Cognitive Linguistics Investigations
human cognitive processing is a forum for interdisciplinary research on the nature and organization of the cognitive systems and processes involved in speaking and understanding natural language (including sign language), and their relationship to other domains of human cognition, including general conceptual or knowledge systems and processes (the language and thought issue), and other perceptual or behavioral systems such as vision and nonverbal behavior (e.g. gesture). ‘Cognition’ should be taken broadly, not only including the domain of rationality, but also dimensions such as emotion and the unconscious. The series is open to any type of approach to the above questions (methodologically and theoretically) and to research from any discipline, including (but not restricted to) different branches of psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science, cognitive anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and neuroscience. It takes a special interest in research crossing the boundaries of these disciplines.
Editors Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University Raymond W. Gibbs, University of California at Santa Cruz Jan Nuyts, University of Antwerp Editorial address Jan Nuyts, University of Antwerp, Dept. of Linguistics (GER), Universiteitsplein 1, B 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium. E-mail:
[email protected] Editorial Advisory Board Melissa Bowerman, Nijmegen; Wallace Chafe, Santa Barbara, CA; Philip R. Cohen, Portland, OR; Antonio Damasio, Iowa City, IA; Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Madison, WI; David McNeill, Chicago, IL; Eric Pederson, Eugene, OR; François Recanati, Paris; Sally Rice, Edmonton, Alberta; Benny Shanon, Jerusalem; Lokendra Shastri, Berkeley, CA; Dan Slobin, Berkeley, CA; Paul Thagard, Waterloo, Ontario Volume 15 Cognitive Linguistics Investigations: Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries Edited by June Luchjenbroers
Cognitive Linguistics Investigations Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries
Edited by
June Luchjenbroers
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
8
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Australian Linguistics Institute (4th : 1998 : University of Queensland) Cognitive Linguistics Investigations : Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries / edited by June Luchjenbroers. p. cm. (Human Cognitive Processing, issn 1387–6724 ; v. 15) Chiefly revisions of papers presented at a 4th Australian Linguistics Institute workshop, held in July, 1998, at the University of Queensland. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Cognitive grammar--Congresses. I. Luchjenbroers, June. II. Title. P165.A96 1998 415--dc22 isbn 90 272 2368 8 (Hb; alk. paper)
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© 2006 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
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Table of contents
Preface
ix
Biographical information
xi
chapter 1 Introduction: Research issues in cognitive linguistics June Luchjenbroers
1
Part I. Cultural models and conceptual mappings chapter 2 When does cognitive linguistics become cultural? Case studies in Tagalog voice and Shona noun classifiers Gary Palmer
13
chapter 3 Purple persuasion: Deliberative rhetoric and conceptual blending Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley
47
chapter 4 Depicting fictive motion in drawings Teenie Matlock
67
chapter 5 Discourse, gesture, and mental spaces manoeuvers: Inside versus outside F-space June Luchjenbroers
87
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Part II. Computational models and conceptual mappings chapter 6 In search of meaning: The acquisition of semantic structures and morphological systems Ping Li
109
chapter 7 Grammar and language production: Where do function words come from? Joost Schilperoord and Arie Verhagen
139
chapter 8 Word recognition and sound merger Paul Warren
169
Part III. Linguistic components and conceptual mappings chapter 9 Verbal explication and the place of NSM semantics in cognitive linguistics Cliff Goddard chapter 10 “How do you know she’s a woman?”: Features, prototypes and category stress in Turkish kadin and kiz Robin Turner
189
219
chapter 11 Cross-linguistic polysemy in tactile verbs Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
235
chapter 12 How experience structures the conceptualization of causality Maarten Lemmens
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chapter 13 Internal state predicates in Japanese: A cognitive approach Satoshi Uehara
271
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chapter 14 Figure, ground and connexity: Evidence from Xhosa narrative David Gough
293
chapter 15 Discourse organization and coherence Ming-Ming Pu
305
Name index
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Subject index
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Preface
