Archive for: November 2008

Cognitive English Grammar

Günter Radden and René Dirven

University of Hamburg / Gerhard Mercator University Duisburg

Cognitive English Grammar is designed to be used as a textbook in courses of English and general linguistics. It introduces the reader to cognitive linguistic theory and shows that Cognitive Grammar helps us to gain a better understanding of the grammar of English. The notions of motivation and meaningfulness are central to the approach adopted in the book. In four major parts comprising 12 chapters, Cognitive English Grammar

In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (Eds). Scope and Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter.

Gilles Fauconnier

I. MEANING, LANGUAGE, COGNITION

Linguists agree on one thing – that language is diabolically hard to study. They do not always agree, however, on the how’s, the why’s, and the what for’s: how one should go about studying it and how speakers manage to do what they do; why it is so hard and why exactly we bother to study it; what language is for, and what linguistics is for. A mainstream view that has been popular in the last thirty years (but not necessarily before that) offers the following answers.

007十句经典台词-邦德

Classic lines of 007 movies ：Bond

10. Octopussy

Magda: “He suggests a trade. The egg for your life.”

Bond: “Well, I heard the price of eggs was up, but isn’t that a little high?”

9. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

(A villain chases Bond and skis into a snow-blower, which then sprays red snow.)

Bond: “He had a lot of guts!”

helicopter mom/mother

“直升机母亲”?单从字面理解，相信大多数人一定会理解为“直升机母亲/妈妈”，但依然会感到困惑，什么是“直升机母亲/妈妈”?到底要表达的是什么意思或其含义到底是什么意思?

我们来看看原文对helicopter mom/mother的解释

1，A hovering & controlling, but well-meaning, parent who gets way too involved in her child’s life to the point of doing things that are completely inappropriate, such as personally attending all of little Sweetiepie’s extracurricular activities, writing medium-sized Sweetiepie’s school application essays, and submitting full-grown Sweetiepie’s job applications.

References of Neurocognitive Linguistics

· Benson, D. Frank and Alfredo Ardila, Aphasia: A Clinical Perspective. Oxford University Press, 1996.

· Burnod, Yves. An Adaptive Neural Network: The Cerebral Cortex. Masson and Prentice Hall, 1990.

· Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error. Grosset/Putnam, 1994.

· …

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

如果，还有人怀疑美国是一切皆有可能的国度，还有人怀疑国父们的梦想在我们的时代是否还存在，还有人怀疑我们的民主所拥有的力量，那么今晚，你听到了回答。

もし、米国ではあらゆることが可能であるということを疑ったり、建国者の夢がまだ生きているのか疑問に思っていたり、米国の民主主義の力を疑ったりする人がいたら、こう言いたい。今夜が答えだと。

尽管谷歌口袋里装有大把的钞票，最近针对YouTube的诉讼案件还是让人不得不考虑是否是时候把“管子”上喜爱的视频抢救出来存放在律师们看不到的地方——你的硬盘。

幸运的是，我们有大量工具可以将视频video从YouTube下载下来并/或将YouTube视频转换成.flv以外的格式。它们都各有优缺点，很难说哪一种是最好的方法。因此，我们选择了23个确实可行的YouTube下载工具。以下就是这些工具，按各自运行的平台分类：

网站平台

1. YouTubeX 并没有很多功能，但是简单并且可行。它也提供让用户通过电子邮件与朋友分享YouTube视频的服务。不过，所有文件都命名为get_video，你必须手动在文件名后加上.flv。

Book review:From Perception to Meaning

Reviewed by Ludwig Johnson, independent scholar

As is generally acknowledged, the term image schema first appeared in Talmy (1983), Johnson (1987), and Lakoff (1987), and was used as a notion to account for the embodied origins of human language and cognition. In her introduction to the volume under review, Beate Hampe points out that image schemas were originally characterized as directly meaningful, pre-conceptual, highly schematic, continuous and analogous, and internally structured. In the past two decades, image schemas have proven to be a crucial and fundamental concept in cognitive linguistics. They are useful in explanations of various linguistic and non-linguistic issues, in the areas of lexical semantics and inference structure in particular. However, despite all this, different scholars entertain different views on how to understand and define image schemas, and there are still many fundamental questions awaiting adequate exploration. The major goal of this collection of papers is, instead of offering a unified account of image schema theory, to bring together some of the major ideas on image schemas in order to see how the divergent approaches contribute to a deeper understanding.

Innovations in Learning and Teaching: Individualizing

Instructional Strategies

By Mindy J. Oppenheim, M.Ed.

(Article Published by TRN InfoLine, May 1999)

Facilitating valued, meaningful employment for people with severe learning challenges was the original intention of supported employment. Although we’ve made great strides, in many areas people with severe challenges are still excluded from valued employment and community living opportunities. To realize our original intention, supported employment professionals are challenged to look to other fields of study for ideas, strategies and techniques that will help us in the areas of assessment, job matching and instructional programming, and teaching.

Fodor’s Frame Problem and Relevance Theory

(reply to Chiappe & Kukla)

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson

Abstract: Chiappe and Kukla argue that relevance theory fails to solve the frame problem as defined by Fodor. They are right. They are wrong, however, to take Fodor’s frame problem too seriously. Fodor’s concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that Relevance thoery helps address them.

The AI “frame problem” (McCarthy & Hayes 1969) has been reinterpreted in a variety of ways (Pylyshyn 1987). Fodor’s is the loosest and grandest reinterpretation of all (Fodor 1987). The “frame problem”, he writes, is: “Hamlet’s problem: when to stop thinking” (p.140); the problem of formalizing the distinction between “kooky facts” and “computationally relevant ones” (p.145); “just the problem of nondemonstrative inference” (p.146); “the problem of formalizing our intuitions about inductive relevance” (p.148). Fodor concludes that “the frame problem is too important to leave it to the hackers” (p.148), and Hayes retorts that “Fodor doesn’t know the frame problem from a bunch of bananas” (Hayes 1987: 132).