claim that speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions) and 1b (the prediction that speakers of German are less strongly influenced by RO-features than speakers of English) will only be provided based on the results from Analysis 1B.

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7.2.5 Analysis 1B: Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs) and frequency distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs As has been indicated above (Section 7.2.3), Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs) are superior to SCTs when it comes to measuring construal tendencies: they are more fine-grained and differential, and they apply on a higher level of schematicity and abstraction than SCTs. Because construal meanings constitute relatively high-level phenomena (see Chapter 5), this defines OVDs as a more direct measure of this meaning dimension than SCTs. Therefore, the statistical models reported in this section use ODVs as a dependent variable. To do justice to the complexity of the data and research questions under investigation, these ODV-based statistical analyses address Hypotheses 1a–c in a largely explorative manner, and are complemented by a descriptive account of the frequency distribution data for the Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs. These distribution data provide structured insights into specific levels of language use (and, possibly, representation), and therefore serve as a means of illustrating, in concrete terms, the more abstract results from the ODV-based analysis. As a consequence, they also provide insights relevant for usefully interpreting these results. This section will therefore proceed from an account of how ODVs were devised via a report of the procedure and results of the ODV-based statistical analyses to an interpretation of these results under complementary consideration of the frequency distribution data for Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs.

Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs) ODVs constitute metrical values which were assigned to each DIMDIM(TOP)utterance in the data from Experiment 1. They indicate the relative degree of object-focusedness with which a speaker, in using a particular construction, can be assumed to have construed a referent scene. The ODV that is assigned to an individual instance of use of a DIMDIM(TOP)-construction thus indicates where on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale this particular usage event can be located. To realize this, a scheme of ODV-calculation was devised which covers all those features of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in use that could be expected to have an impact on degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings. These features were determined on the basis of the construal-theoretical considerations laid out in Chapter 3.

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These considerations, and the cognitive linguistic principles by which they are motivated, also formed the basis for defining SCTs (see Section 7.2.4). However, as indicated above, the analysis in terms of ODVs differed from the SCTbased analysis in several central respects. In particular, it also took into account those utterance features which were too specific, and/or occurred too rarely, and/or were distributed too broadly across different construction types to be included in the SCT-classification scheme. An analysis in terms of ODVs could readily accommodate these features because the set of criteria used for the calculation of ODVs was applied to each instance of a DIMDIM(TOP)-expression individually. This had the following beneficial effects: firstly, ODVs mirror construal meanings on a level of abstraction high enough to be applicable cross-linguistically. Secondly, they also reflect similarities in construal meanings between formally rather different utterances, as well as differences in construal meanings between formally rather similar utterances. In more detail, ODVs were calculated as follows: in a first step, the features of the most strongly space-focused construction type identified in the data from Experiment 1, S-73 (vorne rechts (auf dem Tisch) ‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV (on the table-RO)’), served as a basis for defining the baseline for ODVcalculation. That is, instances of S-73 constructions were assigned an ODV of 0. Accordingly, the presence of each of the three features characteristic and constitutive of S-73 constructions – two simple dimensional adverbs and a topological prepositional phrase which succeeds these adverbs – were assigned the value 0 also when they occurred as parts of DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions which were otherwise different in structure from S-73 constructions. All other features of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances were classified as effecting a more or less strong increase in degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings. They were, accordingly, assigned positive values. The exact values varied depending on the presumed strength of influence of each particular feature. As a guideline and working solution, those features which also resulted in the formation of a new Intermediate Level SCT were rated higher than those features which resulted in the formation of a new Specific Level SCT, or which did not result in the formation of a new SCT-subclass at all. Features pertaining to the same constituents of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, e.g. to the different kinds of RO-PARTNs, were therefore assigned graded values. For instance, the use of a natural/specific RO-PARTN resulted in an increase of the ODV by 1, the use of a simple dimensional noun only in an increase by 0.5. Structures which are classified here as indicating a low degree of objectfocusedness, but which are not included in S-73 (as the baseline and most highly space-focused construction), were assigned negative values. As indi-

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cated in Table 12, this mainly applied to dynamic prepositions (to, towards), which are indicators of fictive motion constructions. Put very briefly, the ODV of a DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance is the sum of the values assigned to all of its construal-relevant features. The higher this value, the more strongly object-focused the degrees of object-focusedness construal meaning realized by this utterance. How this value is arrived at exactly is subsumed in Table 12, which provides an overview of the different criteria that were taken into account when calculating ODVs and indicates the values assigned to each of them. Tab. 12: Experiment 1 – ODV-calculation scheme.

ODV-calculation scheme DIMDIM(TOP)-construction component

example

value

(the) left

+1

dimensional terms noun adjective

left/link- (‘left-DIM-ADJ’)

+1

preposition

in front of/vor (‘in front-DIM-P’)

+0.5

adverb

vorne (‘front-DIM-S-ADV’)

0

handle, Spitze (‘tip’)

+1,5

additional obligatory elements: PARTNs noun types functional/highly specific PARTN natural or SPEC-PARTN

corner/Ecke (‘corner’)

+1

GEN-PartN

side/Seite (‘side’)

+0.5

+ of + PARTN/genitive PARTN

+ 0.5

noun-related features

point

+ 0.5

face

+ 0.25

+ DIM-N

on the top of

+0.5

static P

in

0

dynamic/direction-denoting P

to, towards

-1

P introducing the dimensional term phrase

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ODV-calculation scheme DIMDIM(TOP)-construction component

example

value

+ DIM-N

on the top of

+0.5

static P

on

0

topological terms kind of topological term

order DIM-TOP (with G-C) TOP-PPinitial

+0.5

TOP-PPintermediate

+0.25

TOP-PPfinal

0

ODV-calculation thus transfers to one integrated value how the following questions (see also Chapter 3) can be answered for individual instances of DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances: – How explicitly does a particular feature make reference to the RO and thus to the object-level of the scene? – Does the use of a particular feature … … explicitly draw attention to object-specific characteristics like RO-shape? … require explicit mention of the RO and/or any of its features? … contribute to construing the RO as bounded and/or draw particular attention to its boundedness? … ascribe dimensionality to the RO or any of its parts? … allow for dimensionality to be defined independently of the RO and/or its boundaries? This set of questions also forms the basis on which ODVs could be assigned to instances of constructional variants. With partial variants (see Analysis 1A-2, pp. 216–219), those constituents which they share with prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions were treated according to the ODV-calculation scheme. For any deviant elements alternative strategies were developed. These are as follows: – Because they explicitly draw attention to object-specific information, the value 1 was added to the ODVs assigned to instances of LO-variants (S-101/a bottle of wine whose label can no longer be seen … on the left side) as compared to instances of their prototypical construction equivalents.

248 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

–

With distance variants (S-111/in the near left corner, S-410/on the left-hand side nearest to you, S-610/to the left-hand side of the lettuce leaf and towards us), the distance element was treated in the same way as the dimensional elements in prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, to which it is largely equivalent in function. An utterance like in the far right-hand corner was, for instance, assigned the same ODV as an utterance of the form in the bottom right-hand corner. Reasons for this equivalence of treatment have been provided in Section 7.2.4 above (pp. 216–219).

Because they are based on metaphorical object-to-object mapping (see pp. 219– 223), metaphorical variants were assigned a base value of 2 in analogy to the constructions at the less object-focused end of the class of object-focused constructions (G-A).114 As with prototypical DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions and partial variants, any elements like additional references to parts of the RO resulted in an increase of this value. In the following, the procedure of ODV-calculation is illustrated for two different corpus examples. The box with the wine

in the

bottom

left

corner

inside the box.

+1

+1

+1 +0.5

+0

SPEC-PARTNpoint

TOP

DIM

Die Tasse befindet sich ‘the cup is

auf dem Tisch

rechts

oben

on the table

right-DIM-S-ADV

top-DIM-S-ADV

+0.5 TOP

+0

in der Ecke.

+0 DIM

ODV = 3.5

ODV

in the corner’

+1

= 1.5

ADD. PARTN

Analysis 1B-1: ODVs in context The application of the ODV-calculation scheme to the full set of precise DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances from Experiment 1 yielded the following general find-

|| 114 Given the lack of research on this kind of structure, this solution cannot constitute more than a working solution based on the observations from Analyses 1A and 1B. However, given the relative rarity of occurrence of these structures and the range of arguments which can be brought forward in support of positioning such structures in the data from Experiment 1 at the lower object-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, adopting this strategy is considered here to be the best solution available at the present state of knowledge.

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ing: the range of ODVs extends from 0 to 5.5 for the German dataset, and from 0 to 5 for the English dataset. This finding confirms what has also been revealed by Analysis 1A (see Section 7.2.4), namely that the sets of construction types used by speakers of English and German for referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes cover a comparably extensive range on the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. This indicates that any cross-linguistic differences in overall construal meaning tendencies can only be the result of differences in usage conventions. Whether such differences occurred, and what they reveal about languagespecific, context-dependent patterns of conventionalization, was investigated by the use of three linear regression analyses (random intercept models; see below for details). Jointly, these models addressed the following interrelated questions: (1) Cross-linguistic differences: do speakers of German and English indeed conventionally construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in significantly different ways, i.e. with different degrees of object-focusedness? That is, does a speaker’s (native) language influence how he or she will (preferably) construe a DIMDIM(TOP)-scene? (2) External (situational) context: do degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings vary with variation of external context? In particular, are shapefeatures of the RO a relevant factor? Do those only significantly influence English speakers’ choices of referential expressions (Hypothesis 1c) or do they also have an impact on German speakers’ linguistic/referent scene construal behaviour? (3) Internal (cognitive) context: do individual speakers differ in their preferred ways of construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes and, if so, how strongly do they do so? Is this the case (to the same extent) in German and English? Do particular features of individual speakers, like their gender, correlate with differences in scene construal? As can be seen, these questions pertain to possible effects on a between-languages level and on a within-language(s) level. They were differentially addressed by three statistical models (random intercept models, see below for details), one model which applied to the full set of German and English data, and two models which applied to the German and English subsets, respectively. All calculations were made using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22.0 (IBM Corp., New York). The reasoning for the applied procedure was as follows: question (1), the influence of language on referent scene construal, could, naturally, best be addressed on the basis of the full dataset (German and English data). For

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addressing questions (2) and (3), calculating separate models for the two language-specific datasets proved most useful and straightforward, particularly because one major focus of interest of this investigation was whether the external and internal contextual effects addressed by questions (2) and (3) have language-specific structures. In particular, the use of more than one model constituted the most direct way of accounting for the aspect that is most innovative to the present research project, the relevance and patterns of interindividual variation within the two speech communities: it allowed for the factor of individual participants (i.e. cognitive contexts) to be included in the language-specific models as a relevant random variable. Since this separatemodels approach proved fully adequate for addressing questions (1) to (3), more complex models were not considered.115 The following presentation and discussion of Analysis 1B and its results will proceed from the between-languages model (question (1)) to the within-language(s) models (questions (2) and (3)).

Between-languages effects To address between-languages effects, a linear regression model (random intercept model) with ODV as dependent variable, language (German versus English), target item/RO-shape type and gender as fixed effects and individual participants (cognitive contexts) as random intercept was calculated on the full (German and English) dataset. In contrast to most applications of such models, the random effect was not only included to control speaker-/individual-related confounding. Instead, it constituted a way of including the factor of individual participants (cognitive contexts) as a relevant explanatory variable. Therefore, fixed and random effects are reported together in the following. The calculation of this between-languages model revealed main effects of language (F = 67.5, p < 0.0001), target item/RO-shape type (F = 7.7, p < 0.0001) and individual participants (Wald Z = 2.2, p < 0.05). No relevant effect was revealed for gender (F = 0.002; p > 0.1), which will therefore not be further discussed in the following. Table 13 (full dataset-column) indicates the coefficients for the fixed effects, Table 14 (full dataset-column) the covariance parameters for the random intercept.

|| 115 I would like to thank Helmut Küchenhoff and André Klima from the Statistisches Beratungslabor (StaBLab), LMU Munich, for their invaluable advice and support with the statistics.

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Tab. 13: Experiment 1 – estimated regression coefficients for fixed effects (between- and within-languages).116

parameter

estimated regression coefficients full dataset German subset English subset

language

intercept

2.847

1.175

3.010

German

-1.495

-

-

English

0a

-

-

0.404

0.816

-0.021

T1 RO-shape cornered type/ T2 target item odd-shaped T4

0.473

0.810

0.116

-0.486

-0.230

-0.731

T6

-0.633

-0.447

-0.800

unbounded T7

-0.175

-0.060

-0.299

T8

0a

0a

0a

-0.077

-0.128

-0.095

0a

0a

0a

round

gender

male female

Tab. 14: Experiment 1 – covariance parameters for the random intercept (between- and withinlanguages).

parameter

covariance parameters full dataset

German subset English subset

residual

1.021

1.459

0.565

intercept [ind. speakers] variance

0.181

0.165

0.211

The main effect for language suggests a positive answer to question (1) above, and therefore lends strong support to Hypothesis 1a (i.e. the hypothesis that speakers of German prefer space-focused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions): with all other factors kept constant, the model predicts of speakers of German an ODV of 1.495 lower than of speakers of Eng-

|| 116 The values reported were rounded by 3 positions after the decimal point.

252 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

lish. This clearly indicates that, overall, speakers of English construed the referent scenes in a more strongly object-focused manner than speakers of German. The main effect for target items/RO-shape types answers the first part of question (2) to the positive by identifying shape variation as a factor of influence on referent scene construal. As can be seen from Table 13 (full dataset-column), the ODVs for cornered items (T1 and T2) are clearly more positive than the ODVs for the remaining set of (uncornered) target items. What can be seen from a comparison of the data from the full dataset with the data from the two language-specific subsets in Table 13 is, however, that the effects of RO-shape are pronounced very differently in the two language-specific subsets. Accordingly, the German and English language data contribute in different ways to the effects observed in the full dataset. In particular, the effect of cornered items (T1 and T2) in the full dataset can, at closer consideration, be revealed to be mainly an effect of the German language subset. This indicates that RO-shape effects can only be covered adequately on a within-language(s) level, i.e. by the statistical models based on the language-specific subsets. These effects will therefore be discussed in the following sections. The situation is similar for the main effect for the random variable of individual participants (cognitive contexts). As can be seen from the full datasetcolumn in Table 14, about one fifth of the residual variance (0.181 out of 1.021) explains from differences between individual speakers, i.e. can be ascribed to cognitive contextual influences. However, as indicated by the subset-specific values in the two rightmost columns of Table 14, both the overall residual variance and the variance explained by the factor of individual participants differ considerably between the German and the English dataset. How the results for the full dataset are to be explained and whether and how the two languagespecific datasets contribute to this language-general finding requires to be discussed, and will therefore be discussed in the following, on the basis of the findings from the within-language(s) models.

Within-language(s) effects As just indicated, the main purpose of the subcorpus- and thus languagespecific statistics was to gain further insights into the ways in which the factors of target item/RO-shape type (as an external contextual factor) and individual participants (as a possible indicator of internal/cognitive contextual conditions) influence construal decisions within the two speech communities under investigation, and to determine whether and how these influences differ between the language-specific groups. For these purposes linear regression analyses (random intercept models) with target item/RO-shape type and gender as fixed ef-

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fects and individual participants as random intercept were calculated for each of the two language-specific subcorpora. As can be seen from Tables 13 and 14, these models revealed a range of discussion-worthy effects for both the factors of target item/RO-shape type and individual participants. As indicated in the previous section, the language-specific effects for the random variable of individual participants (Table 14, two rightmost columns) prove particularly interesting when they are compared to the corresponding finding from the language-general dataset (Table 14, full dataset-column). What can be seen from the residual values is that, overall, the residual variance is higher in the German (σ2German = 1.459) than in the English dataset (σ2English = 0.565).117 However, the variance explained by interindividual differences (the intercept variance in Table 14) is markedly lower in German than in English, both absolutely (σ2speaker, German = 0.165/σ2speaker, English = 0.211) and, in particular, proportionally: a comparison of the residual-to-intercept ratio for the two language-specific datasets reveals that the factor of individual participants (cognitive contexts) explains more than one third of the remaining variance in the English language subset, but only about 10% of the remaining variance in the German language subset. If the degree of variation between individual speakers is used as a measure of the degree of conventionalization of a particular form of linguistic behaviour (see Section 5.4), these patterns in the data can be interpreted as confirmative of Hypothesis 1c. They indicate that, when it comes to making DIMDIM(TOP)-references, interindividual differences indeed play a more central role in the English than in the German speech community. Consequently, the degree of conventionalization of how to refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes can be claimed to be higher in German than in English. As, for instance, indicated by the overall markedly higher residual variance in the German data, such a conclusion based on differences in mere strength of conventionalization comes, however, short of the full picture of cross-linguistic differences associated with cognitive contextual influences, and can thus hardly constitute a full, and fully satisfactory, answer to question (3) above. Instead, a more differential view on conventionalization is required. As will be demonstrated in the following, a complementary analysis of the patterns of distribution of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs revealed that German and English indeed do not only and primarily differ with respect to strengths of conventions, but also, and even more centrally, with respect to patterns of conventionalization. In defining and explaining the occurrence of

|| 117 German subset: Wald Z = 1.18; p > 0.1; English subset: Wald Z = 2.15; p < 0.05.

254 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

such patterns, the second factor at the core of the within-language(s) analyses, target item/RO-shape type, can be revealed to play a central part. For this factor, significant effects were revealed for both the German (F = 4.06; p < 0.01) and the English dataset (F = 5.1, p < 0.001). Counter to Hypothesis 1b, but in line with the findings reported in Section 7.2.4 for the General Level SCTs (Analysis 1A-1), this, very generally, suggests that the factor of target item/RO-shape type has a relevant influence on construal selection decisions in speakers of English and in speakers of German. A comparison of the estimated coefficients for the target items in Table 13 indicates, however, that the ways in which the factor of target item/RO-shape type influenced speakers’ construal decisions differed considerably between the two language-specific groups: in the German data, the values for T1 and T2 (cornered objects) are clearly more positive than the values for the remaining targets. This might indicate that speakers of German made a relatively categorical difference between cornered and uncornered referent scenes: they systematically construed cornered referent scenes in a more strongly object-focused manner. As can be seen from Table 13 as well, no comparable effect can be observed in the English data. Instead, a tendency to refer to uncornered scenes (T4, T6) in a less strongly object-focused manner (the estimated values are lower) than to cornered and unbounded scenes can be observed. These patterns are well in line with the observations made based on the distribution patterns for General Level SCTs in Section 7.2.4 (Analysis 1A-1). This indicates that a closer look at the actual linguistic behaviour, i.e. the specific constructions used, may be required in complementation to the ODV-estimates to get to a fuller picture of the nature of the variation between and within languages in dependence on external contextual conditions. This will be done in the following section, which presents the distributional patterns of ODVs in more detail and complements this information by a detailed account of the frequency distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs.

Analysis 1B-2: ODV-variance and frequency distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs Cross-linguistic differences Figure 34 and Table 15 provide an overview of the usage frequencies of the different Intermediate Level SCTs (I) in German as compared to English. Figure 35 and Table 16 provide the same kind of information for Specific Level SCTs (S).

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Tab. 15: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs (German versus English).

SCTs

German

English

I-1

25 (20.3%)

45 (37.5%)

I-2

5 (4.1%)

22 (18.3%)

I-3

0 (0%)

20 (16.7%)

I-4

0 (0%)

5 (4.2%)

I-5

6 (4.9%)

12 (10%)

I-6

2 (1.6%)

10 (8.3%)

I-7

85 (69.1%)

6 (5%)

all SCTs (I)

123 (100%)

120 (100%)

Fig. 34: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs (German versus English). Tab. 16: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Specific Level SCTs (German versus English). SCTs

German

English

SCTs

German

English

S-11

22 (17.9%)

39 (32.5%)

S-51

0 (0%)

3 (2.5%)

S-12

1 (0.8%)

0 (0%)

S-52

0 (0%)

6 (5%)

S-13

1 (0.8%)

0 (0%)

S-53

0 (0%)

1 (0.8%)

S-101

1 (0.8%)

0 (0%)

S-54

0 (0%)

2 (1.7%)

S-111

0 (0%)

6 (5%)

S-55

3 (2.4%)

0 (0%)

S-21

0 (0%)

3 (2.5%)

S-56

3 (2.4%)

0 (0%)

256 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

SCTs

German

English

SCTs

German

English

S-22

4 (3.3%)

1 (0.8%)

S-61

0 (0%)

2 (1.7%)

S-23

0 (0%)

4 (3.3%)

S-610

0 (0%)

1 (0.8%)

S-24

0 (0%)

9 (7.5%)

S-62

0 (0%)

7 (5.8%)

S-201

1 (0.8%)

3 (2.5%)

S-63

2 (1.6%)

0 (0%)

S-202

0 (0%)

2 (1.7%)

S-70

5 (4.2%)

0 (0%)

S-31

0 (0%)

2 (1.7%)

S-71

55 (44.7%)

5 (4.2%)

S-32

0 (0%)

18 (15%)

S-72

2 (1.6%)

0 (0%)

S-410

0 (0%)

5 (4.2%)

S-73

23 (18.7%)

1 (0.8%)

all SCTs (S):

German: 123 (100%); English: 120 (100%)

Fig. 35: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Specific Level SCTs (S) (German versus English).

The data presented in Figures 34 and 35 and Tables 15 and 16 indicate that the patterns of distribution of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs differ considerably between the two languages. As is perhaps most clearly visible in Figure 34, the distribution pattern in the English data is characterized by a decrease in frequency of uses from strongly object-focused to strongly space-focused constructions: the majority of uses are instances of adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1; 37.5%), adjective-

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plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2; 18.3%) or adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions (I-3; 16.7%). Uses of the remaining set of construction types are comparatively rare. However, as indicated by Figure 35, uses of Specific Level SCTs (S) with intermediate or low degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings are distributed fairly equally across the whole range of available options. Based on this, the English pattern can be described as dispersed with an object-focused bias. The pattern of distribution observable in the German data is clearly different. As can be seen, the great majority of uses concentrates on two Intermediate Level SCTs, adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1; 20.3%) and simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7; 69.3%), and, within these types, on only three Specific Level SCTs, namely S-71 (topological-term initial simple dimensional adverb constructions; 44.7%), S-73 (topological-term final simple dimensional adverb constructions; 18.7%) and S-11 (adjective-plus-point-denotingSPEC-PARTN constructions; 17.9%). The remaining set of SCTs makes up for only 19.3% of all uses. In particular those constructions with intermediate degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings (adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions/I-2 and hybrid constructions/I-5) were hardly used at all (9%). If one takes into account that S-71 and S-73 only constitute order variants of simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7), this means that there are two clear but differently strongly pronounced frequency peaks at the extreme ends of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, while the mid-range of this scale is hardly covered at all. Accordingly, the overall pattern in the German dataset can be described as bifurcated with a space-focused bias. These findings regarding the frequencies with which the German and English participants in Experiment 1 made use of the different SCTs comply well with the cross-linguistic differences identified by the statistical models in Analysis 1B-1, as well as with the differences in language-specific repertoires identified in Section 7.2.4. The dispersed pattern in the English dataset accords well with the observation from Analysis 1A that the repertoire on which the English-speaking participants in Experiment 1 drew is broader and more varied than the repertoire of which the German-speaking participants made use. In addition, it also fits well the finding that the factor of individual participants (cognitive contexts) explains the residual variance in the English dataset to a considerable extent. If considered jointly, these findings may be interpreted as supportive of Hypothesis 1c, i.e. of the prediction that, in general, providing full DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances is less strongly conventionalized in English than in German.

258 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

The finding of a high degree of agreement among speakers of English with respect to the use of object-focused constructions (G-A), which is mirrored in the patterns of distribution of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs in the form of the strong object-focusedness bias, however, suggests a more qualified interpretation of this finding. It indicates that speakers of English mainly display different usage habits on the more specific, form-focused levels of construction knowledge and representation, but agree rather strongly on the more schematic levels. This tendency of preferably selecting (different) constructions from the object-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, and thus constructions whose ODVs vary only along a relatively narrow range, also becomes visible in the data for the General Level SCTs (G) (see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-1) and in the ODV-variance data presented and discussed below (see Figure 36 on p. 260). This finding, on the one hand, lends further support to Hypothesis 1a, i.e. the hypothesis that speakers of English strongly prefer using object-focused constructions. On the other hand, it illustrates very clearly that identifying the degree of schematicity with which constructions are represented in speakers’ minds and from which they are activated for use (see above and Section 5.2.2) is highly relevant for identifying patterns and degrees of conventionalization. This, again, renders drawing conclusions about cross-linguistic differences in degrees of conventionalization more complicated than anticipated. A close-up investigation of the distribution patterns of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs in the German subcorpus further illustrates this point. The German pattern is characterized by a strong concentration on a very small set of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs only. However, these construction types are located at the extreme opposite ends of the Degrees of Objectfocusedness Scale. This creates a seemingly contradictory picture with respect to Hypotheses 1a (i.e. the prediction that speakers of German prefer spacefocused constructions, speakers of English object-focused constructions) and Hypothesis 1c (i.e. the prediction that the degree of conventionalization of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions is higher in German than in English): the concentration on a small range of relatively highly specific construction types can be interpreted as indicating a high degree of interindividual agreement as to which forms to use when referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. On this interpretation, this finding supports Hypothesis 1c. The finding that one of the three most frequently used Specific Level SCTs is located at the extreme object-focused end of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, however, qualifies this interpretation. It indicates that several German-speaking participants in Experiment 1 construed DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in an object-focused manner, and did so on a considerable

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number of instances (see also pp. 268–271 below). That is, on these occasions, these speakers behaved in a way which is markedly different from what was predicted by Hypothesis 1a. This divergence from what was predicted for speakers of German is not visible from the main effect of language revealed by the between-languages analysis (which merely indicates that, on a high level of abstraction and generalization, the degree of object-focusedness of scene construal is markedly lower in German than in English), and can only be guessed from the RO-shape effects in the within-language(s) model, which, being based on ODVs, cannot reveal patterns on specific, form-focused levels of language use and, eventually, linguistic knowledge. This finding thus, once more, justifies both the use of separate statistical models and the complementation of the ODV-based analyses by the SCTbased analyses. With regard to patterns of conventionalization, the findings from the analysis of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs recapitulate the findings from the analysis of General Level SCTs reported in Section 7.2.4 (Analysis 1A-1). Taken together, these more form-focused findings from the SCT-based analyses therefore reveal that the pattern of conventionalization as it can be derived from the German dataset is not as clearly compliant with Hypothesis 1a as the pattern observable in the English dataset. As already hinted at above, and as will be shown in more detail in the following section, this finding is closely interrelated with the occurrence of relevant (and significant) effects for the variable of target items/RO-shape type in the German subcorpus (see above), and thus with a finding which runs counter to Hypothesis 1b, i.e. to the prediction that features of the RO are a main factor of influence on scene construal decisions in speakers of English but not in speakers of German. External situational contexts (RO-shape types) Figure 36 indicates how ODVs and patterns of distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs varied across references to the different RO-shape types. The data displayed in this figure, as well as the data presented in Tables 17 and 18, thus provide the basis for investigating whether and how RO-shape variation influenced speakers’ construal selection decisions.

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Fig. 36: Experiment 1 – ODVs and frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by ROshape types (German versus English). Tab. 17: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by RO-shape types (German).118

German cornered (T1, T2)

odd-shaped (T4)

round (T6)

unbounded (T7, T8)

I-1

16 (40%)

1 (4.8%)

1 (4.5%)

7 (17.5%)

I-2

1 (2.5%)

3 (14.3%)

1 (4.5%)

0 (0%)

I-3

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

I-4

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

I-5

3 (7.5%)

0 (0%)

2 (9.1%)

1 (2.5%)

I-6

0 (0%)

0 (0%)

2 (9.1%)

0 (0%)

I-7

20 (50%)

17 (81%)

16 (72.7%)

32 (80%)

40 (100%)

21 (100%)

22 (100%)

40 (100%)

all SCTs (I)

|| 118 The relative frequencies reported in Tables 17 and 18 were rounded by one position after the decimal point. Therefore, these rounded values do not always add up to exactly 100%. In line with convention, the total relative frequencies are still reported as 100%.

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Tab. 18: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs by RO-shape types (English).

English cornered (T1, T2)

odd-shaped (T4)

I-1

21 (60%)

I-2

4 (11.4%)

I-3 I-4 I-5 I-6 I-7 all SCTs (S)

round (T6)

unbounded (T7, T8)

4 (18.2%)

1 (5.6%)

19 (42.2%)

3 (13.6%)

6 (33.3%)

9 (20%)

3 (8.6%)

5 (22.7%)

3 (16.7%)

9 (20%)

2 (5.7%)

2 (9.1%)

1 (5.6%)

0 (0%)

4 (11.4%)

2 (9.1%)

3 (16.7%)

3 (6.7%)

1 (2.9%)

4 (18.2%)

3 (16.7%)

2 (4.4%)

0 (0%)

2 (9.1%)

1 (5.6%)

3 (6.7%)

35 (100%)

22 (100%)

18 (100%)

45 (100%)

First of all, the data illustrated in Figure 36 strongly suggest that external context, i.e. the shape of the Reference Object in the target scene, has an influence on English and German speakers’ habits of scene construal: both the patterns of ODV-variation and of distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs differ between ROshape types (see also Table 13 on p. 251). What can be seen as well is that they do so in different ways and to different degrees in the language-specific datasets. The overall picture of ODV-variation across RO-shape types once more clearly illustrates the dispersed pattern with an object-focused bias identified above for English and the bifurcated pattern with a space-focused bias identified above for German. In addition, it reveals that these patterns are associated with differences in how particular scene types have been construed. In the German corpus, the amount and degree of variation of ODVs differs clearly between (a) scenes with cornered ROs, references to which cover a range of ODVs from about 0 to 4, (b) scenes with bounded but uncornered ROs, which (apart from some outliers) were referred to in a highly space-focused manner (approximate OVD-range: 0–0.5), and (c) scenes with unbounded ROs, which were also mainly referred to in a space-focused manner but for which the ODVrange extends further into the object-focused area than for scenes with un-

262 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

cornered ROs (see boxplot in Figure 36 on p. 260).119 This clearly indicates that, across individuals, cornered scenes were treated in a considerably different way from uncornered scenes. In addition, the distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs displayed in Figure 36 indicates that the high degree of variance for references to scenes with cornered ROs is explained by a clustering of uses of adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) and simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7/S-71 and S-73), i.e. by a clustering of ODVs at the extreme ends of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. In dependence on external context, the German pattern can therefore be described as bifurcated in two respects. On the one hand, a two-way difference in degrees of variation of OVDs exists for references to scenes with cornered ROs as opposed to scenes with uncornered ROs; on the other hand, a bifurcated division of uses of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs exists for references to scenes with cornered ROs. This, firstly, confirms one of the central findings from the analysis on the basis of General Level SCTs (see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-1): when speakers of German made use of adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11), they mainly did so when referring to scenes with cornered ROs. This indicates, again, that many speakers of German obviously made a categorical difference between scenes with cornered and scenes with uncornered ROs (see also Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-1). Secondly, the pattern observed in the German data lends support to an assumption on which the whole set of Hypotheses 1a–c is partly based: highly space-focused simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) can be (and indeed were) used for reference to scenes with ROs of all shape types. Furthermore, the concentration on the use of very few specific construction types only and the particular manner of interacting with cornered scenes might, if taken together, suggest that, in German, the general convention of construing spatial scenes in a space-focused manner (as it has been identified by the ODV-based analysis and by the overall frequency distribution patterns) co-exists with two different subconventions for the more specific context of referring to scenes with cornered ROs (see also below). The pattern of ODV-variation across scene types in the English subcorpus is very different from the one just reported for the German data. In the English dataset, object-focusedness gradually and rather slightly decreases with decreasing corneredness of ROs and increases from uncornered to unbounded || 119 The more strongly object-focused pattern with unbounded ROs is mainly explained by object-focused references to the (cornered) picture- or screen-level.

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ROs. Despite these object-type related differences, there is, however, still a relatively broad overlap between the ranges of variation of ODVs for the different scene types (see Figure 36 on p. 260). Furthermore, the extent of the ranges of variation remains relatively narrow both within and between references to the different scene types, and, overall, the majority of utterances remains in an area of ODVs higher than 2 across all items. This might indicate that construing DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a highly object-focused manner is indeed highly conventionalized in the English speech community. The distribution of Intermediate Level SCTs across object-shape types illustrated in Figure 36 and Table 18 indicates, however, that this convention very likely only exists at a relatively high level of schematicity. On the more specific levels, interindividual agreement among speakers is rather low, i.e. which Intermediate Level SCTs were used exactly varies rather broadly. In particular if it is taken into account that adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1), adjective-plus-GEN-PARTN constructions (I-2) and adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions (I-3) are subtypes of object-focused constructions (G-A), the pattern of broad interindividual variation is particularly predominant with references to uncornered (round and odd-shaped) ROs. This can be interpreted as indicating that individuals differed with respect to which kinds of scene types they still considered eligible for being referred to in a highly object-focused manner, and, accordingly, with respect to which scene types triggered the use of constructions from the mid-range of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale, and thus of constructions which, obviously, are relatively less strongly conventionalized in the speech community as a whole (see also Section 7.2.4). That there very likely is variation in how strongly the higher-level convention is entrenched in individual speakers can, exemplarily, be illustrated by the finding that some English-native participants used corner as a term of reference even for scenes with round ROs (example (64)). (64)

Tealight is on plate in the top left-hand corner.

Although it cannot be decided on the basis of the available data whether speakers used the picture as a whole as an RO (i.e. referred to the corner of the picture rather than construing a subpart of the round table as a corner), utterances of this type, in any case, indicate that a range of speakers of English searched for an object-focused ‘work-around’ with scenes with round ROs. If interpreted like this, and if it is taken into account that comparable examples cannot be found in the German subcorpus, these instances can be interpreted as supportive of

264 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Hypothesis 1a, i.e. might indicate that speakers of English have a strong preference for using object-focused constructions. In sum, the joint discussion of ODVs and (frequency distributions of) SCTs under consideration of RO-shape types (as a feature of external context) just provided has demonstrated the following: firstly, it provides a rather clear picture of patterns of conventionalization in the two languages investigated and reveals them as markedly different from each other in several respects. Secondly, it allows first insights into patterns of interindividual variation, i.e. into differences in linguistic behaviour between individual members of the same speech communities, and thus into differences which are presumably triggered by differences in cognitive contexts. This second aspect will be addressed in more detail in the next section.

Cognitive contexts (individual usage preferences) The analysis of frequency-distribution patterns on the level of General Level SCTs (G) (see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-1) already allowed for the identification of different speaker types in the two speech communities tested. Figure 37 provides an overview of the different types and their frequencies in the speaker groups that resulted from this analysis.

Fig. 37: Experiment 1 – frequency distribution of speaker types based on uses of General Level SCTs (German versus English).

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This general finding will, in the following, be revised and further refined on the basis of findings from Analyses 1B-1 and 1B-2. Within this scope, including external context/RO-shape type as an additional factor will be revealed to be decisive. More specifically, the following questions will be addressed: in how far are the patterns of conventionalization identified compliant with the patterns of entrenchment in individual speakers of the two languages? How does languageinternal variation relate to intra-individual variation? Is interindividual variation completely random, or are there speech-community internal groups of speakers (i.e. speaker types) who comply with a particular subconvention? To answer these questions, the distributions of Intermediate Level and Specific Level SCTs across scene types were identified for each individual participant in the experiment. These distributions were then compared among each other and to the overall distribution pattern across RO-shape types as it has been identified in the previous section (see Figure 36 on p. 260). This procedure yielded the following findings for the English subcorpus: given that the general pattern of conventionalization in English was characterized above as dispersed with an object-focused bias, the only subconvention that might have been expected to exist is the use of adjective-plus-(point-denoting)SPEC-PARTN constructions of the type in the front right-hand corner (I-1/S-11) for referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes with cornered ROs. On this interpretation, the dispersed pattern observed for references to scenes with uncornered ROs would indicate the lack of a clear specific convention for how to refer to scenes of this type. It was suggested that this situation is compensated for by the existence of a strong convention on the more abstract level of General Level SCTs (see Section 7.2.4, Analysis 1A-1). However, there is a second way in which the obvious lack of conventions of how to refer to uncornered DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes could be compensated for. It might be the case that strongly entrenched specific (sub)routines exist in individual speakers of English. This option is in the focus of the following analysis and discussion. The charts in Figure 38 provide an overview of the different usage patterns (and thus, presumably, patterns of entrenchment) that could be identified for the English participants.

266 | Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Fig. 38: Experiment 1 – individual patterns of use of Intermediate Level SCTs (English-speaking participants).

As can be seen from these charts, some individual speakers of English indeed displayed clearly consistent routines of how to refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in general, and to uncornered scenes in particular: charts (a)–(c) reveal that some English directors displayed a strong preference of using one particular Intermediate Level or even Specific Level SCT consistently. Director E.109 (chart (a)), for instance, invariably used adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) across all targets, i.e. even referred to the round ROs by using the part-denoting noun corner, and director E.113 (chart (b)) consistently used the more general part-denoting noun side for all targets to which she provided precise references.120 This high degree of consistency in using one specific SCT in general, and adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) in particular, had as an effect that, in many speakers, some target scene types – namely those not well-suited for being referred to by use of the preferred construction type – either triggered the production of imprecise descriptions or induced the respective directors to diverge from their otherwise highly consistent patterns. As illustrated in chart (c), for directors with a preference of using adjective-plus-(point-

|| 120 It cannot be fully excluded that highly consistent forms of behaviour of this type are partly an effect of self-alignment and/or of differences in proneness to self-align between individuals. Since it is also of relevance to the interpretation of the data from Experiment 2, this issue will be discussed in more detail in Section 8.5 below.

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denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) this mainly was the case for scenes with round ROs (T6). This once more underlines the finding that, among the parameters of RO-shape variation included in Experiment 1, corneredness of the RO is the main determinant of construction selection decisions. The usage patterns displayed in chart (d) exemplarily stand for a pattern which complies most strongly with the dispersed with an object-focused biasconvention that has been observed with the English dataset as a whole. The directors whose usage patterns are displayed in (d) used adjective-plus-(pointdenoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) for targets whose ROs could be readily referred to by use of corner and switched to the use of constructions from the (still object-focused end of the) mid-range, i.e. mostly adjective-plus-DIM-N constructions (I-3), in all cases in which their corner-concept could not be applied to the shape of the RO. Variation with respect to this last aspect becomes visible from the fact that there are differences as to which targets the individual directors did not refer to by use of adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11). The patterns displayed in charts (e) and (f) illustrate that some individual usage patterns diverged rather strongly from the tendencies observed on a more global level. Thus, for example, the speakers whose distribution patterns are displayed in (e) either did not comply with the tendency of mainly using highly object-focused constructions at all (director E.121) or hardly provided any precise DIMDIM(TOP)-references (director E.117). The pattern of distribution for director E.102, which is displayed in chart (f), even comes rather close to the pattern observed for a subset of speakers of German: this speaker referred to scenes with clearly cornered ROs by using object-focused constructions and switched to the use of space-focused constructions when referring to scenes with uncornered and/or unbounded ROs (see below). Director E.102 thus stands out from the main tendency identified from the English subcorpus because he made relatively frequent use of simple dimensional adverb/I-7-like constructions. In sum, the patterns identified with individual speakers of English largely confirm the observation that most speakers made preferred use of highly objectfocused constructions. It also illustrates that the scope of application of these constructions differs between individuals to the extent that the degree of uncorneredness of an RO from which onwards highly object-focused constructions were no longer used is different; some speakers considered it possible to refer to the lettuce leaf in T4 or even the round plate in T6 as having corners, others diverged to the use of different constructions with these items. Overall, however, the range of different speaker-specific patterns in the English data is too diverse to allow for the identification of any subgroups or

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subconventions on the more concrete, more strongly form-defined levels of Intermediate Level or Specific Level SCTs. That is, there are no indications of subconventions that might exist within, or on top of, the general high-level convention of using object-focused constructions if possible, and even of always using the most strongly object-focused construction applicable to a particular scene. As will be shown now, the situation is different with the German data. The patterns of conventionalization identified for this language-specific subset (see above, pp. 254–264) already indicate that there exist two different general conventions, or, respectively, one general convention and one competing contextspecific subconvention in German. These are, firstly, the convention of generally and consistently referring to (all kinds of) scenes by using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) and, secondly, the convention of using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) for reference to scenes with uncornered ROs and of using adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) for reference to scenes with cornered ROs. This observation suggests that in particular the SCT-distribution patterns for those speakers who had been classified in Section 7.2.4 (Analysis 1A-1) as Mixed Speakers require to be investigated more closely. These speakers are particularly interesting because it might be the case that they, in fact, behave in a way consistent with the subconvention of using adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) when referring to cornered scenes and with the subconvention of using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) when referring to uncornered scenes. Alternatively, given that speakers are exposed to different subconventions, it might also be the case that the two patterns of conventionalization just outlined compete for use in these speakers. In fact, both possible scenarios find support by the distribution patterns identified for individual speakers of German. Figure 39 displays a selection of these patterns. The patterns displayed in charts (a) and (b) can be considered prototypical of speakers of German: many of the German-speaking participants in Experiment 1 could be identified to generally comply with either of the two conventions sketched above, i.e. the general use of simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) (consistent pattern; chart (a)) or the use of adjective-plus-SPECPARTN constructions (I-1) for scenes with cornered ROs and of simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) for all other scene types (bifurcated pattern; chart (b)).

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 39: Experiment 1 – individual patterns of use of Intermediate Level SCTs (German-speaking participants).

However, a comparison of charts (a) and (b) with charts (c) and (d) indicates that not all speakers complied equally well with either the consistent or the bifurcated pattern. As chart (c), for instance, shows, several speakers switched between using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) and adjectiveplus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) when referring to scenes with cornered ROs, but still largely complied with the principle of referring to uncornered and unbounded scenes by using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7). This pattern of linguistic behaviour might indicate that both possible conventions of referring to scenes with cornered ROs, the general convention of using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) and the specific convention of using adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1), are entrenched with a roughly comparably strong degree in these speakers and, thus, compete for use during utterance planning and production. What proved particularly interesting in the German data is that a relatively clear pattern of subconventions could be identified on the basis of how speakers interacted with cornered target scenes. This, again, made it possible to identify most individual speakers as representatives of one of the following three different speaker types: Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers or Variable Speakers. Those speakers classified as Consistent SPF-speakers consistently used simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) when referring to cornered target scenes (and usually also when referring to uncornered scenes; see chart (a)). This pattern could be observed with six out of the 23 German directors (26.1%).

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Members of the class of Consistent OBJF-speakers used adjective-plus-SPECPARTN constructions (I-1) when referring to cornered target scenes. Most of them complied with the bifurcated pattern, i.e. they used space-focused constructions when referring to uncornered scenes (chart (b)). Again, six of the German directors (26.1%) were speakers of this type. Variable Speakers switched between using adjective-plus-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1) and simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) when referring to cornered scenes. This might indicate that these constructions are comparably readily available to those speakers, and therefore potentially compete for use during utterance planning and production (chart (c)). Among the 23 German directors tested, eight (34.8%) could be identified as belonging to this group. Overall, most of the German-speaking participants in Experiment 1 could be classified as representatives of one of these three speaker types: only three directors in the sample (13%) displayed completely different patterns of distribution. The pattern displayed in chart (d) (Figure 39) proves particularly interesting in this context since it runs counter to several general tendencies identified for German: firstly, the speaker (director G.2) drew on a relatively broad range of different Intermediate Level SCTs. Thus, her behaviour clearly diverged from the behaviour of the majority of the German-speaking participants in Experiment 1, who hardly made use of any construction types other than I-1 (adjective-plusSPEC-PARTN constructions) and/or I-7 (simple dimensional adverb constructions). Secondly, she is the only speaker of German whose references to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes gradually decreased in degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings with decreasing corneredness of RO-objects. This might indicate that director G.2 is the only speaker who seems to have categorized RO-shape variation in a gradual manner, while all other speakers very likely classified target scenes categorically as either cornered or uncornered. In this respect, the language-use behaviour of director G.2 could even be claimed to be more in line with what was observed with speakers of English than with what was observed with the majority of speakers of German. The occasional occurrence of such unique patterns of language-use behaviour does not, however, call into question the general finding that there obviously exist three different German speaker types: Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers and Variable Speakers. The existence of these types and of the related subconventions thus marks a clear difference between the German and the English data.

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In addition, and very importantly, this finding identifies speakers of German as the ideal subjects for testing Hypothesis 2, i.e. for investigating whether the use of different spatial construction types is correlated with systematic differences in referent scene perception and memory: as will be elaborated on below, the presence of both Consistent Speakers and Variable Speakers in the German speech community provides an ideal testing ground for differentiating between the predictions made on the basis of Schematicity Theory and the predictions made on the basis of Differentiality Theory. Therefore, Experiment 2 investigated Hypothesis 2 on a within-language level with German speakers only. Taking into account that Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory make different predictions with respect to the possible occurrence of cross-linguistic effects, the findings from Experiment 2 thus also provided the basis on which it could be evaluated whether testing Hypothesis 3, i.e. conducting a contrastive (German versus English) investigation of language-perception/cognition effects, would be possible and useful at all. The issue of possible cross-linguistic differences will therefore be taken up again subsequent to the presentation and discussion of Experiment 2 (see Section 8.3.6). Before the procedure and results of this experiment will be reported and discussed in Chapter 8, the following section once more summarizes the findings from Experiment 1, interprets them in the light of what was predicted by Hypotheses 1a–c, and illustrates what they might imply for the investigation of Hypotheses 2 and 3.

7.2.6 Summary and discussion Based on the findings from Experiment 1, the following can be concluded with regard to Hypotheses 1a–c: Hypothesis 1a predicted that speakers of German make preferred use of space-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, speakers of English of object-focused constructions. Both Analysis 1A and Analysis 1B revealed between-group differences which are in line with this hypothesis: (1) Among the three different General Level SCTs (object-focused/G-A, midrange and mixed/G-B and space-focused/G-C), space-focused constructions (G-C) constituted the most frequently used construction type in German, object-focused constructions (G-A) the most frequently used construction type in English.

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(2) On the level of language-specific subcorpora, the Object-focusedness Degree Value (ODV) was, overall, higher in English than in German. Focusing on the speaker groups tested as wholes, i.e. disregarding group-internal variation, speakers of German can thus indeed be claimed to construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a more highly space-focused manner than speakers of English (at least if the Schematicity Theory view that particular construction types are stably associated with particular construal meanings is accepted; see Chapters 5 and 6). An inclusion of external and internal contextual factors into the analyses, however, revealed the existence of a high degree of language-internal variation, some systematic, some unsystematic. The findings from this more differential analysis thus considerably qualify the conclusion suggested by the findings from the context-independent analyses. In addition, they yield far from unambiguous answers to Hypotheses 1b and 1c, i.e. to the predictions that speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by external contextual factors than speakers of English (Hypothesis 1b), and that speakers of German should agree more strongly in how they refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes than speakers of English (Hypothesis 1c). This becomes obvious from the following observations: (1) Several of the findings reported in this chapter indicate that speakers of German, just as speakers of English, attend to and are influenced in their construction selection decisions by functional features of the referent objects. For instance, the German-speaking participants in Experiment 1 used the handle of the basket in target item T5 (apple in basket; see Figure 28 on p. 177) as an RO even more frequently than the English-speaking participants. In addition, there are indications that German speakers’ selection of dimension-replacive constructions (e.g. in the bottom right corner) versus non-replacive constructions (e.g. in the front right corner) was influenced by the degree to which the referent scenes enabled the simulation of an interaction with the LO (see p. 188 above). This is interpreted here as indicating that the set of situations or scene types to which Hypothesis 1b (i.e. the prediction that speakers of German are less strongly influenced in their construction selection decisions by RO-features than speakers of English) might apply is smaller than expected, i.e. does not necessarily comprise scenes with highly salient functional components. (2) On a very general level, Analysis 1B revealed that the shape of the RO constitutes a relevant factor of influence on scene construal in both languages investigated. This finding is clearly not in line with Hypothesis 1b.

