Cognitive Operations in Tropes: The Case of Parameterisation

8 pages•Published: February 23, 2017

Abstract

Over the last few years, the study of cognitive operations from both a pragmatic and a cognitive angle (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014) has gradually received more and more attention. According to Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2014), parameterisation is based on world knowledge and is cued by the linguistic expression, resulting in the fixation of a generic value which is otherwise undefined to a greater or lesser extent, as in John drinks standing for ‘John usually drinks alcohol’ or Something has happened meaning ‘something bad has happened.’
Following Herrero (2009), in this paper we attempt to analyse how parameterisation applies in some tropes (overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism) by placing constraints on how far the operations that underlie them, strengthening and mitigation, can go.
The examples have been extracted from a multi-faced corpus compiled from The British National Corpus, The Corpus of American English, and Google searches.

Keyphrases: cognitive linguistics, Cognitive operations, Parameterisation, pragmatics, tropes

In: Chelo Vargas-Sierra (editor). Professional and Academic Discourse: an Interdisciplinary Perspective, vol 2, pages 191--198

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/hC4b
	https://doi.org/10.29007/5j6z