TV news in English and Vietnamese. Doctor of Linguistics: 62 22 15 01

ABSTRACT The dissertation aims at comparing and contrasting television news in English and Vietnamese from cognitive approach with the assistance of corpus-based analysis techniques.. Th

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HOANG THI NGOC DIEM

TV NEWS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

(Phân tích bản tin truyền hình tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt)

Major: English Linguistics Code: 62 22 15 01

A Thesis Submitted in Total Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

Supervisors: Ha Cam Tam, PhD

Assoc Prof Tran Xuan Diep (PhD)

Hanoi - 2015

I wish to express my sincere thanks to the staffs of Post Graduate Department, particularly Assoc Prof Le Hung Tien (PhD), Dean of the Department, Mrs Ngo Thanh Thuy (M.A), Mr Do Ba Quy (M.A) and Mrs Nguyen Thi Phuong Nhung for their assistance in the finalization of the dissertation.

I also would like to extend my deep and special thanks to my colleagues and friends, whose help and encouragement were great contribution to the completion of the dissertation

I’m also indebted to my course mates Mrs Nguyen Thi Quyet and Mrs Tran Thi Ngoc Lien for their support in publications and reference materials

Finally, I owe the completion of this dissertation to my parents, my husband and my two children, who have always given me their understanding and encouragement throughout my study My special thanks are due to my husband for his software and technical support

To all mentioned, and to many more, my heart extends the warmest thanks

ABSTRACT The dissertation aims at comparing and contrasting television news in English and Vietnamese from cognitive approach with the assistance of corpus-based analysis techniques The main source of data is daily news from BBC World News and VTV1 channel, both covering the topic of natural disasters The analytical framework is centered on mental spaces and Figure-Ground theories The study first provides in-depth analysis regarding mental spaces in television news in English and Vietnamese, how mappings are constructed to generate blended spaces Secondly, research is conducted

on how Figure-Ground theory is illustrated in news language and what cognitive differences there are between the two languages The results show that there were cognitive similarities and differences between the two sources of news stories in the way of reporting news Because cognition is embodied, the way reality (i.e natural disasters) was viewed and retold in news stories in each language had its own features

In English news, the disastrous events were reported with more current and up-to-date information Details of the disasters were described with more facts, numbers and directly from various points of view such as the news readers, the field reporters, region correspondents and witnesses In other words, it can be said that English news was more direct, factive and objective On the contrary, in Vietnamese news, stories were focused more on the consequences The information included not only the events themselves but also subjective advice, prediction and evaluation of the reporters and news makers Description of the events was also concerned with subjective attitudes, compared with human feelings and endurance Human sufferings and feelings were integrated while news stories were told In summary, The English news generally is more factive, reported from the view of the outsiders The event is focused on itself and news has the function of objectively reporting events with full and immediate details Meanwhile, Vietnamese news is reported from the view of the insiders The ego is seen as the reference for description, prediction, advice and evaluation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I – INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale 1

2 Objectives of the study 3

3 Scope of the study 3

4 Contribution of the study 3

5 Organization of the dissertation 4

PART II - DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Background of news language 5

1.1.1 Historical background of news 5

1.1.2 Television news broadcast 6

1.1.2.1 Definitions and features of news 6

1.1.2.2 Television in comparison with other channels of communication 9

1.1.3 News genre 10

1.1.4 Approaches to news language 14

1.1.5 Previous studies on news 17

1.1.5.1 Preceding studies on news texts 17

1.1.5.2 Previous studies on news from corpus-based and cognitive approach 18

1 2 Cognitive linguistics 19

1.2.1 Overview 19

1.2.2 The nature of cognitive linguistics 22

1.2.2.1 Generalization commitment 22

1.2.2.2 Cognitive commitment 26

1.2.2.3 The embodied mind 27

1.2.2.4 Cognitive approach to semantics and grammar 28

1.2.3 Cognitive semantics 29

1.3 Mental spaces 33

1.3.1 Definition and categorization 33

1.3.2 Speech space 37

1.3.3 Space builders 39

1.4 Conceptual blending 40

1.4.1 Basic concepts 40

1.4.2 Metaphor, metonymy and blending 46

1.5 Figure and Ground 47

1.5.1 Background concepts 47

1.5.2 Figure and Ground in a single clause 50

1.5.3 Figure and Ground in a complex sentence 51

1.5.4 The grammatical relations of Figure and Ground 54

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2.1 Research questions 56

2.2 Analytical framework – corpus-assisted cognitive semantics 56

2.5.1 Cognitive framework 56

2.5.2 Corpus assisted analysis 58

2.3 Data collection 59

2.3.1 Criteria for collecting data 59

2.3.2 Corpus design 60

2.3.3 Representativity of the data 60

2.4 Methods of the study 61

2.5 Data collection instruments 63

2.6 Data analysis procedure 64

CHAPTER 3: MENTAL SPACES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS 3.1 Speech space 66

3.1.1 Findings from English news 66

3.1.2 Findings from Vietnamese news 73

3.1.3 Discussion 80

3.2 Hypothetical spaces 83

3.2.1 Findings from English news 83

3.2.2 Findings from Vietnamese news 87

3.2.3 Discussion 94

CHAPTER 4: CONCEPTUAL BLENDING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS 4.1 Condition and comparison 98

4.1.1 Findings from English news 98

4.1.2 Findings from Vietnamese news 101

4.1.3 Discussion 105

4.2 Conceptual blending with occurrence verbs 105

4.2.1 Findings from English news 106

4.2.2 Findings from Vietnamese news 107

4.2.3 Discussion 109

4.3 Conceptual blending in imagery descriptions 109

CHAPTER 5: FIGURE AND GROUND IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS 5.1 Findings from English news 113

5.2 Findings from Vietnamese news 117

5.3 Discussion 123

PART III - CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 1 Summary of major findings and conclusion 128

2 Implications 131

3 Suggestions for further study 137

PUBLICATIONS AND PROJECTS RELATED TO THE DISSERTATION 138

Bibliography 140

Appendix 1: Data export – Key words in context (KWIC) ……… I

Appendix 2: Raw analysis of speech spaces ……… XXVIII Appendix 3: English collocations for natural disasters ……….…… … XLI Appendix 4: Vietnamese collocations for natural disasters XLIV

LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES AND GRAPHS

Figure 1: Some members of the category “cup” 23

Figure 2: Inputs and generic space 41

Figure 3: Blended space 42

Figure 4: Figure – Ground examples 48

Figure 5: Speech space type 1 in English news 71

Figure 6: Speech space type 2 in English news 71

Figure 7: Speech space type 3 in English news 72

Figure 8: Speech space type 1 in Vietnamese news 78

Figure 9: Speech space type 2 in Vietnamese news 79

Figure 10: Speech space type 3 in Vietnamese news 79

Figure 11: Example 1 - blended space in English news 99

Figure 12: Example 2 - blended space in English news 100

Figure 13: Example of blended space in Vietnamese news 104

Figure 14: Example 1 - Conceptual blending in English news with metaphors 109

Figure 15: Conceptual blending in Vietnamese news 111

Figure 16: Example 2 - Conceptual blending in English news with metaphors 112

Figure 17: Similarity of Figure and Ground between English and Vietnamese news 123

Figure 18: Difference of Figure and Ground between English and Vietnamese news 126 Table 1: Speech verbs and quotation in English news 67

Table 2: Senders in English news 68

Table 3: Speech spaces in English news 69

Table 4: Speech verbs and quotation in Vietnamese news 74

Table 5: Senders in Vietnamese news 75

Table 6: Speech spaces in Vietnamese news 75

Table 7: Comparison of quotations in English and Vietnamese news 80

Table 8: Comparison of senders between English news and Vietnamese news 81

Table 9: Comparison of speech spaces in English and Vietnamese news 82

Table 10: Advice and command in English news 83

Table 11: Predicting structures in English news 84

Table 12: Concordance of prediction in English news 84

Table 13: Estimation expressions in English news 85

Table 14: Concordance of “at least” 86

Table 15: Evaluation expressions in English news 87

Table 16: Advice in Vietnamese news 88

Table 17: Concordance of “phải” 89

Table 18: Prediction expressions in Vietnamese news 90

Table 19: Concordance of ‘có nguy cơ” 91

Table 20: Estimation expressions in Vietnamese news 91

Table 21: Concordance of “khoảng” 92

Table 22: Evaluation in Vietnamese news 93

Table 23: Concordance of “kinh hoàng” 94

Table 24: Comparison of advice and command between English and Vietnamese news 94

Table 25: Comparison of prediction and possibility between English and Vietnamese news 96

Table 26: Comparison of quantity estimating expressions between English news and Vietnamese news 96

Table 27: Condition and comparison structures in English news 98

Table 28: Conditional and comparative structures in Vietnamese news 101

Table 29: Concordance of “nhất” 102

Table 30: Concordance of như” 102

Table 31: Verbs in English news 106

Table 32: Concordance of “hit” 107

Table 33: Verbs in Vietnamese news 108

Table 34: Concordance of “cướp đi” 108

Table 35: Imagery language in English and Vietnamese news 110

Table 36: Concordance of “fading hope” 110

Table 37: Concordance of “rốn lũ” 110

Table 38: Connectives in English news 116

Table 39: Connectives in Vietnamese news 122

Table 40: Figure – Ground comparison between Vietnamese and English news 125

Table 41: Comparison of occurrence verbs between Vietnamese and English news 125

Table 42: Concordance of “of the earthquake” 133

Table 43: COCA sample KWIC 134

Graph 1: Comparison of speech spaces in English and Vietnamese news 82

Graph 2: Comparison of advice and command between English and Vietnamese news 95 Graph 3: Comparison of prediction and possibility between English and Vietnamese news 96

PART I - INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

The media has now become one of the principal means of getting information about the world Not only for information, are the media also used for various purposes including entertainment, education, national identity enhancement or even political ones Among media channels, television seems to be increasingly popular and favoured as access to television is widening to everyone and every corner of the world It is largely believed that the media are always there, and have come to be taken for granted as an integral part of most people’s lives With its crucial role, the power of the media cannot be denied They are a “site for the production and circulation of social meanings, i.e to a great extent the media decide the significance of things that happen in the world for any given culture” (Thornborrow, 2004:56)

Within the research circle, the media has been explored a great deal so far With regards

to TV news alone, much interest has been shown in the field of linguistics Hohn (1995) investigated linguistic features of BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4 to find out the similarities and differences between them In 2006, Luginbuehl presented the result of comparing news stories in American and Swiss TV news since the 60s in view of “culturality” His conclusion stated that Swiss TV news showed a detached way of reporting while CBS news displayed close and immediate reports; cultural differences were also found in different journalistic roles At the same time, Senokozlieva and her co-researchers (2006) also examined the relationship between culture and selected formal characteristics of newscasts from three regions: The United States of America, Germany and the Arab world Their findings showed that in collectivist societies like the Arab world, there were more displays of groups or individuals who are contextualized by others than in the individualistic US Most recently, Shi Hong-mei (2008) conducted a critical analysis on turn-taking organization in English news interviews in China and her results showed the influence of the power and ideology on turn-taking; the interviewer with the institutional role, could interrupt or insert their turn-taking to control, direct the talk as intended plan

Apart from the findings that those authors have made about news above, news and television news are also of great importance in reasoning the way human mind sees events and representing them via language This can be a great opportunity to theoretically and practically contribute to the field of cognitive linguistics However, to the best of my knowledge, comprehensive investigations into news features of Vietnamese and British broadcasting from cognitive linguistics seem to be rare

From pedagogical approach, newscasts in general are a rich source of authentic materials for foreign language learning and teaching News is practically integrated into textbooks, English software, interactive websites for e-learning, and are used to develop all skills as well as particular subjects like translation and interpretation BBC itself also

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml) with various activities Besides, access to visual original news is undoubtedly becoming common for self-learning However, for Vietnamese learners of English, the use of news broadcasts

in learning seems spontaneous The news language itself as well as differences in news broadcasts between British culture and Vietnamese culture has not yet been introduced systematically to learners and teachers Newscasts are merely seen by many as an authentic source for practice or one of the accesses to native speakers or real-life English

Again, the importance of news reports in general and television newscasts in particular cannot be denied in our everyday lives, language learning as well as in scholarly researching It is also a fertile source of data for various branches of social sciences such

as linguistics, semiotics, and discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1988:109) Despite the increasing popularity of television news broadcast and its important functions in shaping human perception as well as reasoning the relationship between human mind, meaning construction and language presentation, from a look into previous studies on news broadcasts and an investigation in practical applications of news in teaching, to the best of my knowledge, investigations into comparing news of Vietnamese and British broadcasting from cognitive approach seem few and far between Basing on that account, the author would like to conduct an investigation of VTV1 news and BBC World News products to make a contribution to the large gap of news language analysis, hence give suggestions for English language learning and teaching The author

does hope the results of the study will be of potential concern to those who have interest

in linguistics, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, mass communication and cultural study

inter-2 Objectives of the study

The objectives of this study are:

- To explore the ways by which mental spaces and conceptual blending are realized in English and Vietnamese television news broadcasts,

- To find out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese television news broadcasts with regards to mental spaces and conceptual blending,

- To explore Figure-Ground presentation in English and Vietnamese news broadcasts, and finally

- To find out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese television news broadcasts with regards to Figure-Ground presentation

3 Scope of the study

Television news broadcasts as a part of the media are an endless source of data for various study approaches The thesis focuses on television news in English and Vietnamese covering the topic of natural disasters The reasons for the choice of news topic are discussed in chapter 2, part II of this dissertation The main source of data is daily news from BBC World News channel and VTV1 newscasts News broadcasts are studied from cognitive linguistics perspective with the assistance of corpus-based analysis techniques The analytical framework is centered on mental spaces, conceptual blending and Figure-Ground theories Other news topics, other sources of news as well

as other linguistic approaches to news language fall beyond the scope of this study

4 Contribution of the study

Theoretically, the study reviews and systemizes important principles and characteristics

in cognitive linguistics It investigates a research area that few Vietnamese researchers have ever explored, that is news language from cognitive perspective Particularly,

theories related to mental spaces, Figure-Ground relationship, to my knowledge, have not been applied in analyzing and comparing news language