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Analysis 1B also identified the factor of individual participants, and thus of variation in internal/cognitive contexts, as one factor that explained the distribution of ODVs in the data. It was shown that this factor explained more of the residual variance in the English than in the German data (and did so in both absolute and relative terms), which might point towards a lower degree of conventionalization of making DIMDIM(TOP)-references in English than in German (see Section 7.2.5, Analysis 1B-1). However, complementary close-up analyses revealed that the major dimension of variation is not strength of conventions (as predicted by Hypothesis 1c), but rather patterns of conventionalization. These patterns are as follows: in the English subcorpus, a dispersed pattern with an objectfocused bias was identified; uses of highly object-focused constructions were dominant with all scene types, but decreased in frequency with decreasing corneredness of the RO. Relative to this, uses of a relatively diverse set of constructions with intermediate degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings increased. This was interpreted as indicating that, in English, there exists a high-level convention of using constructions with as high a degrees of object-focusedness construal meaning as licensed by the referent scene. The high diversity of mid-range and mixed constructions observed with uncornered referent scenes was interpreted as indicating that there exists no convention for how to refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes on a more specific level in English. This interpretation finds further support by the finding that scenes with round ROs were particularly frequently referred to in an imprecise manner (see Section 7.2.2). These findings indicate that speakers did not agree as to which particular specific construction type to use. In addition, speakers varied as to which scene types they still considered eligible for being referred to by use of a highly object-focused construction, i.e. an adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN construction (I-1/S-11). If taken together, these findings suggest that Hypothesis 1c (the hypothesis that there exist no clear conventions in English as to how to make precise DIMDIM(TOP)-references) is not fully disconfirmed by the data, but does not meet with unambiguous support either. The data suggest that it might apply on a high level of specificity of language knowledge and use, i.e. to conventions of using particular, very specific formal variants of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, but does so mainly for references to scenes with uncornered ROs. In the German subcorpus, a bifurcated pattern with a space-focused bias was identified: the speakers of German made use of either highly space-

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focused simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) or highly objectfocused adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11), and hardly ever used constructions from the mid-range of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. Overall, simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) were used more frequently than adjective-plus-(point-denoting)SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11). The main reason for this difference in frequencies is that speakers agreed quite strongly in referring to spatial scenes with uncornered ROs by using constructions of this type. The bifurcated pattern, accordingly, mainly became manifest with references to scenes with cornered ROs. Accordingly, counter to Hypothesis 1c, no single overarching convention of referring to all kinds of scenes in a highly spacefocused manner could be identified. Instead, a specific convention of using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7) only appears to exist for references to scenes with uncornered ROs. The pattern of distribution for scenes with cornered ROs led to the identification of two different speech-community internal subconventions: the convention of referring to such scenes by using highly object-focused adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11) (and of referring to all other scene types by use of space-focused simple dimensional adverb constructions/I-7), and the convention of referring to all scene types by use of simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7). A close-up investigation of the data for each individual German participant revealed that not all speakers clearly complied with one of these two subconventions. Instead, three different speaker types could be identified based on their descriptions of scenes with cornered ROs: Consistent SPF-speakers, who referred to all cornered scenes by using simple dimensional adverb constructions (I-7), Consistent OBJF-speakers, who referred to all cornered scenes by using adjective-plus-(point-denoting)-SPEC-PARTN constructions (I-1/S-11), and Variable Speakers who switched between the use of both construction types and who are assumed here to initially co-activate both constructions in the course of utterance planning and production. In sum, Experiment 1 revealed clear tendencies in support of the general prediction that uses of space-focused constructions are more frequent (and thus more common) in German than in English, and that, accordingly, speakers of English, overall, indeed tend to construe DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a more strongly objectfocused manner than speakers of German. However, it also revealed that neither the frequencies of SCTs nor the ODVs on the level of language-defined speaker-groups (German versus English speak-

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ers) draw a comprehensive picture of usage conventions and, consequently, construal conventions in the two languages investigated. Instead, it was revealed that, in defining how members of a particular speech community will linguistically interact with spatial scenes, a central role requires to be assigned to external/situational and internal/cognitive contextual factors. In this respect, the findings from Experiment 1 clearly line in with findings from earlier studies (see Section 1.1) which indicate that general-level frequency analyses often hide considerable context-related variation in the data, including variation caused by interindividual differences in usage preferences. As indicated above, this finding had considerable methodological consequences for the testing of Hypotheses 2 and 3: it suggests, firstly, that findings pertaining to relatively high levels of schematicity and abstraction of construction knowledge and use do not provide a solid basis for investigating languageperception/cognition effects on a cross-linguistic basis, in particular if participants are randomly recruited from the speech communities as wholes. Secondly, and partly as a consequence of this, it suggests (a) that any investigation of language-perception/cognition effects requires that more detailed information on the cognitive contexts of the specific individuals tested, i.e. the individual participants’ entrenched linguistic habits, be available, and (b) that the kinds of external contexts for reference to which the linguistic structures under investigation are used be highly controlled. Thirdly, the theoretical considerations laid out in Chapter 5 indicate that any investigation of language-perception/cognition effects on a cross-linguistic level must be preceded by an investigation of possible effects on a language-internal level. Importantly, the findings from Experiment 1 do not only draw attention to these methodological requirements, but also provide the basis on which they can be fulfilled. The three different speaker types identified for German (Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers and Variable Speakers) define speakers of German as an ideal test group and scenes with cornered ROs as ideal test scenes for investigating Hypothesis 2, and thus for laying the grounds for a possible investigation of Hypothesis 3. As will be elaborated on in the following Chapter 8, testing representatives of these three German speaker types and comparing their linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour towards cornered referent scenes renders it possible to jointly and comparatively test the set of hypotheses formulated in Chapter 6 (and subsumed as Hypothesis 2) on the basis of Schematicity Theory and the set of (partly competing) hypotheses formulated on the basis of Differentiality Theory. This becomes possible because Schematicity Theory predicts that correlations between forms of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour should become observable with both Consistent and

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Variable Speakers, whereas Differentiality Theory predicts that such correlations should occur with Variable Speakers only. Testing German references to scenes with cornered ROs thus did not only allow for determining whether uses of different DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions are systematically associated with different patterns of attention allocation to their referent scenes, but also for assessing the validity of the two theoretical frameworks proposed in Chapter 5, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory. How this was realized in Experiment 2 and which results were yielded by this investigation will be reported in the following Chapter 8.

8 Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: The role of cognitive contexts … the language of space is inextricably bound up with the process of seeing our world and acting on it. (Coventry and Garrod 2004: 13)

The research questions addressed by Experiment 2 are the following: (1) Are uses of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions from the extreme ends of the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale indeed systematically associated with the different patterns of (visual) attention allocation that derive from construaltheoretical principles (see Chapter 3)? (2) If so, under what situational and cognitive contextual conditions do such effects occur? (3) How pervasive and permanent are such effects? Since they make different predictions with respect to questions (2) and (3), Experiment 2 differentially investigated the Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory versions of Hypothesis 2, i.e. the idea that construction-use associated attentional effects should occur in all speakers of a language and thus independently of cognitive contextual conditions versus the idea that such effects should only become manifest under contrast- or competition-inducing cognitive contextual conditions (i.e. in Variable Speakers). In this way, it provided an empirical basis on which Hypothesis 3, which relates to general, crosslinguistic effects, could be re-evaluated. Experiment 2 applied on a language-internal level only: all speakers tested were native speakers of German. As indicated above, the main reason for this is the finding from Experiment 1 that there exist different speaker types in the German speech community. This allowed for interindividual differences in cognitive contexts, i.e. in patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge, to be readily operationalized. This operationalization is based on the assumption that differences in cognitive contexts become manifest by and thus measurable via an investigation of differences between speakers’ usage preferences (see Chapters 5 and 6). In addition, addressing language-perception/cognition relations on a language-internal level avoided a range of possible pitfalls inherent in crosslinguistic investigations (cf. e.g. Casasanto 2008: 74). In particular, it reduced cultural differences. Since they are closely and complexly interspersed with

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linguistic differences, cultural differences constitute a considerable challenge for the analysis and interpretation of language-related findings (cf. e.g. Bohnemeyer 2002; Enfield 2000; Everett 2013: 272–273; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 643). Furthermore, focusing on German only avoided problems of analysis and interpretation resulting from the fact that it is still largely unclear whether similar-looking German and English linguistic constructions may at all be treated as if they were formally and/or semantically as well as functionally equivalent (e.g. Croft 2001: 60; see also Chapter 5). Apart from these issues relating to the use of language and the analysis and interpretation of linguistic data, cultural differences might also act as a confounding factor to the interpretation of eye-movement data. Previous research has revealed that an observer’s cultural background can and very likely does influence the position data (e.g. position of eye-fixation, landing position in AoI, fixation duration, dwell time) he or she produces in an eye-tracking experiment (cf. e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 395–396), i.e. very likely plays a role for the interpretation of visual attentional data, as well as of experimental behavioural data more generally (cf. e.g. Boduroğlu, Shah, and Nisbett 2009). Furthermore, there is evidence indicating that the processing principles during language production might vary considerably and systematically in dependence on the language used (cf. e.g. Griffin and Crew 2012: 413). Both the research questions asked here and the choice of method for their investigation thus licensed and even strongly suggested that Experiment 2 focus on members of one speech community only. In line with this strategy, Experiment 2 investigated uses of space-focused versus object-focused constructions (a) between Consistent Speakers and (b) within Variable Speakers of German. In this way, it provided a basis for comparing the possible occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects in different cognitive contextual environments (preference versus no preference for the use of a particular DIMDIM(TOP)-construction type). In doing so, it built on findings from earlier research on interindividual variation and idiolectal patterns of language use and linguistic knowledge: based on Barlow’s (2013) findings, it assumed that idiolectal preferences are relatively stable across time within single individuals (Barlow 2013: 443), are “based on preferences rather than absolutes, which translates into marked differences in the frequency of use of particular patterns” (Barlow 2013: 446; see also Croft 2000: 176), and cannot, or at least not completely and exclusively, be identified to be a function of external contextual influences or of situation-internal alignment or self-alignment effects (cf. Barlow 2013: 472–473; see also the discussion in Section 8.5).

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The factors of situational context and permanence/pervasiveness of language-perception/cognition effects were covered in Experiment 2 by the use of different task conditions and thus contexts of interaction with the spatial referent scenes. In line with up-to-date methodology in experimental language-andthought/linguistic relativity research (e.g. Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Pourcel 2002), Experiment 2 involved different tasks which enabled the complementary investigation of the following types of effects: (1) language-use concurrent perceptual effects (2) perceptual and memory effects as they occur subsequent to recent language use (recency effects) (3) potentially habit-induced, language-use independent (‘Whorfian’) perceptual effects. To realize this, Experiment 2 combined a production version of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm (cf. e.g. Gleitman et al. 2007; Griffin 2001; Griffin and Bock 2000; Griffin and Oppenheimer 2006; Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011: 154–155, 164–166; Meyer, Sleiderik, and Levelt 1998; Strömqvist, Holmqvist, and Andersson 2009), a scene viewing task and a recognition memory test. This design, which was partly inspired by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) (see below), proved to be ideally suited to addressing the research questions listed above for three main reasons. Firstly, it combined on-line and off-line measures (eye-tracking and recognition-memory testing) and thus was suited to reveal both perceptual and representation/memory-related effects of the current, recent and/or habitual use of particular linguistic constructions. This combination, secondly, allowed for oculomotor behaviour (as a relatively direct measure of region/location-based attention) and memory performance (as an indirect but more content-related measure of attentional effects) to complement each other. This compensated to a considerable extent for the problem that eye-fixation data cannot, on their own, reveal which kind of information was attended to in a fixated region, but can only indicate where attention was at a certain point in time (cf. e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 95–96). Thirdly and most generally, the use of several measures and tasks allowed for Experiment 2 to address, in an explorative manner, a considerable range of possible effects. The explorative approach explains from and, at the same time, accounts for the fact that the research reported in this chapter is innovative in several respects: firstly, it could only partly rely on existing methodologies; and,

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secondly, it could not draw on findings from preceding investigations, both as regards comparisons between preference-defined speaker types and as regards language-perception/cognition effects associated with the use of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions. Therefore, specific predictions as to which effects were most likely to occur, and how strong they would be, could not be made. Taking this into account, eye-tracking proved particularly well-suited to the purposes of this project. Being a highly sensitive on-line measure of attentional effects, it has the potential of revealing even very subtle effects, as well as temporally local effects, i.e. effects that only become manifest during certain phases of task performance (cf. e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 454). Furthermore, eye movements constitute a well-established and broadly accepted measure of visual perceptual attention, whose correlations with current language use are well attested (see discussion below for details). As regards the status of oculomotor behaviour as an indicator of attention allocation, previous research has demonstrated the following: – The planning of a saccadic movement to an object or region, and, consequently, the fixation following such a saccade (cf. e.g. Deubel 2008: 631) are (obligatorily) coupled with and thus indicate the assignment of attention to the respective region and (parts of) its content (cf. e.g. Deubel 2008; Deubel and Schneider 1996; Hoffman and Subramaniam 1995; Shepert, Findlay, and Hockey 1986; see also Groner and Groner 1989; Holmqvist et al. 2011: 378–379; Irwin 2004: 106; Rayner 1998: 374–375; Rayner 2009: 1458).121 – The time spent visually fixating a particular region of a scene (gaze duration) constitutes a measure of the degree of attention assigned to this region (and to the information it contains) (cf. e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 376– 391), i.e. “longer fixations equal deeper processing” (Holmqvist et al. 2011: 381, emphasis original; see also Just and Carpenter’s (1980) eye-mind assumption and Irwin 2004: 106). – The assignment of a high degree of attention to a particular region and/or feature of a scene has as an effect that information on this region and/or feature is well remembered and can be retrieved from memory rather easily and quickly (cf. e.g. Baddeley et al. 1984; Craik et al. 1996; see also Feist and Gentner 2001; Griffin 2004: 223 and Section 4.2).

|| 121 As, for instance, pointed out by Rayner (2009: 1458), eye movements and attention can, theoretically, be disengaged. However, Rayner (2009) also notes that instances of eyemovement detached attentional phenomena are bound to specific contextual conditions, and are highly unlikely to occur with complex tasks like the ones used in Experiment 2.

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As regards the second issue pertaining to interrelations between eye movements and language use, there is considerable empirical evidence indicating that eye movements are time-locked to processes of (situated referential) language comprehension (cf. e.g. Cooper 1974; Eberhard et al. 1995: 411–412; Griffin 2004: 214–215; Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011: 166; Rayner 2009: 1485; Tanenhaus et al. 1995) and (situated referential) language production (cf. e.g. Griffin and Bock 2000; Meyer, Sleiderik, and Levelt 1998; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Strömqvist, Holmqvist, and Andersson 2009; see also Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011 for an overview and critical discussion). These findings suggest that language use can, on the one hand, be influenced or even directed by visual attention (cf. e.g. Gleitman et al. 2007; Tomlin 1995, 1997; see also Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.). On the other hand, they indicate that language might have the potential to drive perceptual attention, i.e. to function as a top-down source of (visual) perceptual salience (cf. e.g. Coventry et al. 2010: 202; Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.; Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 28–29; Logan 1995: 115; see also Section 4.2. and Chapter 5). Plenty of relatively recent empirical investigations have addressed these questions, mostly but not exclusively in the context of investigating linguistic relativity or language-and-thought effects. Those studies that proved most relevant theoretically and/or methodologically for the planning and realization of Experiment 2 will be referred in the following section.

8.1 Methodological and theoretical inspirations from previous research Quite a number of studies have provided evidence in support of perception-tolanguage effects (cf. e.g. Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.). To refer to just a few, Tomlin (1995, 1997) has demonstrated that visual items that were rendered visually salient by means of overt visual cueing are mentioned earlier in referential utterances than their less salient competitors, and/or occupy more prominent functional slots, like the subject slot, in sentence-level constructions. Gleitman et al. (2007) show that these linguistic effects can also be triggered by covert/subliminal attentional cues. In addition, they provide evidence indicating that the salience structure of the visual input can induce speakers to make use of disfavoured linguistic constructions, i.e. constructions that are not as deeply entrenched in these speakers’ minds as their functionally largely equivalent alternatives.

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Evidence for the reverse direction of influence, language-to-perception effects, has relatively recently been provided by studies making use of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm (cf. e.g. Hartsuiker, Huettig, and Olivers 2011; Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011; Salverda, Brown, and Tanenhaus 2011), which is also the core paradigm used in Experiment 2. These previous studies, which often triangulate eye-tracking with further methods like memory testing, do not only confirm earlier findings that eye movements to a visual item are time-locked to the (active or passive) use of its linguistic label (cf. e.g. Altmann and Kamide 2004; Cooper 1974; Griffin and Bock 2000; Tanenhaus et al. 1995). They also provide relatively robust evidence indicating that specific perceptual attentional effects can differentially be triggered by the (current) use of particular grammatical patterns (cf. e.g. Altmann and Kamide 2004: 358–361, 2007; Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014; von Stutterheim et al. 2012) or (complex) construction types (cf. e.g. Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008). Several studies from this field constituted a major source of inspiration for Experiment 2. Those are reported in more detail in the following. One set of studies highly relevant to the planning and realization of Experiment 2 was conducted by von Stutterheim and collaborators (Carroll, von Stutterheim, and Nuese 2004; Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014; von Stutterheim et al. 2012; von Stutterheim, Carroll, and Klein 2009). These studies centrally address the following question: do cross-linguistic differences in the domain of temporality/aspectuality, in particular the presence versus the absence of grammatical aspect, affect event conceptualization and distribution of attention when talking about motion events? And, if so, do such influences become manifest in the form of “seeing for speaking”-effects (von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 835, emphasis original), i.e. in language-type specific patterns of visual attention allocation to the referent scenes during utterance planning? Von Stutterheim and collaborators (2012) used a visual world language production task to investigate differences between speakers of English (as an aspect language) and speakers of German (in which aspect does not constitute a grammatical category). They report the following findings: when asked to tell what is happening in a video clip depicting a motion event, direction of attention to particular aspects or features of these events varies systematically between speakers of the two languages tested. Speakers of English tend to “conceptualize the event[s] as ‘in progression’” (von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 836) and to focus on prominent phases in its development; in contrast to this, speakers of German tend to “take a holistic view” (von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 836). In terms of oculomotor behaviour, the German-speaking participants in this experiment focused on and thus assigned more attention to the endpoints

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of motion (even under conditions on which this endpoint was not reached in the events, which were presented to the participants in the form of video clips), whereas speakers of English tended to focus relatively strongly on the (depicted) intermediate phase of (ongoing) motion (see von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 836–837). Von Stutterheim and colleagues interpret this finding, as well as findings from the testing of memory for endpoints of motion in speakers of aspect and non-aspect languages (see von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 855–857), as indicating that conceptualization during utterance preparation (thinking for speaking, Slobin 1991) is to some extent language-(type-)specific, and also, eventually, becomes manifest through visual-attentive behaviour (seeing for speaking). A follow-up study by Flecken, von Stutterheim and Carroll (2014) even demonstrated that the language-(type-)specific (aspect versus no aspect), language-use concurrent patterns of visual attention allocation reported in von Stutterheim et al. (2012) are met by the occurrence of corresponding patterns during the performance of a non-verbal task (watching dynamic motion event scenes while simultaneously performing an auditory distracter task): even when not asked to use language, speakers of German (as a non-aspect language) attended to endpoints of motion more frequently and longer than speakers of Modern Standard Arabic (as an aspect language). The high relevance in particular of this follow-up study for the research reported in this book explains as follows: while language-use concurrent effects are relatively well recorded (see references above and Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.), Flecken, von Stutterheim and Carroll’s (2014) finding of relatively highly pervasive effects even in non-linguistic task conditions is by far not a finding which all empirical cross-linguistic language-and-thought studies that have focused on relatively highly schematic, abstract-grammatical linguistic constructions or categories have made. Rather, across investigations, the pattern of findings is very mixed. For instance, on investigating whether Mandarin classifiers influence attention allocation patterns, Huettig et al. (2010) did not find any effects in non-verbal conditions, i.e. could not provide evidence indicating that language-use associated patterns of attention allocation persist beyond contexts of current situated-referential language use. In contrast to this, Boroditsky, Schmidt and Philips (2003) provide evidence in support of a rather pervasive influence of grammatical gender systems on the conceptualization of and feature ascription to objects, as well as on memory for object-name pairs. Thus, as noted by Flecken, von Stutterheim and Carroll (2014: 51), existing “empirical studies leave us with an inconsistent picture of the inter-relation of language and cognitive processing” to the extent that most of them show that there are certain effects of language on perception, but that the nature, strength

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and permanence of these effects is far from stable, let alone clear, across different tasks, studies and even conceptual domains (see also Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 74–75 and Chapter 2 above). In addition, there are several indications that differences in language-use associated behaviour are not always best measured in off-line, resultative terms, but might to a considerable extent be a matter of preference or order of processing (cf. e.g. von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 859; see also Section 8.4 below). This observation accounts even more for studies that focus on a lower, more specific, ‘lexical’ level of language in use. A comparison of several relatively recent studies on motion event perception (Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; Soroli 2012; Soroli and Hickmann 2010; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010; see also Gennari et al. 2002) illustrates this very clearly. These studies draw on the typological differentiation between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages (cf. e.g. Slobin 1997; Talmy 2007b), and thus investigate cross-linguistic variation on a less highly general and abstract-grammatical level than the studies by von Stutterheim and collaborators just reported (see also Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 47; von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 836). As regards types and levels of schematicity of constructions, these studies thus come close(r) to the differentiation between space-focused and object-focused spatial scene construal that is at the core of Experiment 2. Therefore, their findings are of particular relevance here. Comparing the behaviour of speakers of English (a satellite-framed language) and French (a verb-framed language) in a visual world scene description task, as well as comparing the performance of the same participants in a verbal and non-verbal categorization task, Soroli and Hickmann (2010; cf. also Soroli 2012) found language-type specific effects in both the linguistic and the nonlinguistic behaviour of speakers of the two languages. In line with what would have been expected on the basis of motion verb typological considerations, speakers of French displayed a relatively stronger preference for referring and attending to path relative to manner information than speakers of English (Soroli and Hickmann 2010: 588–590). However, the non-linguistic effects were not fully systematic since eye-movement patterns did not differ cross-linguistically for the whole trial period. Instead, effects only occurred during certain time spans. In addition, they only occurred with cartoon stimuli but not with video stimuli (Soroli and Hickmann 2010: 589–590). As regards categorization, the predicted language-specific effects were clear in the verbal categorization task, but only tentative in the non-verbal task (Soroli and Hickmann 2010: 590–591). Thus, the data provided by Soroli and Hickmann (2010) revealed clear linguistic effects, as well as a range of language-associated non-linguistic effects. How-

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ever, they also indicate that language-perception/cognition effects are not fully systematic. Instead, the (non-)occurrence of such effects is obviously subject to modification by external contextual conditions, like the type of stimuli referred to or the task to be solved. In sum, the findings by Soroli and Hickmann (2010) still indicate, however, that, given the right contextual conditions, linguistic habits can (and do) influence non-linguistic behaviour, both on-line (eye movements) and off-line (categorization). The findings from a series of experiments conducted by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and by Trueswell and Papafragou (2010), by contrast, yield a different, less supportive, picture of language-perception/cognition effects during the verbal and non-verbal interaction with motion events. More specifically, they suggest a less pervasive, highly complex influence of current and habitual language use on visual attentional behaviour. Both studies investigated how speakers of English (a satellite-framed language) and Greek (a verb-framed language) interact with motion scenes under different task conditions (verbally describing scenes or memorizing scenes, partly while performing different types of secondary/interference tasks). Both used oculomotor behaviour as well as memory performance as the main measures of attention allocation. Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) found that speakers’ eye movements indeed matched the predicted attentional patterns while speakers were planning a verbal description of a currently observed scene: speakers of both English and Greek assigned relatively more attention to those scene features which are usually obligatorily encoded in motion verbs in their languages. That is, speakers of English attended relatively more to the manner of motion (as compared to the path/endpoint of motion) than speakers of Greek. This effect did not recur, however, during the non-verbal task of memorizing the scenes for a subsequent memory test. Instead, a “reverse-Whorfian effect” (Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67) occurred in this task condition, but only in the final phase of interacting with the stimuli: while speakers still had time left, they attended to those features of the scenes which they usually do not explicitly encode in their native languages. This same effect of attending to what participants’ native languages presumably define as non-obligatory and thus as ‘details’ also occurred with the participants in a study by Trueswell and Papafragou (2010), which investigated different conditions of non-linguistic interaction with motion event scenes. However, the attentional effect just described only became manifest under conditions in which participants performed a non-linguistic interference task (tapping) in parallel to memorizing the scenes, but did not occur when no secondary task was involved or when this

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task was linguistic in nature (counting aloud). Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) interpret this to indicate that language, or, more precisely, the typological class (in terms of motion-event conceptualization) to which a speakers’ native language belongs, does not generally and automatically influence how individuals attend to motion scenes, but only does so under conditions of cognitive load on resources other than language. In very general terms, a comparison of the work by Soroli and Hickmann (2010) and Soroli (2012) with the studies by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) illustrates very clearly that different studies on language-perception/cognition effects have yielded different kinds of findings and have done so even when focusing on very similar structures and languages. On top of this, in particular the findings by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) draw attention to a range of theoretical and methodological issues that also proved crucial to the planning and realization of Experiment 2. Firstly, they show that (and how) different task conditions can influence the (non-)occurrence of languageperception/cognition effects. Secondly, they demonstrate that language-mediated attentional effects can take different forms, including ones reverse to what would have been predicted on the basis of linguistic relativity theory and of construal theories. And, thirdly, they reveal that language-perception/cognition effects can occur at different points in time during the performance of a specific task and can, accordingly, also only be revealed by fine-grained, temporally resolved measures, i.e. measures that allow insights into the process(es) of task performance (cf. also von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 859–860). All of these issues have rendered the studies by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) a central source of inspiration for Experiment 2, which models on it methodologically in several respects (see Sections 8.3.3 to 8.3.5). In sum, the selective overview of recent investigations of linguistic relativity effects involving the use of eye-tracking that has just been provided has a range of important methodological and theoretical implications for Experiment 2, as well as for language-and-thought research more generally. First of all, it confirms that eye movements (dwell times, fixation duration and fixation frequency) constitute well-suited measures of visual attention allocation to and consequent memory representation of referent scenes. Accordingly, it identifies these measures as good indicators of patterns of referent scene conceptualization (see also von Stutterheim et al. 2012: 862). Secondly, several previous studies suggest that external contextual conditions (e.g. referent scene design or task conditions) play a decisive role for

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whether, when and how language-perception/cognition effects become manifest. In this way they acknowledge that language-perception/cognition effects can become subject to considerable modulation by influences from other attention-directing forces potentially present on specific occasions of language use. This also involves that the interactions between language and perception/cognition are not unidirectional: they consist in and are constituted by a complex interaction between linguistic and perceptual/cognitive factors and processes. This interpretation, at the same time, provides one basis on which the divergences in findings between individual studies can be explained. They very likely have been caused to a considerable extent by differences in the experimental stimuli and tasks used, as well as by the use of different measures for the analysis and evaluation of observable behaviour, including eye movements. What is telling, however, is that cognitive context – as a further contextual dimension, and thus, very likely, as a further major cause of the diversity of previous findings – has, to the best of my knowledge, hardly been accorded any attention in the field of linguistic relativity research, let alone been investigated systematically. Instead, even highly methodologically refined studies rely very strongly on a homogeneous view of speech-community wide conventions. This can be seen from the fact that the data used for determining linguistic habits in Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008), Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) and Flecken, von Stutterheim and Carroll (2014) stem from a different sample of speakers than those speakers who took part in the non-linguistic tasks, and from the fact that only averaged group data were reported for the linguistic condition in Soroli and Hickmann (2010). Therefore, it appears that most researchers in this field tacitly assume that individual speakers’ entrenched patterns of knowledge comply with speech-community wide patterns of conventionalization to a considerable extent – or, at least, that language-perception/ cognition effects are a speech community/group-level rather than an individual speaker-level phenomenon. As regards this crucial issue, Experiment 2 thus cannot and does not fully rely methodologically on previous research. Instead, to include variation in cognitive contexts between individual speakers as a central factor, the participants in the non-linguistic tasks of Experiment 2 were carefully selected based on their individual linguistic usage preferences, i.e. were (pre-)classified as either Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers or Variable Speakers based on their own linguistic behaviour. How this was realized methodologically will be described in detail in Section 8.3. Prior to this, the following Section 8.2 will outline in more general

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terms how the issues discussed in the present section found application in Experiment 2.

8.2 Hypotheses and general design features Very centrally, the inclusion of cognitive context as a potential determinant of the (non-)occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects enabled a differential testing of Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory: Differentiality Theory predicts that language-use associated attentional effects only occur in contrast-inducing cognitive contextual environments, which are characteristic of Variable Speakers, whereas Schematicity Theory predicts the principled (though differently strong and pervasive) occurrence of such effects in speakers of all types. Taking into account the findings from previous research outlined in Section 8.1, and, in particular, the methodological guidance this research provides for measuring visual attentional effects, Hypothesis 2 could be rendered more concrete and thus testable. Hypothesis 2-G: Speaker-related construal-induced language-perception/cognition effects Hypothesis 2a-G: Language-use concurrent on-line effects Speakers who are currently using a highly object-focused construction (ODV > 2.5) spend more time looking at the RO (relative to the LO) in the referent scene (= a DIMDIM(TOP)-scene with a cornered RO) than speakers who are currently using a highly space-focused construction (ODV < 1). According to Schematicity Theory, these effects should … … occur in Variable and Consistent Speakers. … are particularly strongly pronounced in Consistent Speakers.

According to Differentiality Theory, these effects should … … occur in Variable Speakers only.

Hypothesis 2b-G: Recency effects Speakers who have recently used a highly object-focused construction for reference to a DIMDIM(TOP)-scene with a cornered RO will spend more time looking at the RO when subsequently viewing the same or a very similar scene than speakers who have recently used a highly space-focused construction. In addition, they will remember object-specific features of the RO, like its shape, better.

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According to Schematicity Theory, these effects should … … occur in Variable and Consistent Speakers. … are particularly strongly pronounced in Consistent Speakers.

According to Differentiality Theory, these effects should … … occur in Variable Speakers only.

Hypothesis 2c-G: Habit-induced effects In completely language-use detached contexts, i.e. independently of current or recent language use, speakers’ patterns of attentional interaction with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are as follows: According to Schematicity Theory, … … Consistent OBJF-speakers habitually spend more time looking at the RO (relative to the LO) when interacting with cornered DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a non-linguistic manner than Consistent SPF-speakers.

According to Differentiality Theory, … … strong linguistic preferences do not have an influence on non-linguistic forms of interaction with cornered DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Therefore, the time spent looking at the RO (relative to the LO) does not relevantly differ between representatives of the different German speaker types

In line with previous research (see Section 8.1), dwell time (i.e. the time spent looking at a particular Area of Interest/AoI) was used as the main measure of visual attention allocation. To enable a more content-focused investigation, this measure was complemented by recognition memory performance data (see Hypothesis 2b-G). The focus on attention to the ROs, and to their shape-features in particular, explains as follows: since participants necessarily had to indicate the locations of the LOs (as the figures in the scenes to be described; cf. Talmy 2000: 183; see also Logan 1995: 112) in the language-use concurrent condition, and thus had to refer to them explicitly, variation in attentional patterning could be expected to mainly occur with respect to the ROs. This is also closely in line with the findings from Experiment 1. Since the target items depicted an LO-RO relation only, i.e. did not contain any additional visual information, visual attention assignment to the RO could be measured via the differential of the time spent looking at the LO to the time spent looking at the RO (LO-RO Ratio Value). This enabled the eye-movement analysis to be modelled in a way highly similar to the analytical procedure applied by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010), who used a highly temporally resolved measure based on the ratio of fixations on the manner-of-motion region to fixations on the end-

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point-of-motion region as the main measure of attentional patterning (see Section 8.3.3 for an extensive discussion of the measures used in Experiment 2). In sum, the test conditions, measures and analytical methods used in Experiment 2 allowed for a highly differential investigation not only of Hypothesis 2-G proper, but also of the following more general claims: – Given the right contextual conditions, dimensional adverb constructions and dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions carry different construal meanings. – These meanings … … consist in the attentional patterns of spatial scene conceptualization introduced in Chapter 3 and represented by the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale. … become reflected in and thus observable and measurable via speakers’ oculomotor behaviour and/or memory performance. The experimental design and procedure used to test these claims and, with them, Hypothesis 2-G will be described in detail in Sections 8.3.1 and 8.3.2. The resulting data and the different steps of analysis will be presented in Section 8.3.3. The results of the different analytical steps are reported and discussed in the subsequent Sections 8.3.4 to 8.3.6.

8.3 Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world eye-tracking experiment To cover all relevant levels and forms of interaction with the referent scenes, Experiment 2 comprised the following three tasks (within-subjects conditions): – a combination of a production-focused visual world task and a directormatcher language game (DESCRIBE) – a scene viewing task (VIEW) – a recognition memory test (RECOGNIZE). As a between-subjects condition, the first two tasks were performed in different order by the participants. In this way, language-use independent viewing data (VIEW-condition) could be collected with one group of participants, data providing insights in visual recency effects with the other group (see Section 8.3.3 below). In addition, Experiment 2 involved a web-based pre-test which was used as a means of selectively recruiting Variable Speakers, Consistent SPF-speakers

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and Consistent OBJF-speakers as participants. This pre-test also allowed for a first pre-classification of participants. In addition, given that the main test took part several days after the pre-test, a comparison of participant behaviour between these two test conditions served as a basis for evaluating how stable each participant’s status as a representative of one of the three different speaker types was (see also Barlow 2013: 446–447).

8.3.1 Pre-test and participant recruitment General design features To reach as large a number of potential participants as possible, the pre-test was designed as a web-based survey (cf. e.g. Reips 2002; Tenbrink 2007, 2009).122 The test paradigm constituted of a variant of the director-matcher language game used in Experiment 1. The following changes were made for this task to ideally fit the requirements and purpose of a pre-test to Experiment 2: – To keep participants (who did not receive any benefits for taking part in this pre-test) motivated and to be able to recruit participants from as large a pool of candidates as possible, the entire pre-test could be completed in less than ten minutes (see Reips 2002: 248). Accordingly, the test consisted of three target and six distractor picture sets only. – The number of pictures per set was reduced from eight to four. This was devised on the basis of the following considerations: firstly, as revealed by Experiment 1 (see Section 7.2.4 above), variation in the choice of dimensional terms (not topological terms) constitutes the major source of variation in degrees of object-focusedness construal. Secondly, it could be expected that explicitly drawing attention to the topological relatedness of LO and RO might increase object-attention in general, which, again, might have interfered with or even masked differential effects associated with the use of space-focused as opposed to object-focused constructions. This effect might have been enhanced by the fact that it could hardly have been avoided that one of the two topological relations depicted is more prototypical of the objects than the other (e.g. bottle-on-table rather than bottle|| 122 The pre-test was programmed in PHP as a web-based survey which participants could access online. Any entries made by the participants were made available for later analysis and participant recruitment in an SQL database. I am deeply grateful to Susanne Grandmontagne for programming this survey for me and for supporting me in using it. My thanks also go to the IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften at LMU Munich, who provided the server space for the website and the data.

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–

under-table), which very likely would have resulted in a difference in salience between these two types of relations and the pictures representing them. As a necessary consequence of using a web-based experiment, participants responded in a written mode to an imagined matcher instead of in a spoken mode to a real matcher. With the intention to keep mode-specific effects as limited as possible, participants were explicitly instructed to reply spontaneously and not to re-read and correct their replies (see Appendix, pp. 465– 466 for full instructions). The mode used could therefore be expected to most nearly correspond to the relatively highly ‘speech-like’ mode of using written language as it can be found used in on-line chatrooms or forums (cf. e.g. Beißwenger, Hoffmann, and Storrer 2004; Dürscheid 2003).

Stimuli In keeping with the basic design principles of Experiment 1, each stimulus used in the pre-test consisted of four similar pictures (edited photographs) one of which was marked as the to-be-described picture by a red frame. The differences between these pictures, and the task of having to enable an imagined matcher to select the marked picture quickly and unambiguously from the entire set defined which information had to be included in the descriptions. This ensured that participants provided the required amount of spatial information for the target sets. Three among the nine picture sets in the pre-test constituted such targets. That is, as in Experiment 1, the ratio of targets to distractors was 1:2. The pictures constitutive of the target sets depicted the same two objects, RO and LO, in different DIMDIM(TOP)-relations. The LO was variably positioned in the front right, front left, back right and back left position relative to the RO (see Figure 40 on p. 294). The topological relations were contact-relations (containment or support) on all instances. Since the three different speaker types to be identified by this task were expected to differ in their behaviour towards scenes with cornered ROs, all targets were of this type. The six distractor picture sets each displayed four similar pictures which differed with respect to two features other than their spatial relation. A full list of all target and distractor sets used, and of the kind of differences they displayed, can be found in the Appendix (Table 47 on p. 466). Table 47 also indicates the order of presentation of stimuli, which was kept constant across participants due to the overall small number of items and the use of target scenes with cornered ROs only. As in Experiment 1 (see Section 7.2.1) the experiment started with a distractor set, and targets were never presented in direct succession.

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Procedure The pre-test could be accessed online on a website provided by the IT-service of LMU Munich (IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften). The link to the site was sent via a central mailing list to a pool of several hundred students of this university who had previously agreed to being contacted.123 In this mail, the online-survey was announced as a pre-test to an eyetracking study which would investigate picture description strategies in German. The conditions of participation were defined as follows: German as the only native language, age between 17 and 35, no previous participation in Experiment 1 or in one of the pilot studies to Experiment 2, payment of 8 Euros per hour in case of selection for participation in the eye-tracking study. When accessing the site, participants arrived at a (German-language) welcome page which informed them again that this survey was part of a larger study, and that its main purpose was to identify native speakers of German eligible for participation in an eye-tracking experiment. In addition, they were informed that they would be asked to solve a picture description task in the following. Further down on the same page, participants were asked to enter information on their native language(s), their age and their sex, and to provide an e-mail address by which they could be contacted in case they were invited for participation in the eye-tracking study. They were ensured that their data would be used confidentially and for the purpose of this study only. By proceeding with the pre-test, participants gave their agreement to this usage of their data. Subsequent to this, instructions were provided (see Appendix, pp. 465– 466). Similarly to Experiment 1, participants were told that they would see sets of four similar pictures and that one picture in each set would be highlighted by a red frame. Their task was to describe the highlighted picture such that a fictive person could identify this very picture quickly and unambiguously from the entire set on the basis of their description. For means of illustration and better comprehensibility, a sample (distractor) set and a sample solution to this set were provided. Participants could read the instructions at their own pace and then proceed to the main part, i.e. to the series of nine picture sets, by pressing a start button at the bottom of the page. The subsequent pages were designed as follows: each displayed one picture set which covered about two thirds of the top part of the page. Below this set an empty box for entering the descriptions was provided. Once participants had || 123 I am thankful to the Infodienst of LMU Munich for allowing me to make use of this mailing list.

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entered their description, they could click on a nächstes (‘next’)-button to proceed to the next picture set (see Figure 40).

Fig. 40: Experiment 2 – target item 3 (book on shelf) from the pre-test (with sample description). The original pictures were coloured (light brown shelf, black book, white background). The bold frame of the top left picture was bright red.

On the final page, participants were thanked for taking the time to take part and were informed that they would be contacted soon.

Data and participant selection Overall, 166 students completed the pre-test. Data from three bilingual students (German and Hungarian, German and Romanian), as well as two datasets which did not comprise any DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions were excluded from further consideration. The pre-test thus eventually yielded data from 161 German nativespeaker participants, among them 128 female and 33 male speakers with an

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average age of 22. The resulting corpus of valid, i.e. sufficiently precise, DIMDIM(TOP)-expressions comprised 477 items. Participants were classified as representatives of Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers or Variable Speakers on the basis of the descriptions they had provided for the three target picture sets. For this purpose, each utterance in the corpus was assigned an Object-focusedness Degree Value (ODV; see Section 7.2.5). Descriptions with an ODV < 1 were classified as highly space-focused, descriptions with an ODV > 2.5 as highly object-focused. Those participants in the pre-test who had consistently made use of space-focused constructions were classified as Consistent SPF-speakers, those who had consistently made use of object-focused constructions as Consistent OBJF-speakers; all other speakers were classified as Variable Speakers. Table 19 provides an overview of the results of this classification procedure. Tab. 19: Experiment 2 – speaker types identified from the pre-test.

speaker type

frequencies

Consistent Speakers SPF

97 (60.3%)

OBJF

29 (17.9%)

Variable Speakers

35 (21.8%)

total

161 (100%)

From this set, representatives of each of the three speaker types were invited for participation. Twelve representatives of each group, all of whom were students at LMU Munich and spoke German as their (only) native language,124 took part in the main part of Experiment 2 in exchange for payment or as part of their course requirements. All participants had given their informed consent prior to participation,125 and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

|| 124 Since gender had been shown not to constitute a significant determinant of construalselection decisions within the scope of Experiment 1 (see Chapter 7), and since gender differences also could not be expected to cause any substantial differences in the forms of behaviour measured in Experiment 2, i.e. in attention to and memory for the identities and features of LOs and ROs (cf. e.g. de Goede and Postma 2008: 240–241), male and female participants were recruited in random proportions. 125 This study was conducted at the Department of Psychology, LMU Munich. All standard experimental procedures involving the collection of purely behavioural data (in the present study: eye-movement record, memory-test responses, linguistic responses), without requiring

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8.3.2 Main test: Method and procedure General design features As indicated above, the main part of Experiment 2 comprised three different within-subjects conditions: DESCRIBE, VIEW and RECOGNIZE. The attentional measures used were oculomotor behaviour (dwell times, LO-RO Ratio Values) for DESCRIBE and VIEW and recognition memory performance (Response Accuracy and Response Times) for RECOGNIZE (see Section 8.3.3). As a between-subjects condition, participants completed the first two tasks in different orders: half of the participants from each speaker type were randomly assigned to the DESCRIBE-VIEW (DV) condition, the other half to the VIEWDESCRIBE (VD) condition. The RECOGNIZE task was always solved last. The instructions for each of the three tasks were given only just prior to task performance, and participants were not informed beforehand what the three tasks would be like. Like that, cross-task influences – for instance, influences of an (expected) linguistic task on oculomotor behaviour in the VIEW task in the VD order condition – could largely be prevented.126 The functions of the different tasks and the variation in their order of presentation were as follows: The DESCRIBE task (in both order conditions, i.e. VD DESCRIBE and DV DESCRIBE) required participants to provide situated referential descriptions of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Therefore, it allowed for a more detailed investigation and (re)assessment of each individual participant’s preferred manner of precisely referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Consequently, it provided information on these participants’ presumed states of entrenched linguistic knowledge (cognitive contexts). In addition, the data from the DV DESCRIBE task formed the basis for investigating possible attentional effects of the current use of either a spacefocused or an object-focused construction (Hypothesis 2a-G).

|| any invasive or potentially dangerous methods (which was the case in the present study) are approved by the Department’s Ethics Committee in accordance with the Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki). Data were stored and analysed anonymously. 126 It cannot fully be excluded that participants expected a language-related task based on the online pre-test. Taking into account, however, that the temporal distance between the pre-test and the main experiment was several days up to weeks, and given that none of the participants in the VD condition had indicated that they had expected a linguistic task when asked to perform the VIEW task, it is considered relatively unlikely that task expectations had a marked influence on participants’ oculomotor behaviour in the VD VIEW task condition.

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Depending on the order condition, the VIEW task, as a simple picture viewing task (see below for details), fulfilled two different functions: in the VD order condition, it enabled testing habit-induced attentional effects, i.e. effects as they might occur independently of current, recent or expected language use (Hypothesis 2c-G). In the reverse, DV order condition, in which it was solved subsequently to the DESCRIBE task, the VIEW task provided insights into the occurrence of possible recency effects127 of preceding language use on visual perception during the performance of a non-linguistic task (Hypothesis 2b-G).128 The RECOGNIZE task complemented the DV VIEW task by revealing possible differential effects of preceding language use on recognition memory for specific features of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes (Hypothesis 2b-G). As a more contentoriented task, it also contributed to rendering the eye-fixation data from the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks more readily interpretable: how well the participants remembered particular features of the referent scenes in the RECOGNIZE condition provided insights into which kind of information in a visually fixated region they had attended to while performing the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks (see also Holmqvist et al. 2011: 95–96).

Setting All experiments took place in a low-stimulus environment (dimly lit and soundattenuated test cabin in the eye-tracking laboratory). Stimulus presentation and response recording were controlled by a standard Intel PC equipped with a Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system; the experiment control software was purpose-written in SR Research Experiment Builder (version

|| 127 Given that possible habit-induced effects could be expected to be independent of task condition, a complete separation of recency effects and habit-induced effects was only possible with Variable Speakers but could not possibly be achieved with Consistent Speakers. 128 What is to count as a veritably ‘non-linguistic’ task is a central point of debate in linguistic relativity research. One issue in this debate is whether, for a task that does not involve explicit language use to be ‘non-linguistic’, possible implicit uses of language require to be blocked by the use of a (linguistic) interference task (cf. e.g. Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips 2003: 76; Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 64–65; Gennari et al. 2002; Pederson 2007: 1020– 1021). Since Experiment 2 was targeted towards testing speaker-observers’ entrenched and thus usual ways of interacting with spatial scenes, no such interference task was used. Instead, and in line with Pederson (2007: 1021; cf. also Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003a: 11), the possible habitual implicit use of language as a strategy for solving a particular task was classified as a piece of evidence in support of the hypothesis that language can and possibly routinely does influence cognition, perception and/or behaviour.

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1.10.165, SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada). A 19" CRT monitor (AOC, Amsterdam, NL) was used for stimulus presentation, with refresh rate set to 85 Hz and screen resolution set to 1024 x 768 pixels. The distance between participant and screen was approximately 68 cm. During both the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks, participants’ eye movements were recorded (monocular recording of the right eye; cf. Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008: 165) using an SR Research EyeLink II head mounted system (sampling rate: 250 Hz, visual angle: 0.2°, software version: 2.11; using SR Research default settings, eye movements were classified as saccades if their speed exceeded 35°/s and their acceleration 9500°/s2). Participants’ head positions were maintained by the use of a chin rest (cf. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 43). During the DESCRIBE task, participants responded orally. Their utterances were recorded simultaneously to their eye movements, using a Sony F-V610 microphone. During the RECOGNIZE task, participants indicated their recognition decisions by pressing the (same) or (different) key on a standard keyboard. Figure 41 provides an overview of the general procedure of Experiment 2 and of the measures taken.

(cf. Strömqvist, Holmqvist, and Andersson 2009)

distractors:targets = 2:1

instruction 2/training

3+2 training trials

condition 2: DESCRIBE Describe each picture so that the experimenter (outside) can identify it from a set of 4 very similar ones.

60 stimuli (same as in condition 1) distractors:targets = 2:1 presentation time 15 s/ stimulus

instruction 3 condition 3: RECOGNIZE Surprise memory test: Decide for each picture whether it is identical to or different from one of the pictures you have just described/seen.

Fig. 41: Experiment 2 – procedure (main part).

140 stimuli distractors:targets = 2:1 same:diff. targets = 1:2 (all same:diff. = 3:4) presentation until key press

2 order conditions

60 stimuli (same as in condition 2)

between-subjects (DV, VD)

condition 1: VIEW Look at the picture as if at an exhibition.

presentation time: 15 s/ stimulus

PARALLEL AUDIO RECORDING

EYE-TRACKING (SR RESEARCH EYE LINK II)

instruction 1

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In the following sections more detailed information on the different tasks will be provided. Since the same set of stimuli was used for DESCRIBE and VIEW to ensure comparability and to be able to account for recency effects (see also Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 38), these two conditions will be described together.

