Towards a pragmatic model of cognitive onomasiology

Who said ‘Abortion’? Semantic Variation and Ideology in Spanish Newspapers' Online Discussions

“…This is coherent with previous research on semantic variation in cognitive linguistics, which has proved that concepts are perspectival and they can be negotiated, because there is no such thing as a true essence of a word, but rather a net of meanings prototypically constructed that are made apparent depending on the context (Fillmore 1982). In other words, from an onomasiological perspective, different contextual aspects define the categories that might be brought into focus for the reference to a particular concept (Grondelaers & Geeraerts 2003), that is, the meanings (distributed among the cultural group) that might emerge, in Sharifian's terms, in certain circumstances (Sharifian 2011). In our case study, the patterns of conceptual onomasiological variation are ideologically motivated, showing two conceptual profiles for 'abortion' related to two ideological groups with different cultural models emerging from their semantic preferences.…”

“…Through a case study on the semantic variation of 'abortion' in newspapers' comments in Spain, we have tried to prove the necessity and the possibility of working with conceptual onomasiological variation in context, through an interdisciplinary cognitive sociolinguistic approach (as defended in Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003)). Sociolinguistics needs to have adequate tools for the quantitative…”

“…As has been demonstrated earlier (Grondelaers & Geeraerts 2003), we may access the structure of the conceptual picture by adding a quantitative approach. More central meanings (in the form of conceptual bases) are characterized by being more present, which can be quantitatively measured by calculating the frequencies of appearance of the variants delimited previously.…”

A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch

“…Since indefiniteness is a major formal parameter of contextual newness, referents which are typically marked indefinite structurally occupy the lowest ranks of the taxonomy, well below entities which are normally marked definite (cf. Prince 1981;Gundel et al 1993;Grondelaers and Heylen 2003). As a consequence, there is no structural motivation to assign a higher accessibility rank to the subjects in (7)Ϫ (9) than to the adjuncts 14 : if we wish to implement the factors subject newness and adjunct newness in any reliable way, definite adjuncts will always receive a lower newness value than indefinite subjects 15 .…”

Loanwords in the Urban Meccan Hijazi Dialect: An Analysis of Lexical Variation according to Speakers’ Sex, Age and Education

“…However, lexical variation has been under studied in both sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics (Grondelaers & Geeraerts, 2003). Specifically, studies focusing on the actual choices selected for a certain name as a designation of a certain referent are quite rare (Grondelaers & Geeraerts, 2003).…”