“How Theory Informs Application and How Application Informs Theory” Laura A. Janda University of Tromsø (laura.janda@hum.uit.no; http://hum.uit.no/lajanda) University of North Carolina (janda@unc.edu; http://www.unc.edu/~lajanda) Thank the organizers and the participants Before I start, I’d like to tell a little anecdote. One of my best friends and favorite colleagues in the Slavic field is a generativist whom I have known for over thirty years now. A few years ago I asked him what applications there might be for generative linguistics in the language classroom. His answer was “none”. That was a real non-starter, I had to find another topic to move the conversation to… And on several occasions other colleagues have told me that “real” linguists don’t write textbooks… This talk has been inspired by the theme of this conference: “Cognitive linguistics in action: from theory to application and back” One person’s attempt to use both theory and application to fuel a research agenda There is a general tendency to overlook and underestimate the value of application – this tendency is supported by the hiring, tenure, and promotion processes at universities, and also by the reviewing and ranking of scholarly publications. I’m not saying that there is anything really wrong with these structures, but they do have a certain effect on the relative prestige of working on applications. The purpose of this talk is NOT to suggest in any way that either theory or application is superior over the other. BOTH have their roles, and both are important. The idea here is to show how they can inform each other in just the kind of cyclic way suggested by my title “How Theory Informs Application and How Application Informs Theory”.

Overview What is the Role of Linguistics? Narrow Scope vs. Broad Scope agendas Three Examples of Theory and Application Case meaning Aspect meaning Aspectual clusters of verbs Relevant Works in Theory and Application Brief philosophical introduction about linguistics in terms of theory and application What are the different goals and audiences of work done in theory and application and how they can feed into each other Three examples of work I have done. In each example, I began with a theoretical investigation which led to a model designed to account for specific data. This led to the creation of pedagogical materials with a broader scope, and I will demonstrate all of these briefly. However, in the course of creating pedagogical materials to account for entire subsystems in the grammars of Russian and Czech (and Polish), I discovered new patterns and phenomena that I would not have noticed otherwise. These discoveries led me back to undertake further, more theory-oriented research. Finally I will show in concrete terms (scholarly production) how this process of going from theory to application and back has produced results.

What is the Role of Linguistics? Pure theory – science for science’s sake Application – science for other people too creation of teaching materials, reference grammars, dictionaries computer software: translation, language recognition, text interpretation field work on languages, dialects language planning/policy, intervention Cognitive linguistics has a tradition of being accountable to other disciplines, so why not be accountable to society? is transparent enough to be used in application This is a question I have often posed to both myself and colleagues. In terms of theory and application, we might suggest that there are two answers. It is important to keep in mind that these two answers are NOT mutually exclusive. One is that it is just pure theory and science for science’s sake. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed if we didn’t have visionary theorists, we wouldn’t have our science at all. So science for science’s sake is important. The other answer is that linguistics can contribute to applications that are valuable for people other than linguists. Some of these applications might include teaching materials and language resources, computer technologies for dealing with real-language interfaces, primary research on documenting languages and dialects, consulting on programs to revitalize smaller languages and get them needed political protections Cognitive linguistics has a tradition of being accountable to other disciplines, like psychology, neurobiology, etc. so why not be accountable to society? One big advantage of cog lx is that it you can use it in applications without requiring anyone to master a big theoretical artifice – the results are relatively easy to transfer to applications. [click for box] I am going to focus on the first kind of application, the one that makes a difference in the language classroom. All language learners have bodies, and they can use their embodied physical experience to make sense of the metaphors that underlie foreign languages.