Tasks 1: DESCRIBE and VIEW Procedure In both the DESCRIBE and the VIEW conditions, the participants were  shown series of single pictures. The pictures were presented in succession. Each picture was visible on the screen for a time span of 15 seconds.129 The stimuli were presented in blocks of ten. At the beginning of the tasks and at the beginning of each block the eye-tracker was (re)calibrated (9-point calibration; see Holmqvist et al. 2011: 42–43). Following Strömqvist, Holmqvist and Andersson (2009: 508), participants were instructed in the VIEW task to simply look at the pictures “as if they were at an exhibition” while their eye movements would be recorded (see Appendix, pp. 467–468 for full instructions to all conditions). The DESCRIBE condition constituted a further variant of the directormatcher language game paradigm: participants were asked to describe each picture in a way that allowed the experimenter to identify it from a set of four pictures, one of which was identical and three of which were very similar to the one they could see on the screen. The task differed from the variants used in Experiment 1 and in the pre-test in the respect that the participants (directors) could only see one picture instead of a series of pictures. This change was made necessary to reliably diagnose differences in oculomotor behaviour between participants. It was expected that the simultaneous presentation of four pictures, as used in Experiment 1 and in the pre-test, would have resulted in the occurrence of many saccadic eye movements between the four pictures as an effect of participants comparing these pictures. This would have rendered it impossible to isolate any construc-

|| 129 The presentation duration was devised based on how long participants had taken for describing the referent scenes during piloting. The upper time boundary was used as a guideline to reduce possible distortions of distribution data for dwell times, which might have resulted from stopping trials prior to the point in time at which participants had finished exploring the referent scenes (see e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 387).

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tion-use associated effects. In addition, as will be explained below, the reduction of the director’s screen to one picture at a time constituted an essential precondition for being able to run the RECOGNIZE task. As a consequence of modifying the director-matcher language game paradigm in this way, the participants in Experiment 2 had to guess which features of the presented picture might be relevant to the matcher. To familiarize them with this procedure, to give them an idea of how precise their descriptions were expected to be, and thus to heighten the chances that they would provide full DIMDIM(TOP)-descriptions of the target pictures, the DESCRIBE task was preceded by a training session.

Training session The training session, during which no eye movements were recorded, directly preceded the DESCRIBE task in both order conditions. Participants were informed that they would be solving a task similar to the one in the web-based pre-test. This task would, however, differ from the pre-test in the following respects: (a) they would see only one picture on the screen; (b) they would be asked to provide their descriptions orally; and (c) they would describe the pictures to the experimenter (the matcher), who would be seated outside the test cabin but could hear them over headphones. It was emphasized that the main function of their descriptions was to enable the experimenter (matcher) to identify the pictures they described from a set of similar ones. They were also informed that the experimenter would not give them any feedback. Other than in Experiment 1, no preparatory picture identification and naming task was used in this part of Experiment 2. Since the experimenter acted as the matcher and did not give any feedback on the participants’ descriptions, no communication problems relating to object-labelling were expected to occur. In addition, familiarizing speakers with the objects prior to task performance would have interfered with the order condition and with the RECOGNIZE task. Subsequent to the instructions (see Appendix, pp. 467–468), a first (distractor) picture was presented to the participants on the screen in front of them and participants were asked to describe this picture. After they had provided their description, the corresponding matcher’s screen for this picture, i.e. a set of four pictures which comprised the picture the participants had just described and three very similar ones, was shown to them on the experimenter’s notebook. They were asked to check whether their description would have been sufficiently precise to have enabled the experimenter to select the right picture

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from the set. In case it was not, they were asked to try again. In case it was (or subsequent to correction), the next training picture was presented. Overall, the training task comprised six trials. The stimuli used (two targetlike and four distractor-like items) were chosen and designed in the same way as the stimuli used in the main DESCRIBE and VIEW conditions, a description of which is provided in the following sections. A full list and description of these items is available in the Appendix (Table 48 on p. 469).

Main session As in Experiment 1, the pictures used in Experiment 2 were edited colour photographs of everyday objects,130 and thus of objects easy to identify and name.131 Since animate entities could be expected to “attract a disproportionate number of fixations” (Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 11), only inanimate objects were used for the target items (see Appendix, Table 49 on pp. 470–471). All items were presented in the middle of the screen on a white background (i.e. no frames or boundaries could be seen except for the frame of the screen itself). For the reasons provided above, the sets of pictures used in the VIEW and the DESCRIBE conditions were identical. To control for order effects and to prevent or at least reduce self-alignment effects (cf. e.g. Vorwerg 2009: 55; see also Blythe and Croft 2009: 51 and Section 8.5 below), all stimuli (except the training stimuli) were presented in randomized order both across tasks and between participants. Overall, the stimulus set used comprised 60 stimuli, among them 20 target items and 40 distractor items (excluding the stimuli from the training session). All target items depicted DIMDIM(TOP)-arrangements of a single RO and a single LO and thus corresponded in design to a single picture from the picture sets used in Experiment 1. To ensure that the findings from Experiment 2 would be well comparable with the findings from Experiment 1, the pictures used in Experiment 2 comprised the pictures used in Experiment 1 as a subset.132 A sys-

|| 130 See Experiment 1 (pp. 174–178) for technical details of photographing and picture editing. 131 The use of two-dimensional displays was considered licensed on the basis of Atchley and Kramer’s (2001: 12) findings that “spatial visual attention in depth operates similarly to spatial visual attention in 2D space” and that, thus, “valid generalization from laboratory studies of … attention with 2D stimuli to real-world 3D environments is possible” (Atchley and Kramer 2001: 28). 132 This, of course, does not account for those two pictures from Experiment 1 (T3/orange in bowl and T5/apple in basket) which had proved to be unsuited for triggering the use of precise DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (see Section 7.2.2).

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tematic overview of the target items and their features is provided in the Appendix (Table 49 on pp. 470–471). For several reasons, care was taken to include only naturalistic, functionally plausible pairs of objects (see also Section 7.2.1 above): firstly, the DESCRIBE condition aimed at identifying speakers’ usage habits, and thus forms of behaviour which they could be expected to have learned in natural real-world contexts. Secondly, previous eye-tracking research has shown that objects which do not fit their situational context generate longer fixations than context-appropriate objects (cf. e.g. Friedman and Liebelt 1981; De Graef, Christiaens, and D’Ydewalle 1990; Holmqvist et al. 2011: 387; Loftus and Mackworth 1978). Therefore, as in Experiment 1, the target stimuli used in Experiment 2 had to hit a good balance between the following requirements: on the one hand, they had to display LO-RO relations which are both plausible and natural. On the other hand, they still had to allow a controlled variation of the parameters of interest and a high degree of between-stimulus comparability. Since participants in Experiment 2 were not required to necessarily provide topological spatial information (see Section 8.3.1), the topological relations were always contact-relations. Depending on the nature of the RO, either relations of support or relations of containment were depicted. As in Experiment 1, the locations of the LOs were varied systematically: across stimuli, the LOs occurred equally often in the front right, front left, back right and back left position. The selection of ROs was to a considerable extent determined by the fact that the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks also provided the participants with the information they needed in order to be able to solve the subsequent RECOGNIZE task: firstly, although only references to scenes with cornered ROs were included in the analysis of language data and eye-tracking data from the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks (see Section 8.3.1), half of the DIMDIM(TOP)-scene items displayed in these conditions were scenes with uncornered ROs (see Appendix, Table 49 on pp. 470–471).133 In this way, participants’ memory for the shape of the RO and for the position of the LO could be tested in the RECOGNIZE task.134

|| 133 All possible combinations of the two RO-shape types and the four LO-locations occurred with equal frequency. 134 The use of both cornered and uncornered ROs had a range of additional benefits. Firstly, it allowed for an even more exact characterization of usage habits and thus, presumably, entrenched patterns of knowledge within the three larger groups of speaker types on the basis of their manner of describing uncornered scenes; secondly, it constituted an additional means of reducing the probability of occurrence of self-alignment effects (cf. Vorwerg 2009: 55); and, thirdly, in combination with randomizing the order of presentation of items, it avoided that

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Since shape-variants of the same kinds of objects had to be provided in the RECOGNIZE task, the range of possible ROs was, secondly, restricted to objects like boxes which commonly occur in different shapes (see Appendix, Table 49 on pp. 470–471). Thirdly, two further potential confounding variables, RO-symmetry and LOsize, which could not be kept constant across items as a consequence of the requirement of designing natural stimuli (see above) were controlled for by way of counter-balancing (i.e. equal distribution across stimuli) and by way of crosscombination with each other and with the feature of RO-shape: half of the ROs constituted symmetrical objects, half of the ROs asymmetrical objects (to the extent that they were more extended along the lateral than along the sagittal axis); half of the scenes displayed large (i.e. vertically extended) LOs, the other half small (i.e. non-extended) LOs. This control imposed on Experiment 2 by the careful selection and combination of target scenes was complemented and further enhanced by the use and selection of distractor items. Similarly to how distractors were used in Experiment 1, the distractor items included in Experiment 2 depicted objects or object arrangements which displayed different (salient) characteristics than the target scenes. In selecting these characteristics, care was taken that they were likely to trigger descriptions that were comparable in length and complexity to DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances. A complete list of all distractor items and their features is provided in the Appendix (Table 50 on pp. 471–472). Target and distractor items were presented to the participants in randomized order and were designed so that the participants could interact with both types of items in the same task-specific ways, i.e. could describe them to the experimenter in the DESCRIBE task, or look at them as if they were at an exhibition in the VIEW task. As a consequence, the target items did not stand out from the entire set of stimuli, which lowered the probability that participants would infer the real purpose of Experiment 2. A post-experiment questionnaire confirmed the effectiveness of this strategy. It revealed that none of the participants had guessed what the experiment was about. In the RECOGNIZE task, which will be described in more detail in the next section, a similar set of items and a similar strategy of combining target and distractor items were used.

|| Variable Speakers were primed towards using highly object-focused constructions by (always) initially encountering a scene with a cornered RO.

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Tasks 2: RECOGNIZE The RECOGNIZE task constituted a surprise test of participants’ recognition memory of the target pictures. The information that had to be recognized was (a) the shape of the RO and (b) the position of the LO. A surprise test was used because findings from earlier research (e.g. Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67) strongly suggest that the use of a paradigm in which participants are asked to view visual scenes to prepare for an upcoming scene recollection or recognition memory task may induce a careful taskrelated inspection of the scene. That is, such an instruction might effect that participants pay attention to all details in the scene. As a consequence, it might prevent (the predicted) language-use induced patterns of attentional scene construal from becoming manifest in the eye-movement data (see Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 64). In the RECOGNIZE task used in Experiment 2, the shape of the RO and the position of the LO were defined as the features to be recognized because they were considered the most reliable indicators of attention to object-specific information (RO-shape) and spatial-relational information (LO-location).

Procedure In the RECOGNIZE task, single pictures were presented to the participants on the screen in front of them. Their task was to decide for each picture whether they had seen exactly the same picture in the preceding DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions (see instructions in the Appendix, pp. 467–468). Participants indicated their decisions by pressing either the key (identical picture) or the key (different picture) on the keyboard. A new picture appeared as soon as participants had pressed a key. If no key was pressed within a time period of ten seconds, the next picture was presented.

Stimuli Overall, 140 stimuli, among them 60 target-based ones and 80 distractor-based ones, were presented in randomized order in seven blocks of 20. The target items occurred in three different versions (change types; see also Appendix, Table 49 on pp. 470–471): – change type 1 (same): the pictures presented were identical to the ones used in the VIEW and DESCRIBE tasks.

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–

–

change type 2 (LO-location change): with these pictures the LO occurred in a different location (spatial relation to the RO) than it had done in the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks. change type 3 (RO-shape change): with these pictures the shape of the RO was changed (relative to DESCRIBE and VIEW) from cornered to uncornered and vice versa.

Figure 42 provides an example of all versions of target item C4 (bow on wrapped gift).

change type 1: same

change type 2: LO-location change

change type 3: RO-shape change

Fig. 42: Experiment 2 – versions of item C4 (bow on wrapped gift) as used in the RECOGNIZE task. In the original pictures, the parcel was light grey, the ribbon was red.

With change type 2 (LO-location change), three different kinds of LO-location changes occurred with equal frequencies across stimuli:135 diagonal changes (D; e.g. change from front right position to back left position), sagittal changes (H1; e.g. change from back left position to front left position) and lateral changes (H2; e.g. change from front left position to front right position). Care was taken that all four possible locations of the LO (front right, front left, back right, back left) occurred with comparable frequencies (see Appendix, right-hand column of Table 49 on pp. 470–471).

|| 135 Since no differences in Response Accuracies and Response Times had occurred between these three different types of LO-location changes during piloting, only one out of the three possible location change types was included for each LO-RO pair, i.e. variation only occurred across the different pairs. This was intended to keep the RECOGNIZE task at a reasonable length and to prevent that memory for variants of items encountered in the course of the RECOGNIZE task interfered with memory for the variants of the same items that had been encountered by participants in the course of the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks.

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With change type 3 (RO-shape change), it was seen that the changed shapes still constituted shapes in which the respective objects commonly occurred. This had as a consequence that the occurring changes slightly differed in nature and strength: shapes did not always change from 90°-cornered to round objects or vice versa. Instead, in particular the set of uncornered ROs comprised objects of different shapes like, for instance, oval or odd-shaped ones. This variation was licensed by the finding from Experiment 1 that the great majority of the German-speaking participants made a categorical difference between prototypically cornered objects and all other objects (see Sections 7.2.4 and 7.2.5 above). Therefore, and because RO-shapes and shape changes were kept constant across individuals, it was considered unlikely that the use of differently uncornered ROs would exert a confounding effect on the results. The distractor items used in the RECOGNIZE condition were, again, similar in design and function to the target items. However, to keep the RECOGNIZE task at a reasonable length, only two versions of each distractor item were included: the same version as used in the DESCRIBE and VIEW conditions, and one variant of this version. Consequently, the ratio of distractors to targets was 2:1, the ratio of unchanged to changed targets 1:2 and the overall ratio of unchanged to changed items 3:4. Although divergent from a completely equal distribution of items to be rated as being the same versus different, this ratio could be expected to still efficiently control for possible stimulus- or taskinduced response-bias effects in participants (cf. e.g. Kantner and Lindsay 2012). The variants of the distractor items differed from the versions shown in the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks by the form of realization of their most salient feature(s). An overview of all items and their variants is provided in the Appendix (Table 50 on pp. 471–472). Figure 43 illustrates the same version and the (number) change version of one of the distractor items used in the RECOGNIZE condition.

change type 1: same

change type 2: (number) change

Fig. 43: Experiment 2 – versions of item D33 (giraffes) as used in the RECOGNIZE task. The original pictures were coloured.

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In sum, the use of identical sets or subsets of stimuli in all the three withinsubjects conditions, DESCRIBE, VIEW and RECOGNIZE, as well as the design features of each condition as such, ensured a high degree of comparability of the resulting data between participants, as well as between conditions and tasks. This opened up a range of options of how to analyse these data so as to arrive at as comprehensive a picture of the language-perception/cognition effects predicted by Hypothesis 2-G as possible. The kinds of data that resulted from Experiment 2 will be described in the following section together with a detailed account of the analyses to which these data were subjected.

8.3.3 Data, analytical categories and steps of analysis The following data were collected from all three within-subjects conditions of Experiment 2 (main test) for each of the three participant groups (Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers and Variable Speakers): (1) language data (a) the descriptive utterances provided by the speakers in the course of the pre-test and the DESCRIBE task (b) information pertaining to speech production processes (Voice Onset Times and Voice End Times) (2) (non-linguistic) behavioural data (a) eye-movement data from both the DESCRIBE and the VIEW tasks (b) recognition memory performance data from the RECOGNIZE task (Response Accuracy, Response Times). In the following, the analytical categories applied to these data will be indicated. Results from these analyses will be presented in Sections 8.3.4 and 8.3.5.

Language data The main functions of the language data were as follows: (a) classifying speakers as Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers or Variable Speakers; (b) precisely defining the datasets to be used for analysis; and (c) imposing a sequential structure onto the linguistic and oculomotor data in these sets which allowed for them to be mapped onto each other and thus to be analysed jointly and comparatively.

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For these purposes, the linguistic data provided in the DESCRIBE conditions were subjected to a range of analyses.

Definition of datasets As a first step of language data analysis, ODVs were assigned to each individual (precise) DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance provided by each individual participant. Constructions with an ODV < 1 were classified as instances of space-focused constructions, constructions with an ODV > 2.5 as instances of object-focused constructions; all other constructions (ODVs 1–2.5) were classified as instances of mid-range constructions. For the reasons provided below (see pp. 309–314), instances of imprecise and mid-range constructions were excluded from further analysis. Figure 44 and Table 20 indicate the relative frequencies of occurrence of space-focused constructions and object-focused constructions for the cornered target scenes and the uncornered target scenes.

Fig. 44: Experiment 2 – frequency distributions of space-focused and object-focused referential utterances by RO-shape types. Tab. 20: Experiment 2 – frequency distributions of space-focused and object-focused referential utterances by RO-shape types. RO-shape type cornered

uncornered

ODV

frequencies

2.5

125 (41.5%)

2.5

52 (21.8%)

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As can be seen, the proportion of uses of space-focused and object-focused constructions was significantly more balanced with cornered scenes than with uncornered scenes. This pattern of distribution confirms the finding from Experiment 1 (see Sections 7.2.4 and 7.2.5) that cornered scenes trigger the use of space-focused and object-focused constructions with about equal frequency and thus probability, while uncornered scenes are more likely to be referred to by use space-focused constructions than by use of object-focused constructions. Close-up analyses for each item revealed that this was also the case for the individual scenes in the two sets. Unless indicated otherwise, all analyses presented in the following are therefore based on the subset of references to scenes with cornered ROs. In a second step, the distributions of ODVs in the utterances provided by individual speakers were analysed in order to identify and classify each individual participant in Experiment 2 as representative of one of the three speaker types of Consistent OBJF-speakers, Consistent SPF-speakers or Variable Speakers. In addition, this step of analysis also served to verify whether participants had been pre-classified correctly on the basis of their performance in the pretest, or, respectively, to ensure that only those participants were included in the main test in whom the presence versus absence of a particular usage preference for making DIMDIM(TOP)-references was a relatively stable feature. This eventually resulted in the definition of the three speaker-type specific datasets for the main analysis (see Sections 8.3.4 and 8.3.5 below). These sets were further refined in a third step of analysis. They were checked against the criteria listed in the following: – Criterion 1 (imprecision): the provision of an insufficient amount of spatial information (example (65)) (65)

–

(66)

Eine braune Schokoladentorte mit einer Sahne und einer Frucht a brown chocolate-cake-RO with a cream-LO and a fruit-LO rechts. right-DIM-S-ADV Criterion 2 (mid-range): the use of a construction type with an intermediate or mid-range ODV (example (66)) Ein Kuchenblech und vorne links in der a baking-tray-RO and front-DIM-S-ADV left-DIM-S-ADV in-TOP-P the Ecke liegt noch ein Stück Kekskuchen. corner-SPEC-PARTN lies another piece-of biscuit-cake-LO

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–

Criterion 3 (correction): the occurrence of a correction which corresponded to a switching from the initially selected DIMDIM(TOP)-construction type to a different one (examples (67a) and (67b)) or to a change of the dimensional information provided (examples (68a) and (68b)) 

(67) a. Eine runde Schale außen schwarz innen weiß mit einem a round bowl-RO outside black inside white with a goldenen Bonbon in der äh links hinten. golden sweet-LO in the er left-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-S-ADV b. Eine gelbe Schachtel … die is quadratisch und rechts yellow box-RO … it is square and right-DIM-S-ADV a unten liegt ein silb- in der rechten unteren bottom-DIM-S-ADV lies a silv- in the right-DIM-ADJ bottom-DIM-ADJ Ecke liegt ein silberner Schlüssel. corner-SPEC-PARTN lies a silver key-LO (68) a. Eine Fußmatte und oben link- oben rechts a doormat-RO and top-DIM-S-ADV lef- top-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV in der Ecke sind lila Sneaker. in the corner-SPEC-PARTN are purple sneakers-LO b. Ein grüner Teller, auf dem ein Teelicht steht und zwar am a green plate-RO on which a tealight-LO stands namely at-the äh link- am rechten vorderen Rand. er lef- at-the right-DIM-ADJ front-DIM-ADJ edge-GEN-PARTN –

(69)

Criterion 4 (distribution): the provision of DIMDIM(TOP)-information in a distributed or split manner (example (69)). Ein graues Alublech oder Kuchenblech und links a grey aluminium-tray-RO or baking-tray-RO and left-DIM-S-ADV ist ein Stück Kuchen unten mit roten Johannisbeeren. is a piece-of cake-LO bottom-DIM-S-ADV with red currants

The presence of one or several of the features defined by these criteria led to the exclusion of the respective utterances from the main analysis, because they either rendered a particular utterance incommensurable with the remaining set of utterances (Criteria 1 to 2), or because they did not allow for an utterance to be temporally matched to the eye-movement data (Criteria 3 to 4). Exact information on the datasets resulting from these analytical steps will be provided in Section 8.3.4 for the Variable Speaker dataset and in Section

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8.3.5 for the two Consistent Speaker datasets. Prior to this, information will be provided on how the remaining linguistic data were structured and how linguistic and eye-movement data were mapped onto one another.

Structuring For means of relating the linguistic data to the eye-movement data, not only the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions contained in the utterances from the DESCRIBE task but the full utterances had to be taken into consideration. This involved that (a) the linguistic contexts (cotexts) in which DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions were embedded and (b) the internal semantic and in particular temporal structure of the full utterances had to be defined precisely. For these purposes, the linguistic data were subjected to the steps of analysis described in the following.

Analysis A: Linguistic contexts (cotexts) The DESCRIBE task used in Experiment 2 restricted speakers’ options of how to describe the target scenes and of how much information to provide on each picture far less severely than the task used in Experiment 1. It was therefore considered highly probable that at least some of the linguistic constructions with which the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions co-occurred, or in which they were embedded, might themselves carry RO- or LO-focusing attentional construal meanings. These meaning facets might, again, interact with the construal meanings realized by the DIMDIM(TOP)-structures as such (cf. also Croft and Cruse 2004: 102; Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 49–50). More specifically, the constructions in the cotext of the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions might have the potential of either strengthening or compensating for the tendencies of attention assignment associated with the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions proper (see also Chapter 5). Since such cotext-associated effects were highly likely to also become reflected in speakers’ non-linguistic behaviour, including their eye movements, any cotextual linguistic constructions to the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions which could be expected to selectively foreground either the RO or the LO needed to be identified. Based on the principles and construal types proposed in the cognitive linguistic literature (see Sections 2.3 and 7.1), the following features were classified as potentially attracting additional attention to the RO: – Feature R1 (RO-shape explicit): the explicit provision of information on the shape of the RO (examples (70a) and (70b))

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(70) a. Eine dunkle runde geschlossene Box. Rechts hinten a dark round closed box-RO right-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-S-ADV auf der Box eine kleine hellgrüne achteckige Box. on-TOP-P the box-RO a small light-green octagonal box-LO b. Eine gräuliche Fußabtretermatte, viereckig. Hinten a greyish doormat-RO square back-DIM-S-ADV rechts steht ein Paar lilane Schuhe. right-DIM-S-ADV stands a pair-of purple shoes-LO –

–

Feature R2 (embedding construction): the use of an RO-initial embedding construction (example (71a) below) rather than of an LO-initial or spatialterm initial one (examples (71b) and (71c) below) Feature R3 (RO-profile): the manner of (initially) referring to the RO in the form of a nominal phrase, and thus of construing the RO as a THING (cf. e.g. Langacker 2008: 105–106 and Section 3.3.2; see bold passage in example (71a)), rather than of referring to the RO in the form of the complement of a prepositional phrase, which can be assumed to correspond to it being construed as a PLACE (see bold passages in examples (71b) and (71c))

(71) a. Eine graue Fußmatte [RO] mit lila Schuhen in der a grey doormat [RO] with purple shoes-LO in-TOP-P the rechten oberen Ecke. right-DIM-ADJ top-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN b. Eine grüne Tasse [LO] auf einem blau-weißen Tablett … a green cup [LO] on-TOP-P a blue-white tray-RO … links oben. left-DIM-S-ADV top-DIM-S-ADV c. Links vorne [SPACE] liegt ein Kuchen auf dem Blech. left-DIM-S-ADV front-DIM-S-ADV [SPACE] lies a cake-LO on the tray-RO –

Feature R4 (RO-info): the provision of relatively much information on the RO and/or its features along a range from complete omission of mention of the RO (example (72a)) to the provision of up to four different RO-related information units (example (72b))

(72) a. Rechts vorne liegt ein Schlüssel. (0) right-DIM-S-ADV front-DIM-S-ADV lies a key-LO

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b. Ein Porzellan(1)tablett … es ist weiß(2) und hat ein blaues Muster(3) a porcelain(1)tray-RO … it is white(2) and has a blue pattern(3) mit Blumen(4) und auf dem Tablett steht eine Tasse. with flowers(4) and on-TOP-P the tray-RO stands a cup-LO –

(73)

Feature R5 (RO-frequency): a relatively high frequency of mention of the RO (example (73)). Zwei Klötze(1) übereinander. Unten ein größerer two blocks(1)-LO-RO on-top-of-each-other bottom-DIM-S-ADV a larger Rechts hinten ein aufgestellter schwarzer Klotz(2). black block(2)-RO right-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-S-ADV an upright grüner auf dem schwarzen(3). green-one-LO on-TOP-P the black one(3)-RO

Feature R1, the explicit provision of information on the shape of the RO, constitutes the only feature which resulted in the exclusion of an utterance from the main analysis because it could be expected to foreground information on the shape of the RO even more strongly than the use of object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)constructions. If used in combination with a space-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-construction, explicit mention of the shape of the RO could, accordingly, be expected to override any attentional effects associated with the use of this construction type as such. Differences between speakers or speaker-groups with respect to the remaining features did not lead to the exclusion of items. Instead, they were included and accounted for in the (comparative) analyses (see Sections 8.3.4 and 8.3.5). Utterance features which could be assumed to allocate a high degree of attention to the LO were treated in the same manner. These are: – Feature L1 (embedding construction): the use of an LO-initial embedding construction (see example (70b) above) – Feature L2 (LO-info): the provision of relatively much information on the LO and/or its features (example (74)) (74)

Des isn Hocker … und in der oberen rechten this is-a stool-RO … and in-TOP-P the top-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ Ecke ist ein achteckiges(1) Samt(2)döschen mit Muster(3). corner-SPEC-PARTN is an octagonal(1) velvet(2)box-LO with pattern(3)

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–

(75)

Feature L3 (LO-frequency): a relatively high frequency of mention of the LO (example (75)). Eine blaue Matte … mit einer hellblauen Tasse(1) oder light-blue cup(1)-LO or a blue mat-RO … with a Kerzenglas(2) auf der linken oberen Ecke. candle-glass(2)-LO on-TOP-P the left-DIM-ADJ top-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN Ist gepunktet das Glas(3). is dotted the glass(3)-LO

These cotext-related parameters were analysed separately for the Variable Speaker and the Consistent Speaker subsets. The results of these analyses will therefore be reported and discussed in Sections 8.3.4 and 8.3.5, together with their possible implications for the interpretation of language-use associated oculomotor and memory performance data.

Analysis B: Temporal utterance structure To enable a highly temporally resolved analysis of language-use associated attentional patterns, the linguistic data required to be mapped rather precisely onto the eye-movement data. For this purpose, all utterances were divided into content-defined subphases. Furthermore, to allow for between-task comparisons, the eye-movement data from the DESCRIBE and VIEW conditions had to be temporally structured in largely analogous manners. How this was realized can best be and therefore will be explained together with an account of how the eye-movement data were structured and analysed.

Eye-movement data As explained above, it was assumed that participants who manifest an objectfocused pattern of attention allocation would spend relatively more time looking at the region occupied by the RO than looking at the region occupied by the LO, and that participants who manifest a space-focused pattern of attention allocation would spend relatively more time looking at the region occupied by the LO than looking at the region occupied by the RO. Based on this assumption, and largely following Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) in many respects, the eye-movement data from Experiment 2 were analysed using the measure of LO-RO Ratio Value. As indicated above, the LO-RO Ratio Value is the differential measure of the time participants spent

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looking at the region occupied by the LO (dwell time LO-AoI) and the time participants spent looking at the region occupied by the RO (dwell time RO-AoI): LO-RO Ratio Value = (dwell time LO-AoI) – (dwell time RO-AoI) To arrive at this measure, two Areas of Interest (AoIs) were defined for each target item (using SR Research Data Viewer, version 1.11.1, SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada): the region occupied by the RO and the region occupied by the LO.136 The AoIs defined extended slightly beyond the contours of the ROs and LOs in order to account for more peripheral viewing patterns and for individual differences in participants’ functional/useful fields of view (Irwin 2004: 107; cf. also Ball et al. 1988; Mackworth 1976; Pringle, Irwin, and Kramer 2001),137 and to compensate for instances of slight drift, as they occurred in the data from the DESCRIBE condition despite careful and frequent (re)calibration of the eyetracker because participants moved their heads while speaking (cf. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 101).138 Data in which massive and/or unsystematic drift had occurred, or which were of poor quality for other reasons, were excluded from the main

|| 136 Since ROs and LOs were in a relation of contact, their AoIs were also in direct contact. More specifically, the bottom sides of the LOs were in contact with parts of the top sides of the ROs. Although not ideal (cf. e.g. Holmqvist et al. 2011: 189, 221), this was considered relatively unproblematic for several reasons: firstly, though in contact, AoIs did not overlap on the twodimensional plane of the screen. Secondly, this contact situation only occurred for vertical relations. Given that the task did not require indicating vertical relatedness, and since there is evidence that “the visual field is larger horizontally than vertically” (Holmqvist et al. 2011: 381), which might indicate that strongly peripheral viewing patterns would mainly occur on the horizontal planes, contact-relations on the vertical plane were considered to be the least problematic of all possible options. Thirdly, the positions of the LOs were devised such that the LOs were clearly located in regions that required to be defined by use of two dimensional terms, but were still sufficiently far away from the boundaries of the ROs to allow for differentiating between fixations on the LOs and fixations on RO-boundary features like, in particular, corners. In this way, there was some distance between the regions of the LOs and those features of the ROs that proved most relevant to providing an object-focused reference and that, thus, could be expected to be attentionally most salient to speakers. 137 Accounting for this aspect was particularly important with Experiment 2. This is due to the fact that the scenes presented were reduced to two objects only, which has been demonstrated to allow for peripheral object identification (Griffin 2004: 219; Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 44, 46–48; Irwin 2004: 127). 138 In addition, post hoc drift correction was performed for some data in which stronger but highly systematic drift had occurred as an obvious effect of the combination of pupil-only recording, headband slippage and speech production.

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analysis together with all corresponding linguistic and memory performance data for the same item and participant. LO-RO Ratio Values were calculated on the basis of the dwell times for the two AoIs. To allow for an analysis of the development of patterns of attention allocation over time, and to be able to compare oculomotor and linguistic measures, each given trial of 15 seconds was subdivided into 75 BINs of 200 ms, and the amount of time the eyes spent at a given LO-AoI and at a given RO-AoI were calculated separately for each BIN. This was done by processing the raw data using SR Research DataViewer (version 1.11.1, SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada) in addition to a purpose-written C programme and R script (R Core Team (2014), R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, http://www.R-project.org/).139 Based on the resulting data for each of the 75 BINs, LO-RO Ratio Values could be calculated flexibly for different subphases of the description or viewing process. In this way, patterns of attention allocation from the DESCRIBE task could be mapped onto the semantic structure of linguistic scene descriptions with a high degree of precision. The calculation of LO-RO Ratio Values for the full 15-second trial periods of the DESCRIBE and VIEW tasks and for a set of (sub)phases of the description and viewing processes thus allowed the investigation of both possible overall and possible processing-related differences in language-use associated patterns of visual attention allocation. How the subphases were defined for the different conditions will be explained in the following.

Phases in the DESCRIBE condition To impose structure onto the data from the DESCRIBE condition, the process of description-task performance was subdivided based on general structural features of the full DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances that had been provided by the participants in this task. These features suggested that LO-RO Ratio Values be calculated for the following phases: – the Speech Planning Phase, i.e. the time span prior to Voice Onset Time (VOT)

|| 139 I would like to thank Thomas Geyer for writing these scripts for me and for advising and assisting me with the processing and analysis of the eye-tracking data, as well as with the statistical analysis of the data from Experiment 2.

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–

– –

– –

the Pre-Spatial Term Phase, i.e. the time span from VOT to the beginning of the utterance of the DIMDIM(TOP)-construction (=DIMDIM(TOP) Onset Time (DOT)) the Spatial Term Phase, i.e. the period of time during which the DIMDIM(TOP)-construction was uttered the Post-Spatial Term Phase, i.e. the time span from the end of the utterance of the DIMDIM(TOP)-construction (=DIMDIM(TOP) End Time (DET)) to the end of speaking (Voice End Time (VET)) the Speaking Phase, i.e. the full time span from VOT to VET the Post-Speaking Phase, i.e. the time span from VET until the end of the trial.

Figure 45 illustrates these phases for an example from the data. 0................................................................................................................................15000 ms BIN 1................................................................................................................................BIN 75

Ein blaues Mauspad und in der vorderen rechten Ecke

is ne schwarze Maus.

‘a blue mousepad-RO and

is a black mouse-LO ‘

in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN

Pre-Spatial Term

Spatial Term

Post-Spatial Term

Speech Planning

PostSpeaking

Speaking VOT

DOT

DET

VET

Fig. 45: Experiment 2 – phase structure of the description process (DESCRIBE task).

Since VOTs, DOTs, DETs and VETs differed between the single utterances, the means of the phase-specific LO-RO Ratio Values were calculated separately for each individual utterance under consideration of the exact utterance-specific onset and end times. This use of mean values, however, had the disadvantage that the temporal resolution of the eye-movement data was reduced. Therefore, these mean-based calculations were complemented by calculations on the basis of the 200-ms BINs. These were realized for the following phases: the full trial period (15000 ms), the Speech Planning Phase (defined on the basis of mean VOTs as BINs 1–9)

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and the Post-Speaking Phase (defined on the basis of mean VETs as BINs 50–75). These phases were selected because they could be expected to constitute those phases of the description process in which construction-use associated attentional effects were particularly likely to occur (cf. e.g. Flecken 2011: 62; Griffin 2004: 216; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67). To avoid redundancy, results from these fine-grained analyses will in the following only be reported for those cases in which they yielded additional and/or different findings from the ones revealed by the analysis of mean values for the Speech Planning Phase and the Post-Speaking Phase. In sum, calculating LO-RO Ratio Values for the whole trial period, for several of its subphases and for 200-ms BINs had the following benefits: it made it possible to investigate patterns of visual attention allocation not only from a global, result-focused perspective, but also from a more local, processingfocused perspective; and it allowed for this to be realized both in a more strongly theory-driven manner (based on the subphases of the description process) and in a rather neutral, explorative manner (via the division of processing time into BINs).

Phases in the VIEW condition The set of measures used for analysing the data from the VIEW task was similar to the one used for the analysis of the data from the DESCRIBE task. However, given the lack of internal structuring landmarks in the viewing process which are comparable to the VOTs, DOTs, DETs and VETs in the description processes, the analyses of VIEW data drew on the following, slightly different set of phases (see Figure 46 for an overview): – an Orientation Phase, defined in parallel to the Speech Planning Phase of the DESCRIBE task as the time span covered by BINs 1–9 – an Exploration Phase, defined in parallel to the Speaking Phase and the PostSpeaking Phase in the DESCRIBE task as the phase of observation under exclusion of the Orientation Phase (BINs 10–75) – a Final Exploration Phase, defined in parallel to the Post-Speaking Phase in the DESCRIBE task as the phase from BINs 50–75. As with the DESCRIBE-task data, mean LO-RO Ratio Values were calculated for each of these phases, and more strongly temporally resolved calculations based on 200-ms BINs were made for the full trial period, the Orientation Phase and the Final Exploration Phase.

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Apart from enabling the imposition of structure onto the VIEW-task data in the first place, this strategy of defining all subphases in the data from the (DV and VD) VIEW tasks in parallel to some of the subphases defined for the data from the (DV and VD) DESCRIBE tasks ensured that findings based on LO-RO Ratio Values were not only comparable within tasks between construction-type specific subsets, but also between tasks. In addition, data from both the DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions could, of course, be related to the memoryperformance data from the RECOGNIZE condition. 0...................................................................................................................................15000 ms BIN 1..................................................................................................................................BIN 75 BINs 1–9

BINs 10–49

BINs 50–75

Orientation

Exploration

Final Exploration

Fig. 46: Experiment 2 – phase structure of the viewing process (VIEW task).

Recognition memory performance data The following two measures of recognition memory performance were applied to the data from the RECOGNIZE task: – Response Accuracy, measured as the (relative) frequency of correct responses – Response Time, measured as the time span from picture presentation to the point in time at which a participant pressed either the or the key. These two values were calculated for each of the three different change types used in the RECOGNIZE task (same, LO-location change and RO-shape change; see Section 8.3.2) and were compared between groups and conditions (meanbased comparisons; see Sections 8.3.4 and 8.3.5 below).

Summary Table 21 presents an overview of the analyses to which the data from Experiment 2 were subjected and of the analytical categories devised and applied to the data for these purposes. A differentiation is made between those analytical steps conducted for means of compiling the final dataset and those analyses conducted for means of investigating Hypothesis 2-G.

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Tab. 21: Experiment 2 – analytical steps and categories.

1. Identification of the final dataset type of data

criteria

function(s)

language/ utterances

ODVs

identification of the target scenes to be investigated speaker classification

eye movements

RO-shape explicit imprecision mid-range correction distribution

identification of individual utterances to be excluded from the main analysis

quality

identification of individual utterances/datasets to be excluded from the main analysis

2. Investigation of Hypothesis 2-G type of data

variables

function(s)

language/ utterances

linguistic context (cotext)

identification of LO-focusing vs. ROfocusing cotextual construal meanings which might enhance or complement the construal meanings associated with the use of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions

utterance structure

eye movements

(temporal) alignment and comparability content-defined of linguistic and eye-movement data (sub)phases + temporally defined phase boundaries

LO-RO Ratio mean values for Values the (sub)phases of DESCRIBE and VIEW + temporally resolved values (based on 200-ms BINs; for full trials, onset phases and final phases)

identification of space-focused as opposed to object-focused patterns of attention allocation from an overall and a processing-focused perspective identification of possible correlations between oculomotor and linguistic behaviour and/or recognition memory performance

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2. Investigation of Hypothesis 2-G type of data

variables

function(s)

recognition memory performance

Response Accuracy + Response Times

identification of (differences between) recognition memory for the features of RO-shape and LO-location identification of possible correlations with linguistic and/or visual attention assignment behaviour

The results of the different steps of analysis will, in the following, be reported separately for the data collected from Variable Speakers (Analysis 2A; Section 8.3.4) and for the data collected from Consistent Speakers (Analysis 2B; Section 8.3.5). In a second step, the findings for these speaker-type specific subsets will be compared and jointly discussed (Sections 8.4 and 8.5). For the reasons provided above (see pp. 279–280), and as also indicated by the different dimensions and steps of analysis to which the data from Experiment 2 were subjected as well as by the number of participants tested, Experiment 2 and the analyses it involved were mainly explorative in nature.

8.3.4 Analysis 2A: Variable Speakers/contrast-inducing cognitive contexts With respect to the Variable Speaker set, the predictions made by Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory regarding the possible occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects largely overlap (see Table 19 on p. 295): both theories predict the occurrence of language-use concurrent on-line effects in the DESCRIBE task and of recency effects in the VIEW task and the RECOGNIZE task. And, although on different grounds, both theories predict the absence of habit-induced effects in the VIEW task. Although it cannot be used to differentiate between Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory, an analysis of Variable Speaker behaviour, still, enjoys a different status in the two theoretical frameworks: from the perspective of Differentiality Theory, it constitutes the only possible, or at least useful, way of investigating language-perception/cognition effects. From the perspective of Schematicity Theory, by contrast, it only sets the scene for investigating possible more pervasive, habit-induced language-perception/cognition effects in Consistent Speakers, because it puts to the test the assumption basic to this theory that particular linguistic constructions are generally and stably associ-

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ated with particular construal meanings. Independently of which theoretical perspective is taken, the absence of any construction-specific effects in Variable Speakers would thus seriously call into question the idea that attentional construal meanings can function as inducers of language-use associated attentional behaviour. From the perspective of Schematicity Theory, it would, in addition, render any investigations of habit-based effects (Hypothesis 2c-G) factually superfluous. The analysis of the Variable Speaker data presented in the following thus sets the scene for the investigation of the relations between language use, perception and cognition in several central respects. In particular, it provides first possible answers to the following basic questions: (1) Do space-focused constructions and object-focused constructions indeed carry attentional construal meanings? (2) If so, do these construal meanings take the form predicted by construal theory and illustrated by the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale?   (3) Do these proclaimed language-use associated patterns of attention allocation indeed have the potential to ‘feed back’ into other (non-linguistic) forms of interaction with spatial scenes (e.g. in the form of recency effects)?  In sum, Variable Speaker data thus provide a good basis for investigating Hypotheses 2a-G and 2b-G, i.e. the predictions that both the current (Hypothesis 2a-G) and the recent (Hypothesis 2b-G) use of a highly object-focused construction should correlate with the assignment of relatively more attention to the RO and its (shape) features than the current or recent use of a highly space-focused construction.

Dataset As indicated above (Section 8.3.1), twelve participants who had been pre-classified as Variable Speakers based on their performance in the web-based pre-test completed the main part of Experiment 2. All participants were students at LMU Munich, spoke German as their only native language and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Half of them took part in the DESCRIBE-VIEW/DV order condition, the other half in the VIEW-DESCRIBE/VD order condition. The average age of participants was 21.2 years in the first subgroup, and 24.7 years in the second subgroup. Apart from one participant in the DV order condition, all participants were female. An analysis of the references to the target scenes (DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes with cornered ROs) provided by these speakers confirmed the status of Variable

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Speakers for all of them. Accordingly, the data from all speakers were included in the analysis. The criteria of RO-shape explicit, imprecision, mid-range, correction and distribution (see Section 8.3.3 above) were applied to the data, and the eye-movement data were checked for quality. This led to a reduction of the original set of 132 items to 71 items. The exact characteristics of the dataset resulting from these analyses are subsumed in Table 22. Tab. 22: Experiment 2 – dataset (Variable Speakers).

nspeakers DESCRIBE-VIEW (DV) 6

VIEW-DESCRIBE (VD) 6

nitems

nitems/subgroup

35 (100%)

ODV < 1

23 (65.7%)

ODV > 2.5

12 (34.3%)

ODV < 1

15 (41.7%)

ODV > 2.5

21 (58.3%)

36 (100%)

This dataset formed the basis for the analyses reported in the following.140

Predictions In keeping with Hypotheses 2a-G to 2c-G (see Section 8.2) the following general predictions were made: (1) Attentional construal meanings: the current use of space-focused constructions in the DESCRIBE conditions is associated with higher LO-RO Ratio Values than the current use of object-focused constructions. 

|| 140 Subsequent to the exclusions based on the criteria of RO-shape explicit, imprecision, midrange, correction and distribution, the number of valid observations in the DV > 2.5 set was very low with the data from two participants. As a consequence, the estimated mean values for these speakers, as they were calculated on the basis of the remaining (valid) data, involve a considerable amount of generalization and might therefore reflect these speakers’ actual behaviour only in an imperfect and potentially unreliable way. Taking this into account, analyses were run of both the data from all participants (n = 6) and of a reduced dataset under exclusion of the data from the two critical participants (n = 4). Since the (mean) values and related tendencies identified by these analyses did not differ markedly, and given the explorative nature of Experiment 2, the results for the full dataset (all participants; n = 6) are reported in the following.

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(2) Recency effects I: the preceding use of a space-focused construction for reference to a particular target item in the course of the DV DESCRIBE task is associated with a relatively higher LO-RO Ratio Value for this very item in the DV VIEW task than the preceding use of an object-focused construction. (3) Recency effects II: the preceding use of a space-focused construction for reference to a particular target item in the course of the DV DESCRIBE task is correlated with worse recognition memory for RO-shape changes in the RECOGNIZE task than the preceding use of an object-focused construction. (4) Habit-induced effects: no differences between the two construction-type specific subsets occur in the VD VIEW task. These four predictions will be addressed and evaluated in the following sections.

Analysis 2A-1: Attentional construal meanings (DV DESCRIBE) For the investigation of prediction (1), the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition were analysed using the linguistic and behavioural measures introduced in Section 8.3.3. The focus of this analysis on the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition explains as follows: other than with the VD DESCRIBE condition, the participants in this condition encountered the referent scenes for the first time when solving the DESCRIBE task. Consequently, they did not have available stored information on the respective scenes (yet) which they could use as a top-down processing device in the course of planning and uttering their descriptions. The data from the DV order condition could therefore be expected to be less strongly influenced by factors other than language than the data from the reverse, VD order condition. Accordingly, the data from the DV order condition could be expected to yield a more direct and more unbiased picture of possible languageuse related attentional effects than the data from the VD order condition. In line with this, the data from the VD DESCRIBE condition were not analysed in detail with the Variable Speaker dataset, but only served the functions of (confirming) speaker classification and of establishing scene-to-utterance correlations between the VD VIEW condition and the VD DESCRIBE condition. These data thus also provided the basis for analysing and interpreting the eye-movement data from the VD VIEW condition (see below, Analysis 2A-4).

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Linguistic context (cotext) Tables 23 and 24 provide a comparative overview of the cotexts (RO-related and LO-related parameters; see Section 8.3.3) in which the Variable Speaker participants had embedded space-focused and object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions during their participation in the DV DESCRIBE task. Tab. 23: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): ROrelated parameters.

parameter embedding construction [relative frequencies in %] RO-profile [relative frequencies in %]

ODV

values

evaluation

LO

RO

SPACE

2.5

0

100

0

THING (NP)

PLACE (PP)

2.5

100

0

M142 =

RO-info [Mnumber of information units] 2.5

1.80 M=

RO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention] 2.5

1.13

no difference

no relevant difference141

no sig. difference [paired t-test (two-tailed): t(5) = 0.82; p > 0.1]143

no difference

|| 141 Since, in absolute terms, the 4.3% of utterances with PLACE RO-profiles in the ODV < 1 subset correspond to one single utterance with such a profile only, no inferential statistics are presented. 142 M = mean values. 143 Two-tailed t-tests (by participants) were used with all analyses of linguistic contexts (cotexts) because a “reverse-Whorfian effect” (Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67) had occurred in a similar study by Trueswell and Papafragou (2010; see Section 8.1). Taking this into account, directed predictions on patterns of co-occurrence of constructions could not be made.

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Tab. 24: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): LOrelated parameters.

parameter

ODV

embedding construction [relative frequencies in %]

see above

values

M=

LO-info [Mnumber of information units] 2.5

1.96 M=

LO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention] 2.5

1.44

evaluation

no sig. difference [paired t-test (two-tailed): t(5) = 0.74; p > 0.1]

no sig. difference [paired t-test (two-tailed): t(5) = 0.66; p > 0.1]

As can be seen, there are no indications of relevant differences between the attentional construal meanings realized by the cotexts of space-focused constructions as compared to object-focused constructions: independently of which DIMDIM(TOP)-construction type speakers selected, they exclusively made use of RO-initial embedding constructions, almost uniformly referred to the RO by construing it as a THING, and provided a roughly equal amount of information on both the LO and the RO. Thus, at least for those instances in which Variable Speakers referred to a previously unseen target scene, differences in DIMDIM(TOP)-construction selection did not correlate with differences in the selection of RO- and LO-foregrounding constructions and features in linguistic context (cotext). It can therefore be assumed that cotexts neither enhanced nor compensated for the patterns of selective attention allocation presumably associated with the choice of either space-focused or object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. Instead, the attentional status ascribed to the RO and the LO by the cotexts is largely equal and thus comparable across construction-type specific conditions. This finding has a range of highly relevant implications: firstly, if considered from the perspective of theory and theory formation, it can be interpreted as indicating that uses of either space-focused or object-focused constructions by Variable Speakers do not reflect a general tendency of these speakers to strongly foreground or background (or even neglect) the RO relative

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to the LO and/or relative to spatial information. Rather, independently of which construction type they made use of, all Variable Speakers tended to select cotexts which assigned a relatively high degree of prominence to the RO. Secondly, if considered from a methodological perspective, the high degree of uniformity of cotexts between the construction-type specific subsets of the Variable Speaker data allows for any differences in behavioural data between these subsets to be rather clearly and directly associated with the use of the different DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions as such. As will be shown in the following section, an analysis of the data for temporal utterance structure yielded a similar picture of high uniformity of the construction-type defined datasets.

