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- Speaking bodies II. Topics in cognitive linguistics:
deixis, gesture, prepositions, metaphor and polysemy
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- This second session of the Speaking bodies
minicourse will introduce an exciting alternative approach to linguistics
that has grown out of interdisciplinary contacts among linguistics, philosophy,
psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and anthropology. Classical
linguistics has thought of languages the way we think of algebra or symbolic
logic, as abstract systems of rules applied to combinations of elements:
as codes. Cognitive linguistics, instead, has wanted to investigate language
as one of the ways human bodies influence each other while in the midst
of dealing with the surrounding world. Aspects of language use that have
been particularly important in strengthening this viewpoint have been metaphor,
gesture, deixis (the way words like here or now can only
be understood in relation to a context shared by speaker and hearer), and
polysemy (the way words have many meanings).
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- 1. Naturalizing a discipline
- 2. Review: language as structural influence
- 3. About representing in general
- 4. New conceptual structure of the study of
language:
- 5. Traditional linguistics
- 6. Functional and cognitive linguistics
- Topic 1: deixis
- Topic 2: gesture
- Topic 3: prepositions
- Topic 4: metaphor and polysemy
1. Naturalizing a discipline
Session I was the overview, an orientation, a
way to understand what language is in relation to bodies.
Session II continues this discussion but is also
about studying language as a topic - about linguistics - what it used to
be, what it is becoming - what embodiment means in relation to linguistics
as the study of language - in other words about the naturalization
of linguistics.
Naturalizing
a field of study, for instance epistemology or mathematics, is reframing
it in a non-dualistic way. When we naturalize mathematics, for instance,
we try to understand how mathematical knowledge could be based on evolved
abilities to interact with the natural world. When we naturalize epistemology
we try to understand any sort of knowledge in this way.
2. Review: basic principle: language as structural
influence
- One small set of assumptions that is central
to all three sessions of this minicourse. Simple obvious ideas and yet they
are quite radical in their implications. If we understand them, we change
our whole framework, our whole way of understanding language (and many other
things).
1. Embodiment. We feel and perceive and
imagine and think by means of our physical bodies. Every change in our
cognitive state is accomplished (not 'accompanied') by means of a change
in our physical structure, ie in the way materials making up our physical
bodies are arranged. This is true both at the scale of the whole body,
and at the scale of the nervous system and the brain.
2. Consciousness and unconscious. Conscious
function is by means of a widely distributed network of activity in the
nervous system, probably mostly the brain. Quite a bit of our nervous system
isn't involved in consciousness, but those nonconscious parts can have
an influence on conscious function.
3. Integration and segregation. Parts of
the nervous system that could be, or have been, integrated as part of the
conscious wide net can be made nonconscious: that is, certain kinds of
feeling, memory, perception, and understanding can be cut off, segregated.
This can happen as response to trauma, or just as a result of fairly normal
decisions made in childhood or later. Whatever the reason, a network that
has lost some of its parts is less able: less perceptive, less intelligent.
4. We speak (and write) from the structure
we are at the moment of speaking or writing. This structure may be
more or less integrated, more or less coherent, intelligent, relaxed, sensitive,
balanced.
5. Language has structural effect. Sometimes
the effect is observable - we say something and our hearer blushes, or
laughs, or does something. Sometimes the effect isn't visible, but it is
always there: no one can understand speech without being physically changed.
At the level of the brain we can think of it as a sort of bloodless brain
surgery - we change the other person's wide net, temporarily and sometimes
permanently too.
6. Self-talk. When we speak, think in words,
and write we hear ourselves and we influence our own structure too.
3. About representing in general
Representational media
include natural language, formal languages like math or computer code or
formal logic, graphic images, and photography. A representational medium
includes representational artifacts (things humans make) and practices.
For instance the medium of sculpture includes sculpted objects and our practices
in making or seeing them, etc.
