The objective of this chapter is to discuss the cognitive entrenchment of the linguistic categories black and white in association with pleasant and unpleasant in English through a semantic application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). This study continues earlier linguistic research of implicit associations with basic-color-term couples. The results reveal the cognitive entrenchment of the categories and support the hypothesis that there are underlying conceptualization processes that guide semantic color/object associations. The embodied experiential grounding of darkness/night and lightness/day as the basis for our understanding of black and white emerges with the elaboration of a complex of conceptual metaphors that culminates in knowing is seeing (good is seeing) – experiential motivation of language and thought.

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 Vergaro, Sandford, Mastrofini, and Formisano, unpublished observations),1 we investigate the realization of fictive path in 186 English manner of speaking (henceforth MoS) verb entries accessed through the Corpus of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.

This study presents results of two questionnaires posed to English speaking middle-school students to verify the level of color term entrenchment and color prototypes at the age of 12. The methods included color listing and informant introspection on a color prototype linguistic construction. Listing techniques have long been used to identify basic categories and prototypically relevant linguistic items. In this case Sutrop's Cognitive Salience Index (2001) served to reveal the facilitation of retrieval of concepts in long-term memory thus allowing us to evince the degree of entrenchment and salience of the given color term. Participant introspection in conjunction with conceptual salience analysis (Talmy 2000(Talmy , 2005 regarding prototypical items (Rosch 1975(Rosch , 1978(Rosch , 1983 was also employed to identify what items are actually associated prototypically with colors at this age. The results are compared to adult color listings and prototypes (for both English and Italian speakers). Divergence is significant both in regard to the Cognitive Salience Index and within group judgment of the color prototypes. Further details about the subordinate color term choices and the agreement on prototypes reveal the conventionalized linguistic color associations made by this specific group of north-west American middle-school students.