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How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental "platonic" ideality independent of indi- vidual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent lin- guistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will sub- stantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental prag- matics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve coop- erative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and ap- praising subjective experiences.

This text has two parts. In the first section, we intend to define the narrative schema - the canonical plot structure - as a symbolic form in Ernst Cassirer's sense of the term. This basically implies that the narrative schema is not an invariant higher order combinatorial form, but may itself be subject to variations in view of yielding specific meaning effects. This is because the production and reception of a narrative is a dynamic process where physical forces, modal forces and intentions set up a space of possibilities for the narrative trajectory. We therefore propose a determination of the narrative schema in terms of force dynamics.' In the next section we proceed to an analysis of Ernst Hemingway's 'A Very Short Story' in order to illustrate this point. We lay down the main elements of its remarkable, if not simply outstanding both narrative and semantic-configurational structure: its plot structure is indeed driven by an inverted narrative schema and each significant event in the story but one (as well as each physical paragraph but one) has its rigorously symmetrical counterpart. Moreover, this inverted schema can be explained in terms of the modal forces at stake in the narrative.

The paper develops a characterization of nominal compounds. The analysis is carried out on frame-schematic and construction-grammatical grounds. It rests on assumptions about cognitive processing long since known within cognitive linguistics, but it criticizes certain linguistic applications of Fau- connier and Turner's theory of conceptual integration, which historically is a reelaboration of Lakoand Johnson's theory of metaphor. The first section sums up two classical approaches in the analysis of nom- inal compounds; it comments on their inadequacies, and how these have been assessed by Fauconnier and Turner; next, it sketches out the way these two authors and other scholars in blending theory have traditionally ana- lyzed nominal compounds in terms of conceptual integration, and finally one of the major drawbacks of this approach is identified: namely, its lim- ited descriptive import. In the following section, the authors unfold their own semantic analysis. A non-trivial and non-standard compositional theory is proposed, likely to capture the general way in which semantic parts of a compound configure into a semantic whole. Hereafter the authors proceed to a summary survey of how this scaolding is actually instantiated or processed cognitively. A crucial dierence between processing of literal and metaphorical com- pounds is established. Thus, the approach has a double scope: it aims at characterizing both the semantics of compounds and the way the semantics is cognitively accessed.