Practically, the study first is expected to provide in-depth results regarding mental spaces in television news in English and Vietnamese, how mappings are constructed to generate blended spaces The second practical contribution is made via the detailed research on how Figure-Ground theory is illustrated in news language and what cognitive differences there were between the two languages The study then contributes significant practical implications to related fields of linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language learning and teaching and translation

In terms of methodology, a method that has not been used in previous studies on news is applied, that is corpus-assisted analysis to yield major research results This method is proved to bring valid and reliable findings It includes both qualitative and quantitative techniques in accessing and processing data

5 Organization of the dissertation

Part I is the Introduction of the study Emphasis is given to the issue of the research foci

of the dissertation In so doing it sets the scene for the study of news in the remainder of the dissertation

Part II, the Development, consists of 5 chapters

In chapter 1, fundamental issues of cognitive linguistics are reviewed Then specific theories in mental spaces and Figure-Ground are introduced

Chapter 2 offers an overview of the methodology of the study It includes corpus building, coding system, data collection instruments and the like The not less important part of the chapter is a proposal of the analytical framework, based on which the study

PART II - DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1: literature review

1.1 Background of news language

1.1.1 Historical background of news

Central to the global spread of news as a genre and also in terms of content has been news agency – the first global medium News agencies started in the middle of the nineteenth century (Machine & Leeuwen, 2007) to supply newspapers with news items from across the world Then, information became commodity, presented in a neutral style to be saleable to editors of different political persuasion Today’s news agencies operate on the principle that “almost anything that passes as news in print, broadcasting and electronic media is likely to have some financial implication for someone” (Machin

& Leeuwen, 2007:8) Many people still think of politics, culture and economics as separate domains In global media communication, they come together In reference to the issue of standardization, Machin and Leeuwen (2007) also assert that to sell editors, news has to become politically neutral, pure information, pure fact This approach, which today is common in the world, was gradually developed and globally propagated

by the major news agencies In the 1980s, satellite broadcasters, like other global corporation, began to see profit in news spreading It is argued that satellite TV allowed other exporters of television programmes to enter the market (Machin and Leeuwen, 2007)

Notably, related to the issue of TV broadcasting, Marshall (2002:3) highlights that

“television, as a modern medium, operates in a production-text-audience cycle” It is mass communication produced not for specific individuals but for an unlimited number

of people Therefore, it can be seen by a huge number of viewers simultaneously Apart from news agencies, the role of journalists in the modern time has taken more attention than before “The journalist has been not only the gatekeeper who filters the floods of

information into an orderly stream of news, but also the broker of social consensus who shapes community’s attitudes” (Lewis, 2003:101)

Sociologists have shown that what is called “news” is quite an odd set of institutional practices that must be understood in terms of its social and historical development And the context of news under investigation is a British and Vietnamese one News itself, and its associated practices, the organizations of its institutions, its format and genre, have their origins particularly in British and Vietnamese culture, typical cognition process and mind

The above discussion about the history of news and its globalization process serves as a very basic background which leads to the further discussion in the following parts 1.1.2 Television news broadcast

1.1.2.1 Definitions and features of news

There have existed various concepts of news in different fields so far In the definition from BBC (Language of the media, 2003:2), a news report simply “gives details of a news story and its purpose is to give the listener information in an interesting but objective way” According to NewsTalk & Text Research Group of Ghent University (2009:4), news has two key characteristics that make a productive area for research and understanding Firstly, news is commonly defined through its relation to time News is about novelty, contemporary events, the most recent, should be timely, fresh and pertinent Secondly, news is all about retelling, intertextuality, and, by extension, entextualization, that is, the extraction of meaning from one discourse and consequent insertion of that meaning into another discourse Interestingly, Van Dijk (1988:3) who studies news as a type of text or discourse claims that the notion of news implies the following concepts:

(1) New information about events, things or persons

(2) A (TV or radio) program type in which news items are presented

(3) A news item or news report, i.e., a text or discourse on radio, on TV or

in the newspaper, in which new information is given about recent events

The focus of the study is particularly television news, that is, a type of text or discourse as it is expressed in (3), used, or made public in such a news medium or a public information carrier as TV This medium is distinguished with print media with its unique combination of visuality with both oral and written varieties of language

It can be said that of all concepts of news, the author particularly has interest in the two key characteristics claimed by a group of researchers of Ghent University (2009) and the definition given by Van Dijk (1988) They would be used as the light to look deeply

in news analysis with related features

Interestingly, according to Bell (1991), Galtung & Ruge (1965) and Schlesinger (1987), any event which is worth reporting as news needs to meet the following conditions:

- Frequency: Events that occur suddenly and fit well with the news organization's

schedule are more likely to be reported than those that occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night Long-term trends are not likely to receive much coverage

- Negativity: Bad news is more newsworthy than good news

- Unexpectedness: If an event is out of the ordinary it will have a greater effect

than something that is an everyday occurrence

- Unambiguity: Events whose implications are clear make for better copy than

those that are open to more than one interpretation, or where any understanding

of the implications depends on first understanding the complex background in which the events take place

- Meaningfulness: This relates to the sense of identification the audience has with

the topic "Cultural proximity" is a factor here stories concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations

- Reference to elite nations: Stories concerned with global powers receive more

attention than those concerned with less influential nations

- Reference to elite persons: Stories concerned with the rich, powerful, famous

and infamous get more coverage

- Conflict: Opposition of people or forces resulting in a dramatic effect Stories

with conflict are often quite newsworthy

- Consonance: Stories that fit with the media's expectations receive more

coverage than those that defy them (and for which they are thus unprepared) However, consonance really refers to the media's readiness to report an item

- Continuity: A story that is already in the news gathers a kind of inertia This is

partly because the media organizations are already in place to report the story, and partly because previous reportage may have made the story more accessible

to the public

- Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media For

instance, editors may seek to provide a balance of different types of coverage, so that if there is an excess of foreign news for instance, the least important foreign story may have to make way for an item concerned with the domestic news In this way the prominence given to a story depends not only on its own news values but also on those of competing stories

- Prefabrication: A story that is marginal in news terms but written and available

may be selected ahead of a much more newsworthy story that must be researched and written from the ground up

- Predictability: An event is more likely to be covered if it has been

pre-scheduled

- Time constraints: Traditional news media such as radio, television and daily

newspapers have strict deadlines and a short production cycle, which selects for items that can be researched and covered quickly

- Logistics: Although eased by the availability of global communications even

from remote regions, the ability to deploy and control production and reporting staff, and functionality of technical resources can determine whether a story is covered

Sharing similar opinions, Đinh Trọng Lạc & Nguyễn Thái Hòa (2009) claim that to serve the functions of making reports to and impacts on the audience, news needs to have the characteristics of being up-to-the minute, politically constrained, novel and attractive Therefore, its language use, in their opinion, also needs to follow some principles including attitude-feeling expression, lexical meaning expansion, flexibility and formality (Đinh Trọng Lạc & Nguyễn Thái Hòa, 2009:102)

