tailieunhanh - The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 103

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 103. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 990 STEFAN GRGNDELAERS DIRK SPEELMAN AND DIRK GEERAERTS of clustered and overlapping readings concentrating around one or more salient readings. Third prototypical categories are blurred at the edges there may be entities whose membership of the category is uncertain or at least less clear-cut than that of the bona fide members. And fourth prototypical categories cannot be defined by means of a single set of criterial necessary and sufficient attributes. Although these four characteristics do not necessarily co-occur they are systematically related. The first and third are extensional in nature and involve category membership whereas the second and fourth represent an intensional perspective and involve definitions rather than members. Characteristics one and two refer to salience effects and differences of structural weight whereas three and four focus on flexibility and demarcation problems. In what follows we will sometimes use the notion nonequality with regard to features one and two and nondiscreteness with three and four. There is obviously much more to be said about the status of the four features and their relations see Geeraerts Grondelaers and Bakema 1994 but for present purposes this brief overview will suffice. Turning to historical semantics we can now convert each of the four characteristics of prototypicality into a statement about the structure of semantic change. Modulations of Core Cases By stressing the extensional nonequality of lexical semantic structure prototype theory highlights the fact that changes in the referential range of one specific word meaning may take the form of modulations on the core cases within that referential range. In other words changes in the extension of a single sense of a lexical item are likely to take the form of an expansion of the prototypical center of that extension. If the referents in the range of application of a particular lexical meaning do not have equal status the more salient members will probably be .