Narrow Scope vs. Broad Scope Different audiences, different goals Narrow (theory-based) Scholarly publications Peer review Specific theoretical contributions Broad (application-based) Pedagogical materials Complete coverage I will use some illustrations of fans as a visual metaphor running through this talk. The closed fan symbolizes a tightly focused theoretical contribution, and the open fan symbolizes a wider application. Again, I want to remind you that I am not suggesting superiority for either approach. click Each has its own place and value, just as a fan can have different uses depending upon its state. A closed fan can be used to point at specific things, whereas an open fan can be used for cover or cooling. Our scholarly publications are for the most part pretty narrow. This is partly due to the nature of science – this kind of research is hard to do, and the horizons of our knowledge are gradually pushed forward in tiny increments. It is also partly due to the peer-review process, which makes it easier to get narrow contributions published, and disadvantages broader works, which constitute a bigger target for anonymous peer reviewers. It is thus usually the narrower works that receive the prestige of publication in scholarly journals. And this means that there is less prestige (and less recognition by our universities) attached to broader applications. The audience of broader applications is primarily our students, whose goal is to pass an exam at the end of the semester, or to learn to speak a language well. They are interested in macroscopic issues. They don’t want part of an answer. They want an explanation that will apply as broadly and exhaustively as possible. The advantage is that they can force us as scholars to take a comprehensive look at a phenomenon and connect all the dots of a given system, often giving us new perspectives on language phenomena. In this talk, I would like to suggest that both approaches can co-exist and even inform each other in a research agenda. Both approaches can contribute to a research agenda

Linguistic research Pedagogical materials Further linguistic research So here is the process as I have experienced it. I usually start with a narrowly-focused theoretical issue, looking at a more limited dataset, producing peer-reviewable work. Over time, I develop a model click which can be transformed into teaching materials that are accountable to an entire subsystem of a language. In the course of this process, I am typically forced to confront more data, more related phenomena, and I uncover more patterns and issues which inspire further more narrowly-focused research and more scholarly work In fact,I find that the end product of this loop actually tends to open up entirely new directions that send me back through the loop again with a new topic. As we will see, work on my first set of issues (case meaning) actually led to work on aspect meaning, which then led to work on aspectual clusters…, so in a sense it is more of a cycle than a loop. Further linguistic research

Applications inspired by theory and theory inspired by applications Three Examples Case meaning Aspect meaning Aspectual clusters of verbs In each instance, primary research served as the basis for pedagogical materials, and in turn, work on pedagogical materials led to further progress in research The bulk of this talk will be devoted to three examples of how theory has led to application, and application has led back to theory again. click All are drawn from research on Slavic languages, primarily Czech and Russian, and all have to do with major subsystems of the grammar that are metaphorically motivated. The first is case meaning and the other two have to do with aspect, specifically the meaning difference signaled by Perfective vs. Imperfective aspect and the meaning differences among Perfectives that account for what I call aspectual clusters Although at the time I was not really consciously choreographing my research to follow the loop from research to application and back, now that I take a step back ward, I can see that I have done exactly that with three somewhat overlapping sets of research topics. Somehow every time I managed to develop a model, I was tempted to try it out in the classroom, and doing that led to new realizations and further research. So for me, at least, this was a natural progression. In each of the three examples, we will look first at the main ideas and an illustration from the initial theoretically-based investigation, and then click, click we will look at a demonstration of the pedagogical materials that were inspired by the theoretical model, and then we will look at the more narrowly-focused research topics that got launched while I was working on those materials. It is important to note that pedagogical applications are typically the work of more than one author, and indeed the materials on aspectual meaning involved a fairly large team, all of whom I won’t be able to name in this presentation, but without whom it would have been impossible for me to realize my vision. Now let us begin with the first example…

Case Meaning Main Ideas: Most Slavic languages obligatorily mark all NPs with one of six or seven cases: N, A, D, G, L, I, (V) Each case is polysemous, with meanings arranged in a radial category, which forms a coherent whole Prototypical meanings are based on embodied physical experience; peripheral meanings are extended via metaphor and metonymy With the exceptions of Macedonian and Bulgarian, where there now remain only vestiges of a case system restricted to pronouns, in the remaining Slavic languages all noun phrases are case marked, in a system with 6 or 7 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Locative, Instrumental, and in some languages also Vocative. Case use, when it was explained at all in traditional grammars and textbooks, was usually described just by listing typical syntactic roles and prepositions and verbs associated with given cases. This information was atomistic and incomplete. The main goals of my theoretical research on case have been to work out the relationships between the various meanings, figuring out what concrete prototypical meanings form the core for the networks of extensions that motivate the polysemy we observe in case meaning. In a very real sense, this research agenda was actually initially inspired by my own experience as a learner of Slavic languages, by the frustrations I endured because often even though I knew all the words in a sentence and could parse it accurately, I still didn’t know what the sentence meant because my textbooks had told me only about a very small portion of the uses of case. This experience made me want to master the meanings of case.