Finally, news can be referred to with various terms In this study, the following terms were used to refer to television news under investigation: news broadcasts, newscasts, news reports, news stories, news and news items

1.1.2.2 Television in comparison with other channels of communication

Communicative events differ in their time-space parameters The properties of temporal and spatial setting mean that a communicative event in the mass media can actually be seen as a “chain of communicative events” (Fairclough, 1995:37) Such a chain connects the public domain to the private domain, that is, programmes are produced in the public domain but they are consumed in the private domain, mainly in the home or within the family In Scannell’s opinion, as quoted in Fairclough (1995:39), the media have tried to narrow the gap between the public conditions of media production and the private conditions of consumption, adjusted toward the priorities, values and practices

of private life

Specifically, types of media are different in their channels of communication and the technologies they draw upon For example, the press uses a visual channel with written language, graphic design and printing Differently, radio uses an oral channel with spoken language and relies on the technology of sound recording Television, by contrast, combines technologies of sound and image recording and broadcasting The relationship between oral and visual channels in television has given these special channels broad terms as verbally anchored with images mainly being used to support words

The differences among channels of communication above bring meaning potential for each channel For example, print is less personal than radio and television While radio allows individuality and personality to be foregrounded, television makes people visually available and not in the frozen modality of newspaper photographs, but in

movement and action In Fairclough’s opinion, even when programmes are prerecorded,

“the illusion of liveness and immediacy is maintained” (Fairclough, 1995:39), which helps reduces distance and convey an egalitarian ethos

Similarly, different types of communication involve different categories of participant For instance, the main categories of participants in television consist of reporters, audience and various categories of “third party” such as politicians, scientists, experts, witnesses and ordinary people Particularly, audience is an important feature of media events in television A television news programme is available to the great majority of the population, especially in prime-time television From economic and politic view, audience size implies the potential influence and power of the media However, from linguistic view, the target audience is one of the factors that determine the use of language in the programme

Of all kinds of channels of communication, television seems to possess its own features The oral prepared language in combination with the screen text integrated with visuals

is a special kind of language source for research Moreover, television seems to reveal a mirror of wider society and culture Besides, television can bring on-the-spot or up-to-the minute programmes, especial news broadcast, which has great influence in the use

of news language as well as impact on audience’s attitudes and opinions On the account, this channel promises an attractive field for linguistic research

1.1.3 News genre

It is largely thought that the media are constantly shaping our expectations about the way different kinds of information are transmitted, and these conventional formats can play an important part in the way we interpret the messages they contain Thornborrow (2004:68) claims that “language plays a centre role in structuring these conventions through the association of particular registers with specific types of programme” News programmes are not an exception and this part will discuss news from linguistic view and then its genre as well as register

As Kress (2003:72) defines, Genre - the term means, simply, 'kind' - has a history as long as the western literary tradition Aristotle used the term to distinguish major literary forms In more recent history it has come, by and large, to be used to name

'established' literary forms - the novel, the sonnet, the epic, the tragedy - in a somewhat timeless fashion, as forms which existed out of history

Linguistically, it is important to note that different types of talk produce different types

of language One of the best known definitions of genre is that of Jim Martin (1993) as quoted in Kress (2003:76): 'Genres are staged, goal-oriented social processes which integrate field mode and tenor choices in predictable ways' 'Field' is the term used to describe the 'social goings on, what the text is about'; 'mode' is the term which is used to describe the realisational mode through which the text finds its material form; and 'tenor' describes the social relations of the participants in all this Clearly, in this definition everything that goes on in the text is included in the definition of genre, though the initial focus is on the 'staged, goal-oriented processes', that is, an emphasis

on the social goal that is to be achieved by means of the genre Most other definitions of the term tend to be equally inclusive, even though the emphases may differ somewhat Carter and McCarthy (1997:8) see genres as episodes of speech of which participants have a shared view of their nature as social encounter A clearer definition of genre is given by Swales (2000:58) which is as follows:

“A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice

of content and style”

Approached from the above definition, a TV newscast is undoubtedly a class of communicative events as they are not only comprised of the discourse itself and its participants but also the role of that discourse and the environment of its production and reception, including its cultural associations Furthermore, as defined, genres are also common with communicative purposes News broadcasts may “have purposes of moulding public opinion, organizing public behaviour or presenting the controllers and paymasters of the broadcasting organization in a favourable light” (Swales, 2000:47) With the constraints to broadcast stations and topics, the specific purpose of the news broadcasts under study is merely to deliver news messages to the public, or in other words, to keep the audience up to date with events (namely, accidents and disasters) throughout the nation and the world

Genres vary significantly along quite a number of different parameters They firstly vary according to the complexity of purpose as discussed above Genres also vary in terms of the mode or medium (Swales, 2000:62) through which they are expressed It is hard to verify the genre of television news as in written or spoken mode News broadcasts are mostly scripted and then read aloud With such prepared-text genres, news broadcasts go to quite considerable lengths to ensure that they are comprehensible both by repetition and by providing background information (Swales, 2000:63) However, for inserted field reports or on-the-spot interviews, there may be no prepared texts Therefore, it can be said that the media of news broadcasts are either spoken or

“aloud reading” depending on specific situations

It is also significant to consider the term register as it comprises the discourse of TV news Register has been defined by Halliday as linguistic variation according to the context of use (Thornborrow, 2004:67) It is analyzed in terms of three variables labeled

“field”, “tenor” and “mode” In Swales’ viewpoint (2000:40), “field” is associated with the management of ideas (types of activity in which the discourse operates, its contents and ideas), “tenor” with the management of personal relations (status and role relationships of the participants) and “mode” with the management of discourse itself (channel of communication) The categories provide a conceptual framework for analysis When TV news is seen in this light, its register depends on three features: its field or its topics (accidents and disasters), the tenor or the way it is delivered by the anchors/correspondents/reporters, and its communicative mode which may be speech, teasers, graphics or visual modes However, Thornborrow (2004:68) reminds that the register of news broadcasting also depends on the cultural context of the broadcast and the format may vary from country to country

Some may argue that the concept of genre and register is not always very clear However, if examined to the core, genre and register are disassociated within linguistics This clarification is presented very clearly in Swales’ work (2000:41) Registers impose constraints at the linguistic level of vocabulary and syntax, whereas genre constraints operate at the level of discourse structure In other words, genres (research report, explanation for example) are structured texts while registers (language

of scientific reporting, language of news reporting) represent more stylistic choices

According to Kress (2003:69): “Genre (…) deals not with what is talked about, what is represented in the sense of what issues, but with who acts (and) in relation to whom, with the question of purposes This is directly in the domain of social interaction: the questions that arise are questions such as 'who are the participants involved in the social action as it takes place?' and 'what are their social relations with each other?' Such interactions have structure and shape, which is reflected in or realized in the representational practices that are part of such actions, or which constitute such actions”

In his approach to genre, Kress takes it to be one of three significant factors (there are others) in the constitution of text, along with discourse and mode For me the term is best used to describe one aspect of textual organisation, namely that which realises and allows us to understand the social relations of the participants in the making, the reception and the reading/interpretation of the text Equally central is what I have referred to as 'issues' above, and call, following the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1959), discourse - the organisation of content/material from a particular institutional point of view, as in 'legal discourse', 'religious discourse', 'sexist discourse'

