What is the nature and function of mental representations in cognitive science, and in human language in particular? How do they come into existence and interact, and how is the information attributed to them stored in and retrieved from the human mind? Some theories treat constructions as primitive entities used for structure-building, central in both production and comprehension, while other theories only admit construction-like entities as devices to map the structure into semantics or to relate them to specific morphophonological exponents. (...) In this positional piece, we seek to elucidate areas of commonality across what have traditionally been divergent approaches to the role of constructions in language. Here we outline a robust specification of the differences in how chunks of structure containing information are treated in the two main approaches, and we seek to offer a path toward a more unified theoretical stance. (shrink)

Este trabajo discute el problema de que la inmensa mayoría de los adjetivos deverbales dan lugar a lecturas no episódicas, lo cual se traduce en desafíos para su análisis, toda vez que no tenemos una definición sólida de las propiedades positivas de los adjetivos. Se propone que en un sistema con dominios ontológicos donde el nivel verbal define esencias eventivas sin anclaje a mundos o tiempos el problema se resuelve de forma directa sin necesidad de proponer nudos explícitamente adjetivales. Las (...) ventajas de este sistema se ilustran con la clase de adjetivos relacionales deverbales. (shrink)

One of the most common ways of morphological marking is affixation, morphemes are classified according to their position. In languages with affixal morphology, suffixes and prefixes are the most common types of affixes. Despite several proposals, it has been impossible to identify solid generalisations about the behaviour of prefixes, in opposition to suffixes. This article argues that the reason is that our traditional definitions of suffix and prefix are based on pre-theoretical, surface criteria that have been given up in other (...) areas of linguistics: defining a morpheme as a prefix does not tell us anything about its grammatical nature, as that label does not take into consideration the structural configuration underlying the morpheme. Once the structural configuration is taken into account, solid generalisations begin to emerge. The article illustrates the advantages of this approach through a study of the interaction between vowel harmony and affixes. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.