Principles summarized below apply to any of these
media:
a. In the beginning was the world.
b. Organic bodies come next, inherently related to the world they are adapted to
through evolution.
i. Perception-action capability is primary:
presence: perception and action, emotional response.
ii. Simulation capability is derived from
it: seeming to perceive and act, simulational emotion.
c. Representing forms and practices require
these original capabilities.
d. Without the body of the user there is no
representation. There is no external
relation of environmental thing and representing object.
e. Representational effect is structural effect.
Any representational effect is a structural alteration
of the user: a physical, dynamical event.
It is always a partial effect; it is never the
only thing going on for its users, who must continue also to be attuned/adapted
to other aspects of their physical context.
f. Representing and simulating
Representing practices can be used to organize
states in the user that are like the state that would be produced in
the presence of something: that simulate it.
g. The same representational form can evoke
different states in different bodies, or
different states in the same body, given a different context.
h. 'Thinking' requires all of these conceptual
skills - perceiving, imagining, and representing.
4. Language as a representing medium:
Spoken and written language can be understood as
the use of acoustic, gestural and graphic forms to direct action and
simulation, both in others and in ourselves.
Language is
one representing capability among others (math, art, music, photography),
and may be used in combination with others.
How bodies do language
(review of Speaking bodies I):
- Language is able to effect maximum cognitive
structure with minimal physically present form by triggering structure
pre-organized through intensive training.
- Training with names sets up rapid one-hemisphere
evocation of networks accessed through convergence/divergence zones in
many cortical areas.
- Basic level aboutness seems in general to be
evoked by open-class lexical means.
- Closed-class syntactic resources of a language may in general direct procedural effects.
- Cognitive mode or style
is organized by many means, including rhythmic and sonic effects considered
pragmatic rather than grammatic.
- One hemisphere is linguistically specialized
for the perception and production of acoustic and graphic elements of a
language, but other linguistic effects, including text-level integration,
involve the other hemisphere, so that in normal function language requires
bilateral integration of a cross-callosal net.
5. Traditional linguistics
Traditional linguistics developed in the middle
ages mainly in the teaching of Latin, which was predominantly a written
language.
a. Traditional distinctions and contrasts in
linguistics
>Syllable, word/morpheme, phrase, sentence,
text/discourse
>Grammar = lexicon + syntax
>Closed class and open class forms
>Syntax and semantics
These distinctions have emphasized distinctions
between form and meaning/content, between competence and performance, and
between semantics and pragmatics, semantics being the study of the forms
of language, and pragmatics being the study of everything else about language
use. (Pragmatics would include tone of voice, for instance.)
b. Chomsky
Chomsky's structural linguistics, which is the
present paradigm, hypothesizes an innate universal grammar. It is a formal
theory of language, which hasn't much scope in studying the whole practice
of language. It also isolates language from other representing practices,
and does not offer a common platform.
Structural Linguistics and rationalist tradition
- creationism - mind vs body - reason vs sensory-motor capabilities - the
notion of module with dedicated function - 'computationally specialized'
versus 'general purpose mechanism' - innately specified universal grammar
- "theory of the initial state of the language organ" - expression
of genes.
Hard distinction between language and protolanguage
- grammar is unlearnable, therefore innate.
Chomsky's original impulse was anti-behaviorist,
anti-mechanist.
Doesn't think of language as communication but
as 'thinking'
"Language is not properly regarded as a system
of communication. It is a system for expressing thought ...." "Language
use is largely to oneself." (Chomsky 2002, 77)
c. Representations and computations
The dominant terminology within mainstream cognitive
science is a way of imagining linguistic form and meaning as 'representation'
and 'computation.' They are imagined as two different representations that
have to get associated. For instance they would say, "When asked to
shove something, the system would activate the definition and select
the appropriate schema and parameters from the large collection available."
6. Functional and cognitive linguistics
a. Functional linguistics
Functional linguistics. Halliday's Introduction
to Functional Grammar. "More socially oriented semantically based
model of grammatical structure." Emphasis on multifunctionality of
grammatical units in the linguistic moment.
b. Cognitive Linguistics
Integrating linguistics within other sorts of
study. Cognitive theory - perception, imagining, representing, thinking.