Case Meaning An example: The Russian genitive case is used with prepositions meaning ‘from’ to indicate physical withdrawal and also with verbs meaning ‘fear’, ‘be ashamed of’ indicating emotional (metaphorical) withdrawal Physical withdrawal: Doč’ prišla iz školy [Daughter-N came from school-G] ‘My daughter has come from school’ Metaphorical withdrawal: Doč’ bojalas’/stydilas’ bednosti [Daughter-N feared/was ashamed poverty-G] ‘My daughter was afraid/ashamed of poverty’ Here is an example. The genitive case in Russian can be governed by a rather baffling array of prepositions and verbs. But when viewed from the perspective of a radial category, it is easier to see clear well-motivated patterns. One of the core prototypical meanings of the genitive involves withdrawal from, most often associated with prepositions, as in this example: Doč’ prišla iz školy . This meaning of physical withdrawal serves as the source domain for other, metaphorical, types of withdrawal, thus explaining the association of verbs like bojat’sja ‘be afraid’ and stydit’sja ‘be ashamed’ with the genitive case. Similar explanations can be found throughout the landscape of Slavic case.

Case Meaning Individual studies of case meaning: Pragmatic & semantic (1988) Dative & Instrumental (1993) Genitive (1999) Accusative (2000) Pedagogical/linguistic resources: Case Book for Russian (2002) Case Book for Czech (2006) Reference grammar of Czech (2000) Here is how the research agenda on case meaning unfolded: click, click First I worked on my theoretical model, which, as you can see took a long time, and was built up one case at a time, ultimately covering four cases and involving comparisons across Czech and Russian. I never actually finished the whole system in this stage, since I didn’t cover the Nominative and the Locative. But I had to make up for that deficiency when I took up the creation of pedagogical materials namely a complete description of the case systems for Russian and Czech, both co-authored with Steven Clancy, with a third book in the series devoted to Polish soon to be completed, plus a reference grammar of Czech, co-authored with Charles Townsend, which incorporates my description of case meaning. Oddly enough, scholars continue to cite my 1993 book on the dative and instrumental, without considering the case books, where the analysis is more complete and mature, though it is presented for learners. In the click demonstrations, please note that though cog lx is the basis for all this work, it is never mentioned by name, and indeed, I specifically avoid any unnecessary linguistic terminology, which is restricted only to words like: noun, preposition, verb. Note also that ALL of the examples are real language data, collected from various corpora, not sanitized textbook examples. Also, these materials were designed to cover ALL meanings of case in the given languages, which means that hundreds of examples were used, in both text and interactive exercises. DEMONSTRATIONS

Further case research inspired by applications Case government by nouns and adjectives Near-synonymy of different cases within Russian & across Slavic Comparison of time expressions across Czech, Polish, Russian MDS modeling of case across Slavic languages (Clancy 2006) Case as an element in construction grammar (with Solovyev) Use of case in attenuated agency (with Divjak) So here are some examples of further research that got inspired by the Case Books. click, click Well, while working on the case books, I realized that although the government of case by prepositions and verbs is well-documented, the same is not true for nouns and adjectives, and oddly enough deverbal nouns do not always have the same government as the verbs they are derived from, nor are there clear inheritance patterns for adjectives in this sense. Furthermore, there are many nouns and adjectives that are non-derived but govern a case nonetheless. Of course the explanations are semantic. Within a given Slavic language there are often border zones within the case system where a nearly synonymous idea can be expressed by more than one case. These instances of case competition made for some fine-tuned analyses. Also, there are significant differences in the use of the “same” cases across the various Slavic languages. This led me to undertake a bit of syntactic dialect geography, which yielded results mostly parallel to dialect geography of Slavic in terms of phonology. Furthermore, when I looked at what kinds of cross-linguistic differences in case marking there were within Slavic, I noticed something else namely that by far the largest domain that showed difference was that of time, with that domain alone accounting for nearly a third of all variation. Expressions of time were and continue to be a fascination, and this carried over into the later investigations of aspect. I wasn’t the only one to be hooked on comparing case across Slavic – my case book co-author, Steven Clancy, has undertaken a more sophisticated comparison supported by multi-dimensional scale modeling, an approach pioneered by Bill Croft. Case meaning continues to offer me new opportunities. While reading Adele Goldberg’s latest book Constructions at Work, I became intrigued by the idea of piecing together a comprehensive construction grammar for case languages. Part of that endeavor became the paper I just gave at the Sopot parasession last week, and this relates also to a project that looks at the syntactic profiles of nouns based on corpus data collected by Valerij Solovyev. Finally one thing that is striking about Russian as opposed to English or even most Slavic languages, is the use of the dative case in impersonal expressions that would use a nominative subject in other languages. This tendency to avoid expression of agency has its roots in the meanings of the dative case and its relationship to other cases in closely related constructions, and this is an issue that I have pursued together with Dagmar Divjak. Overall, case meaning has turned out to be a treasure trove that I am still mining out. Creating pedagogical materials forced me to undertake a comprehensive description of case systems, but these in turn have yielded a wealth of ideas that I might never have had otherwise, because I might not have seen the patterns if I wasn’t forced to connect all the dots.