Kress (2003) also adds that “Genre is a category that orients attention to the social world To employ it is to accept that language-use is one kind of social action, shaped

by social structures and habituated practices of greater or lesser stability and persistence In social action, the text-maker shapes language into text-as-genre But 'text' is a material entity, drawing on the resources of the mode of writing to realise the significant features of the social environment in which texts were made, shaped and organised In this manner, texts realise the significant features of the environment in which they were formed Above all, these include the interrelations of the social factors involved in the social event of which the text production is one part and the dissemination of the text another.” (2003:71)

Kress (2003) also further explains by distinguishing text and genre “The text as a whole consists of genres of several kinds - there might be a panel discussion, a bit of documentary film of unemployed young people somewhere in the city The text overall consists of segments which are generically distinct, but which together make up this text Therefore we can say that 'genre' and 'text' are not the same thing; on the one hand,

the latter includes the former, the former is an aspect of textual organisation; on the other hand, they are categories of different kinds Text is the category which refers to the material aspects of language, the tangible phenomenon; genre refers to aspects of the organisation of the text, an intangible phenomenon The two are not coextensive with each other However, it needs to be added, there is no text or textual element that is not generically formed Here is one point of theoretical difference: for some theorists text and genre are identical; for others, myself included, they are not” (2003:76)

With restrict to news genres, a text belongs to a particular genre to the extent that it displays the content, the form (physical and linguistic) and the distribution conventionally associated with some socially established task Broadcast language (television language) favours “oral presentation style, conversational tone and soundbites” (Lewis, 2003:96) It has both functions – narrating and reporting With regards to news, and newsworthy event is turned into a “narrative” (Lewis, 2003:95) ordered by a certain format And for the second function of reporting, some linguists argue that Reportage has an ancient pedigree, but it was radically altered by the advent

of modern communications The assumption that it is integrally linked to the news media is perfectly correct He also made a distinction between reportage and fiction which is stated that reportage relates to the reality outside the text

Alternatively, Machin and Leeuwen (2007:107) state that “The kind of genre analysis

we adopt here focuses on spoken and written text as communicative action It tries to bring out, step by step, how this action unfolds, regardless of whether it obeys explicit prescriptions or rules, follows habitual pattern, or uses generic resources in a creative response to the exigencies of a particular communicative situation”

The examination into genres and registers as discussed above hopefully will give a systematic and proper literature background for the proposed in-depth analysis of newscasts in general, and for the discussion of news from cognitive approach below in particular

1.1.4 Approaches to news language

As above-stated, news language has been a source of research to many scholars in many fields in histories In this part, major approaches to news language will be critically

discussed as the author sees this as a necessary prerequisite before looking at the more theoretical background and empirical data of the study

Linguistic and sociolinguistic approach

Firstly, news reports have been of great interest to linguists throughout history Linguistic properties such as grammar, intonation patterns, types of clauses, word-final consonant clusters in media language have been analyzed in detail (Mardh 1980, Bell 1984) Furthermore, media language has long attracted the attention of sociolinguists Notably, in his studies (Bell, 1991), Bell mostly focused on correlation between linguistic features and aspects of social contexts The benefits of these works are in their values of purely linguistic detail, to the form and textual of text However, they could not interpret the relationships between language and sociocultural context

Conversation analysis approach

The second approach that many researchers follow to analyze news language is conversation analysis Specifically, interviews in news and other media channels were the main focus Studies mostly put emphasis on the formulations in news interviews (Heritage, 1985; Hutchby, 1991) On one hand, these studies show how discussions are rooted in institutional practice On the other hand, they failed to explain how interviews are shaped by social and cultural shifts The author agrees with Fairclough’s critics (Fairclough, 1995) about the strengths and limitations of conversation analysis His positive critique aims at detailed description of organizational properties of media language with the focus much upon relational aspects of conversation – the achievement

of interaction However, properties of text with higher-level features of society ad culture were paid relatively little attention

Semiotic approach

Different from other approaches, semiotic analysis sees the analysis of text as the component of cultural analysis of media Many semiotic codes and conversations which underlie both linguistic and visual aspects of news stories including use of graphics, photographs, film reports wit voice-over, framing of pictures, camera movements, etc have been analyzed to the full (Hartley, 1982) The important achievement of these studies is sociocultural analysis of the media by connecting textual properties to ideologies, power relations and cultural values However, the main limitation of

semiotic analysis compared with other approaches is in its failure to “systematically attend to detailed properties of the texture of text” (Fairclough, 1995)

Critical discourse analysis

Norman Fairclough (1992, 1995) considers the social theories as the ground of critical discourse analysis In his opinion, critical discourse analysis of a communicative event

is the analysis of relationships between three dimensions of facets of that event, which

he called “text, discourse practice and sociocultural practice” (Fairclough, 1992)

“Texts” in his view may be written or oral, and oral texts may be just spoken (radio) or spoken and visual (television) Also from Fairclough’s viewpoint, calling the approach

“critical” is a recognition that the social practice in general and the use of language in particular are connected with causes and effects which people may not be aware of under normal conditions Specifically, connections between the use of language and the exercise of power are often not clear to people In many of his works, he proved that the language of the mass media is the site of power and struggle where language is clearly involved However, there are some limitations with this approach That is, critical discourse analyst may interpret a text in keeping with their own ideological standpoint and as such could be charged with producing an intellectual and subjective interpretation of data Another criticism against critical approaches to textual analysis is that they are generally, and explicitly, partial and political Critiques are always levelled against the powerful groups in society This raises the need for analysts to identify their work within an understanding of notions of reflectivity and reflexivity, whereby authors

do not only subject their understandings to (self) critical scrutiny but are also aware that their previous experiences will affect the way they interpret the present

Social-cognitive model

This model was proposed by Van Dijk (Van Dijk, 1988) and its framework analyses news texts in terms of news structure, news production and news comprehension For production processes, Van Dijk (1988) aims at analyzing how large amounts of source text and talk can be managed and transformed into a relatively small news report The notion of macrostructure is important in these processes, because it helps define the important role of summaries in all stages of news making, from taking notes and asking interview questions, to the formulation of the lead of the final report Besides, the model

of the situation is the crucial cognitive representation communicators use to understand

news events and situations (Van Dijk, 1988:180) It can be said that the combined discursive and cognitive approach to news production helps clarify in detail the structures and strategies of news values and the role of professional and social ideologies in general In his viewpoint, the transformation of knowledge, attitudes and beliefs is much more complex and requires a cognitive analysis that is vastly more intricate than traditionally suggested by effect research However, some limitations of this approach are found The approach only focuses on representation and social relations in news discourse and neglects the interpersonal function of language It can outstandingly explain the news making process but pays little attention to reasoning on impacts on the audience In this part, the author has reviewed some major approaches to news language so far They can be a powerful integrated framework for news report analysis However, from the purposes in this research, either linguistic or socio-cognitive model is not enough, they cannot explain the relationship between human mind, meaning construction and language presentation Against the above background

of much other work about the structures and the functions of news in the media, it is advocated that a new approach should be taken This new direction of research should aims at the important functions of news reports in shaping human perception as well as conceptualization process A systematic theory of cognitive approach to news reports as well as an account of the relationships between human mind, meaning construction and language presentation is to be developed

