Search

Despite the extensive interest in cross-linguistic constructional research over the past few decades, the resultative construction in Spanish has largely been overlooked. Unlike its high productivity in English, in Spanish, this construction is confined to very specific contexts such as the culinary or gastronomic scenario or situations involving chromatic change. The present study is contrastive in two senses: on the one hand, it provides a descriptive analysis of the formal and functional differences and similarities of this construction in both languages, and on the other hand, it adopts a lexical-constructional approach combining the theoretical and methodological principles of Goldberg’s (1995) and Boas’s (2003) Construction Grammars. Both principles, traditionally opposed in the literature, aim to determine to what extent the observed properties of the construction under study can be predicted from Goldberg’s generalisations at the constructional level, the event-frame evoked by the predicate as advocated by Boas, or any other factor such as contextual background information or pragmatics. The results of this study are based on the analysis of 1,173 corpus examples of English and Spanish resultative expressions with verbs of cooking and colouring drawn from Levin’s (1993) classification. The data reveal distinctive traits of the Spanish resultative construction with no parallel in English: (i) the unacceptability of inanimate instrument subjects and the prepositional form of the resultative phrase in resultatives with verbs of cooking, (ii) the preference for the prepositional realization of the resultative phrase in examples with verbs of colouring, (iii) the collocational restrictions of the predicates pintar (“paint”) and manchar (“stain”) with regards to the semantic nature of the subject or the form of the RP respectively. In addition, this study demonstrates that finergrained analyses of the predicates’ event-frames, as those put forward by Boas (2003), make it possible to arrive at more accurate predictions about the idiosyncratic properties of each language than Goldberg’s (1995) broad-scale generalizations, some of which have been refuted. Furthermore, it demonstrates that contextual background information largely determines the observed syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of the resultative construction.

Background This study examines the Arabic semi-prepositional contronym /warā’a/ in the Holy Quran, which conveys the dual meanings of ‘behind’ and ‘in front of.’ By employing cognitive linguistic frameworks—Prototype Theory, Image Schema Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Frame Semantics—the research investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying the term’s semantic versatility. Methods An in-depth cognitive linguistic analysis was conducted, supported by collocational analysis to explore how /warā’a/ is interpreted in diverse contexts. The study analyzed both prototypical spatial meanings and their metaphorical extensions, focusing on semantic priming and contextual interpretation. Results The findings reveal that the prototypical spatial meaning of /warā’a/ (‘behind’) dynamically extends to metaphorical and temporal contexts, encompassing ideas of concealment, control, deliberate ignorance, future anticipation, and other nuanced interpretations. The research highlights the role of semantic priming in shaping contextual meanings and offers actionable insights for translation accuracy in religious texts. Conclusions This study fills gaps in existing research by providing a detailed exploration of /warā’a/’s semantic complexity. It bridges theoretical insights and practical applications, offering innovative strategies for linguistics and translation studies. Future research directions include cross-linguistic studies of contronyms, psycholinguistic experiments on contradictory meanings, and culturally-informed cognitive-semantic translation strategies. This work contributes significantly to Arabic linguistics and cognitive translation studies.

The article explores the metaphorical conceptualization of emotions. Conceptual metaphors are understood here as frames (i.e., structures of knowledge in long-term memory) in their own right. For modeling both the source and target domains of metaphors, the CoMetNet (Conceptual Metaphor Network) project uses frames documented in the German FrameNet-Constructicon project in spite of ad hoc created domains in previous literature. By doing so, it strives for a more empirically motivated description of conceptual metaphors. Drawing on a specialized corpus, it is shown that (1) our frame-semantic approach permits addressing the status of emotion concepts in the conceptual and linguistic system. More specifically, it shows that (2) frame elements (FEs) reflect adequately which aspects are relevant in the conceptualization of emotions and that (3) the complexity of emotion concepts can be thought of as an interplay between (different types of) frames. However, there are still some challenges for CoMetNet, e.g., the frame-semantic description of emotion metaphors that draw on highly schematic and scalar source domains.