Temporal utterance structure As indicated above, one main function of defining Voice Onset Times (VOTs), DIMDIM(TOP) Onset Times (DOTs), DIMDIM(TOP) End Times (DETs) and Voice End Times (VETs) was to enable a theoretically informed, temporally resolved analysis of language-use concurrent eye-movement data. However, these salient points in processing time are also of theoretical relevance themselves: they constitute highly informative indicators of possible construction-type associated differences in how much attention speakers assigned to spatial information. For the following reasons, this accounts in particular for the two onset time measures (VOTs and DOTs): differences in VOTs might indicate that uses of space-focused as opposed to object-focused constructions differ with respect to how much and which information has to be collected and considered in the course of utterance planning. In addition, and closely connected to this, such differences might also indicate that the use of one of the two construction types requires more extensive planning and is thus more resource-consuming than the use of the other (cf. e.g. Ferreira 2007: 1173; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 646; Griffin and Ferreira 2006: 42). Differences in VOTs might, furthermore, point towards differences in accessibility and thus degrees of entrenchment of particular constructions (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé forthc.). In addition, they can function as indicators of particular cognitive contextual constellations. It can, for instance, be assumed that the co-activation of several equally readily accessible constructions requires the running of a selection process, which is both resource- and time-consuming (cf. e.g. Carlson 1999; Griffin and Ferreira 2006: 28; see also Farmer, Misyak, and Christiansen 2012: 355).

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The occurrence of construction-associated differences in DOTs would indicate that DIMDIM(TOP)-information was provided earlier when expressed in the form of one DIMDIM(TOP)-construction type than when expressed in the form of the other construction type. This might entail that speakers differed in how relevant they considered this spatial information unit: findings from previous research suggest that there is a correlation between the provision of information early in an utterance, the cognitive accessibility of this information and its referring expressions, and the assignment of priority and, thus, relevance to the respective information (see Bock, Irwin, and Davidson 2004). If considered from this perspective, marked differences in DOTs between the two construction-type specific datasets would indicate that the status of DIMDIM(TOP)-information differed depending on whether a space-focused or an object-focused construction was selected for use. If it is taken into account that DIMDIM(TOP)-information constitutes space-related information, differences in temporal utterance structure can therefore be defined as construal-meaning relevant features of spatial referential utterances. On this view, differences in DOTs would thus have an impact on the degree of object-focusedness with which a full utterance construes its referent scene. Table 25 indicates the mean VOTs, DOTs, DETs and VETs for the two construction-type specific subsets produced by the Variable Speaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE condition. Tab. 25: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers).

mean VOTs mean DOTs mean DETs mean VETs (in s) (in s) (in s) (in s) ODV < 1

1.64

5.37

6.36

8.84

ODV > 2.5

1.54

6.54

8.09

9.59

comparison [paired t-tests (two-tailed)]

t(5) = 0.8; p > 0.1

t(5) = 0.8; p > 0.1

t(5) = 1.35; t(5) = 0.75; p > 0.1 p > 0.1

As can be seen from Table 25, VOTs and DOTs did not differ significantly between uses of space-focused and object-focused constructions by Variable Speakers. Accordingly, there are no indications that the amount of information that needed to be assembled and processed during utterance planning differed markedly depending on which construction type was used. And, importantly, there are thus also no indications that the status of DIMDIM(TOP)-information

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differed between the cotexts in which either space-focused or object-focused constructions were embedded by Variable Speakers. In sum, the data just presented clearly indicate that the full utterances in which space-focused and object-focused constructions were embedded can be described as highly uniform: they assign comparable degrees of attentional salience to both object-related and spatial information. The two constructiontype specific sets of utterances from the DV DESCRIBE conditions are, accordingly, highly similar to each other in all attention-relevant respects except the kind of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions they contain. This defines them as an ideal testing ground for identifying possible differences in (attentional) construal meanings between space-focused and object-focused constructions and thus in the patterns of non-linguistic attentional behaviour associated with the use of these two construction types. The following analyses focus on this issue of language-perception/cognition relations.

Patterns of visual attention allocation The graphs in Figure 47 indicate the LO-RO Ratio Values for each of the 75 200-ms BINs of the two construction-type specific data subsets from the DV DESCRIBE condition.

spatial terms

VOTs

VETs

Fig. 47: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–75.

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Such graphs will in the following be referred to as LO-RO Ratio Graphs. They indicate how the relative distribution of visual attention between the RO and the LO developed in the course of task performance. The zero line marks an equal distribution of dwell times and thus of attention allocation to both objects. Accordingly, negative values indicate the assignment of a higher degree of visual attention to the RO than to the LO, positive values the assignment of a higher degree of visual attention to the LO than to the RO. Mean VOTs and VETs are indicated by dotted vertical lines. The mean time slots during which DIMDIM(TOP)-information was provided are indicated by boxes (labelled spatial terms). This manner of data presentation and analysis was devised based on Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010). To ensure comparability with the findings by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and other previous research (see Section 8.1), and in line with Trueswell and Papafragou’s (2010: 74–75) observation that “[t]raditional statistical treatments of the data [i.e. of data comparable in many respects to the data from Experiment 2] yielded similar results” (Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 74) to “multi-level mixed modeling over time” (Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 72), ‘traditional’ statistical tests (analyses of variance (ANOVAs), t-tests) were used for the analysis of the data from Experiment 2 (but see discussion in Section 9.2 below). Calculations were made using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 23.0 (IBM Corp., New York). A 2 (construction type) x 75 (BINs) repeated-measures analysis of variance carried out on the LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial period confirms the tendency visible in Figure 47 that, overall, curve progressions are very similar between uses of space-focused and object-focused constructions: using the Greenhouse-Geisser correction,144 the results of this analysis showed that there was no significant difference between uses of the two constructions types as regards overall dwell times on the RO-AoIs as compared to the LO-AoIs (construction type-specific means: M < 1 = 63.1, M > 2.5 = 59.3; F(1,5) = 0.03; p > 0.1). Also, the interaction between the factors of BINs and construction type did not reach significance level (F(3,14) = 2.24; p > 0.05145). However, a visual inspection of the data represented in Figure 47 suggested that differences in attention allocation patterns might still exist for some

|| 144 Unless indicated otherwise, the Greenhouse-Geisser correction was used with any repeated-measures analyses of variance reported in the following. All analyses reported were calculated by participants. 145 Exact p-value: p = 0.1.

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(sub)phases of the full trial period which might be too short to become reflected in the calculations based on the full trial period. As can be seen, this accounts in particular for the phases prior to the utterance of the spatial terms. Therefore, an explorative analysis of the phase-specific data still seemed justified. The results from pairwise comparisons between the means for the different subphases of the DESCRIBE task indeed suggested that attentional patterns differed in relevant ways between the construction-type specific datasets. As can be seen from Figure 48, the calculation of paired two-tailed t-tests146 on the mean LO-RO Ratio Values for the different subphases of the description process reveal the existence of potentially relevant differences between the construction-type specific values during the Pre-Spatial Term Phase (M < 1 = 45.5; M > 2.5 = 124.7; t(5) = 5.04; p < 0.01), the Spatial Term Phase (M < 1 = 167.9; M > 2.5 = 113.4; t(5) = 2.64; p < 0.05) and the Speaking Phase (M < 1 = 86.3; M > 2.5 = 113.4; t(5) = 3.26; p < 0.05).

Fig. 48: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers). Black asterisks indicate effects in line with the prediction that LO-RO Ratio Values should be higher for ODV < 1 than for ODV > 2.5, grey asterisks indicate significant reverse effects.

|| 146 As with linguistic context (cotext), two-tailed tests were used on the grounds that reverse effects had occurred in a similar study by Trueswell and Papafragou (2010). The t-values reported are t-values for unequal variances. This also accounts for the analyses reported in the following. Given the explorative nature of Experiment 2, the false discovery rate was set relatively high (at 0.05) and was not corrected for multiple comparisons.

332 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

The calculation of a 2 (construction type) x 26 (BINs 50–75) repeated-measures analysis of variance did not yield any results from which the existence of differences in a subphase of the Post-Speaking Phase might have been concluded (interaction: construction type x BINs: F(2,11) = 1.89; p > 0.1) and thus confirmed the findings from the pairwise comparisons for this time period. A 2 (construction type) x 9 (BINs 1–9) repeated-measures analysis of variance for the Speech Planning Phase did not yield significant results for the interaction between BINs and construction type either (F(3,13) = 3.23; p > 0.05147). However, a closer inspection of the data for this phase suggested that the construction-specific data might still differ in a relevant way during subphases of speech planning. Therefore, a more fine-grained analysis was carried out on the data for this phase. This additional analysis was also motivated by findings from earlier studies which indicate that the phase of speech planning is the major locus of possible language-perception/cognition effects, but which do not fully agree as to when exactly such planning-associated effects become manifest (see e.g. Flecken 2011: 62; Griffin 2004: 216; Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008; von Stutterheim and Carroll 2006; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67; see also Section 8.1. above). Based on visual inspection (see Figure 49), separate analyses of variance were calculated with this phase for BINs 1–4 and BINs 5–8. This calculation revealed a main effect of construction type for BINs 1–4, i.e. for the first half of the Speech Planning Phase (BINs 1–4: M < 1 = 49.1; M > 2.5 = -31.4; F(1,5) = 7.85; p < 0.05), but no effect for the second half (BINs 5–8: M < 1 = -124.7; M > 2.5 = -82.3; F(1,5) = 1.11; p > 0.1).

*

Fig. 49: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–9.

|| 147 Exact p-value: p = 0.06.

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As regards the Speech Planning Phase, the data thus indicate that the relative distribution of attention to the referent scenes differed considerably between uses of space-focused constructions and uses of object-focused constructions in a very early phase of speech planning (0–800 ms): the (subsequent) use of a space-focused construction was associated with the assignment of a relatively higher degree of attention to the LO (M < 1 = 49.1) than the (subsequent) use of an object-focused construction, which was associated with the assignment of a relatively lower degree of attention to the LO, and thus a relatively higher degree of attention to the RO (M > 2.5 = -31.4). An equally directed difference could also be identified to have occurred during the Spatial Term Phase (see Figure 48 on p. 331).148 This suggests the following: although the LO-AoI was in focus at this phase independently of which construction type was used, speakers who were currently using a space-focused construction still spent even more time looking at the LO (M < 1 = 167.9) than speakers who were currently using an object-focused construction (M > 2.5 = 113.4) (t(5) = 2.64; p < 0.05). The differences identified for the Pre-Spatial Term Phase and the Speaking Phase are, however, oppositely directed. In these phases, the (subsequent) use of an object-focused construction correlates with speaker-observers spending relatively more time looking at the LO than looking at the RO than the (subsequent) use of a space-focused construction. In fact, a visual inspection of the overall curve progressions illustrated in Figure 47 indicates that the effect observed for the Speaking Phase is to a large extent a consequence of the very strong difference between conditions in the Pre-Spatial Term Phase (M < 1 = 45.5; M > 2.5 = 124.7; t(5) = 5.04; p < 0.05).

Summary and Discussion The findings from the Variable Speaker dataset reported thus far can be interpreted as follows:

|| 148 The finding of a difference may seem surprising since it does not become immediately obvious from the curve progressions in Figure 47. Instead, this difference only becomes visible in the calculations based on the mean LO-RO Ratio Values for the different subphases. This is explained by the fact that DOTs varied considerably between instances of object-focused construction uses (range: 1.3–11.5 seconds). This variation is not accounted for by the data presented in Figure 47, which indicate mean DOTs across all speakers and utterances only. It is, however, reflected in the data displayed in Figure 48, since here the mean LO-RO Ratio Values were calculated for each utterance individually, thus taking into account differences in DOTs and DETs.

334 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

(1) The absence of a difference in LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial period runs counter to the prediction that uses of object-focused constructions are associated with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to the RO than uses of space-focused constructions. This finding is thus not in line with Hypothesis 2a-G. It therefore indicates that any effects possibly observable in the subsequent non-linguistic tasks (VIEW and RECOGNIZE) require to be interpreted not so much as recency effects of a difference in quantity of attention allocation to either the RO or the LO, but of a difference in quality of attention allocation. As will be discussed more in detail below, such differences in quality can become manifest in several ways. They can, firstly, pertain to differences in how visual attention is distributed across a scene over time. On such instances, the early assignment of attention to a particular region highly likely indicates the assignment of a higher degree of attentional prominence to this region and to (some of the) the information it contains than the assignment of attention to this same region at a later point in time. Secondly, qualitative differences might also occur on the level of content. In particular, different features or dimensions of information might become attended to in the same fixated region(s) (see Section 2.3.2). (2) As regards the time-course of attention allocation, the finding that preparing to use an object-focused construction correlates with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to the RO within the first 800 ms of the DESCRIBE task, and thus in a very early phase of scene exploration and speech planning, than preparing to use a space-focused construction is very telling. It can be interpreted as a strong point in support of the overall prediction that RO-information plays a more central role with uses of (object-focused) dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions than with uses of (spacefocused) simple dimensional adverb constructions.149 (3) This also accounts for the finding that the same kind of difference occurs during the Spatial Term Phase. Since this effect is closely time-locked to the use of the DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, it strongly supports the assumption

|| 149 The extremely early occurrence of these effects can, however, be interpreted as rendering questionable whether these effects can mainly or even exclusively be classified as speech planning effects. Rather, it might indicate that the later use of an object-focused construction is the result of speakers initially approaching the scene in an RO-focused manner for reasons other than speech planning. This issue, and the issue of cause-effect relations between language and cognition/perception more generally, will be discussed more extensively in Section 8.5 and Chapter 9.

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that the observed differences between the construction-type defined datasets are indeed associated to a considerable extent with the use of either space-focused or object-focused constructions rather than with any differences pertaining to other potential attention-directing factors. If taken together, the findings for the Speech Planning Phase and the Spatial Term Phase can thus indeed be interpreted as indicating that the use of (objectfocused) adjective-plus-noun constructions involves the assignment of a higher degree of attention, and thus, finally, prominence or importance, to the RO than the use of (space-focused) dimensional adverb constructions. In addition, the fact that LO-RO Ratio Values hardly ever became negative again subsequent to the utterance of a space-focused construction (see Figure 47 on p. 329, BINs 39– 75) can even be interpreted as supporting the claim that the RO is hardly relevant at all for uses of simple dimensional adverb constructions (see Chapter 3). In contrast to this, several findings at first sight seem to run counter to Hypothesis 2a-G (i.e. to the prediction that the current use of a highly objectfocused construction correlates with the assignment of relatively more attention to the RO and its features than the current use of a highly space-focused construction), and thus also to the general claim that simple dimensional adverb constructions realize more strongly space-focused construal meanings than dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions. These are, in particular, the clearly negative values for the space-focused construction subset in the second part of the Speech Planning Phase (BINs 5–8), which indicate the assignment of a relatively high degree of attention to the RO, and the finding that mean LO-RO Ratio Values are significantly lower for the space-focused construction subset than for the object-focused construction subset in the Pre-Spatial Term Phase. However, an alternative interpretation, which can be accommodated rather well with Hypothesis 2a-G, becomes possible as soon as these findings are interpreted relative to the subset-specific curve progressions for the full trial period, and as soon as the structure and features of the full referential utterances are taken into account in addition. As has been demonstrated by the analysis of linguistic contexts (cotexts), the Variable Speaker participants who solved the DV DESCRIBE task successfully always explicitly referred to both the RO and the LO, and did so in this very order; that is, all utterances in this subcorpus contained RO-initial constructions. In addition, across instances, a roughly equal amount of information was provided on the RO and the LO (see Tables 23 and 24 on pp. 325 and 326). This suggests that speakers necessarily had to assign attention to both the RO and the LO at some point in the utterance planning and production process in order

336 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

to be able to identify and classify these items, and thus to be able to refer to them linguistically (cf. e.g. Griffin and Bock 2000; Griffin and Oppenheimer 2006: 943; Griffin 2004: 219). Based on this, the observed alternation of phases in which the attention allocation patterns associated with the construction-type specific subsets are in keeping with Hypothesis 2a-G with phases in which the opposite is the case, i.e. in which reverse effects occur, can be interpreted as follows: it might indicate that uses of space-focused and object-focused constructions correlate with differences as to when in the time course of utterance planning and production the (necessary) information on the LO and the RO was collected by the speakers. As can be seen from Figure 50, this interpretation fits the data very well: the use of space-focused constructions correlates with attention being assigned first to the LO and then to the RO, while the use of object-focused constructions correlates with attention being assigned first to the RO and only later to the LO. The entity attended to first is thus in both cases the entity which has been predicted to play a more central role in the context of using instances of either of these two DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types. 0........................................................................................................15000 ms BIN 1........................................................................................................BIN 75 Speaking

ODV < 1

LO

RO

LO

LO

PostSpatial Term LO

ODV > 2.5

RO

RO

LO

LO

LO

as predicted

no sign. difference/ reverse tendency

reverse

as predicted

Speech Planning object primarily attended to

LO-RO Ratio Value

Pre-Spatial Term

Spatial Term

Post Speaking

0

LO

no sign. differences

Fig. 50: Experiment 2 – objects in focus during the subphases of DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers.

If considered from this perspective, the reverse patterns in the second part of the Speech Planning Phase and in the Pre-Spatial Term Phase can be (re)interpreted as the effect of such differences in the assignment of primacy or (temporal) priority (and thus of a high degree of attentional prominence; cf. e.g. Bock, Irwin, and Davidson 2004: 249, 273) to either the RO or the LO. Accordingly, the finding that the use of a space-focused construction correlates with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to the RO in BINs 5–8 than the use of

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an object-focused construction can be interpreted as follows: it might indicate that speakers who plan to use a space-focused construction collect RO-relevant information only at this point in time, while speakers planning to use an objectfocused construction have already done so (or, rather, started to do so150) earlier in processing, during BINs 1–4. The finding for the Pre-Spatial Term Phase, which indicates that speakers preparing to use an object-focused construction assigned a relatively higher degree of attention to the LO than speakers preparing to use a space-focused construction, can be (re)interpreted in an analogous way. It might indicate that it is only at this phase of processing that speakers preparing to use an objectfocused construction strongly focused their attention on the LO for the first time. This entails that they had to collect the information they needed for being able to refer to the LO and to indicate its location in a shorter period of time than speakers preparing to use a space-focused construction, because those had already focused their attention on the LO at an earlier point in processing time, namely in the first half of the Speech Planning Phase (BINs 1–4). As a consequence, speakers had to look relatively longer at the LO during the Pre-Spatial Term Phase when about to utter an object-focused construction than when about to utter a space-focused construction. If it is accepted that initial or early assignment of attention to a particular scene feature indeed corresponds to the assignment of priority and, thus, eventually, of a high degree of prominence to the respective feature (e.g. Bock, Irwin, and Davidson 2004: 249, 273), the following can be concluded: even though the overall amounts of time spent looking at either the RO or the LO did not differ significantly in dependence on which construction type was used, the RO was assigned a higher degree of priority and thus, still, enjoyed an attentionally more prominent status with uses of object-focused constructions than with uses of space-focused constructions. With linguistic contexts (cotexts) being largely equal across utterances, this suggests that the RO is indeed of primary importance to Variable Speakers on occasions in which they (plan to) make use of object-focused constructions, while the LO enjoys attentional priority on occa-

|| 150 As can be seen from Figure 49 (p. 332), when planning to use object-focused constructions Variable Speakers also kept looking more at the RO than at the LO in the second half of the Speech Planning Phase. Since they also did so during this phase prior to using space-focused constructions, and since this difference did not become reflected in the overall LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial period, this finding is, however, considered here to be of less central relevance than the finding pertaining to the first half of the Speech Planning Phase.

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sions in which the same speakers (plan to) make use of space-focused constructions. If considered from this perspective, what has initially been identified as reverse findings, i.e. as findings that run counter to Hypothesis 2a-G, can be (re-) interpreted as actually being well in line with this hypothesis. This (re-) interpretation suggests that the different construction types assign different degrees of prominence or importance to the RO (as opposed to the LO), and do so in spite of the fact that the overall LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial phases did not differ relevantly between the two construction-type specific datasets. This marks the findings from the present study as very similar to the findings reported by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008: 174), who observe the following: … overall attention allocation in event perception does not differ across languages, even when participants are engaged in a linguistic task: what does differ is when people look to particular regions, i.e. which information is prioritized … (emphasis original)

This parallel between the findings just reported, which pertain to a difference in linguistic-construction use that has hardly become subject to investigation at all, and the findings from Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell’s (2008) investigation of motion event perception, i.e. of a well-established and much-researched phenomenon, is seen here as a strong point in support of the interpretation of data from the DV DESCRIBE condition of Experiment 2 just provided. What can be concluded at this point of the discussion is thus the following: the data from the DV DESCRIBE task provide evidence in support of the claim that space-focused and object-focused constructions carry different attentional construal meanings, and that these meanings become manifest in the form of language-use associated differences in oculomotor behaviour in Variable Speakers. This conclusion is, of course, well in line with both the Schematicity Theory version and the Differentiality Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G, i.e. it is theoretically compatible with the assumption that particular forms carry particular attentional construal meanings independently of variation in cognitive contextual conditions and with the assumption that such attentional construal meanings only become manifest in particular, contrast-inducing, cognitive contexts. What still remains to be clarified, however, is whether the observed differences in temporal priority assignment as such – in the absence of a correlative difference in overall LO-RO Ratio Values – have the potential to trigger recency effects (Hypothesis 2b-G).

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This issue will be addressed in the following on the basis of the data from the DV RECOGNIZE and DV VIEW conditions.

Analysis 2A-2: Recency effects I (RECOGNIZE) As indicated above (Section 8.3.2), recency effects, i.e. possible effects of the recent use of the different DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types on forms of nonlinguistic behaviour, were identified by use of two different non-linguistic tasks, DV VIEW and DV RECOGNIZE. In the present understanding (see Chapter 5), recency effects occur because the construction-use associated attentional patterns become included in the memory representations of referent scenes and become reactivated as top-down processing devices in the course of subsequent non-linguistic interactions with the same or very similar scenes. There are therefore a number of reasons which render the RECOGNIZE task particularly well-suited for investigating the occurrence of such effects: firstly, and very basically, this task constitutes a rather direct test of scene memory and is thus particularly prone to reveal memory-based or memory-mediated effects, of which recency effects are an example. Secondly, the RECOGNIZE task exerted time pressure on the participants. This task feature could be expected to render the occurrence of recency effects particularly likely (cf. e.g. Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 646). This is because recency effects can be considered to manifest a resource-saving strategy: they usually rely on already pre-activated, readily accessible knowledge. Accordingly, they can still be executed – and therefore are particularly prone to be executed – under time pressure and in situations of high cognitive load. The third benefit of using recognition memory data as indicators of recency effects derives from the finding from the DV DESCRIBE task that differences in language-use associated patterns of visual attention allocation become manifest in a qualitative, phase-specific manner rather than in the form of differences in overall LO-RO Ratio Values. Based on this finding, it was considered possible that qualitative differences might also become manifest in a way for which eyemovement data are not diagnostic (cf. e.g. Holsanova 2006: 248; Holsanova et al. 2010: 318–319), namely in differences on the level of dimension- or featurebased attention (see Section 2.3.2, p. 25). For instance, it might be the case that, when focusing on the RO, only those speakers who used object-focused constructions assigned attention to its shape or corneredness, whereas speakers who used space-focused constructions did not, but, for instance, attended to the

340 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

RO only for purposes of identifying and classifying it so as to be able to refer to it linguistically (cf. also Irwin 2004: 113). In contrast to eye-movement data, recognition-memory data constitute reliable indicators of the occurrence of such feature- or dimension-specific effects. This also becomes reflected in the design of and in the major predictions relating to the RECOGNIZE task. According to Hypothesis 2b-G, uses of objectfocused constructions should be associated with better recognition memory for the shape of the RO than uses of space-focused constructions, while the reverse should be the case for recognition memory for the location of the LO (as a piece of spatial information). As will be shown in the following, the findings from the DV RECOGNIZE task are at least partly in line with these predictions.

Memory performance Figure 51 and Tables 26 and 27 indicate the Response Time and Response Accuracy data for the two construction-defined Variable Speaker datasets from the DV RECOGNIZE task. They thus indicate how well and how readily speakers remembered the locations of the LOs and the shapes of the ROs in the pictures, depending on which construction type they had used for describing these pictures in the preceding DV DESCRIBE task.

*

Fig. 51: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) and Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers).

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Tab. 26: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers).

change type

ODV < 1

ODV > 2.5

evaluation [paired t-test (two-tailed)]

same

2157.9

1347.8

t(5) = 1.54; p > 0.1

LO-location

1352.8

1539.1

t(5) = 0.98; p > 0.1

RO-shape

3099.8

2155.2

t(5) = 1.43; p > 0.1

Tab. 27: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV RECOGNIZE/Variable Speakers).

change type

ODV < 1

ODV > 2.5

evaluation [paired t-test (two-tailed)]

same

97.1

95

t(5) = 0.60; p > 0.5

LO-location

96.7

100

t(5) = 1.22; p > 0.1

RO-shape

47.5

63.5

t(5) = 2.85; p < 0.05

As can be seen from Table 26, Response Times did not significantly differ between the construction-type defined datasets for any of the three conditions. Thus, with respect to this measure, the prediction that the recent use of an object-focused construction is systematically correlated with the assignment of more attention to as well as with better memory for RO-features (Hypothesis 2bG) could not be clearly confirmed.151 However, as can also be seen from Figure 51, clear effects occurred on a more global level, i.e. across the construction-type defined subsets: Response Times for the RO-shape change condition were significantly higher than Response Times for the same condition (paired two-tailed t-test: MSAME = 1752.9; MRO = 2627.5; t(11) = -4.96; p < 0.001) and for the LO-location condition (paired two-tailed t-test: MLO = 1446.0; MRO = 2627.5; t(11) = -2.78; p < 0.05). In contrast to this, no significant differences could be revealed to exist between Response

|| 151 However, some patterns in the data are at least tentatively supportive of Hypothesis 2b-G: as can be seen from Table 26, Response Times were longer for the same and RO-shape change conditions, and thus for change conditions which required taking into account object-related information, with those targets that had previously been described by use of a space-focused construction (ODV < 1) in the DV DESCRIBE condition than with those targets that had been described by use of an object-focused construction (ODV > 2.5).

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Times to LO-location changes as opposed to the same condition (paired twotailed t-test: MLO = 1446.0; MSAME = 1752.9; t(11) = 1.05; p > 0.1). This finding ties in well with the findings revealed for the Response Accuracy data. As can be seen from Table 27 and Figure 51, responses to the RO-shape change condition not only stand out from the remaining conditions because Response Times were longer. In addition, changes pertaining to this feature were also detected less reliably, and were so independently of which construction type was used for reference: paired two-tailed t-tests on the full Variable Speaker dataset (i.e. independently of the construction type used) revealed that Response Accuracy differed between the RO-shape change condition and the same condition (MSAME = 96.1%; MRO = 55.6%; t(11) = 4.59; p < 0.01) as well as between the RO-shape change condition and the LO-location change condition (MLO = 98.3%; MRO = 55.6%; t(11) = 5.12; p < 0.001), but not between the LOlocation change condition and the same condition (MLO = 98.3%; MSAME = 96.1%; t(11) = 0.88; p > 0.1). This confirmed that Response Accuracy was, overall, significantly lower for RO-shape changes than for the other change types. In addition, and in contrast to the Response Time data, relevant differences in Response Accuracy between the construction-type specific subsets could also be identified to exist within the change conditions. As can be seen from Table 27, the calculation of paired two-tailed t-tests for each of the three change types revealed a significant difference in recognition memory performance for the ROshape change condition: changes were successfully detected in 63.5% of the cases in which the to-be-recognized scene had previously been described by use of object-focused constructions, but only in 47.5 % of cases, and thus on chance level, when the respective scene had been described by use of a space-focused construction (see Table 27 and Figure 51). The preceding use of an object-focused construction is thus indeed correlated with better memory for the shape of the RO than the preceding use of a space-focused construction. In contrast to this, no construction-type associated differences in recognition memory performance could be observed to exist between the same and LOlocation change conditions; with these conditions, responses were correct in almost 100% of cases, independently of which construction types had previously been used (see Table 27 and Figure 51).

Summary and discussion In sum, the investigation of behavioural data from the DV RECOGNIZE task yielded the following results:

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Firstly, among the different scene features tested, recognition memory was worst for the feature of RO-shape, and was so independently of which construction type had been used in the preceding DV DESCRIBE task. Secondly, memory for the shape of the RO was worse when the previously used construction type was a space-focused construction than when it was an object-focused construction. Thirdly, no significant construction-type associated differences in recognition memory occurred for the location of the LO. These findings suggest the following (intermediate) conclusions: (1) The finding that no construction-type associated differences in memory performance exist for the location of the LO indicates that location information was attended to in a comparable manner independently of which construction type was used. This confirms the assumption that attention to the RO and its features constitutes the main determinant of differences in degrees of object-focusedness construal, at least when performing the kinds of tasks used in Experiment 2.152 In addition, this finding matches well several of the observations made for the DV DESCRIBE condition (see Analysis 2A-1): as reported above, speakers (a) spent relatively more time looking at the LO than looking at the RO, independently of which construction type they selected for use, and (b) focused very strongly on the LO-region in the Pre-Spatial Term Phase prior to using an object-focused construction, which indicates that they did collect LO-specific information during the planning and production of this utterance type. Alternatively, the absence of construction-specific effects on attention and memory for the position of the LO might also be interpreted as evidence in support of Talmy’s (2000: 183) claim that the LO, as the figure in a spatial arrangement, generally tends to be foregrounded relative to the RO. On this view, the finding from the RECOGNIZE task would indicate that the general cognitive principle of figure-ground segregation was at work (see Chapter 3). Although in need of further empirical investigation, this might suggest that the attentional effects triggered by construction-type specific degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings are not strong enough to override this presumably more general or basic cognitive principle. In sum, the

|| 152 This finding might partly be the result of the fact that the training task to the DESCRIBE condition (see Section 8.3.2) might have suggested to the participants that they needed to indicate the precise location of the LO in order to solve the DESCRIBE task successfully, as well as of the fact that the LO-location changes in the RECOGNIZE condition were very obvious and the task was thus possibly not diagnostic of precise LO-location memory.

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recognition memory data for the LO-location change condition thus do not allow any definite conclusions relating to Hypothesis 2b-G. (2) The case is very different for the RO-shape change condition: the finding that the preceding use of an object-focused construction correlates with better recognition memory for the shape of the RO than the preceding use of a space-focused construction clearly constitutes a piece of evidence in support of Hypothesis 2b-G. It indicates that the use of an object-focused construction correlates with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to object-specific features of the RO than the use of a space-focused construction. Furthermore, this finding lends support to what was concluded from the analysis of the data from the DV DESCRIBE task. By revealing that differences in memory performance occurred although the overall LO-RO Ratio Values for the construction-type defined datasets from the DV DESCRIBE condition do not differ significantly, the data from the RECOGNIZE condition indicate that the time course of attentional patterns indeed matters, i.e. that attentional priority is indeed an indicator of prominence assignment and thus depth of processing. The finding that recognition memory performance (Response Accuracy) for RO-shape changes is more or less at chance level for the space-focused construction subset is another strong piece of evidence in support of Hypothesis 2b-G, i.e. of the prediction that the recent use of an objectfocused construction is correlated with the assignment of relatively more attention to as well as with better memory for RO-features than the recent use of a space-focused construction. It might even indicate that speakers using space-focused constructions did not attend to the shape of the RO at all while looking at the RO-region during the DV DESCRIBE task. If interpreted in this way, this finding lends even further support to the assumption that the fixation patterns observed in correlation with the uses of either spacefocused or object-focused constructions differed in quality as far as dimension- or feature-based attention is concerned. In sum, the differences in memory performance for information on the shape of the RO thus not only lend strong support to Hypothesis 2b-G (i.e. the prediction that the habitual/preferred use of object-focused constructions correlates with a general tendency to assign more attention to ROs than the habitual/preferred use of space-focused constructions, and does so independently of task conditions), but also to the view that the attentional differences associated with the uses of space-focused as opposed to objectfocused constructions are a matter of quality rather than quantity of relative attention allocation to either the RO or the LO.

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(3) Finally, and in more general terms, the correlations between the attentional patterns from the DV DESCRIBE condition and the recognition memory performance data from the DV RECOGNIZE task just reported are of high theoretical relevance. They clearly indicate that the use of a particular construction with a particular (attentional) construal meaning can have recency effects, i.e. cognitive effects that persist beyond the context of current situated language use proper. In sum, if interpreted in the proposed way, the findings from the DV DESCRIBE and RECOGNIZE conditions are well in line with both the Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory versions of Hypotheses 2a-G and 2b-G: they suggest that the current use of either a space-focused or an object-focused construction is systematically correlated with differences in visual attentional behaviour (Hypothesis 2a-G), and that these differences are in line with what would have been predicted based on construal theory. In addition, they indicate that these effects can persist beyond the actual situation of language use (Hypothesis 2bG), i.e. highly likely leave specific memory traces which can function as topdown processing tools on later interactions with the same scenes. That such recency effects also become manifest in patterns of visual attention allocation to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes will be shown in the following section, which focuses on the data from the DV VIEW condition.

Analysis 2A-3: Recency effects II (DV VIEW) Hypothesis 2b-G holds that speakers who have previously made use of objectfocused constructions in the DESCRIBE task will also attend more and/or earlier to the RO in the course of performing the VIEW task than speakers who have previously made use of space-focused constructions for means of referring to the same scene. Put differently, it predicts that preceding linguistic interaction with a particular scene influences subsequent non-linguistic visual interaction with the same scene to the extent that it triggers the use of similar patterns of attention allocation with both tasks. If these predictions are met, the language-use associated differences in recognition memory performance for the shape of the RO as they have just been reported for the RECOGNIZE condition would constitute the joint effect of the occurrence of construction-type specific patterns of attention allocation during the performance of both the DESCRIBE task and the VIEW task. The absence of any related findings in the DV VIEW task condition, by contrast, would require a modified, more differential modelling of recency effects, since it would indicate

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that such effects become manifest in memory performance, but not in patterns of visual attention allocation.

Patterns of visual attention allocation To investigate whether recency effects of language use did occur in the DV VIEW task, the LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial period and for the three subphases of the viewing process (the Orientation Phase, the Exploration Phase and the Final Exploration Phase; see Section 8.3.3) were compared between the two construction-type specific datasets from the DV VIEW condition. Figure 52 presents the LO-RO Ratio Graphs for the full trial period. Phase boundaries are indicated by vertical lines.

orientation

exploration

final exploration

Fig. 52: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV VIEW/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–75.

In parallel to the analysis of the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition, a 2 (construction type) x 75 (BINs) repeated-measures analysis of variance was carried out on the data. Based on this calculation, no significant differences in mean LO-RO Ratio Values for the full trial period could be revealed to exist between the two construction-type specific subsets (M < 1 = 17.7; M > 2.5 = 2.4; F(1,4) = 0.70; p > 0.1). The interaction between BINs and construction type did not reach significance level either (F(3,14) = 2.01; p < 0.1153). However, as with the DV DE-

|| 153 Exact p-value: p = 0.16.

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SCRIBE condition, a visual inspection of the graphs indicated that differences between the construction-type specific datasets might probably still exist for particular subphases in the viewing process, namely for the Final Exploration Phase (BINs 50–75). An explorative comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values for all three subphases of the viewing process (see Figure 53) lends support to this observation. It reveals relevant differences between the construction-type specific datasets in the Final Exploration Phase (M < 1 = 33.2; M > 2.5 = -23.9; t(5) = 2.65; p < 0.05). This indicates that the preceding use of an object-focused construction in the DV DESCRIBE task correlated with the assignment of a relatively higher degree of visual attention to the RO in the Final Exploration Phase of the DV VIEW task than the preceding use of a space-focused construction.

Fig. 53: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV VIEW/Variable Speakers). Black asterisks indicate significant findings.

Summary and discussion The findings for the DV VIEW condition allow the following conclusions: (1) The finding of significant effects in a subphase of the VIEW task only lends further support to the conclusion already drawn from the analysis of the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition that construction-associated attentional effects are not so much of a quantitative but rather of a qualitative nature, i.e. consist in differences with respect to when in the course of processing attention is assigned to a particular region, as well as, presumably, with respect to which features are attended to within the fixated region(s). What is telling in this context is, however, that the subphases in which relevant effects occurred are not identical between the DESCRIBE and VIEW conditions: they mainly occurred relatively early (Speech Planning and PreSpatial Term Phase) in the DESCRIBE task, but very late (Final Exploration Phase) in the VIEW task. This difference indicates that recency effects do not simply consist in the re-running of identical strategies of attention as-

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signment across tasks, but seem to complexly interact with and be modulated by the task requirements (see also Griffin 2004: 216; Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 40; Strömqvist, Holmqvist, and Andersson 2009: 507 and Chapter 5 above). (2) This becomes even more obvious if it is taken into account that, other than with the DV DESCRIBE task, the differences in relative attention allocation identified for the Final Exploration Phase of the VIEW task are not complemented by the occurrence of reverse effects in other, earlier phases in the course of the trial period. This indicates that the construction-type associated finding from the DV VIEW condition may not be interpreted in analogy to the findings from the DV DESCRIBE task as the result of mere differences with respect to when speakers focused their attention very strongly on either the RO or the LO in the course of task performance. Rather, this finding suggests that the failure of the overall difference in LO-RO Ratio Values to reach significance level results from the shortness of the phase in the DV VIEW task during which relevant differences did occur. (3) The exclusive occurrence of construction-specific effects in the Final Exploration Phase of DV VIEW accords well with findings from earlier research: Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008: 169–171, 180; see also Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 25; Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67), for instance, report that it is in particular during the late phases in the course of exploring a yet unknown scene that participants (who expected a difficult memory test to take place in succession to scene viewing) display behaviour which indicates that they memorize scene details in an active, strategic and thus presumably strongly top-down driven mode. This might indicate that topdown control generally plays a particularly dominant role in the late phases of scene viewing tasks.154 It is assumed here that language-mediated repre-

|| 154 As indicated above, the effects observed by Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell (2008) and Trueswell and Papafragou (2010: 67) were “reverse-Whorfian” effects, i.e. ran counter to the expected attention allocation patterns, whereas, with the data from Experiment 2, “trends of the ‘normal’ Whorfian sort” (Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67) were identified in this phase. This could be explained as follows: Papafragou, Hulbert and Trueswell’s (2008: 164; see also Trueswell and Papafragou 2010: 67) participants (in the non-linguistic condition) knew that the viewing task would be succeeded by a memory test, whereas the RECOGNIZE task came as a surprise to the participants in Experiment 2. Accordingly, instead of intentionally memorizing what they considered as details, the participants in Experiment 2, after they had finished running what seems to be a standard bottom-up driven strategy of scene exploration, seem to have resorted to exploring the referent scenes in a top-down driven manner which comes very close

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sentations, like the ones speakers can be expected to have formed during the DV DESCRIBE task, can function as top-down processing devices in the course of the DV VIEW task. Therefore, the findings from earlier studies just reported can be interpreted as indicating that the differences observed in the Final Exploration Phase of the VIEW task of the present study very likely are indeed related to the observed differences in preceding language use behaviour during the DV DESCRIBE task. (4) Based on this line of argumentation, the following can be claimed: the occurrence of construction-type specific effects in the Final Exploration Phase of the DV VIEW task directly relates to the finding from the DV RECOGNIZE task that speakers who had used object-focused constructions during the DV DESCRIBE task recognized changes in RO-shape features better than speakers who had used space-focused constructions. Although it is not backed up by the statistical findings for the full trial periods, this interpretation can be seen further supported by the very fact that the information collected in the final phase of the DV VIEW task constitutes the most recent and thus presumably most easily (re-)accessible experience speaker-observers have had with those scenes whose memory representations they needed to (re)activate for the purpose of being able to solve the RECOGNIZE task. In sum, the findings from the DV VIEW condition thus provide strong evidence of the occurrence of construction-use induced recency effects on visual attentional behaviour in the speakers tested. As will be shown in the following section, a comparison of the findings from the DV VIEW condition just presented with the findings from the analysis of the data from the VD VIEW condition lends even further support to this interpretation. It indicates that the effects observed in DV VIEW are highly unlikely to mainly have been caused by factors of influence on attention allocation other than preceding language use.

Analysis 2A-4: Language-used detached scene viewing (VD VIEW) The data from the VD VIEW condition, i.e. the condition in which speaker-observers looked at the pictures without having seen and/or described them before and without knowing which tasks they would have to perform afterwards, can be assumed to come closest to yielding a picture of fully language-use inde|| to the attention allocation strategies they had made use of in the course of the preceding DESCRIBE task.

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pendent ways of interacting with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. Accordingly, the analysis of Variable Speaker data from the VD VIEW condition mainly served to ensure that the effects observed with the other conditions are not due to the influence of factors other than language.

Patterns of visual attention allocation Figures 54 and 55 illustrate the LO-RO Ratio Values for the two constructiontype defined datasets from the VD VIEW condition. The analyses and calculations parallel those used with the data from the DV VIEW condition (see Analysis 2A-3, pp. 345–349).

Fig. 54: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD VIEW/Variable Speakers): BINs 1–75.

Fig. 55: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD VIEW/Variable Speakers).

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As can be seen, neither the comparative analysis of LO-RO Ratio Values for the entire trial phase (effect of construction type: M < 1 = 30.7; M > 2.5 = 32.8; F(1,5) = 0.007; p > 0.1; interaction BINs x construction type: F(4,21) = 1.08; p > 0.1) nor the analyses for the different subphases of the VD VIEW process yielded significant findings. That is, in contrast to the DV VIEW condition, no relevant construction-type associated effects could be revealed to have occurred in the VD VIEW condition.

Summary and discussion The findings for the VD VIEW task can be interpreted as follows: On the one hand, they support the assumption that typical, fully languageuse independent linguistic relativity effects did not occur with Variable Speakers. This entails that such effects, if at all, can only be expected to occur as a result of strong linguistic and correlated attentional habits, i.e. in Consistent Speakers (as predicted by Schematicity Theory). On the other hand, the absence of any construction-associated effects in the VD VIEW condition indicates that it is highly unlikely that the patterns identified in the other conditions (including the DV VIEW condition) are the effect of factors other than current or recent language use: if this was the case, these factors should also have become manifest in the VD VIEW condition.

Summary and discussion (Analysis 2A/Variable Speakers) In sum, the analyses of the behaviour of Variable Speakers in the DV DESCRIBE, DV VIEW and DV RECOGNIZE conditions, as well as in the language-use independent VD VIEW condition yielded the following findings: (1) The linguistic contexts (cotexts) in which Variable Speakers embedded (object-focused) dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions and (space-focused) simple dimensional adverb constructions were largely uniform as regards their potential degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings. That is, the selection of either a simple dimensional adverb construction or a dimensional adjective-plus-noun construction for expressing DIMDIM(TOP)-information did not correlate with a more general tendency to strongly foreground either RO-related or LO-related/space-related information. Instead, the ratio of RO-related to LO-related information in the cotexts was rather well-balanced between the construction-type specific datasets.

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(2) Current uses of simple dimensional adverb constructions and of dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions for reference to cornered DIMDIM(TOP)scenes could be demonstrated to be associated with different patterns of attention allocation to these scenes. Variable Speakers assigned attentional priority to the RO when using dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions, and attentional priority to the LO when using simple dimensional adverb constructions. The use of dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions was, in addition, revealed to be associated with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to shape-features of the RO than the use of simple dimensional adverb constructions. These findings suggest that the two construction types investigated indeed carry different (attentional) construal meanings in Variable Speakers, and that these meanings indeed become manifest in the form predicted by the Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale introduced in Chapter 3. (3) The use of either a simple dimensional adverb construction or a dimensional adjective-plus-noun construction exerted recency effects on the subsequent performance of a non-linguistic scene viewing and exploration task (DV VIEW) and a recognition memory test (DV RECOGNIZE). Previous uses of object-focused dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions were associated with the assignment of a higher degree of attention to the RO and better memory for its object-specific features than previous uses of spacefocused simple dimensional adverb constructions. No comparable construction-associated differences occurred, however, with respect to the LO and its location. In sum, the findings from the analysis of the Variable Speaker dataset are thus well in line with Hypotheses 2a-G and 2b-G: they provide clear evidence in support of the predicted differential on-line and recency effects of the use of either highly space-focused or highly object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions. However, these differences turned out to be of a more qualitative, phase- and dimension-specific nature than expected. From the perspective of Schematicity Theory, these findings thus also provide a basis on which Hypothesis 2c-G can be assumed to hold. This hypothesis predicts that Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers should have developed language-use associated habits of interacting with DIMDIM(TOP)scenes which are pervasive and permanent enough to become manifest even independently of current or recent language use. This hypothesis will be investigated in the course of a comparative analysis of the data from Consistent SPFspeakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers in the following section.

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Since Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory make opposing predictions regarding the occurrence of construction-use associated effects for all task conditions in the Consistent Speaker set (see Section 8.2 above), this analysis will not focus on the VD VIEW condition only, but takes into account the full set of conditions. In this way, it also provides a basis for comparing the results from the analyses of the Variable Speaker set and the Consistent Speaker set, and, eventually, a basis for comparatively evaluating Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory.

8.3.5 Analysis 2B: Consistent Speakers/preference-defined cognitive contexts As just indicated, Schematicity Theory and Differentiality Theory make opposing predictions for the Consistent Speaker data. Schematicity Theory predicts the occurrence of effects in all conditions, Differentiality Theory the complete absence of construction-use associated attentional and memory effects in all conditions. Given this clear opposition, the following analysis takes the Schematicity Theory perspective, i.e. the prediction of the occurrence of speaker-type specific effects, as a basis.

Dataset As with the Variable Speaker dataset, speakers who had been pre-classified as either Consistent SPF-speakers or Consistent OBJF-speakers on the basis of their performance in the web-based pre-test (see Section 8.3.1) were invited for participation in the main task.155 However, it turned out that the pre-test did not diagnose for Consistent OBJF-speakers with the same degree of reliability as it did for Variable Speakers and Consistent SPF-speakers: six out of the twelve participants pre-classified as

|| 155 Due to the differences in degrees of conventionalization of space-focused and object-focused constructions in the German speech community as a whole (see Table 19 on p. 295 and Chapter 7) and due to the differences in context adaptivity between these two construction types, the criteria on the basis of which speakers were classified as Consistent SPF-speakers were more strict than the criteria on the basis of which speakers were classified as Consistent OBJF-speakers. While only data from those speakers who had made exclusive use of spacefocused constructions throughout the whole DESCRIBE task were included in the subset of Consistent SPF-speakers, the use of up to three (mid-range/mixed) constructions with an ODV < 2.5 was still considered acceptable for including the object-focused data uttered by the respective speakers in the subset of Consistent OBJF-speakers.

354 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Consistent OBJF-speakers did not make consistent or at least highly frequent use of object-focused constructions in the main experiment. Instead, these speakers resorted to using either constructions with an intermediate ODV – mostly instances of S-70 SCTs (vorne rechts in der Ecke ‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIMS-ADV in the corner-SPEC-PARTN’) – and/or simple dimensional adverb constructions (ODV < 1) in the majority of their linguistic references to cornered scenes. Although in need of future systematic investigation, this unexpected finding might partly be the result of the overall lower speech-community wide frequency and thus, presumably, lower degree of conventionalization of dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions (see Table 19 on p. 295 and Experiment 1/Chapter 7). In addition, mode-specific effects (spontaneous written production in the pre-test versus oral production in the main experiment) might play a more central role with uses of object-focused constructions than with uses of space-focused constructions. Since Experiment 2 aimed at comparing the behaviour of speakers with strong and relatively stable usage preferences to the behaviour of Variable Speakers, the data from these participants were excluded and replaced by data from newly recruited speakers who were more consistent in their preferred use of highly object-focused constructions. The analysis of the data from the twelve speakers who could finally be classified as Consistent OBJF-speakers with respect to the criteria of RO-shape explicit, imprecision, mid-range, correction and distribution (see Section 8.3.3), as well as a scanning of the related eye-tracking data for quality had as a consequence that no valid items remained for two of the Consistent OBJF-speakers from the VD order condition. The data for these two speakers therefore had to be excluded from further analysis. To ensure comparability with the data from the Consistent SPF-speakers for this order condition, the dataset for this speaker group (which had been subjected to the same analyses) was reduced by two accordingly. The participants whose data were included had an average age of 21.7 years in the DV order condition, and of 22.8 years in the VD order condition. 70% (14) of the participants were female, 30% (6) male (of those, 3 took part in the DV order condition, 3 in the VD order condition). Table 28 provides an overview of the datasets that were used as a basis for investigating patterns of construction-use associated attentional behaviour in and between Consistent Speakers.