Aspect Meaning Main Ideas: Slavic Aspect contrasts Perfective vs. Imperfective This contrast is metaphorically motivated by embodied physical experience with discrete solid objects (Perfective) vs. fluid substances (Imperfective) This contrast is relevant at the level of event structure, discourse, and pragmatics Now for our second example, the meaning of aspect. In the Slavic languages, a given verb, in all of its paradigm, is either Perfective or Imperfective, regardless of whatever other categories it might express. Like case meaning, aspect use was traditionally described in terms of long lists of uses, many of which appeared contradictory and unmotivated. My goal was to describe the meanings of the Perfective and Imperfective aspects in a more coherent way, and I discovered that physical matter served as a rich source domain that accounts for the uses of aspect, all of which can be considered metaphorical. Basically Perfective events are understood as metaphorical discrete solid objects, which have clear boundaries and are unique and countable, as opposed to Imperfective events which are understood as metaphorical fluid substances and therefore lack inherent boundaries and shapes, and are neither unique nor countable, but can be spread about. Furthermore, many of the seeming contradictions in use of aspect can be cleared up when we realize that this metaphor is applied at three different levels, and that subsequent levels can trump prior ones. So at the first level the metaphor applies to the inherent structure of events. At the discourse level, the metaphor applies to how events interact, which can motivate a different construal. And lastly at the pragmatic level this metaphor invokes differences in satisfaction, comfort, and danger associated with physical objects, again motivating construals that can concur with or override those at the event and discourse level.

Aspect Meaning An example: Discrete solid object: Has shape/edges, is unique, two cannot occupy the same place Perfective event: Has clear beginning/end, is unique, expresses sequences Oleg sel v mašinu i poexal v restoran ‘Oleg got into the car and drove to the restaurant’ Fluid substance: Has no shape/edges, is not unique, two can be mixed in the same place Imperfective event: No clear beginning/end, not unique, expresses simultaneity Oleg nosil galstuk i ezdil na sportivnoj mašine ‘Oleg wore a tie and drove a sportscar’ Here is an example of how the rich domain of embodied experience we all have with matter motivates Russian aspect. click First let’s take a discrete solid object like this apple. It has a shape, it has edges, it has a distinct identity (no other apple can also be this apple, making this one unique), and I can’t put two apples into the exact same location – the best I can do is to set one next to the other one. These are just a few of the things that we know about discrete solid objects thanks to our embodied experience. So how does this relate to a Perfective event? Well, like my apple, a Perfective event has a definite shape, which means that we know that it had a discrete beginning and/or end, that we are talking about a single, unique event, and when I have more than one such event, the normal interpretation is that they are not at the same temporal location, but next to each other, and therefore sequenced. Here is a sentence with two Perfective events, each of which has clear boundaries and is unique. The normal interpretation of this sentence is as a sequence. Now we will contrast this experience with that of substances and Imperfective events. A fluid substance like this sand has no inherent shape or boundaries and I can’t count it unless I put it in buckets, and furthermore sand is just sand, without unique identity, which can be spread around. And if I have two piles of sand, I can easily blend them together in the same place. Like sand, an Imperfective event is not understood to have a clear beginning or end, it doesn’t have to be unique, and if I have two such events, they can easily occupy the same temporal location, making them simultaneous. So here is a sentence with two Imperfective events, neither of which tell us anything about temporal boundaries or uniqueness, and which are understood to be simultaneous. These examples illustrate just a few of the many meanings of Perfective and Imperfective that are isomorphic to parameters of physical matter.

