Getting started ...

A year and a half into my PhD project, this blog is long overdue! It will, I hope, serve the purpose of helping me keeping track of my readings and ongoing thoughts as well as helping me to remain focused and ultimately achieve a real sense of direction -- at last!

Here is a little bit of background for my research:

The specificity of my project lies in that it brings together the fields of Interlanguage and Cognitive semantics.

First, interlanguage:

Interlanguage, as defined by the OED refers to ‘a linguistic system typically developed by a student before acquiring fluency in a foreign language, and containing elements of either his or her native tongue and of the target language’. So broadly, interlanguage could be considered as a sort of hybrid of two linguistic systems. Effectively, there are many types of interlanguage, depending on the native language of the speaker and his/her second language. My research focuses particularly on the French-English type of interlanguage where the speakers’ first language is French and their second language is English.

The case of Interlanguage is currently raising some interest in the fields of psycholinguistics and neuroscience as researchers are trying to identify the nature of the relations between L1 and L2 in the bilingual mind (e.g. Obler 1993, Snellings 2002, Finkbeiner, Almeida, Janssen and Caramazza 2006, Kovelman, Baker and Pettito 2008). Recent research in neurolinguistics (Kovelman, Baker and Pettito 2008) supports the existing view that “bilinguals have differentiated neural representations of their two languages” (p. 165). Further, another recent study concerned with the selection of lexicon in bilingual speech production, Finkbeiner, Almeida, Janssen and Caramazza (2006), recognises the potentially complicated process of bilingual lexical access in which “concept selection serves to activate two lexical representations to an equal extent” (p. 1075). In other words, there is the possibility of interference between the bilingual’s two linguistic systems. This view is generally recognised in cross-linguistic investigations on interlanguage and second language (L2) knowledge organisation. However, the issue of cross-linguistic interference from a semantic perspective remains under-investigated.


My project offers to investigate first language (L1) and L2 interferences using the cognitive semantics framework. So I am looking at possible interferences of L1 and L2 at conceptual level. Cognitive linguists, generally, are concerned with language use in relation to conceptual representation (conceptual structure (i.e. knowledge representation) and conceptualisation processes (i.e. meaning representation), and they postulate that our bodily experiences contribute to the way we conceptualise the physical world.

On that basis, Image-Schemas have been recognised as one possible cognitive process that reinterprets sensory information as conceptual representation. So Image-schemas are like analogue representations of perceptual states from which lexical meanings can derive and they profile word meanings. Talmy (1981) argues that the meanings of the English modals (may, can, must, etc.) derive from the experiential domain of force dynamics which itself includes a number of Image-Schemas: compulsion, restraint, enablement, blockage, counterforce, attraction, resistance. The literature recognises MAY as referring to the Image-Schema of ‘removal of restraint’ and CAN as referring to that of ‘enablement’. The semantic domain of force dynamics is also applied to the French modal verb POUVOIR in Achard (1996). It is worthy to note here that French doesn’t differentiate lexically between MAY and CAN. Both lexical forms are included under the umbrella of POUVOIR.


According to Lakoff (1987), Image-Schemas can be transformed which means that shifts in the profiling of specific lexical items can take place and thus allow for semantic shifts to be observed. I here question whether those shifts (image-schematic and ultimately semantic shifts) can be equally observed in French-English interlanguage, on the basis of the cognitive economy principle. One way to start tackling the question is to carry out a quantitative analysis of the corpus to find out whether the schemas of ‘enablement’ and ‘restraint’ are activated in equal frequency by French English learners and native English speakers.


Generally, within the Cognitive Linguistics framework it is assumed that the meanings of linguistic forms are understood relative to background/encyclopaedic knowledge. In other words, they are understood as part of a specific experiential domain. Clausner and Croft (1999) make a case for Image-Schematic domains and they argue that Image-Schemas are a subtype of domain. They also argue that Image-Schematic domains show internal structure and that the Image-Schemas included within a specific Image-Schematic domain stand in various relationships. Their argument leads to the speculation that i) POUVOIR, MAY and CAN are all included in the same experiential domain of force dynamics, ii) as separate lexical items, they profile word meanings in different ways and iii) as part of a common structured domain they stand in various relationships. This implies that theoretically, image-schematic shifts could take place cross-linguistically, thus allowing to speculate that cross-linguistic semantic shifts take place at conceptual level.

At this point, a question would be: how do image-schematic shifts (i.e. transformations) take place? Clausner and Croft argue that Image-Schema transformations are the result of the mapping of one image-Schema onto another (1999:23). A few months ago, as an experiment, I started exploring the idea of possible Image-Schema mappings between MAY, CAN and POUVOIR. Although the idea needs to be further investigated, early results seemed to prompt towards a possible metonymic relation between the Image-Schema profiled by POUVOIR and those profiled by MAY/CAN.


Now the corpus data really needs to be scrutinised quantitatively and qualitatively! More on that in the next post …