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 355

Tab. 28: Experiment 2 – dataset (Consistent Speakers).

preference type DESCRIBE-VIEW (DV) SPF/ < 1 OBJF/ > 2.5 VIEW-DESCRIBE (VD) SPF/ < 1 OBJF/ > 2.5

nspeakers

nutterances

6

53 (52.4%)

6

48 (47.6%)

4

34 (57.6%)

4

25 (42.4%)

101 (100%)

59 (100%)

The results from the explorative analysis of these data will be reported and discussed in the following sections.

Analysis 2B-1: Attentional construal meanings (DV DESCRIBE) Linguistic context (cotext) The results from the analysis according to linguistic contexts (cotexts) are reported in the following Tables 29 and 30. Tab. 29: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): ROrelated parameters.

parameter embedding construction [relative frequencies in %]

speaker/ODV

values

evaluation

LO

RO

SPACE

SPF/ < 1

60.4

16.9

22.7

OBJF/ > 2.5

0

100

0

THING

PLACE

omitted

(NP)

(PP)

SPF/ < 1

26.4

47.2

26.4

OBJF/ > 2.5

100

0

0

RO-profile [relative frequencies in %]

clearly different156

clearly different

|| 156 Given that no variation at all occurred in the object-focused subset, no inferential statistics are reported. The same accounts for the data for the feature of RO-profile.

356 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

parameter RO-info [Mnumber of information units]

speaker/ODV

values

evaluation

M=

sig. different [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(6) = -2.65; p < 0.05]

SPF/ < 1

1.14

OBJF/ > 2.5

2.15 M=

RO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention] SPF/ < 1

0.75

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.30

different [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(8) = -2.33; p = 0.05]

Tab. 30: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): LOrelated parameters.

parameter

speaker/ODV

values

evaluation

M=

sig. different [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(10) = -3.26; p < 0.01]

embedding see above construction [relative frequencies in %] LO-info [Mnumber of information units] SPF/ < 1

1.49

OBJF/ > 2.5

2.08 M=

LO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention] SPF/ < 1

0.99

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.10

no sig. different [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(10) = -1.51; p > 0.1]

As can be seen, the patterns in the data diverge considerably from the findings reported above for the Variable Speaker dataset. The cotexts of the spacefocused constructions used by Consistent SPF-speakers differ markedly from the cotexts of the object-focused constructions used by Consistent OBJF-speakers, and even do so with respect to almost all parameters: Consistent OBJF-speakers (a) provided significantly more information on both the RO and the LO (see ROinfo in Table 29 and LO-info in Table 30), and (b) referred significantly more often to the RO than Consistent SPF-speakers. Furthermore, Consistent OBJF-

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 357

speakers used RO-initial embedding constructions in 100% of instances, while Consistent SPF-speakers did so in only 16.4% of instances, i.e. made frequent use of LO-initial constructions (60.4% of instances) and spatial term-initial constructions (22.7% of instances) instead. Similar differences can also be observed for the parameter of RO-profile. While Consistent OBJF-speakers always construed the RO as a THING, Consistent SPF-speakers did so in only 26.4% of cases. That is, Consistent SPF-speakers construed the RO as a PLACE in 47.2% of instances and even did not refer to it at all in 26.4% of instances. What can be concluded from these findings is the following: firstly, at least as regards the parameter of linguistic context (cotext), Consistent OBJF-speakers obviously assigned a higher degree of attention to the ROs and, to a certain degree, also the LOs than Consistent SPF-speakers. Secondly, the cotexts used by Consistent OBJF-speakers were more similar to each other than the cotexts used by Consistent SPF-speakers. A comparison of these findings (Tables 29 and 30) to the findings reported for the Variable Speaker set in Section 8.3.4 (Tables 23 and 24 on pp. 325–326) suggests the following interpretation: very basically, uses of either spacefocused constructions or object-focused constructions by speakers for whom one of these forms constitutes the highly preferred (or possibly even the only available) option of referring to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes differ from spontaneous uses of either of these two construction types by Variable Speakers. As a main difference, the cotexts used by Consistent Speakers seem to reflect and thus potentially enhance the construal meanings associated with the different DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions as such: with Consistent Speakers, object-focused constructions occurred embedded in a more strongly RO-focusing linguistic environment than space-focused constructions. This might indicate that the habitual use of space-focused constructions, unlike their spontaneous use, is the reflex of a more general tendency of the respective speakers to construe spatial scenes in a relatively RO-detached manner, and that the habitual use of object-focused constructions is the reflex of a more general tendency of construing spatial scenes in a highly RO-focused manner. As will be shown in the next section, these differences are complemented, and the interpretation just proposed is thus supported, by the results of the analysis of temporal utterance structure.

358 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Temporal utterance structure Table 31 indicates the mean VOTs, DOTs, DETs and VETs for the DV DESCRIBE subset of the Consistent Speaker dataset. Tab. 31: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers).

mean VOTs mean DOTs (in s) (in s)

mean DETs (in s)

mean VETs (in s)

SPF/ < 1

1.76

3.06

3.83

4.75

OBJF/ > 2.5

2.07

6.57

8.45

9.86

comparison [ind. t-tests (two-tailed)]

t(10) = 0.7; t(10) = 5.47; t(10) = -6.25; t(9) = -5.52; p > 0.1 p < 0.001 p < 0.001 p < 0.001

As with linguistic context (cotext), a comparison between the two preferencedefined groups reveals marked differences in temporal structure between the utterances produced by Consistent SPF-speakers and the utterances produced by Consistent OBJF-speakers. The results for the Consistent Speaker dataset thus differ considerably from what has been observed for the Variable Speaker set in Section 8.3.4. The observed differences between the two types of Consistent Speakers apply both to the overall length of the utterances and to the points in time at which DIMDIM(TOP)-information was provided: utterances produced by OBJFspeakers were about twice as long as utterances produced by SPF-speakers, and OBJF-speakers spoke about twice as long before providing DIMDIM(TOP)-information than SPF-speakers.157 This suggests that OBJF-speakers generally provided more information than SPF-speakers. More particularly, these speakers provided more information prior to providing DIMDIM(TOP)-information than SPF-speakers. This information is object-related in all cases; it either constitutes information on the RO only (in 38.2% of cases; example (76a)) or information on the RO and the LO, with ROrelated information being provided first on all instances (in 61.8% of cases; example (76b)).

|| 157 Other than with the onset times, the differences in end times (in particular DETs) can be explained to a considerable extent by the fact that space-focused constructions are, by their very form, shorter than object-focused constructions.

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 359

(76) a. Ne graue Fußmatte mit schwarzen Streifen [RO], in a

grey doormat-RO with black

stripes [RO]

dessen

in-TOP-P whose

Eck lilane Turnschuhe stehen. rechten oberen right-DIM-ADJ top-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN purple trainers-LO stand b. Weißes Tablett mit grauen Verzierungen [RO] und grüner white tray-RO with grey ornaments [RO] and green Untertasse und Tasse [LO] im linken hinteren saucer and cup-LO [LO] in-the left-DIM-ADJ back-DIM-ADJ Eck des Tabletts. corner-SPEC-PARTN of-the tray-RO If taken together, the findings from the cotext-focused analysis provided in the previous section and the findings just reported indicate the following: Consistent OBJF-speakers, if compared to Consistent SPF-speakers, provided relatively much information on the RO (as well as on object-specific features more generally158), and provided this information first, i.e. prior to the provision of spatial information. This indicates that Consistent OBJF-speakers assigned a relatively higher degree of attention and thus, eventually, a higher degree of prominence and, possibly, also importance to RO-related information than Consistent SPF-speakers. In contrast to this, DIMDIM(TOP)-information was often provided very early by Consistent SPF-speakers (examples (77a) and (77b)), and occasionally even constituted the only information provided by these speakers (example (77c)). This might indicate that Consistent SPF-speakers assigned a relatively higher degree of priority and thus of prominence to LO-related information and, in particular, to spatial information. Schuhe [LO] rechts (77) a. Lila purple shoes-LO [LO] right-DIM-S-ADV einer Fußmatte. a doormat-RO b. Links vorne [SPACE] left-DIM-S-ADV front-DIM-S-ADV [SPACE] dem Blech. the tray-RO

hinten [SPACE] auf back-DIM-S-ADV [SPACE] on-TOP-P

liegt ein Kuchen [LO] auf lies a cake-LO [LO] on-TOP-P

|| 158 Since the provision of relatively more information on the LO in this dataset pertained to the provision of object-specific information like colour, and not information on LO-location, this is interpreted here as in line with the object-focused pattern.

360 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

(77) c. Links hinten [SPACE]. left-DIM-S-ADV back-DIM-S-ADV [SPACE] If interpreted in the manner proposed, the findings from the analysis of linguistic contexts (cotexts) and temporal utterance structure just reported are well in line with the prediction that Consistent SPF-speakers differ from Consistent OBJF-speakers with respect to how much attention they assign to RO-related information.159 These observations give rise to the following questions, which will be investigated and discussed in the following: – (How) do the observed differences in cotexts between the two speaker-type specific datasets become reflected in the non-linguistic behavioural data collected within the scope of the different task conditions of Experiment 2? (In how far) can these effects be shown to interact or even interfere with effects that are predicted to occur in association with the use of different DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions as such? – (How) do the attentional patterns and memory performance data from the Consistent Speaker dataset differ from those in the Variable Speaker dataset?

Patterns of visual attention allocation In line with Hypotheses 2a-G to 2c-G, the analysis of the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition was targeted toward answering the following questions: (1) Did patterns of attention assignment differ at all between Consistent SPFspeakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers in the course of their participation in the DV DESCRIBE task and, if so, what do these differences consist in? (2) In how far is the behaviour of Consistent Speakers similar to the behaviour observed with Variable Speakers?

|| 159 In addition, these findings can be interpreted as indicating that these differences might even be more far-reaching. In particular, the occurrences of uses of spatial-term initial and even spatial-term only utterances by Consistent SPF-speakers, as well as the finding that, in a number of instances, Consistent OBJF-speakers did not only foreground the RO but also the LO more strongly than Consistent SPF-speakers might indicate that the differences observed between these two speaker groups might even be the reflex of these speakers tending to either attend more strongly to the object-level or the space-level of the referent scenes, i.e. to either preferably/habitually pursue a more strongly object-based or a more strongly space-based strategy of attention assignment (see also Section 2.2). This would, however, require further systematic empirical investigation.

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 361

As will be shown in the following, providing an unambiguous answer to these questions has been rendered difficult, however, by the finding that utterances provided by Consistent SPF-speakers and utterances provided by Consistent OBJF-speakers differ more widely than just by the kind of DIMDIM(TOP)-construction they contain. Figure 56 displays the LO-RO Ratio Graphs for the two Consistent Speaker datasets from the DV DESCRIBE condition.

spatial terms

VOTs

VET-SPF

VET-OBJF

Fig. 56: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75.

As can be seen, with the exception of the first few BINs, curve progressions are rather parallel. This indicates that patterns of attention assignment did not differ considerably between groups during most of the trial period. Results from a repeated-measures analysis of variance with speaker type (Consistent SPF-speakers vs. Consistent OBJF-speakers) as a between-subjects factor and BINs (1–75) as a within-subjects factor confirm this impression: Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers did not differ significantly in how much time they spent looking at the LO-region as opposed to the RO-region while performing the DESCRIBE task (effect of speaker type: M < 1 = 48.6; M > 2.5 = 47.8; F(1,10) = 0.001; p > 0.1; interaction BINs x speaker type F(5,52) = 1.09; p > 0.1). A calculation of a 2 x 9 repeated-measures analysis of variance, again with speaker type as a between-subjects factor and BINs (1–9) as a within-subjects factor, revealed, however, that SPF-speaker behaviour and OBJF-speaker behav-

362 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

iour differed significantly during the Speech Planning Phase (F(1,10) = 5.59; p < 0.05). It demonstrates that mean LO-RO Ratio Values are markedly lower for Consistent OBJF-speakers (M > 2.5 = -5.6) than for Consistent SPF-speakers (M < 1 = 61.1). As can be seen from Figure 57, this difference mainly becomes manifest in the time period from 600 ms (BIN 3) onwards.

Fig. 57: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–9.

This difference can be interpreted as indicating that, from 600 ms onwards, Consistent OBJF-speakers assigned a higher degree of attention to the RO than Consistent SPF-speakers when exploring the target scenes for means of utterance planning. In addition, the fact that the LO-RO Ratio Values for the Consistent SPFspeaker subset never turned negative throughout the entire Speech Planning Phase of the DESCRIBE task (see Figure 56) can be interpreted as supportive of the assumption that the differences between groups and thus between construction types are more extreme in the Consistent Speaker data than in the Variable Speaker data: in contrast to the Consistent SPF-speakers, Variable Speakers did assign a rather high degree of attention to the RO throughout the second half of the Speech Planning Phase (BINs 5–8) when making use of space-focused constructions (see pp. 329–339 and Figure 58). When using space-focused constructions, Variable Speakers thus diverged more markedly from pursuing a highly RO-detached attention assignment strategy than Consistent SPF-speakers, presumably as a consequence of initially activating both construction types.

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 363

*

Fig. 58: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/Variable Speakers versus DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–9.

Comparative analyses of the more precise (since utterance-based) mean LO-RO Ratio Values for the subphases of the description process in the Consistent Speaker data confirmed the finding for the Speech Planning Phase just reported: Consistent SPF-speakers indeed assigned significantly less attention to the RO during speech planning than Consistent OBJF-speakers. However, as subsumed in Figure 59, apart from this no further significant between-group differences were revealed.

Fig. 59: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers). Black asterisks indicate significant findings which are in line with predictions.

364 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Since no differences occurred between the Consistent SPF-speaker and the Consistent OBJF-speaker datasets in phases other than the Speech Planning Phase, no equivalent to the patterns of alternation between RO-dominant phases and LO-dominant phases that have been observed in the Variable Speaker data (see Analysis 2A-1, pp. 333–339) occurred with the Consistent Speaker data. Instead, with the exception of the behaviour of Consistent OBJFspeakers in the second half of the Speech Planning Phase, Consistent Speaker behaviour is characterized by a general tendency of attending more to the LO than to the RO. Importantly, this tendency can be observed independently of Consistent Speakers’ specific usage preferences, i.e. occurred with both Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers (see Figure 60). 0......................................................................................................15000 ms BIN 1.....................................................................................................BIN 75

Speech Planning object primarily attended to

ODV < 1

LO

LO

Pre-Spatial Term LO

ODV > 2.5

LO

RO

LO

no sign. diff.

as predicted

LO-RO Ratio Value

Speaking Spatial Term LO LO

Post Post-Spatial Speaking Term LO LO LO

0

no significant differences

Fig. 60: Experiment 2 – objects in focus during the subphases of DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers.

This finding might indicate that, counter to what was predicted by Schematicity Theory, construction-type associated differences in patterns of visual attention allocation are less strongly pronounced in the Consistent Speaker set than in the Variable Speaker set, at least in terms of their scope of extension across full utterances and trial periods.

Summary and discussion In sum, the analysis of the DV DESCRIBE data from the Consistent Speaker set revealed the following findings: firstly, in the Speech Planning Phase, Consistent OBJF-speakers assigned significantly more attention to the RO than Consistent SPF-speakers. Secondly, this construction-use associated difference is more pronounced in the Consistent Speaker set than in the Variable Speaker set; in this phase of the DV DESCRIBE task, Consistent SPF-speakers never assigned a high degree of attention to the RO, while Variable Speakers did so when making use of space-focused constructions. Thirdly, with Consistent Speakers, no sig-

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 365

nificant differences in LO-RO Ratio Values could be identified for any other phase of the DV DESCRIBE task. The findings for the Consistent Speaker dataset are thus clearly different from the findings reported above for the Variable Speaker dataset. On the one hand, the effect in the Speech Planning Phase can be rated as more extreme in terms of the actual values for the Consistent SPF-Speaker group. However, on the other hand, it occurs later than the effect in the Variable Speaker subset. Further differences can be observed for the full trial period. With Consistent Speakers, the predicted construction-type specific effects occurred in the Speech Planning Phase only; with Variable Speakers, by contrast, they occurred distributed across several phases of the speech planning and production process. The findings for the Consistent Speaker group are, in this respect, even more closely in line with the observation from previous studies that “[t]he characteristic effects of sentence planning on eye-movement patterns might only occur just prior to speech production” (Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008: 162; but see also Gleitman et al. 2007; Griffin and Bock 2000) than the findings for the Variable Speaker group. However, the findings for the Consistent Speaker group are neither exactly in line with what was predicted on the basis of Schematicity Theory nor with what was predicted on the basis of Differentiality Theory. As will be shown now, they are, nevertheless, still interpretable from the perspectives of both theoretical frameworks if one takes into account the findings pertaining to linguistic context (cotext) in addition. From the perspective of Differentiality Theory, which predicted the absence of any construction-associated effects in Consistent Speakers, the following interpretation of the unexpectedly strong between-group differences in the Speech Planning Phase suggests itself: these differences might be the effect of the attentional construal meanings associated with the different cotextual constructions in which the space-focused and object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions were embedded, rather than the effect of the use of either of these two construction types themselves. On this interpretation, the prediction that DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions do not carry any attentional construal meanings in Consistent Speakers could still be claimed to hold. What renders this interpretation particularly probable is that, in contrast to what has been observed in the Variable Speaker data (see Section 8.3.4 above), no corresponding effects occurred in the Spatial Term Phase of the Consistent Speaker datasets. If correct, this interpretation poses a considerable challenge to Schematicity Theory, which would have predicted even stronger effects in the Consistent Speaker data than in the Variable Speaker data.

366 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

However, an alternative interpretation that is in line with Schematicity Theory is possible as well. It could be argued that between-group differences associated with uses of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions do not become visible in the Consistent Speaker data in all phases but the Speech Planning Phase because the differences in cotexts caused so much noise in the eye-tracking data that they rendered the detection of such differences impossible. It is also possible that there do exist considerable differences between the two speaker groups for which LO-RO Ratio Values are, however, not diagnostic. For instance, it might be the case that construction-induced attentional effects become manifest in different forms or occur on a different level of abstraction with Consistent Speakers than with Variable Speakers. Both interpretations draw strongly on the finding that linguistic context (cotext) occurred as a further factor of variation in the Consistent Speaker data. How the results from the analyses of Consistent Speaker data reported so far are to be interpreted with respect to their relevance for Hypothesis 2-G, and which of the two theoretical frameworks (if any) they actually lend support to, therefore hinges on which role the observed differences in cotextual language use play in directing visual attention. As will be demonstrated in the following, a comparison of the eye-tracking data from the VD DESCRIBE condition with the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition can contribute to answering this question.

Analysis 2B-2: Attentional construal meanings (VD DESCRIBE) Linguistic context (cotext) Analysing the data from the VD DESCRIBE condition allowed insights into the role of linguistic context (cotext) in directing visual attention because, in the data from this condition, cotextual patterns were far more uniform between speaker types than in the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition: both speaker types used cotextual constructions similar to those used by Consistent OBJFspeakers in the DV DESCRIBE condition.160

|| 160 From a methodological perspective, it would have been even better to compare items from the DV DESCRIBE condition only, i.e. to compare the items in the Consistent OBJF-speaker subset to Consistent SPF-speaker utterances with similar cotexts or to compare utterances with different cotexts within the Consistent SPF-speaker subset. However, this was not possible due to the limited size of these subsets, the high number of potentially interrelated cotextual factors (see Tables 29, 30, 31 and 32 above) and the high degree of inter- and intra-individual variation. The comparison with the VD DESCRIBE condition – though subject to some con-

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As can clearly be seen from Tables 32 and 33, the cotextual patterns in the VD DESCRIBE condition did not differ significantly between speaker types with respect to any of the parameters investigated: both Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers opted for using relatively highly RO-focused cotexts, construed the RO as a THING and, between themselves, provided about the same amount of information on both the RO and the LO. That is, like the Consistent OBJF-speakers in the DV DESCRIBE condition (see Table 29 on pp. 355–356), both speaker types embedded DIMDIM(TOP)-information into relatively highly RO-focusing linguistic environments. Tab. 32: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): ROrelated parameters.

parameter embedding construction [relative frequencies in %]

speaker/ODV

values

evaluation

LO

RO

SPACE

SPF/ < 1

2.9

97.1

0

OBJF/ > 2.5

0

100

0

THING

PLACE

omitted

(NP)

(PP)

SPF/ < 1

100

0

0

OBJF/ > 2.5

100

0

0

RO-profile [relative frequencies in %]

M=

RO-info [Mnumber of information units] SPF/ < 1

2.09

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.96 M=

RO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention] SPF/ < 1

1.23

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.30

no relevant difference

no difference

no sig. diff. [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(5) = 0.60; p > 0.1] no sig. diff. [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(6) = 0.34; p > 0.1]

|| straints as well, given the fact that speakers in this condition were already familiar with the tobe-described scenes – thus constituted the methodologically most practicable working solution for the data available. More systematic investigations of cotextual (and further contextual) effects await future investigation (see also Chapter 9).

368 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Tab. 33: Experiment 2 – linguistic contexts/cotexts (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): LOrelated parameters.

parameter

speaker/ODV

values

embedding construction [relative frequencies in %]

see above

LO-info [Mnumber of information units]

M= SPF/ < 1

2.23

OBJF/ > 2.5

2.12

LO-frequency [Mfrequency of mention]

evaluation

no sig. diff. [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(5) = 0.39; p > 0.1]

M= SPF/ < 1

1.32

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.11

no sig. diff. [ind. t-test (two-tailed): t(4) = 1.19; p > 0.1]

Temporal utterance structure The Consistent SPF-speaker data and the Consistent OBJF-speaker data from the VD DESCRIBE condition were also relatively highly uniform with respect to temporal utterance structure. As can be seen from Table 34, VOTs, DOTs, DETs and VETs did not differ significantly between groups. Tab. 34: Experiment 2 – temporal utterance structure (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers).

mean VOTs mean DOTs mean DETs mean VETs (in s) (in s) (in s) (in s) SPF/ < 1

1.86

5.87

6.72

9.63

OBJF/ > 2.5

1.52

6.19

7.77

9.78

comparison [ind. t-tests (two-tailed)]

t(5) = 2.21; t(6) = 0.30; t(5) = 0.90; t(6) = 0.09; p > 0.05 p > 0.05 p > 0.05 p > 0.05

This indicates that the Consistent SPF-speaker and the Consistent OBJF-speaker participants in the VD DESCRIBE condition neither differed considerably with

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 369

respect to when they provided spatial information nor with respect to how much information they provided on the referent scenes. Any differences in patterns of visual attention allocation that occurred between groups in the VD DESCRIBE dataset can therefore, with a high degree of probability (but see discussion in Chapter 9), be defined as an effect of differences in DIMDIM(TOP)-construction selection. To test for such differences, the eye-movement data associated with the descriptions provided by Consistent Speakers in the VD DESCRIBE condition were subjected to the same analyses as the data from the DV DESCRIBE condition (see Analysis 2B-1).

Patterns of visual attention allocation Figure 61 displays the LO-RO Ratio Graphs for the Consistent Speaker subsets from the VD DESCRIBE condition.

spatial terms

VOTs

VETs

Fig. 61: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75.

As can be seen, curve progressions are highly parallel throughout the entire trial period, thus indicating a very high degree of similarity between groups. This impression is confirmed by the results of repeated-measures analyses of variance with speaker type as a between-subjects factor and BINs as a withinsubjects factor. As with the other conditions, these analyses were calculated for the entire trial period (BINs 1–75), the Speech Planning Phase (BINs 1–9) and the Post-Speaking Phase (BINs 50–75). The results are displayed in Table 35.

370 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Tab. 35: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers).

BINs 1–75

BINs 1–9

BINs 50–75

speaker type mean main effect (between subjects) LO-RO Ratio Values speaker type

interaction BINs x speaker type

SPF/ < 1

45.9

F(1,6) = 0.24; p > 0.05

F(5,28) = 0.61; p > 0.1

OBJF/ > 2.5

45.3

SPF/ < 1

-58.3

OBJF/ > 2.5

-54.6

F(1,6) = 0.02; p > 0.05

F(3,16) = 0.89; p > 0.1

SPF/ < 1

40.3

F(1,6) = 0.61; p > 0.01

F(4,20) = 0.60; p > 0.1

OBJF/ > 2.5

68.3

As can be seen, mean LO-RO Ratio Values are almost identical between groups in all phases investigated. In addition, as indicated by the absence of any significant interactions, there are no indications of relevant between-group differences within any of these three phases. The data presented in Figure 62 show that the same accounts for all subphases of the VD DESCRIBE task.

Fig. 62: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers).

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The findings for the VD DESCRIBE condition thus differ markedly from the findings for the DV DESCRIBE condition. A more detailed comparison of data from these two conditions will be provided in the next section.

VD DESCRIBE vs. DV DESCRIBE As a basis for comparison, Figure 63 jointly displays the visual attention allocation patterns identified for the VD DESCRIBE condition with the pattern associated with uses of object-focused utterances by Consistent OBJF-speakers in the DV DESCRIBE condition. Figure 64 does the same for the pattern associated with the space-focused utterances provided by the Consistent SPF-speaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE condition. A comparison of these two figures indicates the following: the VD DESCRIBE data from both speaker-type defined subsets are highly similar to the DV DESCRIBE data from the OBJF-speaker subset, but differ markedly from the DV DESCRIBE data from the SPF-speaker subset.

Fig. 63: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE vs. DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75, ODV (DV DESCRIBE) < 1.

372 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Fig. 64: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD DESCRIBE vs. DV DESCRIBE/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75, ODV (DV DESCRIBE) > 2.5.

This observation finds support by a statistical comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values for the different phases of the DESCRIBE tasks: as subsumed in Table 36, the DV DESCRIBE and the VD DESCRIBE data for Consistent OBJF-speakers only differed in one phase, the Pre-Spatial Term Phase. A comparison of the DV DESCRIBE data from the Consistent OBJF-Speaker subset to the VD DESCRIBE data from the Consistent SPF-Speaker subset revealed no relevant differences at all. That is, these data subsets hardly differed from each other. A comparison of each of the VD DESCRIBE datasets to the Consistent SPFspeaker subset of the DV DESCRIBE data yielded very different results: both the OBJF-speaker data and the SPF-speaker data from the VD DESCRIBE condition differed significantly from the SPF-speaker data from the DV DESCRIBE condition, and even did so in several phases of the utterance planning and production process, including the Speech Planning Phase (see Table 36). The comparative analyses on the basis of LO-RO Ratio Values thus confirm the initial impression that the oculomotor behavioural pattern produced by the Consistent SPF-speaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE condition differs markedly from all other Consistent Speaker patterns that resulted from the DV and the VD DESCRIBE conditions.

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Tab. 36: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DESCRIBE tasks/Consistent Speakers).161

phases of the description process full trial period

Speech Planning

Pre-Spatial Term

Spatial Term

Post-Spatial Term

Speaking

PostSpeaking

significant differences (ind. t-test [two-tailed])? (Y = yes; N = no) DV OBJF (A) N vs. VD OBJF (B)

N

Y/A>B

N

N

N

N

MDV = 66.1 MVD = 16.8 t(10) = 2.28 p < 0.05

DV OBJF (A) N vs. VD SPF (B)

N

N

N

N

N

N

DV SPF (A) vs. VD SPF (B)

Y/A>B

N

Y/A 0.1

OBJF

M = 26.2

SPF

M = 69.3

OBJF

M = 63.1

F(1,10) = 0.11; p > 0.05

F(3,29) = 0.45; p > 0.1

SPF

M = 6.6

F(1,10) = 0.03; p > 0.05

F(4,43) = 0.39; p > 0.01

OBJF

M = 2.1

Fig. 66: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV VIEW/Consistent Speakers).

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 377

Summary and discussion The findings from the DV VIEW condition clearly do not support the hypothesis formulated on the basis of Schematicity Theory that construction-type specific recency effects of preceding language use will occur in Consistent Speakers (Hypothesis 2b-G). However, they also do not automatically and necessarily imply that the opposite Differentiality Theory hypothesis applies. But there are strong indications that this might be the case. A central one is that recency effects did occur with Variable Speakers (see Section 8.3.4, Analysis 2A-2) although the number of utterances included in the Variable Speaker dataset was smaller than the number of utterances included in the Consistent Speaker dataset (see Table 22 on p. 323 versus Table 28 on p. 355). This renders it unlikely that the absence of effects in the larger Consistent Speaker dataset has been caused by a lack of statistical power and/or by the fact that the measure of LORO Ratio Values is not diagnostic of recency effects. One aspect that still awaits clarification by future research is the following: the absence of any between-group differences in the Consistent Speaker set for the DV VIEW task condition also indicates that the between-group differences in attentional patterns observed for the DV DESCRIBE condition did not become reflected in the form of attentional recency effects in the data from the DV VIEW condition. These between-group differences in the DV DESCRIBE condition have been ascribed above to the use of more or less strongly RO-focusing cotextual constructions (see Analysis 2B-2). It thus remains to be clarified why these seemingly cotext-induced effects did not recur in the subsequent DV VIEW condition, whereas the differences in attentional patterns associated with the use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions by Variable Speakers did so. A possible explanation could be the following: it might be the case that the embedding constructions differ from DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in that they are more context-general. That is, RO-initial, LO-initial or spatial term-initial utterances might be instances of uses of highly schematic constructions which apply to a whole range of scene types other than DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. As such, they would hold only weak pragmatic associations to the specific scene type of DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes. On this interpretation, it is rather unlikely that the participants in Experiment 2 strongly associated their uses of either of these embedding construction types with the particular DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes they had described in the DV DESCRIBE task. Accordingly, they were also relatively unlikely to reactivate the attentional patterns associated with these uses of embedding construction when re-encountering the same referent scenes in the DV VIEW condition.

378 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

Independently of what is the explanation for the absence of attentional effects associated with the use of embedding constructions, the absence of significant between-group differences in the DV VIEW condition rendered the occurrence of such differences in the VD VIEW task, i.e. the occurrence of habitinduced construction-specific patterns of visual attention allocation, highly unlikely. The results of an analysis of the data from the VD VIEW condition presented in the following confirm this expectation. They thus also render it improbable that the absence of between-group differences in the DV VIEW task might be an order effect, i.e. might have resulted from speakers encountering scenes with which they were already familiar.

Analysis 2B-4: Habit-induced effects (VD VIEW) Patterns of visual attention allocation A first visual inspection of the LO-RO Ratio Graphs presented in Figure 67 reveals a picture similar to the one observed for the DV VIEW condition. Accordingly, it suggests the existence of a similar absence of between-group differences.

orientation

exploration

final exploration

Fig. 67: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers): BINs 1–75.

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This impression can be found confirmed by the results of repeated-measures analyses of variance with speaker type as a between-subjects factor and BINs as a within-subjects factor: as shown in Table 38 and Figure 68, there are no indications that the patterns of attention distribution for Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers differed in relevant ways during any of the three subphases of the viewing process, or during any time span within one or several of these phases. Tab. 38: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean LO-RO Ratio Values (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers).

BINs 1–75

BINs 1–9

BINs 50–75

speaker type mean (between subjects) LO-RO Ratio Values

main effect speaker type

interaction BINs x speaker type

SPF

M = 7.4

F(1,6) = 1.14; p > 0.1

F(4,23) = 0.54; p > 0.1

OBJF

M = 37.4

SPF

M = 30.1

OBJF

M = 50.5

F(1,6) = 0.36; p > 0.1

F(3,19) = 1.77; p > 0.1

SPF

M = 16.3

F(1,6) = 0.65; p > 0.1

F(3,17) = 0.75; p > 0.1

OBJF

M = 47.9

Fig. 68: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (VD VIEW/Consistent Speakers).

Summary and discussion The absence of any relevant (and significant) differences in LO-RO Ratio Values between the Consistent SPF-speaker group and the Consistent OBJF-speaker group runs counter to the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2c-G, which would have predicted that speakers’ linguistic preferences become reflected in their patterns of visual attention allocation even when interacting

380 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes in a fully language-used detached manner. Similarly to the findings for the DV VIEW task, and on the same theoretical grounds, the findings for the VD VIEW condition may therefore carefully be interpreted as supportive of the alternative Differentiality Theory view, which holds that language-perception/cognition effects only occur in Variable Speakers but not in Consistent Speakers, and which therefore rejects the possible occurrence of habit-induced effects on principled grounds. What lends further support to this interpretation is that the absence of between-group differences in the VD VIEW condition also allows for a more unambiguous interpretation of the findings from the VD DESCRIBE condition. It indicates that familiarity with the referent scenes cannot explain why no differential language-use concurrent effects occurred in the VD DESCRIBE condition. Given the findings for VD VIEW, the theory that the expected construction-type specific effects had already occurred during the performance of the preceding VD VIEW task and therefore did not recur in the Speech Planning Phase of the VD DESCRIBE condition (see p. 374 above) can clearly be rejected. In sum, the findings for the VIEW conditions and the interpretations of these findings proposed here jointly support the Differentiality Theory view of construal meanings: they suggest that the different types of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions are indeed not associated with particular attentional construal meanings in Consistent Speakers, or, at least, that these construal meanings do not become manifest in observable attentional behaviour with this speaker type. This interpretation finds further support by the findings from the RECOGNIZE task conditions, which will be presented in the following.

Analysis 2B-5: Recency effects II (RECOGNIZE) Memory Performance Figure 69 and Tables 39 and 40 present an overview of the Response Accuracy data for the three change-type conditions in the RECOGNIZE task. Figure 70 and Tables 41 and 42 indicate Response Times. Taking into account that the attention allocation patterns associated with Consistent SPF-speakers differed between the DV and the VD DESCRIBE conditions, the data from both order conditions (DV RECOGNIZE and VD RECOGNIZE) are presented and discussed in the following.

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Fig. 69: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). Tab. 39: Experiment 2 – Response Accuracy data (mean relative frequencies of correct responses in %) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers).

condition

change type

ODV < 1

ODV > 2.5

evaluation [ind. t-test (two-tailed)]

DESCRIBE-VIEW (DV)

same

96.3

100

t(5) = 1.56; p > 0.1

LO-location

98.1

100

t(5) = -1.00; p > 0.1

RO-shape

79.3

68.1

t(9) = 1.14; p > 0.1

same

90.6

100

t(3) = -1.00; p > 0.1

LO-location

100

100

no difference

RO-shape

65.3

77.3

t(5) = -0.94; p > 0.1

VIEW-DESCRIBE (VD)

Tab. 40: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean Response Accuracy data (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers).

condition

change types

evaluation [paired t-test (two-tailed)]

DV SPF/ODV < 1

same x LO-location

t(5) = -0.47; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = 3.42; p < 0.05

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = 3.23; p < 0.05

382 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

condition

change types

evaluation [paired t-test (two-tailed)]

DV OBJF/ODV > 2.5

same x LO-location

no difference

same x RO-shape

t(5) = 3.96; p < 0.05

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = 3.96; p < 0.05

same x LO-location

t(5) = -1.58; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = 2.76; p < 0.05

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = 4.64; p < 0.05

same x LO-location

no difference

same x RO-shape

t(5) = 7.19; p < 0.05

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = 7.19; p < 0.05

VD SPF/ODV < 1

VD OBJF/ODV > 2.5

Fig. 70: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers). Tab. 41: Experiment 2 – mean Response Times (in ms) (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers).

condition

change type

ODV < 1

ODV > 2.5

evaluation [ind. t-test (two-tailed)]

DESCRIBE-VIEW (DV)

same

1552.3

1411.4

t(8) = 0.60; p > 0.1

LO-location

1183.0

1379.3

t(7) = 0.73; p > 0.1

RO-shape

1686.7

1693.6

t(9) = 0.02; p > 0.1

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 383

condition

change type

ODV < 1

ODV > 2.5

evaluation [ind. t-test (two-tailed)]

VIEW-DESCRIBE (VD)

same

1590.3

1376.5

t(5) = 0.52; p > 0.1

LO-location

1477.5

1117.1

t(6) = 1.71; p > 0.1

RO-shape

1774.2

1602.7

t(4) = 0.47; p > 0.1

Tab. 42: Experiment 2 – comparison of mean Response Times (DV and VD RECOGNIZE/Consistent Speakers).

condition

change types

evaluation [paired t-test (two-tailed)]

DV SPF/ODV < 1

same x LO-location

t(5) = 2.34; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = -0.69; p > 0.05

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = -2.42; p > 0.05

same x LO-location

t(5) = 0.17; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = -1.40; p > 0.1

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = -1.47; p > 0.1

same x LO-location

t(5) = 1.37; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = -0.85; p > 0.1

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = -1.62; p > 0.1

same x LO-location

t(5) = 1.69; p > 0.1

same x RO-shape

t(5) = -0.87; p > 0.1

LO-location x RO-shape

t(5) = -2.81; p < 0.05

DV OBJF/ODV > 2.5

VD SPF/ODV < 1

VD OBJF/ODV > 2.5

The memory performance data from the Consistent Speaker sets are in several respects similar to what has been reported above for the Variable Speaker data (see Analysis 2A-2, pp. 339–345). As indicated in Table 40, Response Accuracy was lower for the RO-shape change condition than for the LO-location change and same conditions, and was so across groups (SPF/ODV < 1, OBJF/ODV > 2.5) and order conditions (DV, VD): pairwise comparisons of mean Response Accuracy values (paired two-tailed t-tests) revealed the existence of significant differences between the RO-shape change condition and the LO-location change con-

384 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

dition, as well as between the RO-shape change condition and the same condition. These comparisons also demonstrate that Response Accuracy data did not differ significantly between the LO-location change condition and the same condition. This indicates that, independently of the construction type used and independently of the order of participation in the VIEW and DESCRIBE tasks, Consistent Speakers remembered the feature of RO-shape less well than the feature of LO-location and thus behaved in a way highly similar to what has been observed with Variable Speakers (see p. 342). However, in contrast to the findings from the Variable Speaker set, the Response Accuracy data for the construction-type specific (and thus speakerspecific) groups in the Consistent Speaker set did not reveal any significant differences in recognition memory for RO-shape (see Table 39). This accounted for both the DV and the VD order conditions. In the DV order condition, memory for RO-shape was even worse in the Consistent OBJF-speaker group than in the Consistent SPF-speaker group.162 There are thus no indications that Consistent OBJF-speakers remembered information on the shape of the RO markedly better than Consistent SPF-speakers. As regards Response Times, the results of paired two-tailed t-tests for the different subconditions (see Table 42) revealed only very few effects for the variable of change type: the only significant finding is that, in the VD order condition, Consistent OBJF-speakers took markedly longer to decide whether a change in the shape of the RO had occurred than to decide whether the location of the LO was different. Accordingly, this finding does not allow for very definite conclusions as regards between-group differences. What proves more central to the present discussion is that, as with the Response Accuracy data, no significant differences in Response Times could be revealed to have occurred between

|| 162 Why the group-based tendencies in RO-shape memory differed between the DV and VD order groups in the observed way cannot satisfactorily be explained based on the available data. This post hoc finding thus awaits systematic future investigation. The same accounts for the finding that, in absolute terms, RO-shape memory performance was better in the Consistent Speaker group than in the Variable Speaker group (see Analysis 2A-2, pp. 339–345). Given that both the memory performance patterns and the cotextual patterns were relatively similar between the DV Variable Speaker group and the VD Consistent Speaker group, one factor that might centrally contribute to explaining these post hoc observations, and that therefore should be accounted for in a systematic manner by future research, is linguistic context (cotext; see also Section 9.2). In addition, processing-related issues, in particular the presumably more holistic and thus less resource-consuming manner of speech planning in Consistent Speakers (see Section 8.4 below), might explain for their overall better memory performance.

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Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers in any of the two order conditions for any of the different change conditions investigated (see Table 41). In sum, and independently of the order in which the DESCRIBE and the VIEW tasks had been performed, only some change-type associated effects but, importantly, no significant speaker-type specific effects which would indicate that Consistent OBJF-speakers have better memory for RO-shape than Consistent SPF-speakers could be observed to have occurred in the data from the RECOGNIZE condition. Summary and discussion Taken together, the analysis of the Consistent Speaker data from the RECOGNIZE conditions yielded the following findings: firstly, it showed that information on the shape of the RO was remembered worse than information on the location of the LO. This finding is parallel to what was found for the Variable Speaker data (see Analysis 2A-2, pp. 339–345). Secondly, and very crucially, it revealed that the differences between Consistent SPF-speakers’ and Consistent OBJF-speakers’ memory for the feature of RO-shape were not pronounced in the way predicted by the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2b-G. The findings from the RECOGNIZE conditions thus do not lend support to this hypothesis, i.e. to the prediction that Consistent OBJF-speakers would remember RO-shape features better than Consistent SPF-speakers. Instead, they can, again, be carefully interpreted as supportive of the Differentiality Theory version of this hypothesis, and thus of Differentiality Theory as such.163 In sum, it can carefully be concluded that the Schematicity Theory versions of Hypotheses 2a-G (systematic influences of current spatial construction use on visual attentional behaviour in all speakers, i.e. independently of cognitive context), 2b-G (systematic influences of recent spatial construction use on visual attentional behaviour and spatial scene memory in all speakers, i.e. independently of cognitive context) and 2c-G (systematic influences of habits of

|| 163 As with the findings for the DV VIEW condition, the absence of memory effects despite the between-group differences in the DV DESCRIBE condition calls for comment. Here the same possible explanation as provided for the DV VIEW data might apply (see Analysis 2B-3, pp. 375–378): it might be the case that embedding constructions are so context-general that they do not leave scene-type specific memory traces which are sufficiently salient to be accessed during the RECOGNIZE task. In addition, it has to be taken into account that the relatively uniform attentional behaviour of both speaker types during the DV VIEW task might have compensated for any differential memory effects that could have occurred in direct succession to the DV DESCRIBE task. As already indicated above, these possible explanations await future systematic investigation.

386 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

using particular spatial constructions on visual attentional behaviour independently of current or recent language use in speakers with strong preferences for one particular construction type) are hardly supported by the results from the analysis of the Consistent Speaker data. This marks these data as more in line with the opposing Differentiality Theory versions of these hypotheses. In the following section, the findings reported so far from the analysis of both the Consistent Speaker and the Variable Speaker datasets and their interpretations with respect to Hypothesis 2-G will once more be summarized and discussed. On this basis, first conclusions will be drawn. 8.3.6 Summary and discussion (Analyses 2A and 2B) In sum, the findings from Experiment 2 that have been reported and discussed so far suggest the following conclusions with respect to the different subhypotheses to Hypothesis 2-G: (1) Hypothesis 2a-G (language-use concurrent on-line effects) finds support by the findings from the Variable Speaker dataset. However, the predicted attentional effects were of a less global and more qualitative nature than expected; it could be shown that, on occasions on which they later on used an object-focused construction, Variable Speakers assigned a high degree of attention to the RO in an earlier phase of visual scene processing than they did when preparing to use a space-focused construction. In the present interpretation, this indicates that uses of object-focused constructions correlated with the assignment of attentional priority to RO-related information. In addition to this finding for the early Speech Planning Phase, Variable Speakers also assigned a relatively higher degree of visual attention to the RO at the very point of uttering an object-focused construction than they did while uttering a space-focused construction. Both findings accord well with the Schematicity Theory version and the Differentiality Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G: as predicted, Variable Speakers indeed assigned a higher degree of visual attention the RO (relative to the LO) when using object-focused constructions than when using space-focused constructions. (2) Counter to the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G, the analyses of the Consistent Speaker data did not provide comparably clear evidence for the occurrence of attentional effects associated with the use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, although they revealed that the Consistent OBJFspeaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE condition spent more time looking

Describing, viewing and remembering spatial scenes: A visual world experiment | 387

at the RO during the Speech Planning Phase than the Consistent SPF-speaker participants. The reasons for this are as follows: firstly, with Consistent Speakers, significant between-group differences only occurred in the Speech Planning Phase. In contrast to this, relevant between-group differences occurred in several phases of the utterance planning and production process with Variable Speakers. This finding of cross-group differences is not in line with the Schematicity Theory prediction that construction-use associated attentional effects should be more pronounced in Consistent Speakers than in Variable Speakers. Secondly, it is largely unclear whether the observed effect in the Speech Planning Phase of the Consistent Speaker data is indeed due to differences in the use of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions as such. As discussed above, this finding might just as well explain from the fact that the Consistent SPFspeaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE task embedded their spatial referential utterances into more varied and mostly more strongly RO-detached cotexts than the Consistent OBJF-speaker participants. Therefore, the findings from the Consistent Speaker dataset cannot be interpreted as a clear point in support of the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G: if the between-group differences in the eye-fixation patterns produced by the Consistent Speaker participants in the DV DESCRIBE condition are interpreted as a cotext-induced effect, they suggest an interpretation more in line with the Differentiality Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G, i.e. with the prediction that uses of either space-focused or object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)constructions are not correlated with particular patterns of attention allocation in Consistent Speakers. (3) The finding that differences in linguistic cotexts between uses of spacefocused and object-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions occurred with Consistent Speakers but not with Variable Speakers proves to be highly interesting and discussion-worthy in itself. It may be interpreted as supportive of the claim central to Schematicity Theory that the differences associated with the use of either space-focused or object-focused constructions should be more pronounced in Consistent Speakers than in Variable Speakers, because the LO- or space-focusing cotextual constructions used by the majority of Consistent SPF-speakers clearly match the predicted tendency of these speakers to pursue a highly RO-detached pattern of attention allocation. This might indicate that the tendency of construing the referent scenes in a space-focused manner is so strongly pronounced in these speakers that it becomes manifest not only in their choice of space-focused dimensional

388 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

adverb constructions, but also, in addition, in their choice of a comparably space-focused set of embedding constructions. This interpretation would thus at least indirectly support Schematicity Theory. However, some patterns in the data clearly reveal this interpretation, as well as the finding of cotextual differences as such, as in need of further empirical investigation: firstly, it proves difficult to reconcile with the finding that, overall, the differences in attentional patterns are less strongly pronounced in the Consistent Speaker dataset than in the Variable Speaker dataset. Secondly, only the construction-associated differences in the Variable Speaker data but not the speaker-type associated differences in the Consistent Speaker data triggered observable recency effects in the VIEW and RECOGNIZE conditions. This strongly suggests that variation in cotexts is a factor to be systematically investigated in the future. This also accounts for the related more general questions of whether, to what extent and how construal meanings might spread across, change with or even generate from the combination of several constructions, as well as for the even more basic issue of what this might imply with respect to the structures of Consistent Speakers’ as opposed to Variable Speakers’ cognitive contexts. A central question to be addressed is therefore the following: how does (construal) meaning generate from the associative network into which a particular construction is embedded? Based on the findings just reported, it might, for instance, be argued that the space-focused construal meanings of simple dimensional adverb constructions mainly generate from the co-activation of paradigmatically associated (dimensional adjective-plus-noun) constructions in Variable Speakers, but from the coactivation of syntagmatically associated constructions in Consistent Speakers, i.e. of LO- and space-initial constructions in Consistent SPF-speakers and of RO-initial constructions in Consistent OBJF-speakers. As just indicated, more definite conclusions with respect to this issue cannot, however, be drawn on the basis of the data presently under discussion, but are in need of future investigation (see Chapter 9; see also Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014: 75). What can be concluded at this point is, however, the following: if one focuses on the potential construal meanings of DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions as such, i.e. of phrases of the type vorne rechts (auf dem Tisch) (‘front-DIM-SADV right-DIM-S-ADV (on the table-RO)’)/in der vorderen rechten Ecke (auf dem Tisch) (‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN (on the table-RO)’) only, the findings from Experiment 2 are more in line with the Differentiality Theory version of Hypothesis 2a-G than with the Schematicity Theory ver-

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sion of this hypothesis, because clear evidence for the occurrence of construction-use associated patterns of attention allocation could be provided for the Variable Speaker dataset only. This interpretation in favour of Differentiality Theory is even more strongly supported by the findings pertaining to Hypotheses 2b-G and 2c-G. (4) As regards Hypothesis 2b-G, evidence in support of the predicted recency effects of the previous use of either space-focused or object-focused linguistic constructions could only be found in the Variable Speaker data, but not in the Consistent Speaker data. This accounts both for the oculomotor data and for the memory-performance data: if compared to the habitual and recent use of space-focused constructions, neither the habit of using objectfocused constructions nor the actual recent use of such a construction had a significant influence on how Consistent Speakers assigned visual attention to or remembered RO-specific information. Consequently, the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2b-G, which predicted the occurrence of even stronger recency effects in the Consistent Speaker group than in the Variable Speaker group, did not meet with support. This finding is thus, again, more in line with Differentiality Theory than with Schematicity Theory. What the findings from the Variable Speaker data revealed in addition is that recency effects in patterns of visual attention allocation do not necessarily become manifest in the form of simple reinstantiations of the attentional/oculomotor behaviour executed during preceding situated referential language use. Instead, the predicted construction-use associated attentional patterns occurred in different phases of task performance in the DESCRIBE and VIEW conditions. Although this does not call into question the general finding that attentional recency effects occurred, this difference in the exact manifestation of language-use correlated and language-use detached (recency-induced) attentional patterns has highly interesting implications for how languagecognition relations can be modelled (and have been modelled in Chapters 4 and 5). It indicates that recency effects do not simply consist in a mere rerunning or complete simulation of a pattern of attention allocation that has previously been executed in a context of situated referential language use (see also Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou 2004). Rather, the findings from Experiment 2 indicate that task-specific effects might and obviously do play a central role (see also Montag and MacDonald 2014), and therefore require more detailed and systematic investigation. What can be concluded at this point of the discussion is that recency effects could only be demonstrated to have occurred in the Variable Speaker

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data, but not in the Consistent Speaker data. If compared across these two datasets, the analysis of recency effects thus, again, yielded a pattern of results more in line with Differentiality Theory than with Schematicity Theory. (5) Taking into account the full set of findings reported and discussed thus far, it is not surprising that the Schematicity Theory version of Hypothesis 2c-G, i.e. the idea that the habitual/preferred use of object-focused constructions is correlated with a general and language-use independent tendency to assign a higher degree of attention to RO-features than the habitual/preferred use of space-focused constructions, was not supported by the data. In the present theoretical framework, the predicted highly pervasive habit-induced effects in Consistent Speakers would result from the routinization and automatization of recency effects. Therefore, the absence of recency effects in Consistent Speakers removed the very theoretical basis on which Hypothesis 2c-G could be assumed to hold. Again, the findings from the data are thus more in line with Differentiality Theory than with Schematicity Theory. On a more general level, the findings from Experiment 2 thus suggest the following conclusions: Firstly, differences in linguistic form are not generally and necessarily associated with differences in attentional construal meanings.164 Consequently, linguistic forms are not stably and permanently associated with particular patterns of attention allocation in all speakers; or, at least, the associations between forms and attentional patterns are not strong enough in all speakers of German to become observable in language-use concurrent and/or language useassociated behaviour. Instead, they are only generated, or at least only become manifest, in particular cognitive contextual environments. Secondly, the high degree of agreement between the findings from Experiment 2 and the predictions made on the basis of Differentiality Theory suggest that the cognitive contexts required for attentional construal meanings to become manifest are characterized by the presence and ready accessibility of at least two referentially synonymous constructions or construction types in the same speaker. This identifies construal meanings as a primarily speaker-specific phenomenon. On more general grounds, this indicates that influences of language (use) on perception and/or cognition, as they are at the core of linguistic relativity || 164 And, equally, identical forms do not necessarily carry identical (construal) meaning(s) (cf. Croft 2001: 76).