Aspect Meaning Perfective vs. Imperfective: Metaphorical model (2004) Pedagogical/linguistic resources: User-friendly model for instructors (2003) Aspect in Russian Media Module Here is how this research developed. click, click Again I started with a theoretical model, which I wrote up in an article in Cognitive Linguistics. Then I started looking for ways to make this model accessible to teachers and learners of Russian. I wrote one article for pedagogues, and I also got a grant from the National Science Foundation to create an interactive media module. The medial module was realized within a science education development group at UNC which included more members than I ever actually met or worked with directly, but the most important among them were Catherine Macallister (Educational design), Kerry O’Sullivan (graphic design), and Donny Lofland (programming). This mediamodule has been used and continues to be used at at least two dozens institutions across the US and Europe. click demonstration – virtual experiments DEMONSTRATION

Further aspect metaphor research inspired by applications Differences in metaphorical extension across Slavic Conversion patterns and aspectual clusters Semantic motivations for aspectual clusters As we saw with case meaning, work on a more comprehensive pedagogical presentation of the model, led me back to basic research and ultimately led me to start a new cycle too. click, click Among the new things I worked on as a result was a sketch of how the matter to event structure metaphor differs in its extension across Slavic I also noticed that different verbs showed different behaviors in terms of convertibility, and this initiated the idea of aspectual clusters, which we will get to next. Furthermore, I began to realize that some similar metaphors were at work in determining what kinds of aspectual relations there were between verbs within a cluster. So my next move was to explore aspectual relationships among verbs built from the same lexical item, basically what I call clusters.

Aspectual Clusters of Verbs Main Ideas: Traditional “pair” model fails to account for aspectual relationships among verbs Four different types of Perfective verbs can be distinguished on the basis of both meaning (metaphorically motivated) and word-formation Natural Perfective, Specialized Perfective, Complex Act Perfective, Single Act Perfective An aspectual cluster contains an Imperfective Activity verb plus 0-4 types of Perfective verbs An implicational hierarchy predicts the structures of existing clusters Traditionally it has been assumed in Slavic that the relationship between Perfective and Imperfective verbs built from the same lexical item was that of an aspectual “pair” containing a single Imperfective verb and its Perfective aspectual partner. While the “pair” model had always seemed inadequate to me, it wasn’t until I had collected a lot of data on the physical matter metaphor of aspect that I began to realize that there could be an alternative to the pair model, a model that would comport better with the messy reality of aspectual relationships among Russian verbs. Given that there are aspectual relationships between Perfective and Imperfective verbs, there is no necessity to assume that they are paired in a 1-to-1 relationship. Other, 1-to-many relationships, could also account for the phenomena traditionally described as pairs, and I found that Russian actually has clear distinctions among different types of Perfectives. So in a nutshell, my proposal is that aspectual “pairs” represent only a portion of a system where an Imperfective verb can be related to a number of Perfectives. It is possible to distinguish four types of Perfectives, both semantically and derivationally. There is a Natural Perfective which describes the culmination of a completable activity, and is usually the Perfective that is considered the aspectual partner in the pair model. So Russian has two verbs for ‘write’ – one that is Imperfective and just describes the activity, and one that describes the completion of a document. In addition, there are Specialized Perfectives that give a specific path and goal to the action, and thus provide enough new lexical information to motivate the derivation of secondary imperfectives. Adding a prefix to the verb for ‘write’ gives a specialized perfective like ‘rewrite’ which is suffixed to give a secondary imperfective with the same meaning used to describe a process or repeated action. There are also complex act perfectives which take an atelic action and give it temporal boundaries, usually expressing action that lasts a certain time or begins or ends, in all cases without result. So one can have a Complex Act Perfective that means ‘write for a while without result’. Finally, there is the Single Act perfective which removes a single cycle from a repeated atelic action, such as sneezing, which has a Single Act Perfective used to describe a single sneeze. An aspectual cluster can contain zero, one, two, three or all four types of Perfectives, but there are strict constraints on what combinations are possible. In fact most theoretically possible combinations are not attested, and those that are attested follow an implicational hierarchy that is metaphorically motivated.