1.1.5 Previous studies on news

1.1.5.1 Preceding studies on news texts

News has been the focus of investigation of many linguists, discourse analysts and sociologists for long Famous for working on news are Van Dijk (1988), Biber (2003), Ayto (2003), Hohn (1995), Henry (2003), Lewis (2003) However, with respect to the application of corpus analysis techniques in exploring news, this area of research still stays new and fresh There have been few prominent related studies so far More specifically, Mahlberg (2009) had valuable findings of the application of corpus linguistic theory in English language teaching regarding lexical cohesion His corpus was restricted to the Newspaper Domains “UK broadsheets” Also in the same publication as Mahlberg’s, Morley (2009) displayed his research results which focused

on lexical cohesion and rhetorical structure of news in general and newspaper headlines

in particular Distinctively, his corpus contained one hundred million words taken from the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Times and the Sunday Times in

1993 This corpus was preferred to a corpus of general English, such as the British National Corpus or the Bank of English because Morley was particularly interested in newspaper language

In Vietnam, news has been the target of research by many scholars during the last few decades Political–social news in English and Vietnamese newspapers was once investigated with regard to news discourse analysis by Nguyen Hoa (1999) Following Nguyen Hoa, many other researchers have paid much attention to news and continued to explore this area from different aspects and tenor such as international news on Internet newspapers (Nguyen Thi Viet Nga, 2007), critical discourse analysis of news on North Korean missile launches (Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, 2007), technology news (Trinh Hong Nam, 2008), or cohesive devices in online news discourse (Ngo Thi Tuyet Nhung, 2009) However, TV news is different from paper news, radio news and online news with regards to language use, news production, news delivering techniques, so on and so forth Yet, very few, not to say no, studies have been done in this field, particularly with the use of corpus analysis method It can be said that studies on news from corpus-based and cognitive approach have been very few and far between

1.1.5.2 Previous studies on news from corpus-based and cognitive approach

Gawronska (1999) and her co-authors studied the general architecture of an experimental system for English-Swedish written and spoken summarization of news reports and focused on the information extraction component Information extraction and information structuring was based on the notion of mental spaces - one of the central notions in cognitive semantics The summary generation component had access

to language specific ways of formulating news reports She proved that the text generator also provided the syntactic structures with prosodic markers that modify the default prosodic rules of the text-to-speech system that read the summary However, the study was conducted based on the theories and methods of machine translation The findings were also applied in the field of machine translation accordingly

After discussing some basic background of news language, approaches from which news has been examined and previous studies related to news, the author would like to move on to a detailed discussion of the theoretical background related to the study In the following section, first of all, the dissertation will focus on reviewing the literature

of cognitive linguistics and then, the specific models used in this research This will provide a basis for the elaboration of the analytical framework of the study

1.2 Cognitive linguistics

1.2.1 Overview

It has long been clear that cognitive development proceeds with the acquisition of language and that the two developmental processes are not only temporally but also causally connected According to a traditional view of what causes what, “it is the structure and operation of the mind that determines the grammatical and semantic structure of languages” (Lyons, 1995) Any linguistic theory that is based on the traditional view of the direction of causation between the mind and language is referred

to as cognitivism

The strong connections between Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and the research areas of functional linguistics, linguistic description, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse studies can be clearly seen Particularly, cognitivism has recently become very influential in linguistics, both in semantics and in grammar In Lyon’s viewpoint (1995:97), the terms “cognitive grammar” and “cognitive semantics” are now used quite widely in linguistics to refer to a variety of theories which have developed the basic principles of cognitivism in particular directions As Talmy (2000:21) specifies, the grammatical elements of a sentence determine the majority of the structure of the cognitive representation while the lexical elements together contribute the majority of its content The grammatical specifications in a sentence, thus, provide a conceptual framework or a skeletal structure or scaffolding for conceptual material that is lexically specified In other words, grammatical forms are semantically constrained while lexical forms basically are not; and the basic function of grammatical forms is to structure conception while that of lexical forms is to provide conceptual content With the interest

in cognitive semantics, the writer will further discuss the matters of cognitive semantics

in the following parts If there are any grammatical elements involved, they will be

looked at in the light of cognitive semantics, or with another term “semantics of grammar” or closed-class semantics

Before the in-depth semantic analysis with view to cognitivism, it is necessary to trace back to its original family - cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics came into life as

an independent branch of linguistics in the 1970s thanks to the dedication and passions

of some researchers who were interested in the relation of language and mind It is now considered as a powerful approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and general meaning construction

The distinguished linguists focusing centrally on cognitive principles and organization were Fillmore (1982, 1985), Lakoff (1992), Langacker (1987, 1991), and Talmy (2000) Each of these linguists began developing their own approach to language description and linguistic theory, centered on a particular set of phenomena and concerns One of the important assumptions shared by all of these scholars is that meaning is so central to language that it must be a primary focus of study Linguistic structures serve the function of expressing meanings and hence the mappings between meaning and form are a prime subject of linguistic analysis Linguistic forms, in this view, are closely linked to the semantic structures they are designed to express For many cognitive linguists, the main interest in cognitive linguistics lies in its provision of a better-grounded approach to and set of theoretical assumptions for syntactic and semantic theory than generative linguistics provides For others, however, an important appeal is the opportunity to link the study of language and the mind to the study of the brain

In Saeed’s viewpoint (2005:342), it is inadequate not to mention the main principles behind the approach of cognitive linguistics One principle is the division between formal and functional approaches to languages Formal approaches are often associated with a certain view of language and cognition: that knowledge of linguistic structures and rules form an autonomous module independent of other mental processes of attention, memory and reasoning This approach thus includes the study of syntactic, morphological, and morphemic structure The tradition of generative grammar has been centered in the formal approach It has all along referred to the importance of relating its grammatical component to a semantic component, and there has indeed been much good work on aspects of meaning, but this enterprise has generally not addressed the overall conceptual organization of language The formal semantics that has been

adopted within the generative tradition has largely included only enough about meaning

to correlate with the formal categories and operations that the main body of the tradition has focused on Functionalism, alternatively, implies a quite different view of language: that externally, principles of language use embody more general cognitive principles; and internally, that explanation must cross boundaries between levels of analysis It makes sense to look for principles shared across a wide range of cognitive domains Also in Saeed’s discussion of cognitive linguistics (2005:343), there is another distinction between diachronic and synchronic linguistics It has been accepted in many linguistics theories but is currently questioned in functional approaches Linguistic structures, in a functionalist perspective, have evolved through long periods of use and the processes of change are evident in and relevant to an understanding of the current use of language

The psychological approach regards language from the perspective of general cognitive systems such as perception, memory, attention, and reasoning In contrast, the conceptual approach of cognitive linguistics is concerned with the patterns in which and processes by which conceptual content is organized in language It has thus addressed the linguistic structuring of such basic conceptual categories as space and time, scenes and events, entities and processes, motion and location, and force and causation It addresses the semantic structure of morphological and lexical forms, as well as of syntactic patterns Additionally, it addresses the interrelationships of conceptual structures, such as those in metaphoric mapping, those within a semantic frame, those between text and context, and those in the grouping of conceptual categories into large structuring systems