The origin of this book was a workshop held at the University of Queensland, during the 4th Australian Linguistics Institute, in July 1998. Researchers from around the world offered papers on a range of research topics of specific interest to the cognitive linguistics paradigm, and a number of those papers have been revised and modified for this volume. Since that workshop several additional papers were also sought from exciting researchers in the field, so that this monograph would capture the diversity of research activity from various parts of the world and across a range of languages, relevant to the Cognitive Linguistics orientation toward language and cognition. My thanks to the many colleagues who volunteered their time to give Peer reviews of the papers included in this volume (listed below). Without their help this monograph would not have been possible. Also many thanks are due to the contributors themselves, many of whom have tolerated countless delays and innumerable requests; their patience and good humour have made the task of collating this monograph a satisfying experience. Thanks also to the editors of this series and their reviewers; and a final thanks to the Centre for Language & Cognition Groningen (clcg) Rijks Universiteit Groningen, where this manuscript was finally completed, as well as the Linguistics Department at the University of Wales, Bangor for supporting my visit there. List of guest reviewers Michel Achard French/Linguistics, Rice University, USA Keith Allan Linguistics, Monash University, Australia Edith Bavin Psychology, La Trobe University, Australia Frank Brisard Germanic Languages, University of Antwerp, Belgium Wallace Chafe Linguistics, University California at Santa Barbara, USA Alan Cienki Russian Studies, Emory University, USA Hubert Cuyckens English Linguistics, Katoliek University Leuven, Belgium Dirk Geeraerts Linguistics, Katoliek University Leuven, Belgium Ray Gibbs Psychology, University California at Santa Barbara Adam Glaz Linguistics, University Marie-Curie Sklodowskiej, Poland Andrej A. Kibrik Applied Linguistics, Lomonosov University, Russia Ronald Langacker Linguistics, University California at San Diego, USA
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David Lee Eric Pederson Bill Raymond Giesela Redeker Wilbert Spooren Mark Turner
English Linguistics, University Queensland, Australia Linguistics, University Oregon, USA Linguistics, University Columbus Ohio, USA Communication, Rijks University Groningen, Netherlands Dutch/Communication, Vrije University, Netherlands Arts & Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, USA
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Seana Coulson – is an associate professor in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego where she heads the Brain & Cognition Laboratory. The author of Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting And Conceptual Blending In Meaning Construction, her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication and conceptual structure. Cliff Goddard – works primarily in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) theory originated by Anna Wierzbicka. He has published widely on cross-linguistic semantics, ethnopragmatics, descriptive linguistics, and language typology. His books include Semantic Analysis (OUP, 1998), Meaning and Universal Grammar (co-edited with Anna Wierzbicka, Benjamins, 2002) and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia (OUP, 2005). He is a full Professor in Linguistics at the University of New England, Australia. David Gough – is currently Head of the School of English Language at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, New Zealand where he has been for the past 5 years. Prior to this, David, a South African, was professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. He has research interest and has published in African linguistics, pragmatics and language and literacy education. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (PhD Edinburgh, 1999) – is currently a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She was a research fellow at UC Berkeley (1999–2001), the International Computer Science Institute (2000–2001), and the University of Deusto, Spain (2001–2003). She is especially interested in issues related to cross-linguistic polysemy, constructions, semantic change, semantic typology, sound symbolism, metaphor and metonymy, perception, space and motion. Maarten Lemmens – is senior lecturer of English linguistics at the University of Lille, France, where he teaches cognitive and English linguistics and English phonetics. His research centers around three main areas: (i) English lexical causatives and their constructional alternations, (ii) a lexical semantic analysis of posture verbs in Dutch, English and Swedish, and (iii) a typological study of the expression of static location, as a complement to existing research on movement verbs.