Aspectual Clusters of Verbs An example: Activity ščipat’ ‘pinch/pluck’ > (Natural/Specialized Perfective) о(b)ščipat’ ‘pinch/pluck’/vyščipat’ ‘pluck out’ > Complex Act poščipat’ ‘pinch/pluck a while’ > Single Act ščipnut’ ‘pinch/pluck once’ Let’s look at an example of a cluster that contains all four types of Perfectives. This example also illustrates the implicational hierarchy. The minimal cluster contains only one verb, naming an click activity, such as scipat’ ‘pinch/pluck’, and indeed there are verbs that have no Perfectives associated with them The next items in the implicational hierarchy are non-obligatory and unordered, namely the Natural and Specialized Perfective. In other words, in addition to an Imperfective Activity, a cluster can contain a Natural Perfective and/or various Specialized Perfectives, or both or neither. Our examples for this cluster are the Natural Perfective obscipat’ which means to complete plucking, and the Specialized Perfective vyscipat’, which means ‘pluck out’ Any of the cluster types possible thus far (A only, A+NP, A+SP, A+NP+SP) can, if it has a non-completable, atelic construal, also form a Complex Act Perfective such as poscipat’, which means ‘pinch or pluck for a while’ Finally, only clusters that already contain a Complex Act Perfective can also contain a Single Act perfective, provided that the activity they describe can be construed as an atelic repetition of cycles, one of which can be extracted and seen individually, as in scipnut’ I should probably say a few words about why this is significant. The formation of these types of verbs is so readily available in the system that many of them are not available in dictionaries. So discovering a cluster structure is not just a matter of looking things up – one has to do considerable corpus-based and internet-based research, and then verify results with native speakers. Secondly, the pair model has failed to account for the Specialized, Complex Act and Single Act Perfectives. Sometimes the pair model has incorrectly identified Complex Act and Single Act Perfectives as the Perfective “partners” of imperfective verbs, especially in clusters that lack Natural Perfectives, and there are many such clusters. In short, the “pair” model was problematic, both theoretically and pedagogically.

Aspectual Clusters of Verbs Aspectual clusters and their structures: Study using linguistic database (2007) all morphological types Pedagogical/linguistic resources: Study using pedagogical database (with Korba) hi-freq textbook verbs Cluster Types for Russian Verbs I first worked out the clusters model click, click by taking a multiply stratified sample of the morphological types of Russian verbs. Basically this means that I included all verbs from non-productive classes, plus samples of productive classes. In other words, I used linguistic criteria to build this database, in order to assure that I had accounted for all morphological types of verbs. This meant that all paradigm types were included regardless of their frequency. My database contained 283 clusters and approximately 2K verbs. It was research on this database that made it possible to discover the four types of Perfectives and the implicational hierarchy. Because the pair model is a source of confusion in every textbook of Russian, John Korba and I subsequently built a second database with the aim of providing a resource for instructors and learners. This database contained the 266 clusters of the verbs listed in the vocabularies for a first-year and a second-year textbook of Russian. This database therefore was designed to represent high-frequency verbs most useful for learners, regardless of morphological class. There was some overlap in the databases and the databases were approximately the same size. The results of this project were much more interesting than I had anticipated. On the one hand, the cluster model was perfectly confirmed by the pedagogical database. In other words, we saw the same effect of the four types of Perfectives, and the same implicational hierarchy, giving the same range of possible structures. However the distribution of the cluster types was not identical in the two databases. go to table In both databases there were three cluster structures that were found to be much more frequent than all the rest, and two cluster structures were ranked among the top three by both databases. However, the third item differed and so did the orders. Whereas the linguistic database gave an order that seemed rather arbitrary (A+NP+SP+CA then A+NP+SP then A+SP+CA), the pedagogical database gave an order that was direct read-off from the implicational hierarchy, namely A+NP then A+NP+SP then A+NP+SP+CA. This meant that high-frequency verbs showed that the implicational hierarchy was more than just a predictor of possible structures in the system, but also a predictor of how frequent they were. This discovery also has a very valuable pedagogical implication, since given this distribution it makes sense to teach students the implicational hierarchy, so that they can predict cluster structures and variants. go back to slide click Here is a quick guided tour of the database, which can be freely accessed by anyone online. DEMONSTRATION