Commitment to compatibility with cognitive science, Lakoff 1990.
Emphasis on ways language shows general structures
of perception and action, shared cognitive structure.
'Concepts' embodied in the sense of making use
of sensory-motor capabilities.
Usage-based study - spontaneous spoken speech
recorded, transcribed, analyzed - 'corpus linguistics.'
There are no natural units of language, instead
a self-organizing cumulative network effect. For example articulation of
initial consonant depends on vowel that follows. People mostly don't speak
in sentences but in intonational units - prosodical and semantical units
with only one element of new information - sentence is not prototypical
- spoken and written language very different.
7. Topic 1: spatial language and deixis
a. Language used to direct space perception
and imagining
- From here, black desolation down there at
the river is before his eyes again.
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- They are tramping past him on the road in
their usual weekend peregrinations. He hears them at his back and they
hesitate to overtake him, it's as if he's leading them in procession, ridiculously,
for a few moments, and then they surround him at a polite distance briefly
while gaining on him, two men on the one side, and one of their women on
the other. Gordimer 1975, 109
Nadine Gordimer's devices in this passage from
The conservationist include deictic phrases (from here ...
down there), prepositional phrases (on the one side ... on
the other; at a polite distance; at his back; before
his eyes), verbs with a spatial character (tramping, overtake,
surround, leading), and nouns with spatial implications (peregrinations,
procession).
What is perceived when we read this passage,
and what imagined? As is common with language
function, we are not very aware of perceiving what we have to have perceived
in order to imagine as we do, namely the linguistic forms -- the
letters, the words, and the sentences.
What we are directed to imagine by means of these
more-or-less unconsciously perceived forms is a scene, a road at some distance
from, and on a rise above, a river, and four people socially and spatially
related within it.
Viewpoint may be felt to shift. We begin by seeming
to see from the point of view of a man being overtaken on the road. We
are seeing from his here downward to his there at the river.
We seem to see a river at some distance or other, but we also seem to feel
ourselves looking downward toward it. We feel a reach of space between
our place on the road and that place down there. At the same time
we hear tramping behind us, and then hear it overtaking us. For the rest
of the sentence, at he's leading them in procession ... and then they
surround him ... while gaining on him, I find myself imagining the
whole group from a point behind them. This viewpoint shift is not necessarily
intended; it may occur because the author shifted viewpoint as she wrote,
or it may be idiosyncratic to my reading.
What is imagined normally exceeds instructions:
I seem to see the river at the distance of a quarter mile, toward the left,
at a very shallow downward angle. Other readers may see it at the bottom
of a gorge on the right. My reading is influenced by earlier passages,
but is only very loosely constrained by these paragraphs. We are directed
to imagine a viewpoint; the way we imagine it is up to us, not coerced
as it can be by musical or graphic means. The point is, however, that language
is like other representational media in evoking spatial simulation that
includes somatic, viewpoint, and act perspective.
b. Deixis
Examples of deixis. 'Here,' 'I,' 'now.' Language
forms that obviously rely on mutual context for their function.
Why think about deixis. Because it demonstrates
a concreteness about language use: that to understand language we have
to either be together with our hearer/speaker, or we have to imagine ourselves
so.
In traditional linguistics deictic elements are
thought of as atypical, but in an embodied linguistics deixis can be
imagined as indicating a core fact about language and representation generally
- that it springs from mutual presence and joint attention.
The way deictic elements function demonstrates
the embodied nature and purposes of language.
Deictic elements in spoken natural languages are
forms that have been thought linguistically anomalous because they cannot
be understood outside a particular context shared by speaker and addressee.
Here, that, I and you are examples of deixis
in English.
