People sometimes interpret implausible sentences nonliterally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? In this talk, I contrast a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a nonliteral semantic interpretation account, according to which they arrive at this meaning via purely semantic processing. The former but not the latter account postulates that people consider not only a literal-but-implausible double-object (DO) analysis in comprehending The mother gave the candle the daughter, but also a nonliteral-but-plausible [...]
Intertwining with human cognition and arising from sensorimotor experiences, image schemas are recurring and dynamic patterns of human perception. Schemas, such as UP-DOWN, CONTAINMENT, and FORCE, are not visual images or mental images but are multimodal analogue representations that provide a holistic conceptual summary of perceived spatial relations and movements and function to structure experience and ground meaning. A schematic diagram is what cognitive linguists often use to visually illustrate the underlying spatiotemporal relationships of schemas and the externalised linguistic representations. In recent years, schematic diagrams have been increasingly used in cognitive linguistics inspired second language (L2) pedagogy to help learners [...]