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Ping Li – is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Richmond, USA. His main research interests are in the areas of psycholinguistics and cognitive science. He specializes in crosslinguistic studies of language acquisition, bilingual language processing, and neural network modeling of monolingual and bilingual lexical development. June Luchjenbroers – received her PhD from La Trobe University in 1994, and joined the Linguistics Department at University of Wales, Bangor in 1999 after appointments with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the University of Queensland. Her research involves Discourse Analysis from a cognitive linguistics perspective, including gender and gestural analyses of video, discourse data. Teenie Matlock – is founding faculty in Social and Cognitive Sciences at University of California, Merced, and a visiting scholar in Psychology at Stanford University. An experimental psychologist and cognitive linguist, Matlock has published numerous articles on conceptual structure and imagery in language, especially non-literal spatial language. Todd Oakley – is associate professor of English and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His principle areas of scholarship are in rhetoric, linguistics, and cognitive science. His interest in Cognitive Lingusitics dates from the early 90’s when he began investigating the conceptual basis of rhetorical effect, a project that drew heavily on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces Theory. This project has since expanded to focus on the relationship between attention and meaning construction in general, hence its title, Elements of Attention: Explorations in Mind, Language, and Culture. Gary B. Palmer – is Professor Emeritus at Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996), translated as Hacia una Teoría de la Linguïstica Cultural (2000) by Enrique Bernárdez. He co-edited Talking about Thinking across Languages. Cognitive Linguistics 14/2,3 (2003) with Cliff Goddard and Penny Lee, Cognitive Linguistics and Non-Indo-European Languages (2003) with Eugene Casad, and Languages of Sentiment (1999) with Debra Occhi. Ming-Ming Pu – is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maine, Farmington. She obtained her PhD in psycholinguistics from University of Alberta, Canada. Her current research interests include cognitive linguistics, comparative discourse analysis and Chinese linguistics. Joost Schilperoord – is a psycholinguist with a special interest in cognitive and rhetorical aspects of text production and communication processes. His research focuses on regularities in language use derived from text analysis and experimentally elicited usage data. He is assistant professor at the Communication Department of Tilburg University, where he teaches statistics and text linguistics.
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Robin Turner – teaches English at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. His interests include cognitive, cultural and corpus linguistics, Turkish language and culture, constructed languages, and computer programming Satoshi Uehara – has a PhD in linguistics, from University of Michigan (1995). He is professor of Japanese language and linguistics at Center for International Exchange and Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, Japan. He has also taught at University of Michigan and Wellesley College. His areas of specialization are cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and Japanese and East and Southeast Asian linguistics. Arie Verhagen – received his PhD in 1986 at the Free University in Amsterdam. He has been teaching at the Free University, Utrecht University, and the University of Leiden. He has been editor-in-chief of Cognitive Linguistics, from 1996 until 2004. Since 1998, he holds the chair of Dutch Linguistics at the University of Leiden. Recent publications include Usage-Based Approaches to Dutch (co-edited with Jeroen van de Weijer, LOT, 2003) and Constructions of Intersubjectivity (Oxford University Press, 2005). Paul Warren – is Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Paul’s primary research interests are in psycholinguistics, in particular spoken word recognition and the use of intonation in sentence processing. Since moving to New Zealand in 1994, he has combined these interests with a growing fascination in the development of New Zealand English.
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chapter
Introduction Research issues in cognitive linguistics June Luchjenbroers University of Wales, Bangor
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The cognitive linguistics agenda
Linguistics as a discipline aspires to capture the essence of communication, and how language is processed in the human brain. The exact path to achieving this aspiration however, has in past decades split into two major and substantially different approaches: the now, more traditional approach to language processing, referred to as the ‘Formal’ or ‘Orthodox’ approach (cf. Langacker 1988), and the Cognitive Linguistics approach. A significant point of contrast between these two theoretical approaches lies in whether linguistic processes are deemed essentially different from other cognitive processes, or not; and thus whether linguistic phenomena should therefore should be investigated separately (cf. Chomsky 1980; Fodor 1983), or not. Although the goal of the Formal, generativist paradigm has been to provide cognitively oriented explanations rather than structural taxonomies, linguistics researchers from within the Cognitive Linguistics research community have brought challenge to a range of fundamental elements of the Formalist’s approach to language and cognition. In particular, cognitive linguistics challenges whether the brain is modular, as well as the role of logic and deduction as cognitive strategies for information processing (e.g., Langacker 1987, 1990); whether language in the brain is hardwired, as well as the validity of ‘mentalese’ (the supposed language of the mind, thought to be propositional in structure and possess logical attributes – cf. Fodor 1975; Pylyshyn 1984). The Formalist paradigm has consistently reinforced the view that the representation of language is best seen as involving basic, symbolic building blocks and rules; and further that those building blocks are also autonomously processed – i.e., grammar is distinct from both the lexicon and semantics (cf. Newmeyer 1986;