Where speech is used to organize perception and
action among people present together in a shared space, its construction
and comprehension is constrained and completed by mutual perception
of shared space. Deictic forms are like various nonverbal ways of using
shared context during speech. If there are two Mary's in a room,
we will look at the one we mean. When we and our addressee are working
at a common task we can be cryptic because we are seeing the same things:
Not so near can mean Don't put the rock there; move it further
from the other one. Posture, gesture, gaze and context effects such
as these are assigned to discourse pragmatics rather than grammar, but,
when they coordinate mutual attention and organize our construal of present
situations, many linguistic functions thought to be syntactic rather than
pragmatic can also be understood as forms of presence deixis.
The relation of deixis to referential point and
gaze is suggested by the derivation of the term from the Greek deiktikos:
able to show.
Deictic forms in English
include intransitive prepositions like upstairs, time
expressions like tomorrow, and motion verbs like to
bring and to arrive which must be understood as anchored
to a deictic center. Since all of these expressions are also understood
when we are not speaking about a shared physical context, it is plain that
deictic expressions will also work for mutually imagined circumstances.
In my sense of it they are not unusual in this, since most aspects of a
language require and organize mutual simulational aboutness. In their
simulational uses deictic expressions can in fact be seen as central instances
of linguistic function, instances in which the social management of simulational
aboutness is seen with particular vividness.
Simulational deixis is also called discourse or
narrational deixis, since it can establish comprehensive fictional orientation
of the sort evoked by Gordimer's passage. A simulational orientation or
discourse space may be sustained through very long texts or it may be dropped
after a sentence. It may or may not be a character viewpoint:
...it's also possible to choose a reference
point -- a place with which the narrator somehow associates himself and
his reader in imagination -- which has no particular association with a
central character. Thus, if I'm talking about an uninhabited island in
a little-known lake in Minnesota, I can talk about a loon 'coming' there
at night and about the waves 'bringing' things to its shores. Fillmore
1975, 67
8. Topic 2: gesture
Why think about gesture. Because findings about
gesture show language integrated with action in the body, and suggest its
origins in bodily action. The evidence that language and gesture are one
integrated system in the cortex suggests evolutionary history and the centrality
even in language of capabilities derived from contact with the physical
world.
Comparisons of American Sign Language (ASL) and
spoken English, gesture with speech.
a. Speech and gesture a single system
The recent South African film about Bushman hunting,
The great dance, is suggestive about the relations between whole-body
imitation, gesture, and language.
David McNeill is a linguist-psychologist who studies
gestures that occur with speech and says,
- My own hypothesis that speech and gesture are
elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation in which
there is a synthesis of opposite modes of thought - global-synthetic and
instantaneous imagery with linear-segmented temporally extended verbalization.
Utterances and thoughts realized in them are both imagery and language.
McNeill 1992, 35
What he says about being able to see gesture and
speech as a single system fits well with the gesture-origin theories of
language.
- [Gesture is] a "missing link" between
the abilities of our non-human ancestors of 20 million years ago and modern
human language, with manual gestures rather than a system for vocal communication
providing the initial seed
His hypothesis is that:
- Language readiness evolved as a multi-modal
manual/facial/vocal system with protosign (manual-based protolanguage)
providing the scaffolding for protospeech (vocal-based protolanguage) to
provide "neural critical mass" to allow language to emerge from
protolanguage as a result of cultural innovations within the history of
Homo sapiens.
The theory summarized here makes it understandable
why it is as easy for a deaf child to learn a signed language as it is
for a hearing child to learn a spoken language.
b. ASL and deixis
Since signed languages explicitly use space for
grammatical functions as well as for what are considered pragmatic functions,
studies of signing can also make the continuities between deictic and non-deictic
uses of space particularly obvious. In a recent collection of studies of
the uses of space in signed languages (Emmory and Reilly 1995),
Scott Liddell shows how presence deixis and simulational deixis may coincide.
Linguistic action in American Sign Language is
largely gestural but it also includes syntactic use of eye gaze, facial
expression, head position and movement, and body position and movement
(Liddell 1980). Along with the contour of a sign, its spatial extent and
the number of repetitions, the location of a gesture has syntactic
import. Location matters in two ways: it matters where you produce
the sign, and it matters where you point it.
