This article examines the significance of the schematic domain of boundedness in adjectives. It is proposed that boundedness in adjectives is a fundamental characteristic associated with gradability. Cross-categorial correspondences are made to nouns and verbs, where boundedness is a feature of countability and aktionsart respectively. Two basic types of gradable adjectives are distinguished: those which are associated with a boundary and those which are not. It is also shown that it is possible to change the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundedness through contextual modulation. Finally, it is demonstrated that the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundaries may dominate their interpretation at the expense of the content proper, and the adjectives become more like function words than content words.

The purpose of this article is to propose a constrained lexical semantic definition of referential metonymy within a model of meaning as ontology and construal. Due to their various types of lexical-referential pairings, 3 types of construals that are frequently referred to as metonymy in the cognitive literature are distinguished as metonymization, facetization, and zone activation. Metonymization involves the use of a lexical item to evoke the sense of something that is not conventionally linked to that particular lexical item. It is argued that metonymy is a contingent relation that stops at the sense level. Facetization and zone activation both involve the use of conventional pairings of lexical items and contextual readings. Facetization takes place within senses at the level of qualia structure and zone activation takes place within qualia structure. Zone activation is a ubiquitous phenomenon that concerns all readings, senses as well facets.

This article challenges the widespread view thatdegreeis a grammatical phenomenon characteristic of certain types of word classes and, instead, argues thatdegreeis pervasive in language and may be associated with most meanings. The main aim of the article is to discuss the results of a number of corpus investigations and experiments ofdegreemeanings in general and of the modification ofdegreein particular, and to accommodate these results in a general and dynamic model of Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals (LOC; Paradis 2005). The claims are that (i)degreeis aboundednessconfiguration in conceptual space; (ii)degreemodifiers operate on thedegreestructure of the meanings to which they apply through a construal of contextually motivated zone activationwithinconventionalized senses; (iii) nonconventionalizeddegreereadings of form–meaning pairings are invoked through implication by means of construals of metonymizationbetweensenses; and (iv) this process of metonymization is the mechanism through which change may or may not take place.

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of vision, smell, taste, and touch are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews. Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, buildings, animals, and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon, and cherry used to describe a wine's qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper.