Premonitory urges and Touretting volcanoes: Force construal in personal narratives on Tourette Syndrome

Causative meaning including, but not limited to, causation, prevention, and enabling is realized in language use through force construal. Force is explored in this article through consideration of narratives on Tourette Syndrome, a disorder that is largely characterized by its constitutive actions (i.e. vocal and motor tics). To account for force construal, the article proposes a merger of a vector model for the description of force in language and cognition and a lexical semantic model of ontologies and construals. Force is accounted for in terms of a number of configurations (CAUSE, ENABLE, PREVENT, WITHSTAND, and DESPITE) that are realized through construal operations. This merger of explanatory models allows nuanced and flexible description of forceful meaning in actual language use.