Pronouns in ASL consist of a root sign and a pointing
gesture. Adjectives will be pointed toward the object or person described.
There is also a class of verbs called indicating verbs, which consist of
a verb root and an indicating gesture: the verb form may be pointed toward
a referent, or it may move from one referent to another. Verbs which take
an object may for instance be signed moving from the subject toward the
object of the action: he-there FLIRTS with her-there. And certain verbs
are always signed toward specific parts of the addressee's body: THINK
toward the head, GIVE toward the chest.
Liddell talks about three kinds of signing space:
real space, surrogate space and token space. I will
modify his terminology slightly, since all three of his categories are
using real space, that is, the space mutual to speaker and addressee. The
important contrast is about kinds of use made of that space.
Liddell's surrogate space is a use
of space structurally very similar to perceptual use of mutual location;
the only differences are consequences of the fact that real, mutual
space around the conversation is being used to support simulation rather
than perception. Kids using actual living room furniture to play school
would be using space in a surrogate way.
Signers use space in this way when they are talking
about something that happened last week, or reporting speech, or sometimes
when they are constructing conditionals. For signing purposes people
and objects that are not present are imagined present, full size, and at
realistic distances from the signer. Talking about Mary, who is not
present, the signer establishes a locus to which future pronouns referring
to Mary can be directed; this locus is treated as if it is Mary's height.
If the signer wants to say Mary gives something, the GIVE sign will be
directed toward a locus the height of the actual Mary's chest. To say Mary
flirted with Paul, the signer will direct a FLIRT sign from the Mary locus
to Paul, if he is present, or to a Paul locus if he is not.
Referential shift
is a use of surrogate space to report speech, among other things. To make
it clear that she herself is not the intended speaker, the signer can step
into a different spot and sign from there, establishing a character
viewpoint. Referential shift can also be indicated by shifts of head
position, torso position, facial expression or gaze.
Surrogate space is plainly still a deictic use
of present space to support mutually coordinated simulation. Liddell's
innovation in ASL studies is his description of token space as similarly
deictic. Token space is sign subspace - the space in which signs
are performed - used as if it were compressed surrogate space. The
signer will still establish a locus for imagined Mary, but will establish
it by a small stroke of the pointing finger dropped under the sign for
Mary's name. That locus will then go on functioning as an index for pronoun
co-reference, adjectives and indicating verbs. Directed verbs such as GIVE
will be pointed toward relative heights at that locus as if a token figure
is being imagined (Liddell 1995).
This sort of reduced, token use of space can be
like full size surrogate use of space in supporting conversations about
spatial facts: Mary-there KICKED Paul-there. But it can also be used to
talk about non-spatial facts and relations while retaining the structures
of discourse about spatial facts.
Token space can for instance be used metaphorically
to talk about time: the present-here,
the future-here, and a trajectory from here to here. A signer can even
use this spatial understanding of time in a meta-pragmatic way, to orient
an audience within the time course of the narration itself. The beginning
of the story, here, the end of the story here. Discourse cohesion
can then be maintained by signing or gazing toward time-points indexing
events of the story. The signing hand may be positioned at the point the
story teller has reached, while the signer holds her gaze on that hand.
Mcneill and Pedelty (1995) point out that hearing speakers use gesture
and gaze in similar ways, looking to the side when they are making
back-references, marking topic changes with hand beats and looking directly
at the addressee when they want to indicate an aside.
The use of token space that is most suggestive
in general cognitive terms is a sort of logical and/or attitudinal use.