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research, are possible in principle, though only under specific internal/cognitive and, consequently, external/situational contextual conditions. Since the required cognitive contextual conditions very likely involve the absence of a strong preference or habit of construction use, language-perception/cognition effects are highly unlikely to become manifest in association with fully language-use detached tasks. This does not categorically exclude that they might become manifest (with Variable Speakers) under conditions that trigger the implicit use of language as a problem-solving strategy (cf. e.g. Trueswell and Papafragou 2010). This issue, however, has to be left open for future research. These conclusions also have a range of implications for usage-based cognitive linguistic theory. In particular, it has to be pointed out that the absence of observable language-perception/cognition effects in Consistent Speakers in no way calls into question the premise that “[l]anguage is an integral part of human cognition” (Langacker 1987: 12). The observed differences between the Consistent Speaker data and the Variable Speaker data rather suggest the opposite. They indicate that an individual speaker’s (knowledge of) language can and does influence his or her perception and conceptualization of, for instance, spatial scenes quite markedly, although in a way different than predicted: the findings from Experiment 2 might be interpreted as indicating that it is only because Variable Speakers have available and actually routinely access more than one DIMDIM(TOP)-construction that they are induced to take into account more than one option of how to assign attention to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes when confronted with the task of having to describe them. By contrast, if this kind of paradigmatic association is not (prominently) part of a speaker’s cognitive context – as is presumably the case with Consistent Speakers – he or she might be less likely to take into account several options of scene conceptualization. If considered from this perspective, it can be claimed that differences in languageuse associated cognitive contexts, i.e. in the associative networks which, among other things, are constitutive of speakers’ knowledge of linguistic constructions, indeed induce differences in the ways speakers experience real-world spatial scenes, at least while talking about them and shortly after they have done so. The absence of habitual effects in Consistent Speakers thus does not call into question in principle the ways in which language-perception/cognition (inter)relations have been modelled in Chapters 4 and 5. However, they suggest that an extension of the proposed feedback-loop model by the factor of contrast or differentiality, and therefore also by the processing-related factor of competition between construction types, might be required. Thirdly, the findings from the Variable Speaker data suggest that if language-use associated attentional effects become manifest, they do so in the

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form predicted by construal theory (see Chapter 3). This indicates that the proposed Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale indeed represents one relevant dimension of construal meanings of complex spatial terms. In addition, it also suggests that the basic principles by which particular linguistic forms become associated with particular patterns of attention allocation (see Chapters 3 and 5) might be valid and applicable across individuals. Whether this obvious interindividual validity of principles of form-attentional pattern matching is a matter of convention in German as a speech community, or whether it indicates that the principles proposed by construal theory are indeed of a more universal nature, remains to be clarified by future research. Fourthly, the findings from Experiment 2 have a number of implications for the possible investigation of Hypothesis 3, which predicts that the differences in German and English conventions of using DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions (as derived from frequency data averaged across several members of these speech communities) should correlate with systematic cross-linguistic differences in how DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes are usually selectively attended to by speakers of these two languages. The general finding that construction-associated forms of nonlinguistic behaviour only become manifest in Variable Speakers, and thus in speakers who do not display a strong preference for using one particular construction type as a default, conflicts with this prediction: Hypothesis 3 relies on the existence of strong preferences of using space-focused constructions in all or at least the majority of speakers of German versus strong preferences of using object-focused constructions in all or at least the majority of speakers of English. That is, it starts from a view of speech communities as relatively homogeneous units and presupposes that speakers of German and English are, typically, Consistent Speakers with either a space-focused (German) or an objectfocused (English) preference. Since Experiment 1 has shown that this is not the case, and since the findings from Experiment 2 suggest that the cognitive contexts of Consistent Speakers do not constitute a favourable environment for the occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects anyways, Hypothesis 3 seems hardly worth investigating in the present context. Instead, it can be considered refuted based on theoretical grounds that derive from the empirical findings yielded by Experiments 1 and 2. This re-evaluation of Hypothesis 3, at the same time, brings the issue of community-internal, interindividual variation and its possible relevance to linguistic relativity research from which this project started (see Chapter 1) back to the centre of the discussion. The finding from Experiment 2 that construalmeaning associated attentional and memory effects obviously do not become manifest in all speakers of a language proves particularly central in this context.

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It offers one possible explanation of why different earlier cross-linguistic (neo-) Whorfian investigations have yielded markedly different findings, ranging from very strong and relatively permanent effects of language on cognition and/or perception to hardly any effects or even no effects at all (see Sections 2.2 and 8.1). At least with those studies that selected the languages to be compared based on what is the constructional pattern most frequently used in the respective speech communities (e.g. Papafragou, Hulbert, and Trueswell 2008), the present findings suggest that whether or not effects were revealed might depend on the ratio of Consistent Speakers relative to Variable Speakers in the usually randomly selected participant samples. In the present understanding, those studies which, by chance, included many Variable Speakers were more likely to find results than those studies in which the majority of participants were of the Consistent Speaker type. Differences in findings even between very similar studies might therefore explain from differences in the degree to which the individual speakers tested converged with the speech-community wide conventions. Is thus appears essential to gather information about the individual participants’ specific usage habits (as indicators of their patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge), and to take this information into account in the planning and realization of language-and-thought research and, in particular, in the interpretation of behavioural findings from non-linguistic task conditions, which are usually at the core of such research endeavours. Whether and how including cognitive contexts in this manner can be realized within the scope of cross-linguistic investigations at all is, however, largely unclear and thus open to future methodological work. From the theoretical perspective taken here, taking such a cross-linguistic perspective is rated as challenging, if not problematic, for several reasons: firstly and very basically, even structurally highly similar constructions may, still, not be comparable directly across languages (see Chapter 2). Secondly, the kinds and numbers of competitors to the construction or constructions investigated very likely differ between speech communities. For instance, in the present case of DIMDIM(TOP)constructions, the German dimensional adjective-plus-part noun constructions (in der vorderen rechten Ecke ‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN’) potentially compete with simple dimensional adverb constructions (vorne rechts ‘front-DIM-S-ADV right-DIM-S-ADV’), while this is not the case for their structural English equivalents, i.e. for constructions of the type in the front right corner. Different sets of competitors might, again, foreground different dimensions of construal which could compete or complexly interact with the dimension of interest in a particular study. Closely related to this, and on even more general grounds, cross-linguistic studies presuppose that which forms are associated

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with which attentional patterns is grounded in principles that are valid crosslinguistically, or potentially even language-universally. In particular this last issue strongly suggests that the following question requires to be addressed and, ideally, answered by cross-linguistic empirical investigations before any hypotheses concerning cross-linguistic relativity effects can be formulated: do the principles of construal theory, i.e. the principles on the basis of which, for instance, simple dimensional adverb constructions were associated with space-focused patterns of attention allocation and dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions with object-focused patterns of attention allocation, indeed apply in the same way to Variable Speakers of different languages? Or is the issue of which construction type becomes associated with which attentional pattern rather a matter of convention than of universal principles? The theoretical considerations on how construal meanings become part of a speaker’s knowledge of language provided in Chapter 5 would license both possible explanations. Therefore, in the present understanding, the question to be addressed first by cross-linguistic research does not primarily pertain to the identification of differences and patterns of variation between speech communities, but rather concerns the identification and investigation of possible perceptual and cognitive universals,165 their relation to language and their role in initial and life-long language learning. In a second step, insights into these general issues might then function as a basis relative to which variation between speakers and languages might occur and can be identified and measured (see also Pourcel 2009). A related issue pertaining to possibly universal aspects of perceptual behaviour derives from the findings revealed for the Consistent Speaker dataset from Experiment 2. This issue concerns the question of how, i.e. by influence of which factors, the patterns of attention allocation observed with Consistent Speakers are to be explained given that they are obviously not the result of topdown influences of language/spatial-construction use. This suggests the following question: are the patterns observed with Consistent Speakers representative of general cognitive principles or “universal … properties of the experience” (Croft 2001: 129) of interacting with DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes, e.g. of principles as

|| 165 The idea of cognitive universals is not to be confused with the Generative Grammar idea of linguistic universals, which is rejected by cognitive linguists (e.g. Croft 2001: 5).

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they might occur during a predominantly bottom-up driven mode of interaction with spatial scenes?166 If applied to the present project, this, again, suggests the following related question: is one of the two construction-use associated patterns observed with Variable Speakers more similar to this general pattern than the other? If so, which? That is, is the possibly more general or even universal pattern of attention allocation to spatial scenes of a more space-focused or of a more objectfocused nature? These questions pertaining to general or even universal cognitive patterns of attention allocation, and thus of processing perceptual information, as well as the ways in which these questions relate to language (use) of course need to be addressed by systematic follow-up research. However, as will be shown in the following section, a post hoc analysis which compares the eye-movement data from the DV DESCRIBE conditions of the Variable Speaker dataset and the Consistent Speaker dataset allowed first insights into at least some of these issues. It thus provides a basis for formulating more specific questions to be addressed by future research.

8.4 Analysis 2C: Cognitive context as a determinant of processing strategies? Findings from a post hoc analysis As indicated above, the question of what is the nature of the attentional patterns observed with Consistent Speakers can only be addressed to a limited extent on the basis of the data available from Experiment 2. However, some

|| 166 This definition of ‘basic’ or ‘general’ patterns of attention allocation to spatial scenes in terms of predominantly bottom-up driven processes clearly differs from the following position taken by Croft (2001: 130): “There exists a conceptual structure that represents universal aspects of human experience, even if that conceptual structure is multifaceted. Hence we may posit a (multidimensional) conceptual space that is largely the same for human beings. The conceptual space must allow for alternative conceptualizations of experience, as manifested by the extension of constructions to describe situations that they were not used to describe in earlier stages of the language. This is captured by the structure of the conceptual space.” This position has, however, been revised in Croft (2010). Here, it is suggested that “… what forms the basis of human conceptualization in language are not broad conceptual categories but particular situation types, holistically conceived: that is, their complex Gestalt of semantic properties are apprehended by speakers holistically. … Particular situation types are related to each other, and the conceptual relationships between situation types are also universal. These universals are only revealed through the incredible diversity of language structures.” (emphases original).

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insights can be attained by investigating whether and in how far the attentional patterns observed with Consistent Speakers differ from the obviously construction use-associated patterns observed with Variable Speakers. Since the presence versus absence of language-use associated patterns of (visual) attention allocation in the two speaker-type specific datasets proves essential to addressing these issues, the data from the DESCRIBE conditions – which define the basis on which any more indirect effects of language on perception might occur – proved the most promising. The following comparative analysis focuses on the DV DESCRIBE condition as the condition in which speakers encountered the referent scenes for the first time.

8.4.1 Analysis 2C-1: Patterns of visual attention allocation I (LO-RO Ratio Values) Figure 71 displays the LO-RO Ratio Graphs for uses of space-focused constructions by Variable Speakers and uses of constructions of the same type by Consistent SPF-speakers. Figure 72 does the same for object-focused constructions and Consistent OBJF-speakers.

spatial terms

VOT-var

VOT-cons

VET-cons

VET-var

Fig. 71: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types): BINs 1–75, ODV < 1. Full lines indicate onset and end times for the Variable Speaker subset, dotted lines for the Consistent Speaker subset.

Cognitive context as a determinant of processing strategies? | 397

spatial terms

VOT-var

VOT-cons

VET-var

VET-cons

Fig. 72: Experiment 2 – LO-RO Ratio Graphs (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types): BINs 1–75, ODV > 2.5. Full lines indicate onset and end times for the Variable Speaker subset, dotted lines indicate onset and end times for the Consistent Speaker subset.

On first visual inspection, the graphs seem to indicate the existence of considerable differences between Variable Speaker and Consistent Speaker behaviour: the graphs for the Variable Speaker sets are characterized by the occurrence of relatively extreme peaks and thus extreme LO-RO Ratio Values at different phases of processing. In contrast to this, with the exception of the very early Speech Planning Phase, the graphs illustrating the Consistent Speaker data remain within a markedly smaller range of variation of LO-RO Ratio Values.167 The pattern observable with the Variable Speaker data is, accordingly, characterized by the alternating or phase-wise occurrence of relatively extremely positive or negative LO-RO Ratio Values. It can thus be described as a phase-like pattern of attention allocation. The pattern in the Consistent Speaker data, by contrast, could be described as (more) levelled. Despite this impression that the patterns of attention distribution are markedly different, calculations of repeated-measures analyses of variance with || 167 Given that the number of utterances per condition is smaller in the Variable Speaker set than in the Consistent Speaker set (see Table 22 on p. 323 and Table 28 on p. 355), it cannot be fully excluded that the observable differences in attentional patterns are partly an effect of this factor. Although this is considered unlikely here (taking that the use of a randomly selected subset from the Consistent Speaker data would yield a similar pattern of differences between the two speaker-type defined groups), I offer the following analysis and discussion as a post hoc analysis which clearly is in need of further, more systematic investigation.

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speaker type (Variable versus Consistent Speakers) as a between-subjects factor and BINs (1–75) as a within-subjects factor for both construction-type specific datasets did not reveal any main effects of LO-RO Ratio Value for any of these two sets (ODV < 1: Mcons = 48.6; Mvar = 63.1; F(1,10) = 0.17; p > 0.1; ODV > 2.5: Mcons = 47.8; Mvar = 49.3; F(1,10) = 0.30; p > 0.1). These calculations thus indicate that, counter to expectation, the global patterns of relative attention allocation to either the RO or the LO did not differ significantly between Variable Speakers and Consistent Speakers on occasions in which these speaker types made use of the same DIMDIM(TOP)-construction types. However, the calculation revealed significant interactions between BINs and speaker type for both datasets (ODV < 1: F(5,50) = 3; p < 0.05; ODV > 2.5: F(4,40) = 2.92; p < 0.05). This indicates that differences between groups might exist for subphases of the description process. A comparison of LO-RO Ratio Values for these subphases yielded further significant findings: apart from the presumably cotext-induced effect for the Speech Planning Phase of the space-focused dataset (see Figure 71 on p. 396), the calculations revealed that Variable Speakers focused even more strongly on the LO than Consistent Speakers (a) at the point of uttering a space-focused DIMDIM(TOP)-construction (Spatial Term Phase; see Figure 73), as well as (b) in the course of preparing to use an object-focused construction (see Figure 74).

Fig. 73: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types), ODV < 1. Black asterisks indicate significant findings.

Cognitive context as a determinant of processing strategies? | 399

Fig. 74: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Ratio Values by phase (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types), ODV > 2.5. Black asterisks indicate significant findings.

How this pattern of findings can be interpreted will be discussed in the following section.

Summary and discussion First of all, the findings just reported reveal that the Variable Speaker data and the Consistent Speaker data do differ from each other in certain respects. Accordingly, they indicate that the patterns of attention allocation observed with Consistent Speakers have indeed highly likely been caused by a different combination of attention-directing factors than the patterns of attention allocation observed with Variable Speakers. What has to be taken into account, however, is that the finding from the Speech Planning Phase in the space-focused construction set is only of limited diagnostic value for identifying speaker-type associated differences, because the linguistic contexts (cotexts) differ between the speaker types. As a consequence, the findings just reported do not provide any clear indications that one of the two Variable Speaker datasets is more similar to the Consistent Speaker dataset than the other. This entails the following: if it is assumed that the patterns in the Consistent Speaker set are representative of a more (human-) general, more bottom-up driven pattern of attention allocation to DIMDIM(TOP)scenes than the patterns in the Variable Speaker set, neither the space-focused

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nor the object-focused pattern in the Variable Speaker set is more similar to this proclaimed general pattern than the respective other. The only thing that can be concluded is that the differences between the Variable Speaker set and the Consistent Speaker set occur in different phases of the description process for space-focused and object-focused constructions. What weighs even more heavily is that these findings of relatively moderate, since phase-specific and thus temporarily restricted, differences between the Consistent Speaker and the Variable Speaker datasets are in stark contrast to the marked global differences between the LO-RO Ratio Graphs depicted in Figures 71 and 72. That is, observed and detected differences obviously diverge considerably. One explanation for this finding, and the one held most applicable here, is that LO-RO Ratio Values do not constitute the best suited measure of differences between speaker groups. This is because the differences observed seem not so much to pertain to the distribution of attention between LO and RO, but to the degree or intensity with which both objects in the referent scenes entered the focus of attention of the speakers in the course of the process of picture viewing and description. Pursuing this idea further, a different measure, which could be expected to be diagnostic of this object-general effect and thus of the observed global phaselike versus levelled attentional patterns in the data, was devised and applied to the data. The procedure and results of applying this measure will be reported in the following section.

8.4.2 Analysis 2C-2: Patterns of visual attention allocation II (LO-RO Abs Values) The measure used for assessing the observed tendencies towards a more phaselike versus a more levelled attentional patterning in the speaker-type specific datasets is the sum of the absolute LO-RO Ratio Values for each BIN in the trial period. This measure will in the following be referred to as LO-RO Abs Value. LO-RO Abs Value = |LO-RO Ratio Value(BIN1)| + | LO-RO Ratio Value(BIN2)| + |LO-RO Ratio Value(BIN3)| + … + |LO-RO Ratio Value (BIN75)| This measure was devised as an indicator of strength or extremity of focus on the objects in the DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes based on the following consideration: the more LO-RO Ratio Values diverge from zero, the more exclusively speakers focused on one of the two objects at a particular point in time.

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LO-RO Abs Values were calculated for the full trial period of the DV DESCRIBE dataset, and for the period from BINs 10–75 in order to control for possible cotext-induced effects in the Speech Planning Phase of the Consistent SPF-speaker data (see Section 8.3.5, Analysis 2B-1). The resulting values, as well as the results of the calculation of independent one-tailed t-tests for each construction type-specific dataset, are displayed in Table 43. Tab. 43: Experiment 2 – mean LO-RO Abs Values (DV DESCRIBE/speaker types).

subset

BINs 1–75

ODV < 1

LO-RO Abs Values

variable

7850.0

consistent

5976.2

variable

8166.2

consistent

5973.9

variable

6789.8

consistent

4981.5

variable

7241.9

consistent

5228.1

evaluation ind. t-tests [one-tailed]

t(9) = 1.97; p < 0.05 ODV > 2.5

t(9) = 1.93; p < 0.05 BINs 10–75

ODV < 1

t(9) = 2.06; p < 0.05 ODV > 2.5

t(10) = 1.98; p < 0.05

As can be seen from this table, LO-RO Abs Values are higher in the Variable Speaker subsets than in the Consistent Speaker subsets in all the conditions tested.

Summary and discussion The results of comparing the speaker-type specific datasets on the basis of LORO Abs Values are confirmatory of the impression that the Variable Speaker dataset and the Consistent Speaker dataset differ in the form that they indicate the realization either of a phase-like or of a more levelled pattern of attention allocation. This finding can be interpreted as follows: the levelled pattern in the Consistent Speaker dataset might be representative of a strategy of utterance planning and production which is largely detached and thus independent from external contextual information. It can be assumed that Consistent Speakers categorize a scene as a DIMDIM(TOP)-scene on initial encounter with it (e.g. on

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the basis of the outcome of early gist perception processes; cf. e.g. Henderson and Ferreira 2004: 17, 36; Henderson, Weeks, and Hollingworth 1999), and that this categorization event results in the activation of those speakers’ sole preferred DIMDIM(TOP)-construction type. Being deeply entrenched and, presumably, highly chunked, this construction can then be produced in a presumably highly automatized manner (cf. e.g. Blumenthal-Dramé 2012: 11, 34; Bybee 2013: 50; see also Chapter 5). Accordingly, the production process can be run in a manner largely detached from the further collection of specific information from external context. As a consequence, Consistent Speakers can visually explore the referent scene relatively freely while describing it. On this interpretation, the levelled pattern of attention allocation observed with Consistent Speakers might thus indeed reflect a process of scene exploration which is guided by relatively general perceptual and cognitive principles, and which is thus, presumably, predominantly bottom-up driven. In addition, the assumption that Consistent Speakers categorize DIMDIM(TOP)-referent scenes very early and activate DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in a largely automatic manner independently of which construction type they prefer might explain not only the occurrence of the levelled pattern as such, but also the lack of significant differences in eye-movement patterns between Consistent SPF-speakers and Consistent OBJF-speakers during most of the time of DESCRIBE task performance (as it was revealed by Analysis 2B-1; see pp. 360–366). The phase-like pattern in the Variable Speaker dataset can be explained on the basis of similar considerations. It might indicate that these speakers do (or even have to) draw strategically on object information from external context during utterance planning and production. Accordingly, with Variable Speakers, “gazes support sequencing words” (Griffin 2004: 233), because they allow speakers to treat “the visual environment … as an additional memory database” (Spivey, Richardson, and Fitneva 2004: 161) and thus to reduce current working memory load (cf. e.g. Johansson, Holsanova, and Holmqvist 2006: 1075–1077; Swets, Jaconiva, and Gerrig 2014). On this interpretation, Variable Speakers can be assumed to plan and produce their utterances in a relatively highly incremental manner (cf. Griffin and Ferreira 2006: 42; Swets, Jaconiva, and Gerrig 2014). Single steps in this planning and production process would then depend on (or be guided by; cf. Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011: 164) the availability of particular kinds of information from external context. In the present case, this information would variably be information on the RO or the LO, depending on which phase in the course of referential language production one focuses on, as well as depending on which construction type eventually becomes used by a speaker.

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Via this interpretation, the post hoc analysis of the eye-tracking data presented in this section, on the one hand, makes a contribution to ongoing debates in psycholinguistics. By relating linguistic preference patterns to utterance production processes in general, and to the question of “how and when speakers vary the amount of preparation they engage in” (Griffin and Crew 2012: 419) during utterance planning and production in particular, it addresses several issues that are currently subject to debate in psycholinguistics, and that are still in need of more extensive empirical investigation: “… what sorts of factors affect the degree to which people prepare different units prior to articulation and how does this vary across situations and individuals” (Griffin and Crew 2012: 419)? How much information is and “can be processed while other parts of … [an] utterance are being articulated” (Griffin and Crew 2012: 419; cf. also Ferreira and Swets 2002)? In addition, the findings from the post hoc analysis of the DV DESCRIBE data from Experiment 2 line in well with and provide a production-focused perspective on a range of findings from language comprehension research which identify differences in (learning from) previous linguistic experience as one factor which contributes to findings of considerable variation in language processing performance between individuals (cf. e.g. Farmer, Misyak, and Christiansen 2012: 354–358; MacDonald and Christiansen 2002; Wells et al. 2009). On the other hand, and even more centrally, the findings and interpretations just reported can relatively directly be related to the theories of referent scene construal presented and discussed in the first part of this book. They accord well with the assumption that space-focused and object-focused constructions compete for use in Variable Speakers: firstly, the lack of a uniform routine of how to refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes might prevent Variable Speakers from running processes of quick initial scene categorization and utterance activation as they have been proposed to occur in Consistent Speakers. Secondly, and closely related to this, it can be assumed that selecting one among several readily available constructions for use is resource-consuming (see p. 327 above). This suggests that Variable Speakers might pursue a more incremental production strategy than Consistent Speakers because their cognitive load during the planning and production of a referential DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance is higher than the cognitive load imposed on Consistent Speakers by the same task. Apart from relying relatively strongly on information from external context, Variable Speakers might further reduce or at least redistribute this load by planning utterances step by step: it can be assumed that postponing some planning steps to the Speaking Phase corresponds to distributing the cognitive load of utterance planning more evenly across the whole trial period.

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Another explanation for why Variable Speakers obviously consult information from external context more extensively and more systematically than Consistent Speakers might be that they draw on this kind of information as an aid for selecting either a space-focused or an object-focused construction for use. It might even be argued that Variable Speakers need the information from external context to be able to make a selection decision at all. Thus, why Variable Speakers draw rather strongly on information from external context might have at least two (partly complementary) explanations: it might (a) merely be the reflection of ongoing selection decisions, or (b) assist speakers in making these very decisions. On the second interpretation, external contextual features would thus influence or even determine the choice of constructions in Variable Speakers. In particular if related to the findings from the main analysis of the data from Experiment 2 (Analyses 2A and 2B) the findings from the post hoc analysis (Analysis 2C) of these data have a range of important theoretical and methodological implications. These will be discussed in the following section.

8.5 Summary and discussion: Main and post hoc findings (Analyses 2A, 2B and 2C) In sum, the findings from the post hoc comparison of the Consistent Speaker data and the Variable Speaker data from the DV DESCRIBE condition just reported indicate that the attentional patterns in Consistent Speakers may indeed mainly be explained by the working of factors of influence other than language, and thus presumably by more general or even human-universal principles of visual perception than the attentional patterns in Variable Speakers. However, at the same time, these findings also indicate that the observed differences in oculomotor behaviour between Consistent Speakers and Variable Speakers are not primarily explained by the differential influence which the use of either space-focused or object-focused constructions was demonstrated to have on Variable Speaker behaviour in Section 8.3.4. Instead, they rather explain from the more general differences in usage preferences, and thus, presumably, patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge definitional of Consistent and Variable Speakers. If interpreted in the manner suggested in the previous section, these differences in cognitive contexts between speaker types are highly likely associated with differences in utterance planning and production strategies to the extent that contrast- or competition-inducing cognitive contexts, as they are characteristic of Variable Speakers, are associated with the use of a more incremental

Summary and discussion: Main and post hoc findings (Analyses 2A, 2B and 2C) | 405

planning strategy. This interpretation not only readily explains why neither of the two construction-type defined attentional patterns in the Variable Speaker dataset could be revealed to be more similar to the Consistent Speaker pattern than the other. It even suggests that the observed construction-type specific patterns of attention allocation in Variable Speakers identified in Section 8.3.4 might to a considerable extent be a secondary effect of incremental utterance planning and production. In this context, a further, more processing-related or strategy-based possible explanation for the occurrence of the obviously more incremental planning/production strategy pursued by Variable Speakers requires mention. This explanation pertains to possible interindividual differences in the tendency (and, possibly, ability) to self-align (e.g. Vorwerg 2009; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007),168 and to related possible differences in the scope within which such selfalignment might still occur, i.e. in the time span and/or the amount of intervening information or actions required for these effects to be effectively prevented from occurring. It might be the case that the Consistent Speakers tested in Experiment 2 displayed a stronger tendency to self-align (and, accordingly, better self-alignment abilities) than the Variable Speakers (see also Vorwerg 2009: 54). On this interpretation, the obviously higher ease of planning referential DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances observed with Consistent Speakers, as well as their highly consistent linguistic behaviour as such, might primarily explain from (structural) priming by their previous (in particular task-initial) use of a particular construction type. This would, accordingly, entail that the use of distractors as a means of preventing self-alignment was less efficient with this group of speakers than with the Variable Speakers. In the present understanding, this alternative interpretation of the observed speaker-type specific patterns in the data in terms of self-alignment is considered possible. However, this does not entail that the proclaimed existence of different preference-defined speaker types and, as a consequence, the interpretation provided for the findings of Experiment 2 in this chapter, can and have to be called into question. Instead, as will be shown in the following, taking into account self-alignment effects adds another relevant dimension to this interpretation, while being well compatible with what has been discussed so far. First and foremost, whether effects of construction-specific attentional construal meanings did not become manifest with Consistent Speakers (a) because these speakers did not have available a sufficiently strongly entrenched

|| 168 I would like to thank Thora Tenbrink for drawing my attention to this issue.

406 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

competitor to the construction type they made use of in the main task of Experiment 2, or (b) because they did not access this potential competitor in the course of task performance but stuck to their initial choice of using a particular construction type, is only of secondary relevance to the idea central to Differentiality Theory that construction use-associated attentional effects are the result of a selection conflict: in neither of the two scenarios just sketched would such a conflict occur. Secondly, these two scenarios are considered here to be closely interrelated in several respects: on the one hand, it is highly likely that the initial choice of a particular construction type by a Consistent Speaker also corresponds to the choice of the construction type most deeply entrenched and thus most readily accessible to him or her. This assumption is further supported by the fact that the speakers classified as Consistent Speakers in Experiment 2 made use of the same construction type in the pre-test and in the main test, i.e. displayed the same preference pattern across different task contexts and at different points in time. Since the order of stimuli was the same for all participants in the pre-test, it also seems highly unlikely that the participants’ initial choice of either a dimensional adjective-plus-noun construction or a simple dimensional adverb construction was triggered by the first display (see Vorwerg 2009: 41; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007: 485). A close-up consideration of the data from Experiment 2 (in which the order of presentation of the stimuli was randomized across participants and task conditions, see Section 8.3.2) also did not provide any indications that speakers’ initial construction selection decisions might have been influenced by them encountering particular initial displays or display types. Thirdly, and finally, it is therefore assumed here that a high ability and tendency to self-align might be a central cognitive feature characteristic and, possibly, even definitional of Consistent Speakers: these speakers might have developed a strong preference for using one particular construction type and, thus, might have developed the patterns of entrenched linguistic knowledge described above because they tend to be strongly primed by their own behaviour. This would also explain why Consistent OBJF-speakers could develop (and obviously have developed) a preference for using a construction type which is not the most strongly conventionalized one in the speech community of which they are members. Rather than undermining the interpretation of the data from Experiment 2 offered in this chapter (as might be suggested by the line of argumentation in Vorwerg 2009: 41–42), taking into account self-alignment as a factor thus adds an important explanatory dimension to this very interpretation. In addition, it draws attention to an important more general issue: it underlines once more

Summary and discussion: Main and post hoc findings (Analyses 2A, 2B and 2C) | 407

that patterns of knowledge representation and processing strategies, as well as the abilities that enable or foster these strategies in the first place, are multiply interrelated and interact in complex ways – and therefore require to be modelled and investigated under careful consideration of this very interrelatedness. Overall, the findings from the post hoc Analysis 2C thus suggest the following conclusions, also with respect to some central findings from the main Analyses 2A and 2B: Firstly, as just indicated, they strongly suggest that the traditional focus on cognitive representations characteristic of relativity research and, in particular, of cognitive linguistic research (see Chapter 2) might usefully be complemented by taking into account more closely the level of the processes by which the represented information becomes accessed and is made use of in the course of task performance (cf. also Barlow 2013: 444). In particular if they could be confirmed by future, more systematic empirical investigations, the presumably processingrelated findings reported from Analysis 2C could contribute considerably to differentiating more clearly the Schematicity Theory position and the Differentiality Theory position on the nature of construal meanings (see Chapters 5 and 6). They suggest that the Differentiality Theory framework might explain better for the observed effects, and thus constitutes a more solid – though still not ideal – theoretical basis for further investigations of language-perception/cognition relations, than the Schematicity Theory framework. One main reason for this is that Differentiality Theory postulates the occurrence of a selection conflict, and thus a processing-related phenomenon, in the course of spatial utterance planning and production. This indicates that the Differentiality Theory position can more readily accommodate predictions and findings pertaining to information access and processing than the rather strongly representationfocused Schematicity Theory position. Secondly, the findings from Analysis 2C underline, once more and particularly clearly, that language does not interact with perception and cognition in isolation. Rather, it constitutes one among several possible bottom-up and topdown factors of influence on attentional behaviour to which it holds a complex (inter)relationship. For instance, factors of influence other than language might have been most dominant in controlling the attentional behaviour of Consistent Speakers in Experiment 2 (see Sections 8.3.5 and 8.4.2). This also entails that it cannot be excluded that language might have had a certain influence on the behaviour of Consistent Speakers, but did so in a way too subtle to become reflected in the attentional measures used in Experiment 2. In addition, these considerations indicate that the language-perception/ cognition effects observed with Variable Speakers in the main analysis of the

408 | Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes

data from Experiment 2 (see Section 8.3.4) may not simply be interpreted in terms of a clear cause-effect relation (see also, for instance, Casasanto 2008; Pollio et al. 2005: 151; Hill and Mannheim 1992: 400). The reasons for this are as follows: firstly, language might not be the only attention-directing force that became effective in these speakers, though obviously a very dominant one. Secondly, the analysis of the data from Experiment 2 only revealed the existence of correlations between the use of particular construction types and particular patterns of attention allocation, but is not informative of possible more directed influences. Some findings and their proposed interpretations even point rather clearly toward the existence of mutual influences, or even of reverse, perception-to-language effects. These are (a) the occurrence of very early effects in the Variable Speaker set (in the first 600 ms), which might indicate that selective visual attention temporarily preceded construction selection decisions (see Section 8.3.4, Analysis 2A-1), and (b) the observation that drawing on external context might help Variable Speakers in making a construction selection decision (see Section 8.4.2). The findings of the present project thus do not fully meet what is traditionally the major aim of linguistic relativity research: they do not reveal that language causes perceptual and cognitive effects and not vice versa (cf. e.g. Gleitman and Papafragou 2005: 647, 653; Li and Gleitman 2002; see also Casasanto 2008; Everett 2013: 67, 273). Rather, they indicate that, from the point of view of trying to arrive at a better understanding of how language relates to perception and cognition, this aim can, at best, be of secondary relevance. The aim they define as more central instead is providing an answer to the following questions: which external (situational and social), internal (cognitive) and linguistic (cotextual) factors have an influence on which perceptual and cognitive processes, and how do they interact in doing so? What are the cognitive and behavioural consequences of these effects? And, how uniform and predictable are these effects and their consequences between individuals? As will be conclusively discussed in the first part of the following Chapter 9 (Section 9.1) the project presented in this book could shed at least some light on some of these questions. And, perhaps even more centrally, its findings – both in terms of what they reveal and as regards the limits of interpretation they are subject to – give rise to a number of questions to be addressed by future research. Therefore, these questions are at the core of the following, final chapter.

9 Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond … deciding what to say when … depends on many social, motivational, cognitive and linguistic factors, which are difficult to separate … (Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011: 164)

9.1 Summary of findings The research reported and discussed in this book started from the following set of questions: (1) Which different ways are there for referring to complex spatial scenes (DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes) in German and in English? What determines the use of a particular construction rather than of one of its possible alternatives? (2) Do seemingly referentially synonymous alternatives realize different attentional construal meanings? Can those be observed in language-use associated forms of non-linguistic attentional behaviour? (3) If this is the case, under what contextual circumstances do such languageperception/cognition effects become manifest? In particular, do cognitive contexts play a role, and, if so, which? (4) What are the theoretical and methodological implications of the answers to questions (1) to (3) for usage-based cognitive linguistics, for linguistic relativity/language-and-thought research, and for their possible (inter)relatedness? The theoretical insights and empirical findings reported in this book suggest the following answers: As regards question (1) a discussion of preceding theoretical and empirical work on spatial language in German and English revealed that there is a range of different options of how speakers of these two languages can linguistically refer to complex spatial scenes. If interpreted in construal theory terms, the different formal options should also realize different attentional (degrees of object-focusedness) construal meanings. Enabling a close-up investigation of DIMDIM(TOP)-construction use under controlled contextual conditions, Experiment 1 complemented this picture as follows: firstly, it showed that – counter to what could have been expected from the literature – the ranges of possible degrees of object-focusedness construal meanings that can be realized by speakers of German and English are comparable, at least as far as the possible coverage of the extreme ends of a scale from

410 | Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond

highly object-focused to highly space-focused scene conceptualization (Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale) is concerned. Secondly, it revealed that the patterns of conventionalization differ considerably between the two languagedefined groups tested. It showed that which construction type becomes used is influenced in different ways by features of external context (the shape of the RO) and is subject to variation between individual members of the same speech communities, with external (situational and social) and internal (cognitive) factors of influence interacting in a complex manner. Experiment 1 thus identified cognitive context as a central determinant of construction selection decisions. What it revealed in addition is that interindividual variation in contextrelated usage preferences is to a certain extent systematic: at least in the German speech community, there obviously exist different subconventions for how to refer to DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes with cornered ROs. In sum, Experiment 1, firstly, revealed that constructions that seem to be structurally equivalent in German and English, like the dimensional adjectiveplus-part noun construction (in der vorderen rechten Ecke ‘in the front-DIM-ADJ right-DIM-ADJ corner-SPEC-PARTN’/in the front right-hand corner), are embedded in very different language-specific patterns of conventionalization and are subject to very different contextual usage conditions. As a consequence, construction types are hardly comparable across languages. Secondly, and highly relevant methodologically, it revealed that the majority of speakers of German can be assigned to one of three subconvention groups (Consistent SPF-speakers, Consistent OBJF-speakers, Variable Speakers) based on their usage preferences. Since differences in individual preferences highly likely indicate differences in cognitive contexts, German proved ideally suited for the investigation of attentional construal-meaning effects in dependence on cognitive contextual conditions. More specifically, it allowed for differentially testing whether languageassociated attentional effects … – … are stably and systematically correlated with the use of particular linguistic forms/constructions, and are the more pronounced the higher the degree of routinization of the respective construction is in a speaker (Schematicity Theory), as is traditionally assumed by the majority of cognitive linguistic construal theories and approaches to linguistic relativity. – … generate differentially in contrast- and thus presumably selection conflict-inducing cognitive environments, as they are characteristic of speakers who do not have a clear preference for using one particular construction type only (Differentiality Theory).

Summary of findings | 411

The findings from Experiment 1 therefore also defined that questions (2) and (3) should usefully be investigated in Experiment 2 in a language-internal manner, and that this investigation should involve a comparison between speaker types, i.e. compare speaker behaviour under consideration of their specific usage preferences and thus, presumably, cognitive contextual environments. The central findings from Experiment 2 basically suggest a confirmative answer to (the second part of) question (3). They indicate that whether or not construction-type associated attentional and memory effects occur is centrally determined by the cognitive contexts in which knowledge of the respective constructions is embedded in individual speakers: as predicted by Differentiality Theory, the expected attentional effects only occurred in Variable Speakers, i.e. in speakers who highly likely have to select between several readily available construction types when asked to produce a referential DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance. By revealing these effects, Experiment 2, in addition, indicates that language can indeed function as a possible top-down source of salience and can, as such, direct attentional behaviour. However, a post hoc analysis of the data from Experiment 2 revealed that whether and how this function of language becomes manifest is likely to not only depend on the presence of particular cognitive contexts as such, but also on the occurrence of particular processing strategies (and related cognitive tendencies and abilities), as well as on how dominant language is as an attention directing factor relative to other, potentially interacting or interfering sources of bottom-up and/or top-down salience (see also Günther, Müller, and Geyer forthc.). Experiment 2 thus also gave rise to the following set of related questions, which require to be addressed by future research: to what extent can the pattern of language-perception/cognition effects identified in Experiment 2 be explained based on representational factors relative to processing-related factors? To what extent do these two dimensions interrelate and/or to what extent is a differentiation between knowledge representations and processes or processing strategies possible and useful at all? How central these questions are to interpreting the data from Experiment 2 can be seen from the fact that they allow for calling into question the interpretation of these data as clearly supportive of Differentiality Theory. For instance, they suggest an alternative interpretation for the non-occurrence of construction-specific attentional effects in Consistent Speakers: instead of indicating that, with these speakers, DIMDIM(TOP)-construction representations are not at all associated with any relevant attentional construal meanings, it might be the case that this meaning dimension is present in Consistent Speakers in a manner

412 | Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond

comparable to Variable Speakers, but is routinely overridden by other attentiondirecting factors in the course of referential scene processing. These considerations thus also draw attention to the limitations to which the research presented in this book is subject. These, as well as the perspectives they open up for future research, are at the centre of the discussion in the following section.

9.2 Limitations and perspectives for future research The work presented in this book systematically took into account languageinternal variation when investigating language-perception/cognition effects, and did so in an unprecedented and thus largely explorative way both as regards the combination of theoretical perspectives and the exact methodological procedure. It is therefore, naturally, subject to a range of limitations which await complementation by future follow-up research. Some of these limitations are of a rather general nature. They pertain, for instance, to the relatively small scope and relatively narrow focus of this study: firstly, the number of participants tested in Experiment 2 is, admittedly, relatively low. Nevertheless, the patterns and tendencies identified from the available data are encouraging. Therefore, it would be highly interesting to see the findings of this study confirmed by investigations that address the issues at stake on a larger scale. Secondly, this study focused on one type of linguistic constructions, spatial DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions, only. It remains to be seen whether similar patterns of language-internal, inter-speaker variation can also be found with other construction types, and whether the present finding that construction-associated attentional effects depend on contrast-inducing cognitive contextual conditions can be confirmed on a broader and more varied linguistic basis. One further, closely related question that should be investigated in this context is whether the overall frequency of use of a certain general construction type (i.e. DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions in the present case) in a speech community constitutes an additional factor of influence on the conditions of (non-) occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects. As indicated above (Section 7.1), this question is extremely difficult to address with DIMDIM(TOP)constructions since those are mostly a phenomenon of spontaneous, interactive and situated language use. As such, they are very likely to be underrepresented in the available German language corpora. This is also one reason why reliable predictions as to whether the findings reported in this book readily generalize to other construction types with different overall frequencies and conditions of use

Limitations and perspectives for future research | 413

are difficult to make. However, the high compatibility of the present findings with the established theoretical positions that form the basis of Differentiality Theory (see Chapter 5) renders a confirmative answer to this empirical question possible and even probable.169 Other limitations of the research presented in this book derive from some of those findings from Experiments 1 and 2 which define contexts other than cognitive contexts as in need of systematic future investigation. The same accounts for the manners in which these contexts interrelate and interact. The contextual dimensions that have emerged as of particular interest are the following: – in the more general area of situational contexts: the task to be solved as well as the communicative context in which this task solution takes place – in the field of linguistic contexts, i.e. cotexts: the dimension of syntagmatic associations – in the more extended area of cognitive contexts: (a) differences between individual speakers with the same or very similar preference patterns; and (b) possible interindividual differences in the degree to which certain general cognitive abilities are pronounced. All of these dimensions will be commented on briefly in the following. As regards task, clear parallels in the behaviour of Variable Speakers could be identified for the DESCRIBE as compared to the VIEW task. However, these effects occurred in different phases of the processes of utterance planning and production on the one hand, and of visual scene exploration on the other hand. Experiment 2 thus revealed that the proposed feedback-loop mechanism between language-use concurrent and language-use detached perceptual interaction with spatial referent scenes (see Chapter 5) cannot be one of simply executing the same processes of perceptual simulation and/or behaviour on both occasions. Task as a modulating factor thus clearly requires to be investigated by follow-up studies.170 The results of these studies would then need to become included in the feedback-loop model proposed in Chapter 5.

|| 169 The case might be different for different construal types (see Chapter 3). The finding from Experiment 2 that, overall, LO-RO Ratio Values were positive, i.e. indicated a relatively higher degree of attention assignment to the LO than to the RO, might, for instance, indicate that certain general construal principles usually associated with figure-ground segregation (the LO is the attention-attracting figure, the RO the ground; see Talmy 2000: 183; see also Section 3.1 and Section 8.3.4, Analysis 2A-2) apply independently of the speaker-related preference patterns that have been investigated in this book. 170 This also accounts for procedural factors like the temporal distance between the DESCRIBE task and the VIEW and RECOGNIZE tasks: varying the distance between these tasks could yield

414 | Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond

What identifies communicative context as a highly construal-relevant factor is, among other things, the observation made in Section 5.3 that attentional effects might become manifest in Consistent Speakers during the receptive processing of a DIMDIM(TOP)-utterance that runs counter to these speakers’ own preferences. Extending the scope from productive to receptive and interactive modes of language use might thus centrally contribute to further testing and verifying the contrast- and conflict-based interpretation of the data from the production-focused experiments reported in this book. In addition, it might yield new insights into the question of whether and how active and passive uses of language relate, in particular when it comes to language-internal variation (cf. e.g. Croft 2000: 175). The dimension of linguistic contexts (cotexts) has emerged as highly interesting and relevant mainly from the observations made with Consistent SPFspeakers (see Section 8.3.5). Their uses of LO-focusing and spatial term-focusing (rather than RO-focusing) embedding cotexts, and the attentional effects presumably associated with these uses, define the syntagmatic associations a construction holds to other constructions as potentially relevant to defining the construal meaning(s) realized by a full utterance. This finding thus indicates that syntagmatic associations might be at least as relevant to the (non-) occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects as the paradigmatic associations which have been at the core of the research presented in this book. One focus of future research should therefore be to investigate more closely the manner in which the construal meanings of the different constructions that make up a full utterance interrelate and interact. As regards cognitive contexts, future follow-up research would benefit from breaking even more clearly with existing traditions in the field of language-andthought research than has been done by the research presented in this book: future research could, for instance, extend the limits of Experiment 2 to a considerable extent by devising and applying statistical models that take into account possible interindividual variation within preference-defined speaker groups in addition, and/or by modelling preference patterns in gradient rather than categorical, group-based terms.

|| insights into how long-lasting the observed recency effects are, and might also contribute to explaining why the results from the RECOGNIZE task diverge from findings reported by earlier, related research like, for instance, Papafragou, Massey and Gleitman’s (2002) finding of the absence of any influences of previous language use on memory performance in a recognition memory test performed at two days’ distance from the initial (and potentially priming) linguistic task.