Alternatively, Talmy, in his pre-final draft of an article appearing in “Semantics – An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning” (Maienborn, Heusinger & Portner, 2011) states that Cognitive linguistics further addresses the concerns of the other two approaches to language First, it examines the formal properties of language from its conceptual perspective Thus, it aims to account for grammatical structure in terms of the functions this serves in the representation of conceptual structure Second,

as one of its most distinguishing characteristics, cognitive linguistics aims to relate its findings to the cognitive structures that concern the psychological approach It aims both to help account for the behavior of conceptual phenomena within language in

terms of those psychological structures, and at the same time, to help work out some of the properties of those structures themselves on the basis of its detailed understanding of how language realizes them With its focus on the conceptual structure, cognitive linguistics regards "meaning" or "semantics" simply as conceptual content as it is organized by language

1.2.2 The nature of cognitive linguistics

According to Lakoff (1992) and other cognitive linguists such as Evans and Green (2006), there are two key commitments that make cognitive linguistics a distinctive enterprise They are Generalisation commitment and Cognitive commitment Especially, together with these two commitments, the nature of cognitive linguistics is basically focused on addressing the relationship between language, the mind and experience which is thoroughly discussed in the embodied cognition thesis

1.2.2.1 Generalisation commitment

Firstly, the Generalisation commitment is the commitment to the characterization of common principles that are responsible for all aspects of human language In modern linguistics, the study of language is often separated into distinct aspects such as phonology, semantics, pragmatics and so on Within formal approaches, it is claimed that these different aspects concern significantly different kinds of structuring principles However, within the light of Generalisation commitment, cognitive linguists deny such classification of the language system They argue that there are some areas of language such as categorization, polysemy and metaphor (Evans & Green, 2006:28) that make distinct language components share fundamental organization features

In terms of categorisation, one can generalize across what are often thought of as wholly distinct kinds of linguistic phenomena This makes categorization not criteria That is, human categories can both express fuzziness and family resemblance For example, applying categories to physical objects like cups as illustrated in Figure 1, it can be said that the degree of centrality is often a function of the way we interact with a particular category at any given time

Figure 1: Some members of the category “cup”

(Evans & Green, 2006:29)

In the figure above, figure 1(a) can be seen as the representative of the category “cup” However, the “cup” in 1(e) might be categorized as a “bowl” when it goes with a spoon for dining though it might be called a “cup” when it is used for drinking Although the category members in Figure 1 may be rated as being more or less representative of the category “cup”, each of the members appears to resemble others in a variety of ways Therefore, generalization of categories can be fuzzy, with some members of a category appearing to be more central and others more peripheral It hence can be referred that categories that exhibit degrees of centrality, with some members being more or less like other members of a category rather than sharing a single defining trait, are said to exhibit family resemblance

Similarly, categorization in morphology, in syntax, in phonology can also illustrate the nature of generalization For example:

John imports rugs

John is an importer of rugs

(Evans & Green, 2006:32)

In the example above, the categorization in syntax, particularly the parts of speech was done by nominalization of transitive verbs It can be said that, generalization firstly can

be achieved via categorization in many areas of human language Different theories of human languages are often united in the same objectives, one of which is generalization The second area that makes generalization universal in all theories is polysemy This is the phenomenon where a single linguistic unit exhibits multiple distinct but related meanings Traditionally, this term is restricted to the area of word meaning (lexical

semantics), where it is used to describe words like body which has a range of distinct meanings that are nevertheless related (for example, the human body; a corpse; the trunk of the human body; the main or central part of something) However, Cognitive linguists argue that polysemy is not restricted to word meaning but is a fundamental feature of human language In this view, the distinct areas of language all exhibit polysemy Cognitive linguists therefore view polysemy as a key to generalization across

a range of “distinct” phenomena, and argue that polysemy reveals important fundamental commonalities between lexical, morphological and syntactic organization Evans & Green (2006) successfully support this argument by giving persuasive examples for proofs as follows:

- Polysemy in the lexicon:

a The picture is over the sofa ABOVE

b The picture is over the hole COVERING

c The ball is over the wall ON-THE-OTHER-SIDE-OF

d The government handed over power TRANSFER

e She has a strange power over me CONTROL

These sentences illustrate various senses of “over”, which are listed in the right hand column While each is distinct, they can all be related to one another; they all derive from a central “above” meaning

selling well; and the attribute of dwelling in a specific location This demonstrates the capacity of morphological categories to exhibit polysemy

In sum, with regards to categorization, cognitive linguists argue that polysemy is a phenomenon common to “distinct” areas of language Both “fuzzy” categories and polysemy, then, are characteristics that unite all areas of human language and thus enable generalization within the cognitive linguistics framework

The last area that makes generalization a mutual feature of all linguistic theories is metaphor Cognitive linguists argue that metaphor-based meaning extension can also be identified across a range of distinct linguistic phenomena, and that metaphor therefore provides further evidence in favour of generalizing across the different areas of language (Evans & Green, 2006:38) For example:

- Metaphor in the lexicon:

a I’m on top of the situation

b She’s at the height of her powers

c His power rose

These examples illustrate that POWER or CONTROL is being understood in terms of greater elevation (UP) In contrast, lack of power or lack of control is conceptualized in terms of occupying a reduced elevation on the vertical axis (DOWN), as shown in:

a Her power is on the decline

b He is under my control

c He’s low in the company hierarchy

By virtue of the independent metaphor CONTROL IS UP, the lexical item over, which has an ABOVE meaning conventionally associated with it, can be understood metaphorically as indicating greater control Through frequency of use the meaning of CONTROL becomes conventionally associated with over in such a way that over can be used in non-spatial contexts like (19e), where it acquires the CONTROL meaning

- Metaphor in the syntax:

a [The rain] gave us some time

b [The missed ball] handed him the victory

These are extensions of the ditransitive construction, and are motivated by the existence

of the metaphor CAUSAL EVENTS ARE PHYSICAL TRANSFERS In these examples causal events are conceptualized as the transfer of a physical entity It is no problem understanding what this sentence means This is because we recognize the convention within our language system of understanding causal events metaphorically

in terms of physical transfer

In summary, generalization principle holds the view by cognitive linguists that various areas of human language share certain fundamental organizing principles One area in which this approach has achieved considerable success is in uniting the lexical system with the grammatical system, providing a unified theory of grammatical and lexical structure

1.2.2.2 Cognitive commitment

While the Generalization commitment is about principles of language structure that hold across all aspects of language, the Cognitive Commitment represents the view that principles of linguistic structure should reflect what is known about human cognition from other disciplines, particularly the other cognitive sciences (philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience) Put it differently, the Cognitive Commitment states that language and linguistic organisation should reflect general cognitive principles rather than cognitive principles that are specific to language particularly the other cognitive sciences (philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience) According to Evans & Green (2006:41), there are some lines of evidence that support the view that linguistic organization reflects more general cognitive function They include attention or profiling in language, categorization and metaphor