When comparing or contrasting two notions or two alternative conditions,
the signer will as if establish two token spaces, one on the right, one
on the left. A conversation about art and science, for instance, can be
set up by placing motions establishing loci, art-here and
science-here, where pronouns, adjectives and verbs may later be indexed
to them. Both will have their localized nominals, with internal co-reference
of the kinds described. The signer will thus be able to maintain whole
alternative contexts, looking from one to the other, constructing one
in contradistinction to the other. The signer can also enact a range of
attitudes toward those juxtaposed wholes - ignoring one and concentrating
on the other, drawing the two together or separating them further, setting
one aside. The process of thinking about alternatives is thus
being supported by actions - eye motion, body orientation, gesture
- which are actual rather than imagined, but which are actions toward,
or involving, imagined entities. It may be that ASL allows us to see
people thinking in act-metaphoric ways also used - covertly - when
they are alone or speaking orally.
McNeill and Pedelty, describing gesture use by
hearing people, note that abstract metaphoric uses of space may actually
be built around earlier more concrete uses within the same discourse. In
one of their examples a narrator gestures in a certain direction when describing
a location where a film character exits a scene. Immediately afterward
a gesture in the same direction is used to talk about the beginning of
the next scene. That is, the locus used to support imagining a character's
departure is used metaphorically to indicate the starting point
for a new scene. ('Starting point' -- we do it in English, too.) Both
are token-scale uses of the actual space surrounding the conversation,
but the first supports spatial simulation and the second is act-metaphoric.
"The gestures looked morphologically identical, but their semantic
value was different with each occurrence" (McNeill and Pedelty 1995).
Aspects of what are taken to be ordinary syntactic
uses of space in ASL can sometimes also be seen as a kind of deixis. ASL
indicates clausal relations by establishing clause nodes at particular
loci in sign space and then placing signs under, or to the right or to
the left of that node. This use of loci is similar to alternative conditional
spaces or to loci marking positions in story structure.
Liddell's paper is controversial in ASL studies
because, by finding a continuum between clearly pragmatic and clearly
syntactic functions in a language, he unmakes what has been a founding
dichotomy in linguistics. What seems likely is that we will discover that
many properly syntactic functions are also based on simulational
action or imagined motion perception, and that much grammatical structuring
is performed by means of compressed, left hemisphere sketch-remnants of
simulational spatial behavior.
9. Topic 3: Prepositions
a. fictive motion: evoked abstract sensing
Do not words excite feelings of Touch (tactual
ideas ) more than distinct visual ideas ... the Question is of great Importance,
as a general application - Coleridge Notebooks II, 2152
There is a subtle but distinct difference in semantic
effect between The road lies between the mountains and
the river and The road runs between the mountains and
the river. Leonard Talmy identifies the difference of feel between the
two verbs as a difference in fictive motion (1996, 268), registered
through what he calls an abstract sensing.
Here is another example: The road ran into
the distance. Reading this phrase, it is as if we are looking rapidly
from somewhere near by, the source, along a trajectory to a goal, the
distance. The muscular feel of this simulational sequence is
not additional to but part of our comprehension of the sentence.
The linguistic effect is fictive, in addition
to being simulational, in the sense that we are seeming to see motion
in relation to something we are also and simultaneously imagining as motionless:
"fictive motion is coupled generally with factive stationariness"
(213). Talmy compares the effect to the paradoxic visuality experienced
with motion after-effects. When we have been walking in fog and stop suddenly,
the landscape can seem to be rushing away at the same time as it can be
seen to be standing still. Similar effects can occur as collateral imagining:
seeing a coyote's tracks in snow, we may seem to see the coyote running;
seeing brush strokes on the side of a bowl, we may seem to see the motion
of a brush.
Other instances of sensorimotor fictivity evoked
by verbs include: 1) frame-relative motion, The fence descends;
2) pattern paths, The trail of drips across the floor; 3) access
paths, The vacuum cleaner is down behind the hamper; and 4) coverage
paths, The ranch spread over the plateau. Like viewpoint in the
Gordimer passage, fictive motion effects are underspecified. Individuals
may experience the same example differently, and the same individual may
deal with the same example differently on different occasions. What is
felt as moving, whether it is the object, the self, or just the direction
of the gaze, varies in inscrutable ways, but "every speaker experiences
a sense of fictive motion for some fictive motion constructions"
(Talmy 1996, 215).
