My goal in the paper is to examine the significance of a root morpheme in language and cognition in three interconnected areas; in the creation of words; in meaning making; and in conceptual structure. I use the Hungarian root es-, meaning ‘fall’, for demonstration – a root that occurs in over 100 Hungarian words. First, I examine the issue of the conceptual–semantic relationship between the various word meanings in which this root can be found. Second, I explore the potential cognitive status of the root in Hungarian, and possibly in other languages (such as English). Third, I compare the meanings in which es- occurs in Hungarian to the nearest counterparts of these words in English. Fourth, I investigate the potential role of the root es- in organizing conceptual structure.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a severe mental health problem of a heterogeneous nature. To add to discussions around defining coherent subtypes of OCD, this paper uses qualitative, cognitive linguistic analysis to show how episodes of OCD can be differentiated based on their underlying conceptualizations of threat. Spoken narratives of OCD episodes told by people with OCD were analyzed using image schema theory and cognitive approaches to deixis in discourse. Through an exploration of the participants’ subjective experiences of time, space, and uncertainty in their recounted OCD episodes, the findings demonstrate that perceptions of threats fluctuate as OCD episodes unfold, and that it is the perceived movement (or not) of the threat that induces distress. Moreover, the dynamism of the threat is conceptualized differently for different subtypes of OCD. This variation can in part be explained by the role of two image schemas in structuring OCD episodes: the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL image schema and the CONTAINER image schema. It is argued that the blanket notion of threat as often investigated in clinical models of OCD is not sensitive enough to capture these shifting perspectives. It is thus recommended that threat perception in OCD is researched as a dynamic, evolving, and highly subjective experience.

In this theoretical paper we propose three different kinds of cognitive structure that have not been differentiated in the psychological and cognitive linguistic literatures. They are spatial primitives, image schemas, and schematic integrations. Spatial primitives are the first conceptual building blocks formed in infancy, image schemas are simple spatial stories built from them, and schematic integrations use the first two types to build concepts that include non-spatial elements, such as force and emotion. These different kinds of structure have all come under the umbrella term of ‘image schemas’. However, they differ in their content, developmental origin, imageability, and role in meaning construction in language and in thought. The present paper indicates how preverbal conceptualization needs to be taken into account for a complete understanding of image schemas and their uses. It provides examples to illustrate this influence, the most important of these being the primacy of imageable spatial information.

The aim of this study is to see how and to what extent the Talmyan notion of fictive motion is realized in the conceptual frame of speaking. Drawing from a previous in-depth analysis of the speaking event Manner component in English (cf. Vergaro, Sandford, Mastrofini, and Formisano, unpublished observations),1 we investigate the realization of fictive path in 186 English manner of speaking (henceforth MoS) verb entries accessed through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth COCA). Fictive path is always involved in the conceptualization of the speaking event. Communication is elaborated through the conduit metaphor, which is, in turn, motivated by the embodied act of speaking. Fictive path is further considered in relation to image schemas and windowing. Different degrees of path windowing emerge from this study, illustrating how the speaker focuses attention on a specific portion of the speaking event. Image schema distribution and an implicational hierarchy of the various types of path elaboration also become evident in this study.