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Kempson 1991), and that semantics is distinct from pragmatics. However, researchers from within the cognitive linguistics community have repeatedly shown how a full appreciation of individual linguistic units requires the researcher to consider all parts of language analysis (cf. Fauconnier 1994; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1990; Talmy 1996). The papers of this volume have been collected to illustrate how otherwise separate areas of linguistic concern can present a better clarification of the linguistic distributions in which units are produced in talk; as well as provide a deeper appreciation of the semantic richness of those linguistic units, not captured by Formalist approaches. The cognitive linguistics agenda is to work toward a cognitively real approach to language processing; and for researchers from within the cognitive linguists community that means making ourselves amenable to research from disciplines outside the linguistics domain, such as psychology, A.I., Anthropology and philosophy, in addition to language related studies done within the linguistics spectrum. The papers in this volume are also drawn from a number of areas from within the cognitive sciences, to provide a more comprehensive appreciation of the multiplicity of the language units under investigation, as predicted and advocated by the cognitive linguistics approach to language and cognition. However, the full breadth of the cognitive linguistics agenda involves more than identifying the nature of language processing, which in itself includes both language production and comprehension processes, it also presupposes the more primary concern of language categorization and representation in the mind. In this volume a number of papers illustrate how our understanding of grammar units are essentially semantic, and other papers are devoted to specifically clarifying the nature of conceptual structures. Janda (2000) has also described the cognitive linguistics community as a group of researchers who embrace a concatenation of core concepts and goals, and who are emerged in the empirical observations of language behaviours across languages and disciplines. This does not subsume a single philosophical perspective toward the exact relation between language and mind; instead these core concepts capture the unifying principle that language, as representations in the mind and as the product of cognitive events, reflects the interaction of cultural, psychological, communicative and functional considerations.
. Outline of this volume As promised in the title of this collection, the total body of papers presents research across a variety of languages and language groups, as well show how particular elements of linguistic description draw upon otherwise separate aspects (or fields) of linguistic investigation. The languages include European languages – Basque,
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Dutch, Spanish and Turkish, as well as different varieties of English (American, Australian, New Zealand, and Old English); Asian languages – Chinese and Japanese; Austronesian Languages – Malay and Tagalog; Bantu languages – Shona and Xhosa; as well as a number of examples drawn from Australian Aboriginal languages and cultures, such as Dyirbal and Western Australian communities. Despite possible differences in philosophical approach to the role of language in cognitive tasks, and differences in the methodology used as an avenue for linguistic investigation, these papers are similar in a fundamental way: they all share a commitment to the view that human categorization involves mental concepts that have fuzzy boundaries and are culturally and situation-based. The selection of papers within this volume all concern how language comprehension and production involve conceptual mappings between varying domains of cognitive function. The three thematic subsections captured in this collection include (a) conceptual mappings involving cultural models. These involve specific types of knowledge that impact and sculpt the language outputs produced in talk. The second subsection (b), deals with computational models that emulate and hypothesize different features of the cognitive programming dealing with morphology, grammar, and sociolinguistic variation; while the third subsection of papers (c), focuses on specific components of linguistic description: semantics, grammar and discourse. A very appropriate start to the first subsection, and to this volume, is the paper by Gary Palmer, “When does cognitive linguistics become cultural? Case studies in Tagalog voice and Shona noun classifiers” (Chapter 2). In this paper, Palmer outlines important fieldwork in which important theoretical concerns about grammatical representation and processing are dealt with. He argues for the cognitive and semantic underpinnings of grammatical phenomena in the form of ‘cultural schemas’. Evidence for his argument is provided by cross-linguistic data (from Dyirbal, Tagalog, and Shona), to illustrate how many lexical domains and grammatical constructions link either directly or indirectly