Attention is a human general cognitive ability to shift attention from one aspect of a scene to another Similarly, language provides ways of directing attention to certain aspects of the scene being linguistically encoded This general ability, manifest in language, is called profiling (Evans & Green, 2006: 41) One important way in which language exhibits profiling is in the range of grammatical constructions it has, each of which serves to profile different aspects of a given scene For instance, given a scene in

which a boy kicks over a vase causing it to smash, different aspects of the scene can be linguistically profiled:

a The boy kicks over the vase

b The vase is kicked over

c The vase smashes into bits

d The vase is in bits

In example (a) the entire action chain involving the doer and the effected is being profiled but example (b) only profiles the effected without mentioning the actor Example (c) is about the change in the state of the vase and sentence (d) is profiling a particular state In brief, each of the as above-exemplified is specialized for profiling a particular aspect of an action chain In this way, linguistic structure reflects human ability to attend to distinct aspects of a scene These examples demonstrate how linguistic organization reflects a more general cognitive ability

The two later evidences including categorization and metaphor were discussed in the part above In the cognitive framework, the same principles that hold for categorization

in general can also hold for linguistic categorization Also in cognitive view, metaphor

is a conceptual rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon

1.2.2.3 The embodied mind

Embodiment is the central idea in cognitive linguistics This thesis holds that the human mind and conceptual organization are functions of the ways in which human species-specific bodies interact with the inhabiting environment This theory is reasoned via the three following sub-principles:

- Experience is embodied: This idea states that we have a species-specific view of the

world because of the unique nature of our physical bodies Put it a little differently, our construal of reality is likely to be mediated in large measure by the nature of our bodies For example, human beings have different colour system from other species Therefore,

we have our own experience of colours in terms of the range of the colours in the colour spectrum Similarly, the physical environment together with our physical body structure determines related aspects of our experience in the way we do things, see things or response to the surroundings In other words, our experience is structured in part by the

nature of the bodies we have and by our neurological organization Cognitively, the concepts we have and the nature of the reality we think and talk about are a function of our embodiment Evans & Green (2006:46) explain that “we can only talk about what

we can perceive and conceive, and the things that we can perceive and conceive derive from embodied experience”

- Cognition is embodied: Because experience is embodied, cognition is embodied It is

experience that forms the basis of many of our most fundamental concepts The conceptual process is based on the term of image schemas – the term that many cognitive linguists used in their study such as Lakoff (1992), Jackendoff (1983), or Johnson (1987) Embodied concepts then can be systematically extended to provide more abstract concepts and conceptual domains This process is called “conceptual projection”

- Experiential realism: As a consequence of embodied experience and embodied

cognition, the human view of reality is affected Language does not directly reflect the world, it reflects human construal of the world In other words, the world is described through the human lens of embodiment

1.2.2.4 Cognitive approach to semantics and grammar

Cognitive linguistics can be broadly divided into two main areas: cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar However, unlike other approaches to linguistics, cognitive linguistics puts much emphasis on the role of meaning In cognitive view, a model of meaning (a cognitive semantics) has to be delineated before an adequate cognitive model of grammar can be developed Hence a “cognitive grammar assumes a cognitive semantics and is dependent upon it This is because grammar is viewed within the cognitive framework as a meaningful system in and of itself, which therefore shares important properties with the system of linguistic meaning and cannot be meaningfully separated from it” (Evans & Green, 2006:48)

In summary, cognitive semantics is primarily concerned with investigating conceptual structure and processes of conceptualization, that is, cognitive semanticists are not primarily concerned with studying linguistic meaning for its own sake, but rather for what it can reveal about the nature of the human conceptual system For cognitive semanticists, language is a tool for investigating conceptual organization In contrast,

cognitive approaches to grammar are primarily concerned with studying the language system itself, and with describing that system, and our knowledge of that system, on the basis of the properties of the conceptual system It can be referred that cognitive semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar are ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Evans

& Green, 2006:170): cognitive semanticists rely on language to help them understand how the conceptual system works, while cognitive grammarians rely on what is known about the conceptual system to help them understand how language works

With the above discussed interrelationship of cognitive approach to semantics and grammar, the study would mostly focus on cognitive semantics with in-depth investigation of mental spaces and Figure-Ground conceptualization Here and there, grammatical properties have been mentioned but they have still been explored in the view of meaning structure and conceptualization

1.2.3 Cognitive semantics

It can be said that the first pioneer of cognitive semantics is Leonard Talmy who has had great contributions in building up the theory Sharing his ideas with Ibarretxe-Antuqano (2006), he puts much emphasis on the significance of cognitive semantics From his point of view, understanding how the mind works entails understanding the principles of organization that characterize it overall and that characterize its various systems And this understanding is not only valuable in its own right, but can also serve

as an entry to further understanding those of other systems or of the whole, whether by generalizing the similarities or by contrasting the differences This certainly holds for language More specifically, language consists of components like phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics with relatively distinct principles of organization, perhaps even with further distinct principles for different subcomponents within these Each of these sets of organizational principles — besides their necessity in understanding language as a cognitive system — needs to be compared for similarities and differences against the principles found in other cognitive systems and in cognition overall, so that

we can map out how cognition is organized In his discovery, semantics may have several different subcomponents, each with its own sets of principles Language has a system dedicated to representing structure, in particular, a system of formal structure for representing conceptual structure Comparisons can be made across different cognitive

systems, since language has an explicit indicator of its structural properties, it may offer the best entry to a cross-systems study of cognitive organization

Interestingly, Kuhn (2004) and his co-authors make a quite adequate summary of the core ideas characterizing a cognitive approach to semantics which are:

(1) Meaning is conceptualization in a cognitive model (not truth conditions in possible worlds) Semantics for a language is seen as a mapping from the expressions of the language to some cognitive or mental entities

(2) Cognitive models are mainly perceptually determined (meaning is not independent of perception) Since the cognitive structures are connected to our perceptual mechanisms, directly or indirectly, it follows that meanings are, at least partly, perceptually grounded This, again, is in contrast to traditional realist versions of semantics that claim that since meaning is a mapping between the language and the external world (or several worlds or formal models of them), meaning has nothing to do with perception

(3) Semantic elements are based on spatial or topological objects (not symbols that can be concatenated according to some system of rules) The mental structures applied in cognitive semantics are the meanings of the linguistic idioms; there is no further step of translating conceptual structure to something outside the mind The conceptual schemes that are used to represent meanings are often based on geometric or spatial constructions

(4) Cognitive models are primarily image-schematic (not propositional) Image schemas are transformed by metaphoric and metonymic operations (which are treated as exceptional features in the traditional view) Metaphors and metonymies have been notoriously difficult to handle within traditional semantic theories In contrast, they are given key positions within cognitive semantics (5) Concepts show prototype effects The classical account of concepts within philosophy is Aristotle's theory of necessary and sufficient conditions As a result of a growing dissatisfaction with this theory, an alternative theory was developed within cognitive psychology This is the so-called prototype theory where the main idea is that within a category of objects, like those instantiating a