Further verb clusters research inspired by applications Place of motion verbs in clusters model Place of biaspectual verbs in clusters model Differences in token vs. type frequency effects in verb clusters Conceptual overlap in so-called “empty prefixes” Here are some of the “value added” ideas and projects that were inspired by the applications.There are two types of verbs that are often considered to be aspectually anomalous, the first is the click, click motion verbs, which make an additional distinction within Imperfective between travel to a direction and other kinds of motion, and are notoriously hard to learn. The work on the pedagogical database really confirmed that the motion verbs are not anomalous, but actually prototypical, for they serve as the metaphorical motivation for the types of Perfectives that can be formed and cluster structures. Basically completable (telic) verbs are metaphorical directed motion verbs – where an activity is leading to a result and non-completable (atelic) verbs are metaphorical non-directed motion verbs, where activity is not leading to a result. Furthermore, motion verbs display the maximal cluster structure – all other cluster structures can be arrived at by removing types of Perfectives. The second supposedly aspectually anomalous group of verbs is the so-called biaspectual verbs, which use only one form to express both aspects (always disambiguated by context). These verbs were considered anomalous because they violated the 1-to-1 correspondence expectations of both the aspectual pair model and form and meaning. However, within the cluster model it is seen that there are many form-meaning correspondences other than 1-to-1 within aspectual clusters, and indeed the biaspectual verbs are not so unusual after all. The remaining two projects are just in the beginning stages – there aren’t any publications ready from them yet, but I will mention them anyway. The next issue that came up is that of token vs. type frequency, as I’ve just described. As it turns out, token frequency is more straightforwardly associated with the implicational hierarchy, and it is also token frequency that is probably more relevant for learners. Finally there is the issue of the use of prefixes to form the various Perfectives. It has been traditionally assumed that the prefixes used to form Natural Perfectives are semantically “empty”. There are a lot of problems with this, among them the fact that there are over a dozen such “empty” prefixes, so why would you need different ones for different verbs, and also the same prefixes can be used to form the other kinds of Perfectives, in which instances (especially in the case of Specialized Perfectives) it is clear that they have semantic content – so why would they be sometimes empty and sometimes not? This is a problem that I mentioned already over 20 years ago, in my own dissertation, and I have been searching ever since for a way to prove that what we have is conceptual overlap, not semantic emptiness. Now at last the cluster model gives us some clues as to how to go about this. With a grant from the Norwegian Research Council, I hope to find some answers.

Relevant Works: primary research Relevant Works: applications The bibliography is usually not really part of a presentation, but here I would like to use it in lieu of a conclusion, because when I put it together, I realized that it makes a nice point that actually summarizes my presentation. What I’ve done here is to break the bibliography down into three groups: click The first contains items that represent the primary research done on the three topics presented today. The second represents the applications that came along in the second step, and The third group contains further works that were inspired by the applications Of course I do not intend to read through the bibliography, but I just wanted to give you an idea of the overall bulk of items in each category. Relevant Works: research inspired by applications

Relevant Works: primary research 1988. “Pragmatic vs. Semantic Uses of Case”, in Chicago Linguistic Society 24-I: Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Regional Meeting, ed. by Diane Brentari et al. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 189-202. 1993. A Geography of Case Semantics: The Czech Dative and the Russian Instrumental (=Cognitive Linguistics Research, v. 4). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1999. “Peircean semiotics and cognitive linguistics: a case study of the Russian genitive”, in The Peirce Seminar Papers, ed. by Michael Shapiro. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 441-466. 2000. “A cognitive model of the Russian accusative case”, in Trudy meždunarodnoj konferencii Kognitivnoe modelirovanie, No. 4, part I, ed. by R. K. Potapova, V. D. Solov’ev and V. N. Poljakov. Moscow: MISIS, 20-43. 2004. “A metaphor in search of a source domain: the categories of Slavic aspect”, Cognitive Linguistics 15:4, 471-527. 2007. “Aspectual clusters of Russian verbs”, Studies in Language 31:3, 607-648. So here are the works of primary research for case, aspect meaning, and clusters.