Talmy describes fictive motion as one of several
kinds of structure-sensing normally present with other kinds of perception
but inherently multimodal. It can be part of vision, audition, somatosense,
and touch. In any of these modalities it is "a faintly palpable
level of perception" (Talmy 1996, 248), not exactly vision and
not exactly somatic sense, sometimes with a dimly felt sense of action
for purposes of perception - eye motion, maybe.
Thought of as visuality, it has to be considered
abstract. Talmy compares it to the oddly nonvisual visuality experienced
in form completion illusions; when we experience a pac man as a circle
with a bite taken out of it, we sort of see, or is it feel, the
missing part of the circle as a fictive presence.
This material suggests a structural or spatial
vision participating in sentient vision in an effective but barely visual
form, as if ascribed to what is actually seen - a colorless and
transparent sort of grey vision. It is felt as a sort of vision but it
is felt as a kind of action too, or as somehow more closely tied to action
and motion than to the sense of scene and objects.
b. Prepositions and inferior parietal association
cortex
Locational language is one of the few ways we
can come to notice a structure subsystem of this sort, because fictive
structure and motion effects can be evoked by language forms apart from
the perceptual conditions in which structural perception normally occurs.
In the midst of active vision there is too much other visual structure.
Locationals
direct us to see or imagine one object in a spatial relation with another.
Open class locationals include many names of objects and places
- roof and street - that evoke spatial relation schemas.
They also include many sorts of implicitly relational verb: The train
crossed the trestle.
The same function is often performed by prepositions:
The train chugged across the trestle. Prepositions are closed-class
terms - there are only 80 to 100 in English. A small subset of prepositions
(they include upstairs and outward) is intransitive; most,
like across, must be used with an appropriate nominal in the object
position. Locational prepositions specify direction, relative distance,
and various sorts of contact or containment.
In all of these instances we are being directed
to imagine a foreground object spatially related to a background object.
Prepositions of motion may evoke positions of motion paths of one object
relative to another (via, along, across, around,
parallel to, in line with), or directions of motion of one
object relative to another (to, toward, from, away
from). We may be directed to locate a foreground object relative to
a background object by reference to the intrinsic spatial organization
of the background object (above, below, horizontal to,
behind, in front of). Prepositions may also evoke a distribution
of foreground object or substance relative to a background object or substance
(all over, throughout, all along) (Landau and Jackendoff
1993, 235).
Prepositional effect is characteristic of closed
class linguistic effect in that it is procedural;
when a preposition directs us to imagine two things spatially related in
some specific way, it is also directing us to specific kinds of simulational
participation - it may be directing us to seem to look from one to
the other and so maintain two axes related by eye movements, perhaps, or
to seem to see one of the objects with parvocellular (new visual system)
detail and the other with dorsal (old motion-vision) abstraction.
In general, prepositions elicit a response
that ignores details of reference object shape (Landau and Jackendoff
1993, 258). Compare red wheelbarrow in the snow to snow in the
red wheelbarrow. If a noun is used as object of a preposition, as when
it is used as object of a verb, the presence of the preposition directs
us to imagine that object schematically, as a background object.
At the same time, it directs us to imagine the subject of the preposition
more fully.
Choice of preposition may direct the way we see
or seem to see the reference object in other ways as well. Fillmore (1975)
gives these examples: at the corner and in
the corner organize us to see the corner from different directions,
while in the grass and on the grass
make us see a different kind of grass.
Landau and Jackendoff relate the schematic or
abstract spatial imagining of objects evoked as reference objects to the
sort of perception needed for purposes of action. Both Talmy (1996)
and Landau and Jackendoff (1993), hypothesize that prepositional function
shows a likeness to what we think is happening in the parietal.