Final conclusions | 415

Finally, another open question that has emerged as pressing from the findings reported in this book, and a question that lines in well with the recent trend towards investigating interindividual variation which this research project took as a starting point (see Chapter 1), is the following: how can members of the same speech community come to hold different usage preferences, and thus come to differ in their cognitive contexts in the first place? In trying to answer this question, three types of closely interrelated factors require consideration: situational external contextual factors, i.e. (frequency) patterns in the input which different speakers receive in their more direct communicative environments; social external contextual factors, like, for instance, the status of individual speakers relative to their social-network environments and the related claim that “weak-tie speakers [are] more variable in [their] usage” (Croft 2000: 180; cf. also Milroy 1992); and internal/cognitive factors, i.e. differences in particular cognitive abilities and preferences, like differently strongly pronounced suppression abilities (cf. Boudewyn, Long, and Swaab 2012; see also Chapter 5, p. 108) or self-alignment abilities (Vorwerg 2009; Vorwerg and Tenbrink 2007; see also Chapter 5, pp. 107–108 and Section 8.5), which might lead to differently strong tendencies of preference formation even on exposure to the same or very similar forms of input. In particular this final set of factors has received very little attention in usage-based linguistics, and thus would constitute an ideal starting point for follow-up investigations.

9.3 Final conclusions Despite the limitations and the many open issues stated in the previous section, the research reported in this book allows for drawing at least some rather definite conclusions concerning some theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to language-perception/cognition relations. These are the following: Firstly, usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches and language-andthought/linguistic relativity research are well compatible given the right theoretical modelling, and can cross-fertilize to yield new insights into the nature and conditions of occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects. Secondly, language-perception/cognition effects become manifest in and are subject to influences by a complex, multilevel contextual environment. This environment requires careful modelling, operationalization and investigation for reliable, psychologically realistic findings to be revealed by empirical studies. This also includes that the dimension of cognitive contexts, including the aspect of interindividual variation, requires to be taken into account as a

416 | Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond

central factor of influence on the (non-)occurrence of language-perception/cognition effects. Thirdly, the need of including both external (situational and social) and internal (cognitive) contexts in the modelling of language-perception/cognition relations, and of instances of language use more generally, entails that these contextual dimensions require to be both differentiated and, at the same time, be related to each other. Since external contexts also include the speech communities of which speakers are members and in which linguistic usage events take place, the present project lines in well with current usage-based approaches to language like the EC-Model (Schmid 2014, 2015), which emphasize (a) that entrenchment and conventionalization require differentiation, and (b) that how these processes interrelate needs to be defined very clearly. By revealing that there is a divergence between the patterns of conceptualization that emerge from the analysis of group data and the degree to which individual speakers or preference/entrenchment-defined speaker groups comply with this pattern, the research reported in this book makes at least a small contribution to this aim. Fourthly, addressing another issue pertaining to theory formation in cognitive linguistics, some originally structuralist principles, like the principle of the differential nature of linguistic signs, i.e. of meaningful units in language (cf. de Saussure [1916] 1983: 113), very likely play a more central role in shaping linguistic knowledge and in defining the relation between language, perception and cognition than they have been accorded so far: the findings reported in this book clearly indicate that usage-based cognitive linguistic approaches to language and language learning could highly profit from extending their view from a focus on processes of routinization and generalization, and thus on the formation of hierarchical network relations, to the complementary dimension of same-level paradigmatic relations, including, in particular, relations of contrast. Fifthly, there are strong reasons to believe that language-perception/cognition effects, as well as the Principle of Contrast, which presumably gave rise to these effects in the case of the present investigation, essentially occur in individual participants and are, perhaps, even bound to specific contextual conditions. Accordingly, they, in the first place, constitute speaker-related phenomena, and not phenomena that can be observed to occur between whole speech communities. Linguistic relativity effects are therefore usefully investigated on a primarily speaker-focused, language-internal rather than on a speaker-general and/or cross-linguistic level. In any case, the research presented and discussed in this book has demonstrated that the issue of interindividual differences within speech communities,

Final conclusions | 417

which is increasingly gaining attention in cognitive linguistics, should also find its way as a central theme into linguistic relativity research, ideally together with the central principles of usage-based cognitive linguistics as such.

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Appendix Resources Experiment 1 Tab. 44: Experiment 1 – stimuli used in the object identification and naming task.

O1

orchid

O18

elephant

O2

highlighter

O19

box

O3

swan

O20

cup

O4

polar bear

O21

giraffe

O5

bowl

O22

egg container

O6

leaf

O23

plate

O7

lake

O24

key

O8

umbrella

O25

bottle of wine

O9

field

O26

cup

O10

dish

O27

watering can

O11

pen

O28

table

O12

basket

O29

orange

O13

turtle

O30

striped shirt

O14

apple

O31

egg

O15

cherry tomatoes

O32

puddle

O16

lettuce leaf

O33

spoon

O17

tealight

O34

duck

Tab. 45: Experiment 1 – instruction sample (INSTR) and items used in the training session (TR).

set

objects

feature 1

feature 2

feature 3

INSTR

mice

colour

size

orientation

TR Dist-I

cups

colour

pattern [+/- dots]

orientation

TR Dist-II

bears

colour

orientation

background colour

TR Target

egg in box

position TOP

position H1

position H2

460 | Appendix

Tab. 46: Experiment 1 – distractor items used in the main task.

set

objects

feature 1

feature 2

feature 3

D1

keys

colour background

colour keyring pendant

shape key

D2

triangles

colour

size

shape

D3

circles

colour centre

colour small circle

position small circle

D4

elephant and giraffe

relative position (V)

direction of view elephant (H2)

direction of view giraffe (H2)

D5

tortoise

colour background

colour tortoise

direction of view tortoise (V)

D6

highlighter

colour background

colour marker

shape marker

D7

duckling

colour background

colour duckling

perspective (front, side)

D8

watering can

colour

pattern

direction (H2)

D9

hexagon and octagon

colour background

colour object

shape object

D10

umbrella

colour background

colour object

state [+/- open]

D11

orchid

colour background

colour blossom

colour centre of blossom

D12

cube and cuboid

colour

size

shape

D13

circle and oval

colour background

colour

relation (inclusion)

D14

biros

colour background

colour biros [+/- same]

relation (V)

D15

shirt

colour background

colour stripe 1

colour stripe 2

D16

spoon and bowl

perspective bowl

orientation spoon

relation (H2)

Resources Experiment 1 | 461

Instructions: German participants171 In diesem Experiment geht es um das Beschreiben von Objekten und um das Verstehen solcher Beschreibungen durch andere. Daher arbeiten Sie als Partner zusammen. Auf dem Tisch neben dem PC, an dem Sie sitzen, finden Sie ein Schild mit einer Nummer. Ist dies die 1, ist Ihre Rolle die des/der Beschreibenden. Ist dies die 2, ist Ihre Rolle die des/der Verstehenden. Um Kommunikationsmittel wie Gestik oder Mimik auszuschließen, können Sie sich während des Experiments gegenseitig nicht sehen. Das Experiment besteht aus zwei verschiedenen Teilen, die wie folgt ablaufen werden: Der erste Teil ist eine einfache Benennungsaufgabe. Auf beiden Monitoren werden nacheinander einzelne Objekte eingeblendet. Aufgabe des/der Beschreibenden ist es, diese Objekte zu benennen. z. B. Eine gelbe Maus. Der/die Verstehende hört in diesem Teil hauptsächlich zu. Er/sie kann sich aber einschalten, wenn er/sie mit der Benennung durch den/die Beschreibende(n) nicht einverstanden ist. Der zweite Teil des Experiments wird wie folgt ablaufen. Auf dem Bildschirm vor Ihnen wird eine Serie von Bildern eingeblendet werden. Die einzelnen Bilder in dieser Serie sind ähnlich, unterscheiden sich aber im Hinblick auf bestimmte Aspekte. Auf dem Bildschirm des/der Beschreibenden wird eines der Bilder in der Serie durch einen roten Rahmen hervorgehoben. Dieses Bild wird von nun an als gesuchtes Bild bezeichnet. Ihre Aufgabe als Beschreibende(r) ist nun, das gesuchte Bild so zu beschreiben, dass der/die Verstehende es möglichst schnell und eindeutig aus der Menge aller gezeigten Bilder heraus identifizieren kann. z. B. Die kleine blaue Maus und die große gelbe Maus sind einander zugewandt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass es darum geht, das Bild selbst bzw. die Objekte darauf zu beschreiben, nicht die Position des Bildes auf dem Bildschirm. Eine Be-

|| 171 While listening to the instructions, participants were shown a presentation on the screen. Gender references were used according to participant groups.

462 | Appendix

schreibung der Art Es ist das rechte/erste Bild in der mittleren Reihe wäre also nicht im Sinne dieses Experiments. Ihre Aufgabe als Verstehende(r) ist es, das gesuchte Bild anhand der Beschreibung Ihres Versuchspartners zu identifizieren. Sobald Sie glauben, zu wissen, welches Bild das gesuchte Bild ist, klicken sie mit dem Mauszeiger darauf. Wenn die Beschreibung Ihres Versuchspartners Ihnen nicht ermöglicht, das gesuchte Bild eindeutig zu identifizieren, dürfen Sie Ihrem Versuchspartner Fragen stellen. Das Konzept des Versuchs erfordert es leider, dass Sie während des Versuchsablaufs nicht erfahren, ob das Bild, auf das Sie geklickt haben, tatsächlich das gesuchte Bild war. Sobald Sie als Verstehende(r) auf ein Bild geklickt haben, wird auf beiden Bildschirmen eine neue Bilderserie eingeblendet, mit der genauso zu verfahren ist. Wenn Sie noch Fragen zum Versuchsablauf haben, können Sie diese nun stellen. Teil 1 des Experiments beginnt jetzt. [PART I] Teil 2 des Experiments beginnt jetzt. Zur Erinnerung: Ihre Aufgabe als Beschreibende(r) ist nun, das gesuchte Bild so zu beschreiben, dass der/die Verstehende es möglichst schnell und eindeutig aus der Menge aller gezeigten Bilder heraus identifizieren kann. Ihre Aufgabe als Verstehende(r) ist es, das gesuchte Bild anhand der Beschreibung Ihres Versuchspartners zu identifizieren. Sobald Sie glauben, zu wissen, welches Bild das gesuchte Bild ist, klicken sie mit dem Mauszeiger darauf. Wenn die Beschreibung ihres Versuchspartners Ihnen nicht ermöglicht, das gesuchte Bild eindeutig zu identifizieren, dürfen Sie Ihrem Versuchspartner Fragen stellen. Die erste Bilderserie wird jetzt eingeblendet. [PART II]

Resources Experiment 1 | 463

Instructions: English participants This experiment is about describing objects as well as about understanding such descriptions. Therefore, you will be working in pairs. On the table next to your computer is a card with a number. If this is the number 1, you will be the director, that is, the person doing the description part. If this is the number 2, you will be the matcher, that is the person doing the understanding part. You will not be able to see each other during the experiment so as to avoid your communicating nonverbally. The experiment consists of two different parts. The first part is a simple naming task. Pictures of single objects will be displayed on the screens in front of you. The director’s task is to name these objects. e.g. A yellow mouse. In this part of the experiment, the matcher’s task is mainly to listen. If you as the matcher do not agree with what the director says, you can interfere. In the second part of the experiment, both of you will be shown a set of pictures on the screens in front of you. The pictures in these sets are similar, but differ with regard to certain features. On the director’s screen, one of the pictures will be marked by a red frame. As the director, your task is to describe this picture in a way that allows the matcher to identify it as quickly as possible among all the pictures in the set. e.g. The small blue mouse and the big yellow mouse are facing each other. Please make sure that you describe the picture itself, i.e. the objects in the picture, not the position of the picture on the screen. So, please do not use descriptions of the type It is the first picture in the middle row. As the matcher, your task is to identify the picture described by the director from the entire set. As soon as you think you know which picture is the right one, click on it. If the information you get from the director is not sufficient for you to unambiguously identify the picture, you can ask him/her questions. Due to the target of this experiment, you cannot be told whether you clicked on the right picture or not in the course of the experiment. As soon as you have clicked on a picture, a new set of pictures will appear on the screen and the description and understanding procedure will start anew. If there are still open questions concerning the experiment, please ask now.

464 | Appendix

Part one of the experiment starts now. [PART I] This is the end of part one. Part two begins now. To remind you: if you are the director, your task is to describe this picture in a way that allows the matcher to identify it as quickly as possible among all the pictures in the set. If you are the matcher, your task is to identify the picture described by the director from the entire set. As soon as you think you know which picture is the right one, click on it. If the information you get from the director is not sufficient for you to unambiguously identify the picture, you can ask him/her questions. Here is the first set of pictures: [PART II]

Resources Experiment 2 | 465

Resources Experiment 2 Instructions I: Pre-test [and English translation] Augenbewegungsstudie – Vortest: Bildbeschreibung Vielen Dank, dass Sie sich die Zeit nehmen, an diesem Online-Vortest teilzunehmen! Die Aufgabe auf den folgenden Seiten dient dazu, Ihre Eignung für die Teilnahme an einer Augenbewegungsstudie zu ermitteln bzw. die für Sie am besten geeignete Testbedingung im Rahmen dieser Studie festzulegen. Alle Daten, die Sie auf dieser Seite eingeben, werden ausschließlich zu diesem wissenschaftlichen Zweck verwendet. Ihre Mailadresse wird nur zur Kontaktaufnahme zwecks Terminvereinbarung genutzt. Zur Aufgabe: Bei der zu lösenden Aufgabe handelt es sich um eine Bildbeschreibungsaufgabe. Auf den folgenden Seiten werden Sie jeweils Serien von 4 ähnlichen Bildern sehen (siehe Beispielbild oben). Eines der Bilder ist durch einen roten Rahmen markiert. Ihre Aufgabe ist es, das rot umrahmte Bild so zu beschreiben, dass eine andere Person, die alle 4 Bilder sieht, genau dieses umrahmte Bild eindeutig und möglichst schnell identifizieren könnte. Bitte geben Sie Ihre Beschreibung jeweils in das Eingabefeld unter der Bilderserie ein. Da es auch um Schnelligkeit geht (die andere Person soll das Bild ja schließlich so schnell wie möglich identifizieren können): beschreiben Sie möglichst gezielt und spontan; d.h. geben Sie die nötigen Informationen, aber denken Sie nicht zu lange über die genaue Formulierung nach. Solange die Wörter identifizierbar sind, sind auch Tippfehler, Ungenauigkeiten bei der Groß- und Kleinschreibung etc. kein Problem; d.h. Sie brauchen Ihre Beschreibung auch nicht noch einmal durchzulesen oder nachzukorrigieren. [Eye-tracking Study – Pre-test: Picture description Thank you for taking the time to participate in this web-based pre-test! The function of the task you will be asked to solve in the following is to find out whether you are eligible for taking part in an eye-tracking experiment and, in case you are, to find the best test condition for you. All data that you will enter will be used exclusively for this research purpose. Your e-mail address will only be used for making an appointment for the eye-tracking study. Regarding the task: the task you will be asked to solve is a picture description task. On the following pages you will see sets of 4 similar pictures (see example picture set above). One of the pictures in each set is marked by a red frame. Your task is to describe the picture in the frame in a way that would

466 | Appendix

allow another person (who sees all four pictures at a time) to identify exactly this very (framed) picture unambiguously and as quickly as possible. Please enter your descriptions in the space below the picture set. Since the other person should be able to identify the picture as quickly as possible: please describe the picture in an efficient and spontaneous manner; i.e. provide the necessary information, but do not think too much about the wording. As long as the words can be identified, typos, irregular use of capitalization etc. are no problem; i.e. you do not need to re-read or correct your descriptions.] Tab. 47: Experiment 2 – stimuli used in the web-based pre-test.

picture

differences

order

position LO: front right, front left, back right, back left

3

targets box (LO) on carpet (RO) lemon (LO) in (quadrangular) bowl (RO) book (LO) on shelf (RO)

5

9

distractors toy mice

colours mice: blue, green background: white, green

1

toy elephants

number elephants: two, three arrangement rows: vertical, horizontal

2

highlighters

colour highlighters: green, yellow state: cap, no cap

4

watering cans

colour watering cans: green, yellow orientation watering cans: facing, aligned

6

cups

colour handle: blue, brown body: blue, green

7

shirts

colour shirts: purple, green shape: short sleeves, long sleeves

8

Resources Experiment 2 | 467

Instructions II: Main part [and English translation] Bildbetrachtung (VIEW task) Vielen Dank für Ihre Teilnahme an diesem Experiment. Sie sehen im Folgenden nacheinander mehrere Bilder, von denen jedes Bild 15 Sekunden lang auf dem Bildschirm gezeigt wird. Bitte sehen Sie sich jedes der Bilder in Ruhe an, in etwa so, wie Sie sich ein Bild in einer Ausstellung ansehen würden. Vor und mehrfach während der Bilder-Präsentation erscheint eine Aufforderung zur Kalibrierung des Eyetrackers. Hierbei wird Sie die Versuchsleitung anleiten. Drücken Sie eine beliebige Taste, um zu beginnen. [Picture viewing (VIEW task) Thank you for taking part in this experiment, In the following you will see several pictures in succession. Each picture will remain on the screen for 15 seconds. Please take your time to look at the pictures, and do so in a manner similar to how you would look at pictures at an exhibition. Before and several times during the presentation of the pictures a note asking for calibration of the eye-tracker will appear on the screen. The experimenter will assist you with that. Press any key to start.]

Interaktive Bildbeschreibung (DESCRIBE task) Sie sehen im Folgenden eine Reihe von Bildern. Bitte beschreiben Sie jedes Bild in Ihren eigenen Worten so, dass die Versuchsleitung das Bild auf Basis Ihrer Beschreibung aus eine Reihe von ähnlichen Bildern heraus identifizieren könnte. [TRAINING] Vor und mehrfach während der Bilder-Präsentation erscheint eine Aufforderung zur Kalibrierung des Eyetrackers. Hierbei wird Sie die Versuchsleitung anleiten. Drücken Sie eine beliebige Taste, um zu beginnen.

468 | Appendix

[Interactive picture description (DESCRIBE task) In the following, you will see a series of pictures. Please describe every picture in your own words, and in a way that would allow the experimenter to identify this very picture from a set of similar pictures. [TRAINING] Before and several times during the presentation of the pictures a note asking for calibration of the eye-tracker will appear on the screen. The experimenter will assist you with that. Press any key to start.]

Bildwiedererkennung (RECOGNIZE task) Sie sehen im Folgenden nacheinander mehrere Bilder. Einige der Bilder sind genau identisch mit den Bildern, die Sie gerade beschrieben haben. Andere unterscheiden sich mehr oder weniger stark von den Bildern, die Sie beschrieben haben. Bitte entscheiden Sie für jedes der folgenden Bilder, ob Sie genau dieses Bild im vorangegangenen Teil dieses Versuchs beschrieben haben. Für ja, drücken Sie die -Taste. Für nein, drücken Sie die -Taste. Ein neues Bild erscheint, wenn Sie eine der beiden Tasten gedrückt haben. Drücken Sie eine beliebige Taste, um zu beginnen. [Picture recognition (RECOGNIZE task) In the following, you will see several pictures in succession. Some of these pictures are exactly identical to the pictures which you have just described. Others differ more or less strongly from the pictures which you have described. Please decide for each of the following pictures whether you have described exactly this picture earlier in this experiment. For yes, press the key. For no, press the key. A new picture will appear as soon as you have pressed one of the two keys. Press any key to start.]

Resources Experiment 2 | 469

Tab. 48: Experiment 2 – stimuli used in the training session.

target-like items object pairs and relations

RO-shape

LO-location

alternatives (matcher’s screen)

(a)

small yellow block (LO) on large green block (RO)

cornered

front right

LO-location: back right, front left, back left

(B)

chocolate truffle (LO) on napkin (RO)

cornered

front right

LO-location: back right, front left, back left

objects

feature 1

feature 2

alternatives (matcher’s screen)

(a)

two cups

colour: blue cup or green cup

embroidery: green dotted/blue dotted coloured handle plus either green or blue or dots with coloured handle

(b)

dotted sock

colour: green cuff or blue cuff

colour: green dots or blue dots

blue cuff with green dots, green cuff with blue dots, all blue, all green

(c)

four triangles

colour: blue or green

shape: rectangular or equal-sided

1 green rectangular, 3 blue equal sided; green at 2nd or 3rd position 1 blue rectangular, 3 green equal sided; blue at 2nd or 3rd position

(d)

two swans

colour: white or brown

position:172 above or below

both white, both brown, white above brown, brown above white

distractor-like items

|| 172 Variation in locations along the vertical dimension as part of the distractor items was considered not to interfere with participants’ performance with the target items, since these tested for variation along the two horizontal axes only. Spatial information was even intentionally included in some of the distractor items as a means of avoiding that the target items would stand out too strongly from the entire set.

470 | Appendix

Tab. 49: Experiment 2 – target items used in the DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions.

cornered items173 object pairs and relations

LO-location

LO-location change174 (RECOGNIZE task)

C1

piece of cake (LO) on baking tray (RO)

front right

H2 (front left)

C2

green building block (LO) on blue building block (RO)

back right

D (front left)

C3

flower (LO) in vase (RO)

front left

H2 (front right)

C4

bow (LO) on wrapped gift (RO)

front left

D (back right)

C5

piece of cheese (LO) on chopping board (RO)

back left

H1 (front left)

C6

bottle of wine (LO) in box (RO)

front left

H1 (back left)

C7

computer mouse (LO) on mousepad (RO)

front right

H1 (back right)

C8

glass (LO) on placemat (RO)

back left

D (front right)

C9

key (LO) in box (RO)

front right

H1 (back right)

C10

cup (LO) on tray (RO)

back left

H2 (back right)

C11

pair of shoes (LO) on doormat (RO)

back right

H1 (front right)

|| 173 The deviation in numbers of cornered as opposed to uncornered items explains from the fact that one item which had initially been classified as uncornered – item C11 (pair of shoes on doormat; the doormat had slightly rounded corners) – had to be recategorized as cornered on the basis of the fact that it had been treated in a way identical to all other cornered objects by the great majority of participants. 174 D = diagonal change, H1 = sagittal change, H2 = lateral change.

Resources Experiment 2 | 471

uncornered items object pairs and relations

LO-location

LO-location change (RECOGNIZE task)

U1

octagonal box (LO) on round box (RO)

back right

D (front left)

U2

candy (LO) in dish (RO)

back left

H2 (back right)

U3

maple leaf (LO) in puddle (RO)

front left

D (back right)

U4

half tomato (LO) on lettuce leaf (RO)

back left

H1 (front left)

U5

pickled gherkin (LO) on half roll (RO)

back right

D (front left)

U6

tealight (LO) on plate (RO)

front right

H1 (back right)

U7

mug (LO) on table (RO)

back right

H2 (back left)

U8

whipped cream (LO) on cake (RO)

front right

H2 (front left)

U9

little bottle (LO) on plastic box (RO)

back left

H1 (front left)

Tab. 50: Experiment 2 – distractor items used in the DESCRIBE and VIEW task conditions.

colour/pattern item(s)

salient feature

change (RECOGNIZE)

D1

bag

green

purple

D2

bears

white and brown one

brown and white one

D3

book

red ribbon page marker

blue ribbon page maker

D4

box

blue pattern

pink pattern

D5

candy

blue and green one

blue and red one

D6

carpet

red stripes

green stripes

D7

cars

green and blue one

green and red one

D8

ducks

aligned

facing

D9

hairbrushes

blue and green one

only green ones

D10

mice

yellow and blue one

yellow and red one

D11

punches

red and blue one

red and green one

472 | Appendix

D12

screwdrivers

blue and green handle

blue handles only

D13

sock

dots

stripes

D14

teapot

yellow dots

blue dots

D15

toothbrushes

blue and green one

red and green one

D16

watering can

with flowers

no flowers

salient feature

change (RECOGNIZE)

shape/state item(s) D17

alarm clocks

round and square blue ones

green round one and blue square one

D18

biros

old and new one

only old ones

D19

glove

large with stripes

small

D20

highlighters

with and without cap

no caps only

D21

keys

new and old one

old and new one

D22

knifes

blunt and sharp one

sharp and blunt one

D23

lamps

bent and straight one

only straight ones

D24

pasta

penne and spirelli

penne only

D25

saucepans

lid and no lid

lids only

D26

screws

long and short one

long and different short one

D27

shirt

striped long sleeves

striped short sleeves

D28

umbrellas

open and closed one

open ones only

salient feature

change (RECOGNIZE)

number item(s) D29

boats

two

three

D30

busses

two

three

D31

elephants

three

two

D32

eye shadow

two

three

D33

giraffes

two

three

D34

helicopters

three

two

D35

liquorice wheels

four

three

D36

plants

three

four

D37

toasters

two

three

D38

turtles

three

four

D39

oranges

one

two

D40

apples

three

two

Author index Aarts, Bas 69 Adamson, Lauren B. 113ff. Agnoli, Franca 8, 160 Alexander, Henry G. 14 Allport, D. Alan 25, 84 Altmann, Gerry T. M. 3, 282 Ameka, Felix K. 48 Amorim, Michel-Ange 41 Andanova, Elena 49 Anderson, Anthony 145, 147 Andersson, Richard 7, 279, 281, 298f., 348 Andrews, Sally 1 Apel, Jens 101 Aronoff, Mark 128 Atchley, Paul 15, 301 Athanasopoulos, Panos 7ff. Atkinson, Jeanette 15 Au, Terry K. 7f. Auer, Peter 144, 147 Aurnague, Michel 41, 43, 54, 57, 80 Auwera, Johan van der 112, 124, 126 Avraamides, Marios N. 101 Awh, Edward 85 Aylett, Matthew P. 145 Backus, Ad 1 Baddeley, Alan D. 146, 280 Baldwin, Dare A. 114 Balin, Jennifer A. 145 Ball, Karlene K. 315 Ballweg, Joachim 69 Bard, Ellen G. 145 Barlow, Michael 1f., 11, 106, 109, 147, 164, 206, 278, 291, 407 Barr, Dale J. 145 Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2, 4, 86ff., 90ff., 110, 115, 117, 138, 146, 159, 389 Bateman, John 46 Baus, Jörg 166 Baylis, Gordon C. 24 Becker, Angelika 27, 34, 38f., 44, 50f., 56ff., 65ff., 69, 72, 78f., 81, 165 Behne, Tanya 114 Behrens, Heike 11, 113

Behrmann, Marlene 15f., 47f. Beißwenger, Michael 292 Berthele, Raphael 165 Bickel, Balthasar 7 Bierwisch, Manfred 69 Birdsong, David 1 Blanco, Manuel J. 14 Blomberg, Johan 59 Bloom, Alfred 7 Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice 1f., 16, 108f., 119ff., 123ff., 142, 152, 327, 402 Blythe, Richard A. 106f., 143, 146, 301 Bock, J. Kathryn 144f., 147f., 279, 281f., 328, 336f., 365, 374 Boduroğlu, Ayşecan 278 Bohnemeyer, Jürgen 2, 155, 278 Bolinger, Dwight 127 Borillo, Andreé 57 Boroditsky, Lera 2, 59, 118, 163, 283, 297 Bosse, Solveig 7 Boudewyn, Megan A. 108, 415 Bowerman, Melissa 39, 41 Boyd, Jeremy K. 128, 130 Braddick, Oliver 15 Brandt, Patrick 69 Branigan, Holly P. 4, 144ff., 167f. Bréal, Michel 127 Breindl, Eva 69, 165 Brennan, Susan E. 114, 129, 144ff., 167 Brewer, Bill 41, 98 Brown, Meredith 282 Brown, Paula M. 144 Brown, Vincent 20 Brown-Schmidt, Sarah 4, 167 Bruner, Jerome 114 Brunyé, Tad T. 42, 101 Bryant, David 101 Buhl, Heike M. 41, 78 Burenhuldt, Niclas 41 Burigo, Michele 49 Buscha, Joachim 65 Bußmann, Hadumod 52 Butterworth, George 114

474 | Author index

Bybee, Joan L. 11, 100, 106, 112f., 119ff., 125, 141ff., 189f., 402 Bylund, Emanuel 7ff. Campana, Ellen 4 Campbell, John 41, 114f. Campbell, Siobhan 39, 49 Cardini, Filippo-Enrico 2, 8 Carey, Suzan 41 Carlson, Laura A. 13, 39, 41, 46f., 49, 181, 327 Carlson-Radvansky, Laura A. 13, 41f., 46f., 49 Carpenter, Malinda 114 Carpenter, Patricia A. 280 Carroll, Mary 27, 31, 34, 38f., 41, 44f., 47, 50, 57, 59, 61, 64ff., 78f., 81, 104, 165, 279, 282ff., 287, 297, 304, 311, 332, 388 Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew 127 Casasanto, Daniel 2, 7, 102, 107, 163, 277, 408 Casenhiser, Devin M. 119 Chaffin, Roger 52 Chilton, Paul 41 Chipere, Ngoni 1 Christiaens, Dominiek 302 Christiansen, Morten H. 108, 327, 403 Chun, Marvin M. 18, 84f. Clark, Andy 85 Clark, Eve V. 128, 130 Clark, Herbert H. 144, 146f., 149, 167 Clarke, Samuel 14 Cleland, Alexandra A. 144 Connell, Louise 87f. Cooper, Roger M. 281f. Cordes, Anne-Kristin 120 Corrigan, Bryce 39 Coupland, Justine 144, 146, 149 Coupland, Nikolas 144, 146, 149 Coventry, Kenny R. 8, 13, 27, 39, 45, 49, 57, 101, 163, 277, 281 Covey, Eric S. 49 Cowell, Patricia E. 1 Craik, Fergus I. M. 84, 280 Crew, Christopher M. 278, 403 Croft, William 2, 6, 10f., 17, 19, 21, 24, 83, 99, 103, 106ff., 112, 115ff., 119ff., 125ff.,

132ff., 139ff., 143, 146, 149, 152f., 161, 191, 220, 278, 301, 311, 390, 394f., 414f. Cruse, D. Alan 10f., 17, 19, 21, 24, 83, 100, 103, 107, 119f., 133, 220, 311 Cuyckens, Hubert 119 D’Andrade, Roy G. 125 D’Ydewalle, Géry 302 Dąbrowska, Ewa 1, 108, 124f. Damasio, Antonio R. 92 Davidson, Brian J. 19 Davidson, Douglas J. 336f., 374 De Graef, Peter 302 De Smet, Hendrik 119 Dell, Gary S. 144 Denis, Michel 101 Deubel, Heiner 84, 280 Diessel, Holger 106, 113, 149 Dietrich, Rolf-Albert 69 Dijk, Teun van 101 Dirven, René 2, 39, 54, 59f., 78 Doherty, Gwyneth D. 147 Downing, Cathryn J. 20 Driver, Jon 14f., 24 Dürscheid, Christa 292 Eberhard, Kathleen M. 281 Eckert, Penelope 139 Egeth, Howard E. 14 Egly, Robert 14f. Ehrich, Veronika 30, 41f., 63, 78 Einstein, Albert 13 Eisenbeiss, Sonja 2, 155 Eisenberg, Peter 34, 65 Ellis, Nick C. 2, 106f., 113, 119, 121, 144 Elsner, Katrin 15 Enfield, Nick J. 7 Eriksen, Charles W. 20 Erman, Britt 240 Eschenbach, Carola 65, 79 Etherton, Joseph L. 84 Evans, Vyvyan 19, 24, 54, 86f., 89f., 100, 107f., 117, 119, 122, 162f. Everett, Caleb 2, 7, 106, 278, 408 Farah, Martha J. 15f., 48, 85 Farmer, Thomas A. 108, 327, 403

Author index | 475

Farrar, Michael J. 46, 114 Feist, Michele I. 8, 39, 280 Fernald, Anne 1 Ferreira, Fernanda 101, 174, 281, 299, 301, 315, 327, 348, 402f. Ferrier, Gilian 39, 49 Fillmore, Charles J. 27f., 44 Findlay, John M. 280 Fine, Alex B. 1, 144, 147 Firestone, Chaz 86 Fitneva, Stanka A. 402 Flecken, Monique 104, 279, 282ff., 287, 297, 304, 311, 318, 332, 388 Fodor, Jerry A. 86f. Found, Andrew 25 Francken, Jolien C. 86 Franklin, Nancy 101, 174 Freksa, Christian 165, 185 Friederici, Angela D. 13, 44 Friedman, Alinda 302 Friston, Karl 85 Fuhrmann, Orly 163 Gapp, Klaus-Peter 41, 49, 65, 165 Garrod, Simon C. 39, 45, 49, 101, 144ff., 163, 277 Gast, Volker 24, 131, 232 Geeraerts, Dirk 2, 96, 107, 139 Gennari, Silvia P. 8, 284, 297 Gentner, Dedre 2, 8, 280, 297 Gerrig, Richard J. 167, 402 Geyer, Thomas 85, 281, 283, 316 Gibbs, Raymond W. jr. 87, 90 Giles, Howard 144, 146, 149 Gilquin, Gaëtanelle 128 Gleitman, Lila 2, 7f., 146, 278f., 281, 327, 339, 365, 408, 414 Glenberg, Arthur M. 87f., 90, 100f., 106 Goede, Maartje de 295 Goldberg, Adele E. 9ff., 100, 107, 112f., 117, 119ff., 123ff., 128, 130f., 140, 142 Goldin-Meadow, Susan 2, 297 Goldsmith, Morris 14f., 49 Goldstone, Robert L. 87, 119 Golonka, Sabrina 89 Goodale, Melvyn A. 15 Gorniak, Peter 29

Grabowski, Joachim 33, 45f., 68, 175 Graesser, Arthur C. 87f., 90, 101 Granovetter, Mark 143 Green, Melanie 19, 24, 54, 86f., 90, 100, 108 Grice, Herbert P. 130 Griffin, Zenzi M. 144, 278ff., 315, 318, 327, 332, 336, 348, 365, 402f. Groner, Marina T. 280 Groner, Rudolf 280 Guijarro-Fuentes, Pedro 8, 13, 39, 49, 163 Gumperz, John J. 2, 7ff., 138 Günther, Franziska 85, 162, 281, 283 Guo, Jiansheng 7 Habel, Christopher 65 Haiman, John 24, 153 Hanna, Joy E. 114, 145, 167 Hansen, Mikkel B. 128 Harder, Peter 2, 10, 107, 109 Harré, Rom 132 Harris, Roy 1 Hartsuiker, Robert J. 3, 83f., 147, 282 Haspelmath, Martin 106, 119 Hays, Paul R. 7 Hayward, William G. 13, 89, 166 He, Xun 15 Heijden, Arnoldus H. C. van der 84 Heine, Bernd 79 Helbig, Gerhard 65 Heller, Dieter 25 Henderson, John M. 101, 174, 281, 299, 301, 315, 348, 402 Henkel, Linda A. 174, 181 Herrmann, Douglas 52 Herrmann, Theo 29, 33, 42f., 45f. Herskovits, Anette 34, 40, 44, 50, 53f., 56ff. Herweg, Michael 65 Hickmann, Maya 57, 284ff. Hill, Clifford 46 Hill, Jane H. 408 Hinskens, Frans 144, 147 Hockey, Robert J. 280 Hoffman, James E. 78, 280 Hoffmann, Ludger 292 Hoffmann, Sebastian 142f., 190 Hollingworth, Andrew 402 Holmes, Kevin J. 2, 6, 8f.

476 | Author index

Holmqvist, Kenneth 7, 88, 278ff., 297ff., 302, 315, 348, 402 Holsanova, Jana 88, 339, 402 Hopper, Paul 11, 106 Horton, William S. 145 House, Juliane 186 Hruschka, Daniel J. 2, 109 Hudson, Richard A. 152 Huettig, Falk 3, 7, 83f., 279, 281ff., 402, 409 Hulbert, Justin 3, 5, 7, 9, 279, 281f., 284ff., 289, 298, 314, 330, 332, 338, 348, 365, 393 Humphreys, Glynn W. 15 Hunt, Earl 8, 160

Klabunde, Ralf 66f. Klein, Wolfgang 282 Koffka, Kurt 24, 176 König, Ekkehard 24, 131, 232 Kosslyn, Stephen 88 Kövecses, Zoltán 11 Kramer, Arthur F. 15, 20, 85, 301, 315 Krausz, Michael 132 Kravitz, Dwight J. 15 Kristiansen, Gitte 2, 107 Kronefeld, David B. 140, 160 Kruley, Peter 101 Krummenacher, Joseph 18, 84 Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 41

Iani, Christina 16, 48, 85 Irwin, David E. 13, 41f., 46f., 85, 280, 315, 328, 336f., 340, 374

LaBerge, David 18, 20 Laeng, Bruno 88 Lakoff, George 87, 90, 219f. Lakusta, Laura 13 Lamb, Sydney M. 104, 113 Lamy, Dominique 14f. Landau, Barbara 13, 27, 41, 45, 49, 78 Langacker, Ronald W. 9ff., 17, 19ff., 24f., 27, 54, 57, 59, 83, 88, 90, 95f., 98f., 104, 106ff., 110ff., 117ff., 128ff., 134, 139f., 142, 159, 161, 219, 230, 312, 391 Langston, William E. 101 Larsen-Freeman, Diane 144 Lattanzi, Kathleen M. 49 Lavie, Nili 15 Lee, Penny 6f. Leßmöllmann, Annette 65 Levelt, Willem J. M. 13, 40ff., 44ff., 78, 175, 185f., 189, 279, 281 Levine, Suzan 41 Levinson, Stephen C. 2, 4, 7ff., 13, 33, 40ff., 54, 57, 65, 78f., 109, 138, 162, 167f., 186, 220 Li, Peggy 8, 408 Liebal, Kristin 114 Liebelt, Linda S. 302 Lieven, Elena 11, 106, 108, 113, 120f., 143 Lindsay, D. Stephen 306 Liszkowski, Ulf 114 Lo, Steson 1 Lockhart, Robert S. 84 Lockman, Jeffrey J. 41

Jackendoff, Ray 41, 49, 79 Jacobson, Andrew 20 Jaconiva, Matthew E. 167, 402 Johansson, Roger 88, 402 Johnson, Addie 18, 84 Johnson, Mark 87, 90, 220 Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 27f., 41ff., 45, 54, 101, 186 Johnstone, Barbara 1 Jonides, John 85 Jucker, Andreas H. 146 Just, Marcel A. 280 Kamide, Yuki 3, 282 Kantner, Justin 306 Kanwisher, Nancy 14 Kapatsinski, Vsevolod 120f. Kaplan, Stephen 92, 98 Kaschak, Michael P. 106 Kay, Paul 2 Kecskes, Istvan 119, 146 Keller, Rudi 107, 144 Kemmer, Suzanne 2, 11, 106, 109 Kerremans, Daphné 140, 144, 149 Keysar, Boaz 145 Kilgarriff, Adam 234 Kintsch, Walter 101 Kiparsky, Paul 128

Author index | 477

Loebell, Helga 147 Loftus, Geoffrey 302 Logan, Gordon D. 15, 41f., 46f., 84, 86, 281, 289 Long, Debra L. 108, 415 Los, Bettelou 165 Lucy, John A. 2, 7, 9 Lupyan, Gary 2, 6ff. Lutzeier, Peter Rolf 28 Lynott, Dermot 87f.

Müller, Hermann J. 18, 25, 84f., 281, 283 Müller-Plath, Gisela 15 Munnich, Edward 45, 78

MacDonald, Maryellen C. 389, 403 Mackie, Diane M. 110, 119, 146 Mackworth, Norman H. 302, 315 MacWhinney, Brian 87 Maienborn, Claudia 69 Mainwaring, Scott 42 Majid, Asifa 42, 45 Mannheim, Bruce 408 Mantlik, Annette 2 Marchman, Virginia A. 1 Markman, Ellen M. 128 Marshall, Catherine R. 146 Martin, Alex 88 Massey, Christina 7f., 414 Mather, Gayner 49 Matlock, Teenie 59 Matsunaka, Yoshihiro 78 McArthur, Duncan 113ff. McCarty, Rosaleen 15 McLean, Janet F. 4, 144f., 167f. Meltzoff, Andrew 114ff. Meteyard, Lotte 86, 88ff. Metzing, Charles 129, 144f., 147 Meyer, Antje S. 84, 279, 281f., 402, 409 Miller, George A. 27f., 41ff., 45, 54, 186 Miller, John A. 33, 45f. Milner, A. David 15 Milroy, James 144, 149, 415 Milroy, Lesley 144 Mishkin, Mortimer 14f. Misyak, Jennifer B. 108, 327, 403 Moll, Henrike 114ff. Montag, Jessica L. 389 Moore, Richard 114 Moses, Louis J. 114 Mozer, Michael C. 14, 16, 41, 48, 85

Oakley, Todd 88 O'Hearn, Kirsten 78 Olivers, Christian N. L. 3, 83f., 282 Olson, David R. 49 Oppenheimer, Daniel M. 279, 336

Narasimhan, Bhuvana 2, 155 Neumann, Odmar 84 Newton, Isaac 14 Niemeier, Susanne 2 Nisbett, Richard 278 Nuese, Ralf 282

Palmer, Bill 41 Papafragou, Anna 2f., 5, 7ff., 13, 104, 146, 278f., 281f., 284ff., 289, 298, 304, 314, 318, 325, 327, 330ff., 338f., 348, 365, 391, 393, 408, 414 Paul, Hermann 127 Pears, Julian 41 Pecher, Diane 2, 87, 146, 389 Pederson, Eric 2, 7ff., 11, 41f., 155, 167, 297 Peirsman, Yves 2, 107 Philips, Webb 283, 297 Pick, Herbert L. jr. 41 Pickering, Martin J. 4, 144ff., 167f. Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 143 Pinker, Stephen 20 Pittner, Karin 69 Pollio, Howard R. 8, 408 Posner, Michael I. 18 Postma, Albert 295 Pourcel, Stéphanie 2, 8f., 155, 279, 394 Prat-Sala, Merce 39, 49 Pribbenow, Simone 24 Pringle, Heather L. 315 Prinz, Jesse 8 Proctor, Robert W. 18, 84 Pulvermüller, Friedemann 84, 88, 92, 97f., 101, 114f. Pütz, Martin 2 Pylyshyn, Zenon W. 86

478 | Author index

Radden, Günther 54 Radicke, Joshua 120f. Radvansky, Gabriel A. 42, 49, 101 Rafal, Robert 14f., 24 Ramscar, Michael 59 Rapp, David N. 42, 101 Rayner, Keith 280f. Regier, Terry 39 Reines, Maria Francisca 8 Reips, Ulf-Dietrich 291 Retz-Schmidt, Gundula 41, 78 Reuter-Lorenz, Patricia A. 85 Richardson, Daniel C. 402 Rickheit, Gert 2, 28, 34, 45, 65, 164, 166, 185f. Riddoch, M. Jane 15 Rinck, Mike 186 Robinette, Laurie E. 42 Rogers, Everett M. 144 Rohrer, Tim 88ff. Rommers, Joost 84, 279, 281f., 402, 409 Roy, Deb 29 Salverda, Anne Pier 282 Saussure, Ferdinand de 130ff., 416 Schlesinger, Izhak M. 132 Schmid, Hans-Jörg 2, 20, 24, 54, 57, 85, 90, 97, 106ff., 115f., 119f., 124, 128f., 139ff., 146, 176, 186, 190, 220, 416 Schmidt, Lauren A. 283, 297 Schneider, Werner X. 84, 280 Schober, Michael F. 41f., 45f., 107, 149, 175 Scholl, Brian J. 86 Schön, Georg 69 Schwartz, David A. 92, 98 Seemann, Axel 114, 116 Selimis, Stathis 104 Senft, Gunter 167 Shah, Priti 278 Shapiro, Lawrence 87 Shepert, Martin 280 Shinohara, Kazuko 78 Shoemaker, Floyd F. 144 Sleiderik, Astrid 279, 281 Slobin, Dan I. 160, 283f. Smith, Diane M. 119, 146 Smith, Eliot R. 110

Smith, Sara W. 146 Snyder, Charles R. R. 18 Soroli, Efstathia 284ff. Soto, David 14 Speiser, Harry 166 Spivey, Michael J. 402 St. James, James D. 20 Staden, Miriam van 234f. Steels, Luc 106 Sternefeld, Wolfgang 69 Stöckle-Schobel, Richard 87 Storrer, Angelika 292 Street, James A. 1, 108, 124f. Strömqvist, Sven 7, 279, 281, 298f., 348 Stucchi, Natale 41 Stutterheim, Christiane von 38, 47, 61, 64ff., 70f., 73f., 104, 165, 279, 282ff., 286f., 297, 304, 311, 332, 388 Subramaniam, Baskaran 280 Suttle, Laura 128, 130f. Svorou, Soteria 27, 41, 52 Swaab, Tamara Y. 108, 415 Swets, Benjamin 167, 402f. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt 106, 146 Tacca, Michaela C. 86f. Talmy, Leonard 10f., 17ff., 23ff., 27, 31, 34, 39, 49, 52, 57, 59f., 83, 86, 107, 122, 153, 161, 284, 289, 343, 413 Tanenhaus, Michael K. 4, 167, 281f. Tang, Zhihua 49 Tarr, Michael J. 13, 89, 166 Taylor, Holly A. 42, 46f., 101 Taylor, John R. 108, 119, 121, 129, 142, 144, 146, 222 Tenbrink, Thora 24, 28f., 34, 41, 43f., 46, 49, 56, 59, 65, 75, 78f., 163ff., 291, 405f., 415 Teodorescu, Dinu-Stefan 88 The Five Graces Group 2, 106f., 120, 139 Theeuwes, Jan 85 Thompson-Schill, Sharon L. 88 Tipper, Steven P. 16, 47f. Tomasello, Michael 11, 106, 108, 113ff., 120f., 125, 130, 143 Tomlin, Russell S. 281 Torres Cacoullos, Rena 119, 121, 125

Author index | 479

Treisman, Anne 25 Treyens, James C. 98 Trudgill, Peter 144 Trueswell, John 3, 5, 7ff., 279, 281f., 284ff., 289, 298, 304, 314, 318, 325, 330ff., 338, 348, 365, 391, 393 Tsal, Yehoshua 14f. Turk-Browne, Nicholas B. 84f. Tversky, Barbara 42, 101 Ungerer, Friedrich 24, 90, 176, 220 Ungerleider, Leslie 14f. Valdés, Berenice 8, 13 Valente, Thomas W. 144 Vandeloise, Claude 39, 49, 53, 57 Varley, Rosemary A. 1 Vecera, Shaun P. 14ff., 48f., 85 Vega, Manuel de 87f., 90, 101 Veltkamp, Eline 147 Verhagen, Arie 10, 17f., 116, 123 Verhagen, Véronique 1 Verspoor, Marjolijn 2 Vieu, Laure 57 Vorwerg, Constanze 2, 28, 34, 42, 45, 65, 69, 78, 146, 164, 166f., 173, 185f., 301f., 405f., 415 Wasow, Judith L. 128 Watson, Matthew 144ff. Weaver, Mark 92, 98 Weeks, Phillip A. 402

Weidner, Ralph 25 Weiß, Petra 45f., 175 Wells, Justine B. 403 Wertheimer, Max 24, 176 White, Tiffani R. 119 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 6f. Wick, Neil 128 Wickens, Christopher D. 85 Wilder, Matthew H. 85 Wilkins, David P. 4, 13, 33, 40, 44, 79, 167f. Willems, Roel M. 86 Wilson, Andrew D. 89 Wilson, Margareth 87, 89 Winston, Morton 52 Wolfe, Jeremy M. 18, 84 Wolff, Phillip 2, 6, 8f. Wunderlich, Dieter 65, 69, 186 Yantis, Steven 14 Yeari, Menahem 15 Yeh, Yei-yu 20 Zangas, Thomas 174 Zee, Emile van der 39, 49 Zeelenberg, René 87, 146, 389 Zhang, Fenghui 146 Ziegler, Johannes 25 Zifonun, Helga 34, 38, 65, 69f. Zimmer, Hubert D. 166 Zimmerer, Vitor C. 1 Zlatev, Jordan 11, 59 Zwaan, Rolf A. 2, 87, 98, 100f., 114, 159

Topic index abstraction 90, 92, 94, 110, 117, 121ff., 125, 127, 191, 244f., 259, 275, 366 abstractness 95, 244, 265, 283f. accessibility, cognitive 20, 92, 98, 101, 103, 113, 120f., 123, 129, 133f., 154, 156, 160, 163, 227, 270, 327f., 349, 390f., 405ff. accommodation see adaptation action 84, 87, 101 activation 111, 117, 130, 135, 138, 150, 154, 258, 274, 349, 402f. – reactivation 142 adaptation 98, 107ff., 129, 140, 143ff., 147ff., 278 – Input-Output Coordination Principle 145 – Interactive Alignment Theory 145 – lexical entrainment 147 – Monitoring and Adjustment Model 145 – structural persistence 147 – structural/syntactic priming 144f., 147 addressee-orientedness see otherorientedness adjectives 54 – dimensional 54, 60, 77, 79, 194, 212f., 219, 228 adverbial combiner/Adverbialkombinator 69 adverbial complex/Adverbialkomplex 69 adverb-like structures 64, 74, 194, 236, 242 adverbs 64ff., 77, 194 – complex 65 – deictic 66, 69 – dimensional 64, 75, 158, 164f., 212, 229 – ‘genuine’/‘true’ 64, 67ff., 73, 158, 226, 231f., 234 – prepositional 65ff., 164f. – pronominal see adverbs, prepositional – simple 67, 76, 158, 164f. – simple, dimensional 65, 70, 72, 181, 226, 230ff., 245 – simple, topological 65, 70 alignment see adaptation alternatives 133, 155f., 166, 281, 395, 409 Area of Interest (AoI) 289, 315f., 330, 333 artefact, experimental 231, 233 aspectuality 282f.

associations 108, 110ff., 114ff., 121, 123f., 126f., 129f., 132ff., 138, 152f., 272, 276 – hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical 416 associations, paradigmatic 112, 118, 120f., 123, 130, 137, 140, 150, 388, 391, 414, 416 – hierarchical 135 – hierarchical/hyponymy 121, 123f., 135f. – non-hierarchical 124, 135 – non-hierarchical/contrast 135 – non-hierarchical/identity 121, 124 – non-hierarchical/polysemy 123 – non-hierarchical/synonymy 123 associations, pragmatic 112f., 116, 136, 139, 150, 377 associations, symbolic 112f., 130, 136, 150, 322, 390, 394 associations, syntagmatic 112, 120f., 123, 131, 184, 232, 241, 388, 413f. attention 4, 7, 9, 15, 17ff., 27, 47, 59, 83ff., 87f., 94f., 98, 103, 114ff., 122, 132, 136, 138, 144, 157, 160f., 171, 175, 185, 223, 226, 232, 247, 272, 277ff., 291, 295, 297, 301, 304, 311, 313, 322, 327, 329f., 335, 343f., 347, 352f., 359, 362, 366, 385f., 408, 411f. – attention allocation 84f., 91, 94ff., 103f., 114ff., 133, 280, 283, 285f., 289, 311, 330, 333ff., 341, 344, 349, 357, 360, 386, 413 – dimension-/feature-based 25, 95, 115, 334, 339f., 344, 347 – focus of 95f., 114f., 348, 400 – gradient model 20 – perceptual 84, 280, 282 – space-based vs. object-based 14ff., 279, 360 – spotlight model 18, 20 – zoom lens model 20 attentional patterns 95, 97f., 103ff., 111, 116f., 122, 133, 135, 138, 149, 152, 159ff., 276f., 282f., 285, 289f., 314, 316, 318, 322, 326, 329ff., 333, 336, 339, 344ff., 352, 360f., 369, 371, 374ff., 379f.,

482 | Topic index

386ff., 394ff., 404f., 408, see also construal, space-focused vs. objectfocused – construction-associated vs. general 396, 399 – levelled vs. phase-like 397, 400ff. automaticity 402 automatization 119, 150, 390, 402 behaviour 123, 132, 137, 278 – linguistic 126, 143, 147, 155, 157, 161, 173, 182, 193, 231, 253, 264, 270, 275, 277, 281, 284f., 287, 290, 295, 302, 307, 311, 314, 316, 320f., 324, 349, 405 – non-linguistic 17, 102, 111, 130, 152, 155ff., 160f., 275, 277, 283ff., 289, 297, 307, 311, 321f., 324, 327, 329, 339, 342, 345, 348ff., 360ff., 364, 375, 380, 385, 392ff., 397, 406f., 409, 411, 413 – oculomotor see eye movements between-objects relations 13, 16 blending theory 220 blocking 128 boundedness 39, 48ff., 55f., 58ff., 64f., 71f., 75f., 176f., 201ff., 210, 216, 229f., 232, 247, 254, 261ff., 267, 269, 315 categorization 7, 93, 95, 110, 119, 143, 170, 270, 284f., 402f. categorizing relationships 121 causality 334, 408 ‘ception’ 83, 86, 88f., 334 change condition 304ff., 319, 341f., 344, 380f., 383ff., 470f. chunking 120f., 125, 142, 188f., 201, 227, 233, 240, 402 classification 119, 131, 295 – subclassification 132 clearness of the RO-boundary 176, 178, 188f. co-adaptation see adaptation cognition 4, 9, 27, 83, 85f., 89f., 97, 106, 113, 123, 136, 138, 155, 159, 287, 297, 322, 391, 407f. cognition, theories of see also knowledge, formats of representation – connectionism 92 – embodiment 4, 87ff.