Relevant Works: applications 2000. Czech (= Languages of the World/Materials 125), coauthored with Charles E. Townsend. Munich/Newcastle: LINCOM EUROPA. Online version 2002. The Case Book for Russian. co-authored with Steven J. Clancy. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Online exercises 2002. “Sémantika pádů v češtině”, in Setkání s češtinou, ed. by Alena Krausová, Markéta Slezáková, and Zdeňka Svobodová. Prague: Ústav pro jazyk český, 29-35. 2003. “A user-friendly conceptualization of Aspect”, Slavic and East European Journal 47:2, 251-281. 2006. The Case Book for Czech. co-authored with Steven J. Clancy. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Online exercises Submitted. “Beyond the pair: Aspectual clusters for learners of Russian”, coauthored with John J. Korba. Aspect in Russian Media Module Cluster Types for Russian Verbs And here are the applications.

Relevant Works: research inspired by applications 2002. “Cases in collision, cases in collusion: the semantic space of case in Czech and Russian”, in Where One’s Tongue Rules Well: A Festschrift for Charles E. Townsend, ed. by Laura A. Janda, Steven Franks, and Ronald Feldstein. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 43-61. 2002. “Cognitive hot spots in the Russian case system”, in Michael Shapiro, ed. Peircean Semiotics: The State of the Art (=The Peirce Seminar Papers 5). New York: Berghahn Books, 165-188. 2002. “The conceptualization of events and their relationship to time in Russian”, in Glossos 2 at http://www.seelrc.org/glossos/. 2002. “The Case for Competing Conceptual Systems”, in Cognitive Linguistics Today (= Łódź Studies in Language 6), ed. by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Kamila Turewicz, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 355-374. 2002. “Concepts of Case and Time in Slavic”, in Glossos 3 at http://www.seelrc.org/glossos/. 2004. “Border zones in the Russian case system”, in Sokrovennye smysly (a festschrift for Nina D. Arutjunova), ed. by Ju. D. Apresjan. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury, 378-398. 2004. “The Dative Case in Czech: What it Means and How si Fits in”, in the published proceedings of the annual meeting of the Společnost pro vědy a umění 2003, published in 2004 at: http://www.svu2000.org/conferences/papers.htm. But to my own surprise, it turns out that the bulk of publications came in round three, when I had the wealth of both the primary research and the applications to build on. Not only is the font smaller here, but there are…

Relevant Works: research inspired by applications 2006. “A Metaphor for Aspect in Slavic”, Henrik Birnbaum in Memoriam (=International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 44-45, 249-60. Clancy, Steven J. 2006. “The Topology of Slavic Case: Semantic Maps and Multidimensional Scaling“, in Glossos 6, at http://seelrc.org/glossos/issues/7/. To appear. “Mesto dvuvidovyx glagolov v modeli vidovyx gnezd”, in a volume edited by Marina Ju. Čertkova at Moscow State University. To appear. “Ways of attenuating agency in Russian”, co-authored with Dagmar Divjak, to appear in Impersonal Constructions, a special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society, edited by Anna Siewierska. To appear. “From Cognitive Linguistics to Cultural Linguistics”, in Slovo a smysl/Word and Sense. To appear. “Semantic Motivations for Aspectual Clusters of Russian Verbs”, in: Michael S. Flier, Ed. American Contributions to the XIV International Congress of Slavists. 2008. To appear. “What makes Russian Bi-aspectual verbs Special”, in: Dagmar Divjak and Agata Kochanska, eds. Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain. Cognitive Linguistics Research. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. To appear. “Totally normal chaos: The aspectual behavior of Russian motion verbs”, in a festschrift for Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28, 2006. To appear. “Transitivity in Russian from a Cognitive Perspective”, in a festschrift for Elena Viktorovna Paducheva entitled Dinamičeskie modeli: Slovo. Predloženie. Tekst, edited by Galina Kustova. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. TWO pages of application-inspired research and publications. When I look at this distribution, I realize that building applications for instructors and learners isn’t just something I did to be altruistic. It turns out that the resources that I created for others also forced me to take a comprehensive, big-picture look at phenomena, and that has brought very tangible benefits to my own research agenda.

The end