What intrigues us is that ... the location
system in language has just about the right properties to interface with
the "where" system described by neuroscience. We therefore conjecture
(a weaker term than "claim") that what we find in the language
of places has a fairly strong homology with the [tracking] of objects and
places situated in the "where" system of the brain. Landau and
Jackendoff 1993, 257
We have seen that, while temporal object vision
matrices are responding in detailed ways to the thingness of things, parietal
systems are tracking them spatially and in less sensory detail. Talmy concludes,
from the linguistic evidence, that objects are taken as points and lines
for the purposes of prepositions (1996, 261), and that this schematization
is an effect of the dorsal system.
We have seen that nouns and verbs evoke activity
through convergence zones in different cortical areas. When sentences
and longer texts evoke whole spatial scenes, there will have to be ways
of tying these separate nodes together so they participate in dynamically
integrated wholes. The inferior parietal, whose development is a precondition
for every kind of representational function, seems to be well placed to
link and integrate sentence effects, since it is between act constant
areas in the superior parietal and object constant areas in the
temporal lobe, and next to phoneme and morpheme perception and production
areas in the Wernicke's-Broca's stream. Since prepositions tell us
where to imagine parts of a scene relative to each other, and how to imagine
our own spatial participation in the scene, we may discover the IPL is
a convergence site for prepositions.
The right hemisphere dorsal stream is more involved
in bilateral spatial action than the left, and the left hemisphere dorsal
stream is more involved in rapid, routinized fine muscle motion. Landau
and Jackendoff suggest the linguistic system for location is "closely
homologous to" spatial response by the left hemisphere where
system (Landau and Jackendoff 1993, 261).
Kosslyn describes right hemisphere spatial function
as metrical and left hemisphere spatial response as conceptual.
Kosslyn's distinction between conceptual and metrical forms of spatial
response may be redescribed in terms of Liddell's distinction between token
and surrogate uses of sign in ASL. Left hemisphere prepositional response
may be a system of distinctions made at token scale, so that rapid
habitual use of above/below, right/left, inside/outside,
and the like may evoke minimal versions of structures that, if they were
evoked on the right, would be part of presence or surrogate simulation.
The IPL may also be important in tying language
hemisphere linguistic nets to counterpart spatial function areas in the
other hemisphere. If so, widely connected surrogate scale spatial simulation
organized from the right hemisphere might evoke left hemisphere minimal
simulation, which in turn would evoke a spatial name. Halle Brown
suggests that discrete categories of location are a product of the interface
between the left and right hemisphere spatial systems, not of the interface
between the spatial system and language (1993). Circuits making minimally
connected prepositional distinctions on the left might under some circumstances
also set up more widely connected right hemisphere circuits via callosal
connections with counterpart structures.
An additional point made by Landau and Jackendoff
is that prepositions treat parts of objects as if they were objects in
their own right:
The language used to express the relations
of parts to objects is identical to that used for configurations of independent
objects ... we speak both of a nose on one's face and a fly on one's face.
261
With both sentences given above, face is
vaguely imagined, but nose and fly are both imagined with
focal vision. We regard the part as a separate object with its own location,
while the object of which it is a part is treated schematically like any
reference object of a preposition.
10. Topic 4: metaphor and polysemy
Why think about metaphor? Because it demonstrates
an effect of language apart from the 'meaning' we think of it as having.
Why think about polysemy (the fact that words have
many meanings, some of which may even be contradictory) and language change?
Because, like metaphor, they demonstrate that words don't really 'have'
meanings, they have uses.
Functional grammar shows how one word or phrase
can be functioning in a number of different ways simultaneously -
10. Summary
- 1. Given a linguistic event or artifact,
- 2. linguistic effect
- 3. is on the structure
- 4. of a whole body,
- 5. and within the body the neural wide net,
- 6. within which, in turn, there is a linguistic
subnet
- 7. and a conscious subnet,
- 8. which may overlap in different ways and to
different degrees.
- 9. These structures are dynamically self-organizing
at all scales.
- 10. Language that we understand evokes structure.
- 11. When we create language it runs off existing
structure we have activated in the moment of utterance.
The locus of effect of language (or any
representation) is the body of the user.
*
For a longer discussion of representation and language
see my web book, Being about, especially chapters
6 and 9.
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