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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, propositions and other spatial language, and polysemy, the way words can have many meanings, which almost invariably change over time. Outline:
1. Naturalizing a discipline Session I was a general orientation to 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 it's 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 There is a small set of assumptions central to all three sessions of this mini-course - simple obvious ideas radical in their implications.
3. Conceptual structure of the study of representing in general
> Orienting principle 1: There is no external relation of environmental thing and representing object. There is no re-presenting of the thing, only a re-evoking of a cognitive state. A name doesn't actually 'stand for' a thing - what it does is evoke structure relevant to that thing. > Orienting principle 2: Representational effect is structural effect. Any representational effect is a structural alteration of the user, a physical, dynamical event. A picture or sentence organizes its user to be structured in one way rather than another. It is always a partial effect; it is never the only thing going on for its users, who must continue also to be about other aspects of their physical context. > Orienting principle 3: Representing most of the time is organizing simulational states. When we are with people in some mutual place and time representational media can be used to coordinate perception and action. An example would be people building a house together, measuring timber, calling out instructions. That is a presence use of representing practices. Representing practices can also be used to organize states in the user that are like the state that WOULD BE produced if in the presence of something. Looking at a photo of a thing is in limited but definite ways like being with the thing itself. > Orienting principle 4: The same representational form can evoke different states in different bodies - and with the same body, in different contexts. It isn't about the form of the representation, it's about
the representing object or event PLUS the existing state of the user. 4. How bodies do language in particular:
5. Traditional linguistics Traditional linguistics developed in the Middle Ages mainly in the teaching of Latin, which was predominantly a written language. It emphasized distinctions between form and meaning/content, competence and performance, semantics and pragmatics. These distinctions all implicitly ignore the fact that language is something a body does. It talks about language as if it is somehow independent from its users, a thing: 'the language'. a. Traditional distinctions and contrasts
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 framework. 6. Functional and cognitive linguistics There are at present a couple of related kinds of approach to naturalizing linguistics:
Halliday's Introduction to functional grammar is a "more socially oriented semantically based model of grammatical structure." Emphasis is on the way a grammatical unit such as a word or phrase can be having more than one kind of effect at a time: on multifunctionality of grammatical units in the linguistic moment. This approach is compatible with and suggestive of a dynamical network vision of language function.
It's been based at UCSD and UC Berkeley in both cognitive science and linguistics departments, where linguistics has been integrated with other sorts of study (including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science) as part of cognitive science. Cognition here means perception, imagining, representing, thinking, the whole bundle of things we think of as 'the mind'. The cognitive linguistics approach includes: - Emphasis on ways language shows general structures of perception and action, shared cognitive structure. - 'Concepts' understood as embodied in the sense of making use of sensory-motor capabilities, rather than added by some 'higher' faculty. - Usage-based study - 'corpus linguistics' - of spontaneous spoken speech recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, rather than study of language as a system of rules. - Claim that there are no natural units of language, but instead a self-organizing cumulative network effect. For example, articulation of an initial consonant depends on the vowel that follows. Try saying ock and then ack, and feel the difference in the articulation of the ck. - Not thinking of the sentence as prototypical. People don't speak in sentences so much as in intonational units - prosodical and semantical units with only one element of new information. - Realization that spoken and written language are very
different. 7. Topics investigated by cognitive linguistics Topic 1: spatial language and deixis
Here's a fine example of spatial language of different kinds used together:
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 by the language. The point is, however, that language is like other representational
media in evoking spatial simulation that includes somatic, viewpoint, and
act perspective.
Examples of deixis: here, you, I, now. Language forms that obviously rely on mutual context for their function. The term comes from the Greek deiktikos: able to show. 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. In other words, the way deictic elements function demonstrates the embodied nature and purposes of language. Example: we can point with our eyes OR say you. Both the gesture and the word both work the same way. 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. Where people aren't together in a space we have to say more - for instance in giving directions on a phone. 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. A comprehensive fictional orientation of the sort evoked by Gordimer's passage may be sustained through very long texts or it may be dropped after a sentence. It may or may not be a character viewpoint:
Topic 2: gesture and ASL Why think about gesture. Because findings about gesture show language integrated with action in the body, and suggest its origins in body movement. There is strong evidence that language and gesture are
one integrated system in the cortex, which comes from comparisons
of American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English, and from studies
of gesture that accompanies speech in hearing people.
David McNeill is a linguist-psychologist who studies gestures that occur with speech. He says "My own hypothesis is that speech and gesture are elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation " (McNeill 1992, 35).
The South African film about San people hunting, The great dance, is suggestive about the relations between whole-body imitation, gesture, and language. We see hunters running after a springbok communicating to each other silently with gestures, and later telling the story of the hunt by enacting it both with their hands and their whole bodies. McNeill's hypothesis is that:
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.
Topic 3: Prepositions
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.
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 noun in the object position. In all of these instances we are being directed to imagine a foreground object spatially related to a background object. 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 new visual system detail and the other with old motion-vision abstraction. Example: 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 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:
We have seen that, while the new vision system responds in detailed ways to the thingness of things, the old vision system is tracking them spatially and in less sensory detail.
An additional point made by Landau and Jackendoff is that prepositions treat parts of objects as if they were objects in their own right:
With both phrases given above, face is vaguely imagined, but nose and fly are both imagined with focal vision. Linguistically we treat 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. 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. The specific effect seems to be something to do with overlaps and or partial activation of the wide networks of cortical activation that are usual to language function. Example: That beech tree is so muscular. What happens when we hear or read that sort of sentence, which we don't for a moment take literally? > Why think about polysemy. Because, like metaphor, it demonstrates that words don't really 'have' meanings, they have uses, which overlap. Polysemy is the way a word can have many meanings, some of which can are quite remote from each other. Example: the word grain Noun:
Verb [ trans. ]
> Usage seems to change or expand because of partial overlaps in networks evoked. Example: Jesse is very bright but he's only two. His farmer
dad asks him, "What's the difference between a breaking plow and an
ordinary plow?" Jesse says, "The breakin' plow has bigger ...
knives." He doesn't know the word plowshare, so he uses a word
that is evoked by the sharpness, the cutting. - Summary
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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