– grounded see cognition, theories of, embodiment – modular see cognition, theories of, semantic memory – network-based 92 – Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory (PSS) 90ff., 97ff., 105, 110, 115, 117, 119, 159 – representational 92f. – semantic memory 86ff. – situated see cognition, theories of, embodiment – statistical 92 cognitive abilities 7, 108, 143, 153, 394, 402, 411, 413, 415 Cognitive Grammar 54, 100, 121, 230 cognitive linguistics 1, 3f., 6f., 9, 12, 17, 57, 69, 83, 88ff., 99f., 103f., 106, 108, 110, 116ff., 121ff., 129, 135, 139, 153, 157, 159, 190, 245, 311, 391, 394, 407, 409f., 415ff., see also usage-based models of language – view of language-perception/cognition (inter)relations 17 cognitive load see resources, cognitive cohesion/coherence 66f., 101, 165 – anaphora 66, 73 combination 142, 232f. – recombination 91, 93f., 96 common ground 144ff. comparability 124, 153, 156, 173, 178, 191, 194, 242, 301, 393, 409f. comparison 93, 95, 110, 118ff., 123, 129, 135, 226 competition 32, 119, 124, 127, 132f., 136f., 151, 153, 160, 268ff., 277, 281, 391, 393, 403f., 406 complementation 35, 74, 77 – of dimensional terms 71 complexity 125, 142, 156, 193 composition 110, 228 compositional path 126 concept 93, 96, 132 conceptual pacts see adaptation conceptual space 395 conceptualization 10, 83, 91, 94, 96ff., 115, 132ff., 157, 282f., 286, 290, 391, 395, 410, 416

Topic index | 483

conflict 185, 406f., 410, 414 consistency 171, 206, 208f., 266, 268f., 354, 405 Consistent Speakers 271, 275, 278, 288f., 295, 297, 311, 314, 321, 351, 353ff., 360ff., 395ff., 411, 414 – Consistent OBJF-speakers 206, 269f., 274f., 287, 289, 291, 295, 307, 309, 352ff., 356ff., 366ff., 371ff., 379, 384ff., 396, 402, 406, 410 – Consistent SPF-speakers 206, 269f., 274f., 287, 289f., 295, 307, 309, 352ff., 356ff., 371ff., 379f., 384f., 387f., 396, 401f., 410, 414 constituency 68f. construal 3ff., 10f., 16ff., 29, 39, 83, 116, 120, 122, 132, 134, 139, 146, 150, 153, 155, 157ff., 178, 190, 192, 199, 209, 230, 241, 244, 246f., 249, 259, 288, 311, 320, 393, 403, 409ff., 413f. – construal meanings 10f., 17, 19, 29, 58, 64, 76, 84, 90f., 94, 100, 103ff., 109ff., 116ff., 121ff., 132ff., 144, 146ff., 159, 162, 164, 190ff., 195, 206, 213ff., 219, 224, 226f., 229, 231, 237f., 240ff., 249, 257, 270, 272f., 290,311, 320, 322ff., 326, 329, 338, 343, 345, 351f., 355, 357, 365, 380, 387f., 390, 392, 394, 405, 407, 409ff., 414 – construal theory 138, 277, 286, 322, 345, 392, 394, 409f., see also Differentiality Theory; Schematicity Theory – degrees of object-focusedness see degrees of object-focusedness construal (main entry) – space-focused vs. object-focused 4, 14ff., 25, 47, 54, 103, 115, 139, 154, 157f., 160f., 163, 165, 175, 182, 184, 189, 195, 201, 203ff., 207ff., 213ff., 218f., 223, 225f., 230f., 236f., 240f., 243, 245, 251, 254, 256, 258, 261ff., 267f., 270f., 273f., 278, 284, 288, 291, 295f., 303, 308f., 314f., 320, 322, 326f., 329, 335, 343f., 354, 357, 359f., 374, 386ff., 392, 394,395, 398, 400, 410 construal types 10, 17, 22, 25, 153, 159, 195, 311, 413

– (Degree of) Specificity 21 – Focus(ing) of Attention 23f. – Focusing/Profiling 16, 20, 32, 53f., 64, 312, 325, 355, 357, 367 – foregrounding vs. backgrounding 10, 14, 18, 21, 54f., 59ff., 182, 219, 311, 313, 326, 343, 351, 360, 393 – Item-Based Weighting 18, 24 – Level of Particularity 21 – Levels of Attention 23, 25, 52f. – Level-Weighting 18, 26 – subjective vs. objective 21, 219, 237 – Weighting of Attention 25 – Windowing of Attention 18, 22, 51f., 64, 247, 335 Construction Grammar 69, 100, 116, 121, 123, 128, 135, 190 construction types 103, 123, 133, 135, 137, 151, 157, 159, 164, 190, 192, 195, 200, 206, 208ff., 218, 225ff., 242f., 245, 249, 266, 270f., 274, 278, 282, 309f., 313, 326ff., 335ff., 343ff., 349, 351, 357, 362, 364f., 380, 383f., 386, 391f., 394, 398, 401f., 405f., 408, 410ff. – DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions see DIMDIM(TOP)constructions (main entry) – dimensional adjective-plus-noun constructions 54f., 58, 60, 62, 158, 165, 194, 203, 238f., 242, 256f., 262f., 265ff., 273f., 290, 334f., 351f., 354, 388, 393f., 406, 410 – fictive motion constructions 194, 226ff., 236f., 239, 242, 246 – hybrid constructions 238ff., 257 – integrated constructions 227f. – observer-focusing constructions 219 – preposition-plus-noun constructions 60 – repertoires, English vs. German 212, 223, 225 – RO-switching constructions 238 – simple dimensional adverb constructions 65ff., 72, 165, 195, 208, 210, 226f., 229ff., 236f., 239, 242, 245, 257, 262, 267ff., 274, 290, 334f., 351f., 354, 388, 393f., 406 – simple dimensional noun constructions 58

484 | Topic index

– split constructions 189, 201, 227f., 240, 310 constructional variants 172, 180, 183, 190, 194f., 212f., 216, 219, 236, 238, 247 constructional variants, metaphorical 185, 216, 219ff., 248 – clock-face 220, 222f. – compass (card) 220, 222f. constructional variants, partial 216f., 219, 221, 247f. – DIM 217f. – distance 218f., 224f., 237, 248 – LO 218, 223, 247 – TOP 217 constructions 4, 9, 11, 17f., 54, 76, 100f., 103ff., 110, 112, 114, 117, 120ff., 142, 150ff., 158, 190f., 193, 258, 277ff., 281, 283 content 116 context 15, 62, 98, 106, 123, 128, 139, 144, 147f., 155f., 160, 166, 168, 178, 190f., 211, 225, 248, 275, 280, 285, 289f., 302, 367, 409f., 413, 415f. – cognitive 3f., 19f., 67, 81, 85f., 88, 90f., 93, 96f., 102, 106ff., 111f., 118f., 125f., 133ff., 150ff., 154, 156f., 159, 162, 164, 166f., 184, 186, 188, 190, 199, 206, 209, 211, 241, 249f., 252f., 257, 264, 272f., 275, 277f., 287f., 296, 321, 327, 338, 353, 385, 388, 390ff., 395, 404, 408ff. – communicative 22, 29, 107, 167, 413ff. – external 4, 9, 85ff., 91, 96f., 106f., 111, 130, 136f., 155, 157, 159, 162f., 166, 184, 186, 188, 190, 198f., 201, 203ff., 210f., 249f., 252, 254, 261f., 264f., 272, 275, 278, 285f., 401ff., 408, 410, 416 – external, situational 8, 85, 91, 93, 95, 97f., 101, 106, 112f., 154, 156, 163, 184, 209, 233, 259, 275, 277, 279, 302, 391, 402f., 408, 410, 413, 415f. – external, social 29, 88, 106, 108, 112f., 149, 154, 156, 184, 408, 410, 415f. – external, socio-cultural 133 – linguistic 56f., 67, 73f., 77, 101, 130, 167, 217, 224, 311ff., 320, 325ff., 329, 331, 335, 337, 351, 355ff., 365ff., 374, 377f., 384f., 387f., 398f., 401, 408, 413f.

context adaptivity 91, 94, 96, 106, 109 context-dependence 107, 139, 198, 210, 249 context-independence 94, 151, 158, 198, 210, 272, 377, 385 context-neutrality 91, 94 context-specificity 91, 118, 268 contextualization, cognitive 93 contextualization, internal 118f., 130 contrast 118, 121, 128ff., 133ff., 137, 140, 160, 206, 277, 288, 321, 391, 404, 410, 412, 414, 416 – Principle of Contrast 128, 130, 152f., 416 contrast establishment 129f., 132, 134f., 137, 151 contrastive linguistics 4, 131, 162, 165, 191, 271 conventional universalist view 132, 161 conventionality 107 conventionalization 47, 81, 108f., 111, 117, 123, 128, 135, 139ff., 147f., 150, 152f., 156, 159, 161ff., 165f., 183f., 191f., 199ff., 203ff., 208ff., 221ff., 234f., 242f., 249, 253, 257f., 263f., 273, 353f., 406, 416 – macro-conventionalization 143f., 148f., 150 – micro-conventionalization 143ff., 148f., 171 – patterns 157, 167, 184, 206, 211, 226, 253, 257ff., 261f., 265, 267f., 273, 287, 410 conventions 78, 107, 111, 115, 129, 132ff., 139, 144, 153, 159, 162, 164, 182, 184, 190, 201, 204, 209, 211f., 220, 222, 225, 236, 249, 262f., 265, 268f., 273ff., 287, 392ff. – local vs. global 129, 146f., 150, 152, 156, 165 – partner-specific 147, 149 – stability 6, 11 – strength 253, 258, 273 – subconventions 205, 210, 262, 265, 268ff., 274, 410 co-occurrence 120 Cooperative Principle 130 cornered objects see corneredness corneredness 176ff., 184, 188f., 201ff., 210f., 220, 223, 251f., 254, 260ff., 265ff., 273ff., 288f., 292, 302f., 305f., 308f., 322, 339, 352, 354, 410, 470f., see also Reference Object (RO), shape

Topic index | 485

corpus linguistics 163f., 190f., 233 correction 301, 310, 323, 354 cortical pathways, dorsal vs. ventral 14f. cotext see context, linguistic creativity 90ff., 108, 111 debounding 60 decontextualization, external 91, 111, 118 definiteness, of RO-boundaries 176, 178, 188f. degrees of object-focusedness construal 4, 16, 35, 39, 48f., 51, 55, 58, 60, 63f., 67, 70f., 73, 76, 78, 81, 157, 162, 164, 190ff., 195, 199, 214f., 219, 223, 227, 229f., 237f., 240ff., 249, 252, 257, 259, 261f., 267, 272ff., 291,328, 343, 351, 409, see also construal, space-focused vs. objectfocused – and Frame of Reference selection 47, 78f., 81 Degrees of Object-focusedness Scale 14f., 17, 58, 63f., 76ff., 81, 157f., 162, 190, 193, 210, 216, 243f., 248f., 257f., 262f., 274, 277, 290, 322, 352, 392, 410 deindividualization 111, 140 deixis 22, 116 dependency syntax 69 desituationalization 111, 118, see also decontextualization, external Differentiality Theory 4, 100, 133ff., 137ff., 150ff., 159ff., 206, 271, 275ff., 288f., 321, 338, 345, 353, 365, 374, 377, 380, 385ff., 406f., 410f., 413 differentiality, differential nature of the linguistic sign 130f., 416 diffusion 143, 149 DIM(ensional)-schema 34, 52f., 73 DIMDIM(TOP) End Time (DET) 317f., 327f., 333, 358, 368, 396f. DIMDIM(TOP) Onset Time (DOT) 317f., 327f., 333, 358, 368, 396f. DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions 3ff., 14, 17, 27, 29, 39, 50, 64ff., 73, 81, 103, 109, 133, 156ff., 160ff., 166f., 171f., 180ff., 191f., 195, 199ff., 204, 207, 209, 211, 213, 216ff., 221f., 226f., 229, 237f., 241, 243ff., 247f., 258, 271, 273, 276ff., 280,

294f., 301, 310f., 313, 317, 320, 325ff., 334, 336, 339, 352, 357, 360f., 365f., 369, 374, 377, 380, 386ff., 391ff., 398, 402, 409, 411f. DIMDIM(TOP)-information 292, 310, 328, 330, 351, 358f., 367 DIMDIM(TOP)-scenes 13f., 17, 29f., 34, 49, 62, 64, 70, 73, 101, 103, 131, 133, 157ff., 171, 180, 191f., 205, 208f., 222f., 249, 253, 258, 263, 265f., 270, 272ff., 288f., 296f., 301f., 322, 345, 350, 352, 357, 377, 380, 391f., 394, 399ff., 409f. DIMDIM(TOP)-utterances 49, 101, 158f., 167f., 171, 173, 183, 190, 192f., 200ff., 204f., 228, 243ff., 253, 257, 267, 273, 300, 303, 308f., 316, 403, 405, 411, 414 dimensional axes 41, 59, 62, 75, 166, 174, 219, 227, 232, 237 dimensional orientedness 60 dimensionality 55, 57, 247 dimension-replacement 171, 185ff., 219, 272 director-matcher language game 4, 167ff., 171, 290ff., 299f., 461ff. discourse, descriptive 165 distance 181, 218f., 224, 236ff., 248 domains, conceptual 7, 100, 131, 165, 284 Dutch 235 dwell times 286, 289, 296, 299, 315f., 330, 333, 337, 343, 387 dynamicity 96, 106f., 109, 229 ellipsis 51, 68ff., 73f., 233 embedding constructions see context, linguistic embodiment see cognition, theories of, embodiment emergentism 88, 109 entrenchment 47, 81, 103, 108ff., 117ff., 123, 125, 130, 134ff., 140, 142f., 149, 152f., 155ff., 161f., 167, 188, 191, 204f., 208ff., 222, 228, 263, 265, 269, 275, 277, 281, 287, 296f., 302, 327, 393, 402, 404ff., 416 – patterns 211, 265ff. Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (EC-Model) 108f., 120, 143, 416

486 | Topic index

episodic memory see knowledge, formats of representation, analogous equivalence 217, 232, 238, 247f., 278, 281, 393, 410, see also comparability event frames 19 expectation 98, 129f., 137 experiences 90ff., 96, 101, 106ff., 110, 113, 117ff., 121, 130, 132, 134, 137f., 146, 148, 152, 160, 391, 394f. – displaced 101 – non-linguistic 103f. – perceptual 87, 93, 96, 98, 101f., 104 – receptive 93 explication 51, 60, 67, 71 Exploration Phase 318, 346, 349 expression 22 extension 76 eye movements 278ff., 284ff., 289f., 295f., 298ff., 304, 307, 310f., 314, 316f., 320, 323f., 327, 338ff., 365, 369, 372, 374, 389, 395, 402, 404, see also dwell times; fixation; gaze eye tracking 278ff., 282, 286, 290, 293, 297, 302, 316, 354, 366, 389, 403 eye-mind assumption 280 familiarity 128, 170f., 178, 222, 367, 374, 378, 380 feedback-loop mechanism 98ff., 102, 136, 138, 140ff., 148, 150, 391, 413 fictive motion 59ff., 227, 229f., 236 – additive path construal vs. sequential path construal 227 fictive motion constructions see constructions, fictive motion figurative language 219f. figure vs. ground 10, 289, 343, 413 figure-ground segregation 343, 413 fillers 240 Final Exploration Phase 318, 346ff. fixation 279f., 297, 301f., 315, 334, 344, 347, 374 – fixation duration 286, see also LO-RO Ratio Value – fixation frequency 286 flexibility 96, 107f.

form, linguistic 100, 104, 111f., 116f., 122f., 125ff., 132, 134, 138, 142, 147ff., 153, 190ff., 245, 258f., 268, 273, 278, 390, 392, 409f. Frame of Reference (FoR) 40, 175, 220 – ambiguity 45, 47 – diachronic perspective 79 – formal realization 78 – projection 40, 43f. – selection 78f., 81 – source 40f., 43, 47, 54, 80 – target 40f., 47, 80 Frame of Reference (FoR), types 41 – absolute 41, 44, 220 – deictic 186 – intrinsic 40f., 43, 47, 75, 78, 81, 175 – relative 41, 43, 45, 47, 75, 78, 80f., 175 – relative, egocentric 41, 241 frames, in Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory (PSS) 93ff., 114 frequency 7, 107f., 119f., 123, 125, 129f., 136f., 140ff., 145, 148, 151, 158, 164, 166, 182f., 186, 190ff., 198ff., 205f., 208ff., 218, 224ff., 228, 242ff., 254ff., 260ff., 264, 267, 271, 273ff., 278, 283, 295, 302, 308f., 313f., 325f., 340, 354, 356, 367f., 392f., 412, 415 function, pragmatic 116 functional/useful field of view 315 gaze 59, 95, 114, 186, 227, 230, 402 – gaze duration 280 gender, grammatical 283 gender, participants 168, 249ff., 295 generality 94, 117, 125, 284 generalization 90, 92ff., 109f., 118ff., 124, 126, 139, 142, 191, 208, 259, 323, 416 Generative Grammar 7, 69, 394 German-English contrasts see variation, cross-linguistic, English vs. German Germanic 234ff. Gestalt 25, 395 Gestalt psychology 176 givenness 171 grammar 83, 122, 126, 139, 282 – vs. lexicon 7, 9, 100, 122, 284 gravity 186

Topic index | 487

ground vs. figure see figure vs. ground habit-formation 145 habits 85, 138, 147, 149ff., 160f., 222, 258, 261, 275, 279, 285, 287, 297, 302, 351f., see also preferences homogeneity 392 horizontality 186 hyponymy 121f., 124 see also associations, paradigmatic iconicity 153 identity 108, 119ff., 123, 125f., 129, 142 see also associations, paradigmatic idiolect 278 imagery, conventional see construal imagination 86, 90 imitation 145, 147ff. individual speakers 107, 110f., 143 – vs. speech community 2f., 154, 156, 206, 222 inference 7, 64, 131 inheritance 136 inheritance relations 121 input 107, 118f., 129, 137, 140, 148f., 415, see also context, external intention 108, 116, 148 – intention-indication 116 – intention-reading 115, 130, 149 interaction 87, 91, 103, 106f., 116, 157, 272 – communicative 107ff., 111, 113, 128f., 144, 146ff., 167, 221 – linguistic 104, 345 – non-linguistic 104 – social 111 intransitivity 35, 48, 52, 64f., 70, 74, 77 – ‘genuine’/‘true’ 64, 68, 73, see also adverbs intrinsic orientedness 42f., 45ff., 54, 75, 80, 175 joint attention 114f., 149 knowledge 91, 118, 407, see also context, cognitive – activation 96f. – individual 109

– linguistic 106f., 112, 117, 127, 151, 155, 159, 275, 278, 394, 404, 416 knowledge, formats of representation 85, 102, 110, 407, 411, see also cognition, theories of – amodal 90, 93 – analogous 86f., 89f., 92 – episodic 86 – modal 90ff., 97, 138, see knowledge, formats of representation, analogous – neural 88 – symbolic 86f., 90ff. landmark see ground language 99f., 107, 109 – as a dynamic associative network 9, 100, 103, 110, 112, 117, 122ff., 126f., 136, 159, 388, 391 – as a form of action 84 language change 128, 143 language comprehension 39, 101, 125, 133, 136, 156, 281, 403, 414 language learning 106, 117f., 122, 394, 403, 416 – initial 110, 113, 115f., 123, 128, 138, 148 – life-long 106, 110 – situated 17, see also usage-based models of language language planning and production 18, 84, 103, 124f., 127, 133, 136f., 156, 166, 168, 171, 173, 189, 228, 241, 269f., 274, 278f., 282f., 307, 318, 324, 327f., 332ff., 343, 362, 365, 372, 384, 386f., 398, 401ff., 407, 413f. – holistic 5, 241 – incremental 5, 227f., 240f., 405 – spoken 354 – written 354 language proficiency 143 language system 107ff., 111ff., 117f., 122ff., 129ff., 134, 137, 139f., 143, 147ff., 152 language use 90, 102, 106, 115, 117, 167 – active 104, 113, 137, 140ff., 282, 414 – conditions of 50 – current 138 – implicit 297, 391 – interactive 414

488 | Topic index

– passive 104, 113, 137, 140ff., 282, 414 – patterns 162, 268ff., 274 – situated referential 18, 84, 101, 103f., 160, 163f., 166, 281, 374, 389, 412 – spoken 292 – usage conditions 164, 191 – usage experiences 101f., 126, 140, 149, 403 – usage restrictions 39, 63, 158 – written 292 language-and-thought research see linguistic relativity research language-perception/cognition (inter)relations 84, 91, 99, 106, 136, 138, 155, 277, 329, 389, 391, 407f., 415f. language-perception/cognition effects 5, 99, 104, 109, 134, 136, 138f., 151, 154ff., 159, 162, 271, 275, 278ff., 285ff., 307, 321, 332, 380, 391ff., 396, 407f., 411f., 414ff., see also linguistic relativity effects learning 84, 113, 115, see also language learning – from experiences 85, 87, 90ff., 113, 115, 119 – implicit 145, 147 – statistical 108 lexical entrainment see adaptation linguistic anthropology 7 linguistic relativity effects 84, 100, 104, 106, 124, 150ff., 153, 159f., 280f., 285f., 288, 304, 316, 348, 352ff., 389ff., 396, 406, 408, 410ff., 414, 416, see also languageperception/cognition effects – cross-linguistic 139, 144, 151ff., 161, 271, 275, 277, 392ff. – habit-induced 104, 285, 289, 297, 321f., 324, 344, 349, 351f., 374, 378ff., 386, 390f. – language-internal 275, 277 – language-use concurrent 279f., 283, 285, 288, 296, 318, 321ff., 327, 336, 338, 345, 347, 351f., 364ff., 369, 380, 385ff., 389ff., 413 – off-line 7, 9, 11, 151 – on-line 7, 9, 11, 151, 160f. – permanence/pervasiveness 7, 9, 11, 84 – recency effects 104, 108, 146, 151, 160f., 173, 279, 288, 290, 297, 299, 321f., 324,

334, 338f., 341, 343ff., 351f., 374f., 377f., 380, 385, 388ff., 414 – reverse-Whorfian effects 285f., 325, 336, 338, 348 linguistic relativity research 2f., 155, 279, 287, 297, 390, 392f., 407ff., 415, 417 – methods 3, 8f. linguistic relativity theory 6, 10f., 83, 103f., 132, 138, 155, 279, 286, 410 – strong version/determinism 7ff. – weak version 7 Located Object (LO) 27, 29, 43, 47, 49, 171, 175, 178, 188, 194, 196, 204, 215, 217f., 230, 236, 272, 288f., 291f., 301f., 305, 311ff., 320, 325ff., 330, 333ff., 343f., 348, 351f., 355ff., 361, 364, 367f., 374, 376f., 381ff., 386ff., 398, 400, 402, 413f. – boundaries 315 – location 27f., 32, 50, 56, 60, 65, 76, 166, 181f., 215, 218, 224, 232, 236, 289, 292, 302, 304f., 315, 319, 321, 337, 340ff., 352, 359, 381ff., 470f. – selection 178 – size 178, 303 – visibility 218 LO-RO Abs Value 400f. LO-RO Ratio Graph 329f., 332, 346, 350, 361ff., 369, 371f., 375, 378, 396f., 399f. LO-RO Ratio Value 289, 296, 314ff., 323f., 329ff., 333ff., 337ff., 344, 346ff., 350f., 362f., 365f., 370, 372f., 376f., 379, 396ff., 413 meaning 116, 122, 124, 126ff., 134, 148, 153, 193, 224, 278 – encyclopaedic 100 – linguistic 87, 90f., 96, 100f., 103ff., 112, 116 – referential 88, 90, 100, 132, 136 meaning negotiation 221 memory 7, 83f., 94f., 101f., 104, 117ff., 160, 271, 279f., 282f., 285f., 289f., 295, 302, 304f., 314, 316, 319, 339, 341, 343ff., 348f., 352f., 360, 383ff., 389, 392, 402, 414 – consolidation 160 – episodic 90

Topic index | 489

– recall 92 – recognition 9, 279, 296f., 307, 319ff., 324, 339f., 342ff., 352, 380, 384f., 414 – retrieval 118 – traces 91, 93, 104, 110, 120, 123, 152, 385 mental models 101 mental models, spatial 101 meta-linguistic skills 108 metaphors, conceptual 163, 219f., 223, 248 meta-statements 222 methodology 155f., 275, 281f., 286f., 327, 393, 409ff. methods – categorization 191f. – classification 195 – elicitation 163f., 166f., 171, 173, 180, 224 – web-based survey 164, 290ff., 322, 353, 466 mid-range/mixed constructions (G-B) 194, 198ff., 203ff., 211f., 219, 226, 228, 237f., 242, 271, 273f., 308f., 320, 323, 354 Minimal Constellation/Minimalkonstellation 29 Minimal Spatial Situation Model (MSSM) 29f. misunderstanding 45 monitoring 146 motion 59, 226f., 234, 283, 285 – motion events 282ff., 338 – motion verb typology 284ff., 289 motivation 148, 153f. nativism 87f., 122 natural parts 53, 213 naturalness 164, 167, 174, 176, 178, 302f. neural networks 92, 97f. neuro-anatomy 107 neuro-linguistics 88, 100 neuro-psychology 88 neuro-science 114 norms 107 nouns 54, 77, 194 – compounds 54, 62, 224 – dimensional 54f., 60, 62, 78f., 212f. – direction-denoting 229 – general 58 – part-denoting see part-nouns – RO-referring 52

– simple dimensional 57f., 62ff., 158, 194, 213, 216, 223ff., 229, 245 – topological 54 object features – boundaries 39, 42 – functional 39, 53, 76 – inherent 42 – parts, functional 53, 175 – parts, inherent 16, 31, 53f. – size 39 object labelling/naming 170 object-focused construal see construal, space-focused vs. object-focused object-focused constructions (G-A) 194, 198ff., 204f., 209ff., 215, 223, 226, 228f., 237, 239, 248, 258, 263, 271, 303, 308f., 313, 322ff., 333ff., 347, 349, 351ff., 356ff., 365, 371, 374f., 386,387, 389f., 392, 396, 398, 400, 403f. Object-focusedness Degree Values (ODVs) 190, 192, 202, 216, 226, 242, 244ff., 248ff., 254, 258ff., 272ff., 288, 295, 308f., 320, 323, 325f., 328, 331, 341, 353ff., 367f., 371f., 381f., 396ff., 401 – calculation 244ff. objectness 16, 48f. odd-shaped objects see corneredness of-phrase 58, 69, 216f., 228 Old English 234f. order conditions 384f. order effects 173f. Orientation Phase 318, 346 other-modelling 144ff., 148f. other-orientedness 149, 186, 219, 227, 230, 237f. parsing 93, 120, 125 partiteness 52f. part-nouns (PARTNS) 52ff., 213, 215f., 228ff., 245 – general 194, 213, 216, 230, 239, 266 – specific/natural 194f., 213, 229f., 245, 266 partonymy 32, 52f. part-whole relations 16, 53, 121 path 59, 61, 227, 284f.

490 | Topic index

perception 4, 7, 9, 15, 83ff., 94ff., 101ff., 107, 115f., 122, 138, 155, 271, 279, 283f., 287, 297, 322, 338, 391, 395, 402, 404, 407f., 413 – gist perception 402 Perception Space 30, 33, 56f., 60f., 74ff. Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory (PSS) see cognition, theories of, Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory (PSS) perceptual symbols 91ff., 102, 114, 117, 138 permanence 117, 135f., 146, 151, 277, 279, 284, 345, 352, 390, 393, 414 pervasiveness 123, 277, 279, 283, 285, 288, 321, 352, 390 picture-level references 185, 204, 262f. PLACE 312, 325, 355, 357, 367 plausibility – functional 178, 302 – psychological 129, 415 pointing 114 polysemy 123, 126f., see also associations, paradigmatic Post-Spatial Term Phase 317 Post-Speaking Phase 317f., 332, 369 precision 33, 172, 180f., 183f., 188, 204, 217f., 243, 248, 266f., 273, 295, 300f., 308f., 320, 323, 343, 354, 363 preemption 128, 130f. preferences 5, 103f., 137, 145, 151, 284, 415 – cognitive 108, 415 – formation 85, 151 – individual 81, 206, 210, 222, 287 – patterns 211 – usage preferences/construal preferences 125, 138, 155ff., 160, 162ff., 167, 175, 184, 192, 199f., 204ff., 243, 249, 251, 258, 264, 266f., 271, 275, 277f., 280f., 284, 289, 296, 302, 309, 353f., 357f., 360, 364, 373, 379,386, 389ff., 399, 402ff., 410f., 413ff. prepositional phrase, topological 230, 232, 245 prepositions 65, 70, 72f., 77 – dimensional 50, 65 – dynamic 58, 77, 246 – static 77 – topological 31, 38, 51f., 56f., 62, 213ff.

Pre-Spatial Term Phase 317, 331, 333, 335ff., 343, 347, 372f. primacy see priority priming 145ff., 405, 414 primordial sharing situation 113ff. priority 328, 336ff., 344, 352, 358f., 386 processing 91, 101, 106, 108f., 143, 228, 240f., 280, 283f., 318, 320, 337, 344, 347, 395, 397f., 400, 402f., 405, 407, 411ff. – bottom-up 15, 85, 93, 97ff., 110, 115, 123, 144, 348, 395, 399, 402, 407, 411 – cognitive 144 – discourse/text 101 – high-level 123 – incremental 227, 402f., 405 – off-line 84, 88, 104, 241, 285 – on-line 84, 88, 104, 285, 288 – perceptual 98 – sensorimotor 88, 92, 100 – socio-interactive 144 – top-down 15, 85, 93, 97ff., 103f., 136, 281, 324, 339, 345, 348f., 394, 407, 411 processing, measures – off-line 279, 284 – on-line 279f. processing, strategies 395, 402, 404, 407, 411 productivity 86, 90ff., 110f., 117f., 121, 125 prominence 29, 103, 137, 214, 219, 327, 334ff., 344, 359, 391 propagation see diffusion psycholinguistics 403 Radical Construction Grammar 135 reasoning 7, 90 redundancy 117, 123, 139 reference 101, 103, 114ff., 129ff., 133, 135, 150, 157f., 160, 162, 175, 186, 249, 328, 336, 345, 409f., see also meaning, referential Reference Object (RO) 27, 29, 32, 41, 43, 47, 49, 52, 56f., 103, 160, 163, 166, 171, 175f., 178, 182f., 194, 197, 199, 201f., 204f., 213, 215ff., 220, 223, 228ff., 234f., 237ff., 243, 247, 259, 267, 272, 288f., 291f., 301ff., 311ff., 320, 322, 325ff.,

Topic index | 491

330, 333ff., 343ff., 347f., 351f., 355ff., 367, 374, 376f., 381ff., 386ff., 398, 400, 402, 413f. – boundaries 60, 166, 176, 188, 201f., 204f., 210, 213ff., 232, 247, 261ff., 267, 315 see also boundedness – function 188 – functional features 64, 181ff., 188, 272 – intrinsic orientedness 46 – location 67 – parts 48, 60, 213, 215f., 230, 245, 248, 315 – part-whole structure 159 – portion/chunk 215, 239 – primary 31, 54, 175, 204 – secondary 31 – selection 32, 47, 171, 175, 178, 181, 204, 219, 237f., 263, 302, 326 – shape 39, 131f., 159, 174ff., 181, 184, 188f., 198, 201ff., 210f., 213, 220, 223, 247, 249ff., 259ff., 272ff., 288f., 292, 302ff., 308f., 311, 313, 319ff., 339ff., 349, 352, 354, 381ff., 410 – size 178 – symmetry 303 referent scene 18, 24, 126, 130, 132, 135, 148, 156f., 160, 163, 165, 167, 175, 183f., 199, 220 – construal, local vs. global 61 – features 280, 282 – object-level 14, 28, 54f., 67, 75, 171, 182, 247, 360 – picture-level 221 – space-level 14, 67, 75, 360 Referent Space 30, 33, 50, 76 region 14, 66, 95, 114, 280, 334 reification 48, 54, 57f., 74ff. repetition see frequency resources, cognitive 145, 166, 228, 286, 327, 339, 384, 402f. Response Accuracy 296, 305, 307, 319, 321, 340ff., 344, 380f., 383f. Response Time 296, 305, 307, 319, 321, 340ff., 380, 382ff. round objects see corneredness routines 98, 117, 145, 148, 201, 228, 265f., 412

routinization 103, 108ff., 119, 121, 124, 129, 134, 136ff., 140, 145, 150, 390f., 403, 410, 416 saccades 280, 298f. salience 85, 97, 176, 181ff., 241, 272, 303, 315, 329, 385, 411 – cognitive 20, 22, 85, 94, 97f., 227 – ontological 97, 115, 186 – perceptual 98, 115, 178, 281, 292 – pragmatic 114f. – situational 97, 114f. satellite-framed languages see motion verb typology scene exploration 402, 413 scene sketch 174 scene types 210, 377 scene viewing task 279 see also task, VIEW schema 54, 120ff., 124f., 136, 140 schema mapping 34, 39, 49f., 52, 54, 73, 219 schematicity 9, 33, 93ff., 123ff., 131, 135f., 140, 142, 156, 191ff., 201, 204f., 209, 213, 226, 233, 237, 242ff., 258f., 262f., 265, 268, 273, 275, 283f., 377 Schematicity Theory 4, 100, 123f., 127, 132ff., 150ff., 158ff., 193, 271f., 275ff., 288f., 321f., 338, 345, 351ff., 364ff., 375, 377, 379, 385ff., 407, 410 schematization 109, 120ff., 126f., 135, 150 Search Domain see Search Space Search Space 27f., 30ff., 38f., 50, 71f., 74, 76, 229f. – Primary 32 – Secondary 32 seeing for speaking 282f. segmentation 91, 93, 95, 120, 142 selection 18, 21, 84, 94f., 97, 115, 166, 194, 202, 223, 327, 369, 406 – attentional 14, 18, 21 – construction selection 79, 175 – of Frame of Reference 46f. – of the Reference Object (RO) 76 – selection conflict 137 – selection-for-action 84 – selection-for-perception 84 selection decision 132, 159, 163, 175, 177, 182, 188, 190, 199, 203, 205, 210, 227,

492 | Topic index

243, 252, 254, 259, 267, 272, 295, 326, 404, 406, 408, 410f. self-alignment 173f., 266, 278, 301f., 405f., 415 shape 53, 76, 181f., 205, 303 signals, attention-directing 114 similarity 108, 118ff., 125, 129, 143, 190, 219f., 223, 245, 393 simulation, perceptual 59f., 87, 90, 92ff., 96ff., 100f., 103f., 107, 138, 159, 227, 272, 389, 413 simulator 93f., 96ff., 103, 107, 112, 114, 138, 141, 159 situation models 101, 147f. Situation Space 30, 33 social networks 415 space 9, 16 – absolute 13, 16, 64, 75f., 226 – in (neuro-)psychology 14 – in philosophy 4, 14 – relative 13, 16 space-focused construal see construal, space-focused vs. object-focused space-focused constructions (G-C) 194, 198ff., 203ff., 208, 210, 212, 226, 236f., 239, 271, 274, 295, 309, 313, 322ff., 333ff., 347, 349, 351ff., 356ff., 362,364, 365, 371, 374f., 386f., 389f., 392, 396, 398ff., 403f. Spatial Construction Types (SCTs) 190ff., 198, 202, 205, 216, 228, 242, 244f., 255, 257, 259, 264, 268, 271, 274 – General Level (G) 193f., 198ff., 202ff., 209, 211ff., 226, 237, 242, 254, 259, 262, 264f., 271 – Intermediate Level (I) 193ff., 198, 201, 204, 211f., 216, 237, 242ff., 253ff., 257ff., 265f., 268ff. – repertoires, English vs. German 195 – Specific Level (S) 193ff., 198, 201, 204, 211f., 216, 224, 229, 236f., 240, 242ff., 253ff., 262, 265f., 268 spatial constructions 159, 232 – complex 159, 164ff., 183, see also DIMDIM(TOP)-constructions – nominal 34, 60f., 77, 103, 194 – non-nominal 34, 77, 194

– repertoires, English vs. German 13, 237, 257 – topological 58 spatial information 240, 359, 387 – dimensional 173, 183, 194, 201, 230, 238, 310 – topological 173, 183, 194, 217, 230 spatial language 27, 29, 64, 155, 409 – dynamic 59, 226f., 229, 234 – functional approaches 49 – static 27, 227 spatial language, functions 29 – acknowledging/presupposing function 27 – identifying/referring function 27ff., 32, 164, 168 – informing/predicating function 27ff. – search instruction 32 spatial relations, dimensional 302, 315 spatial relations, distance 33, 42, 50 spatial relations, topological 174, 215, 217, 291f. – contact/proximity 33f., 38, 50, 171, 174, 217, 292, 302 – containment 171, 217, 292, 302 – support 171, 292, 302 spatial scenes 101, 157, 162, 275, 277, 290, 322, 395, see also referent scene Spatial Term Phase 317, 331, 333ff., 337, 365, 373, 398 spatial terms 312, 360, 374, 377, 414 – complex 166, 392 – dimensional 29, 33f., 39f., 50, 78, 164, 194, 212f., 218, 220, 227, 235, 291, 315 – directional 220 – nominal 48, 52 – non-nominal 48, 50, 64 – object-related 29 – question words 34 – relative pronouns and relative adverbs 34 – repertoires, English vs. German 157, 162, 223f., 243, 257 – topological 29, 33f., 38f., 217, 291, 302 speaker types 206ff., 264f., 268ff., 274f., 277, 280, 289, 291f., 295f., 302, 309, 353, 358, 360f., 363, 365ff., 369ff., 373, 376, 379f., 385, 388, 396ff., 404f., 410f.,

Topic index | 493

see also Consistent Speakers; Variable Speakers Speaking Phase 317f., 331, 333, 373, 403 specificity 33, 50, 72, 76, 95, 131, 245, see also schematicity speech community 107, 109f., 115, 143f. Speech Planning Phase 316ff., 332f., 335ff., 347, 362ff., 369, 372ff., 380, 386f., 397ff., 401 stability 98, 104, 107ff., 117, 123, 127, 134ff., 138ff., 148ff., 152f., 158, 162, 272, 278, 284, 291, 309, 321, 354, 390, 410 storage 94f., 111, 118, 120, 125, 139 structural/syntactic priming see adaptation structuralism 126, 133, 416 structuring 93 subjectivity 87, 90f., 95, 104, 108, 149 subregions, RO-internal vs. RO-external 61 subspaces, dimensional 34, 48 subspaces, topological 34, 39, 51, 70 – boundary space 38f., 60 – exterior space 70 – interior space 38, 70 – neighbouring space 38 suppression abilities 108, 415 symbol formation 118 symbolic units see constructions symbolization 110 symbols see knowledge, formats of representation, symbolic synonymy 123, 127ff., 137, see also associations, paradigmatic – referential 5, 128, 135, 148, 155, 206, 390, 409 synonymy avoidance 129, 131, 135f. – Principle of No Synonymy 128 – Principle of Synonymy Avoidance 127f. syntactic/combinatorial behaviour see associations, syntagmatic syntactic/structural persistence see adaptation task 8, 85, 140, 167, 279f., 283, 285ff., 290, 296f., 306f., 315, 343ff., 348, 360, 389, 403, 406f., 413 – communicative 151, 167

– DESCRIBE 290, 293, 296ff., 311, 314ff., 328f., 331f., 334ff., 338ff., 343ff., 351, 353, 355f., 360ff., 377, 380ff., 389, 391, 395ff., 401, 403f., 413, 470f. – linguistic 284, 286f., 289, 296f., 338, 414 – non-linguistic 160, 284f., 287, 297, 334, 339, 352, 391, 393 – object identification and naming 169f., 300, 459 – picture selection and identification 168 – RECOGNIZE 290, 296ff., 300, 302ff., 319, 321, 324, 334, 339ff., 348f., 351f., 375, 380ff., 385, 388, 413f., 468, 470ff. – secondary/interference 285, 297 – VIEW 290, 296ff., 301ff., 314, 316, 318ff., 334, 339, 345ff., 355, 374ff., 388f., 413, 467, 470f. temporality 282 THING 54, 57f., 60, 67, 176, 312, 325f., 355, 357, 367 thinking for speaking 7, 283 time pressure 233, 339 TOP(ological)-schema 34, 38, 53, 73 trajector see figure transitivity 34, 48, 50ff., 70, 77 typology 165 uncornered objects see corneredness unexpectedness 183 universalism 7 universals 394 – cognitive/perceptual 394f., 404 – linguistic 394 unusualness 183 usage events 108, 119f., 141, 244, 416 usage-based models of language 106f., 109f., 113, 115, 140, 149, 167, 224, 415f., see also language, theories of utterance structure, temporal 311, 314, 327f., 357f., 360, 368, 400 Variable Speakers 206, 269ff., 274ff., 287ff., 295, 297, 303, 307, 309f., 314, 321ff., 331ff., 335ff., 340ff., 346f., 350ff., 356ff., 360, 362ff., 375, 377, 380, 383ff., 391ff., 407, 410ff. variation 107, 127, 190f.

494 | Topic index

– cross-linguistic 5, 43, 50f., 109, 124, 140, 153, 162, 198f., 211f., 236, 242, 249, 278, 282ff., 338, 393f., 410 – cross-linguistic, English vs. German 4, 13, 62ff., 67, 70, 72ff., 76f., 131, 152, 157ff., 161ff., 182, 184, 193, 199, 204f., 208ff., 223ff., 229, 232, 237, 242f., 245, 249ff., 261f., 264, 268, 271ff., 282, 392, 409f. – inter-cultural 43, 277f. – interindividual 1, 3, 5, 8, 43, 46, 109, 119, 124, 134, 143, 146, 148ff., 152, 155f., 158, 162, 164, 166f., 184, 191, 193, 198f., 205f., 222, 228, 249ff., 258f., 263ff., 267, 269, 271ff., 275, 277f., 313, 315, 366, 368, 370, 374, 376f., 384, 392ff., 399f., 403, 405, 410, 412ff. – intra-individual 46, 109, 198, 265, 366 – language-internal 162, see variation, interindividual

verb-framed languages see motion verb typology verbs 48 viewer-centeredness 186 viewpoint-dependence 45 viewpoint-independence 42 visual world eye-tracking paradigm 5, 279, 282, 284, 290, 467 Voice End Time (VET) 307, 317f., 327f., 330, 358, 368, 396f. Voice Onset Time (VOT) 307, 316ff., 327f., 330, 358, 368, 396f. within-object relations 17 word order 131, 232 word-class categories 50, 54, 57, 60, 64, 76, 81, 194, 212f.