The notion of mental grammar has been at the heart of linguistic theorizing for much of the past century. The arguments for the existence of grammar, a set of mental rules/constraints governing the well-formedness of linguistic structures, are vast and varied, however the central argument that has been made in its favor is that speakers are capable of producing (and understanding) an infinite s...

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this study...

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces—abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Middle spaces are indispensable sites for central me...

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from language change, grammaticalization, stability of ...

The article is devoted to the problem of teaching a foreign language for specific purposes. paper emphasizes need develop functional communication skills in foreign-language professional environment as well an intercultural communicative competence. approach usually associated with peculiar way grammar, but at present it seems appealing consider functionality discourse from cognitive perspectiv...

In this paper, we propose Objects, Containers, Gestures, and Manipulations (OCGM, pronounced like Occam’s Razor) as universal foundational metaphors of Natural User Interfaces. We compare OCGM to existing paradigms using SRK behavior classification and early childhood cognitive development, and justify the “universal” and “foundational” descriptors based upon cognitive linguistics and universal...

We investigated the hypothesis that two well-studied brain systems (see Feinberg & Farah, 1997) underlie the lexicon/grammar dichotomy (Ullman et al., 1997). In this view, frontal/basal-ganglia circuitry implicated in the learning and expression of motor and cognitive skills also underlie the acquisition and use of grammatical rules, and temporal-lobe circuits implicated in the learning and use...