to significant cultural models. Well known concepts from the cognitive sciences, such as ‘scenarios’ from Artificial Intelligence and psychology, and ‘Idealized Cognitive Models’ from linguistics, are incorporated in his treatment of grammatical voice and noun classifiers, which are presented as extraordinary polycentric categories that provide the key to understanding the discourse of these language communities. After Palmer’s consideration of the role of culture (and thus experience) in explaining linguistic structure, the first thematic subsection continues with three other papers dealing with how different linguistic choices are manifest by each speaker’s conceptual representations of the world – Coulson & Oakley; Matlock; and Luchjenbroers. These papers, each drawing on different methodologies (discourse, experiment, and gesture), deal with different aspects of con-
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ceptual representation: Coulson & Oakley’s paper deals with conceptual blending; Matlock’s paper with how information in memory is manifest in lexical retrieval; and Luchjenbroers deals with how cognitive strategies are evident in conversational gesture. In the chapter by Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley, “Purple persuasion: Deliberative rhetoric and conceptual blending” (Chapter 3), the authors consider semantic structure in the form of ‘Conceptual Integration Theory’ (‘Blending Theory’). In their paper, the authors illustrate how blending is recruited in persuasive discourse. The data used include an email message encouraging people to vote in a US congressional election, and a church letter sent to encourage monetary donations to that church. With excerpts from these data, the authors show how simplified input models are blended to form integrated event scenarios, and how the strategic choice of input frames can provide a writer (or speaker) with the means to encourage a particular construal of events that will likely result in the target action(s). Coulson and Oakley argue that persuasion depends on ‘objects of agreement’, and the strategic choice of inputs to create a convincing blend will promote the perception of such agreement. The following chapter (4), “Depicting fictive motion in drawings”, by Teenie Matlock, puts Len Talmy’s proposed, ‘fictive motion’ (1996) to the test, and thereby also cognitive theory dealing with conceptual representation and language processing. In this paper Matlock deals with motion verbs, and asks whether fictive motion plays a role in their comprehension. With a number of drawing experiments, she uncovers reliable evidence of a link between motion verbs and the mental simulation of the action conveyed by the verb: a link that involves a mentally simulated traversal or scanning of a trajectory. For example, manner information (such as slow, fast, or neutral) is depicted with longer, thinner or straighter lines for fast verbs than for slow verbs. The results given from three experiments challenge many traditional approaches to lexical representation, and provide strong evidence that comprehension taps into knowledge acquired from embodied experience. The final paper of this subsection (Chapter 5), “Discourse, gesture, and mental spaces manoeuvers: Inside vs. outside F-space”, by June Luchjenbroers, investigates the dynamics of conversational gesture in terms of the physical space in which they occur during discourse. That space, also called the ‘comfort zone’ or ‘F-space’, is where speakers produce most of their gestures during discourse, and Luchjenbroers argues that speakers convey added meaning, relevant to mental spaces navigations (i.e., movements around conceptual structure), when they choose to locate their gestures inside the boundaries of that space, or when they physically stretch to place a gesture outside it. The examples offered in this paper also illustrate how a speaker’s choice of gesture can amplify, and sometimes supplement information provided by the lexical component; they also show how the loca-
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tion of a gesture in relation to a speaker’s F-space conveys role relations relevant to the subject-matter being discussed. As such, a speaker’s gestural F-space can be an important source of information for all discourse participants to establish, navigate and disambiguate the many mental spaces that may be required during discourse. These chapters are then followed by a new thematic subsection, that brings together research dealing with different computational models of the human cognitive system. These papers discuss different computation models for describing cognitive processes associated with the mental lexicon, in relation to morphology (Li); grammar (Schilperoord & Verhagen); and the phonological system (Warren). The paper by Ping Li (Chapter 6), “In search of meaning: The acquisition of semantic structures and morphological systems”, presents a very different approach to cognitive processing, in that he utilizes computational models in the form of a connectionist network. In this paper Li challenges the Formalist assumption embraced by many areas in the cognitive sciences that language is best seen as involving basic, symbolic building blocks and rules. Using child language acquisition data, and in particular parental speech from the childes database, Li begins with the observation that young children learn word meanings by exploiting contextual information in the input; thus, lexical categories can be acquired by the computation of statistical regularities involving multiple constraining factors, and meaning is the emergent property of that process. The major part of this paper, however, is his consideration of a puzzle involving a ‘cryptotype’, in the form of the reversive prefix ‘un-’. The un- problem is described as essentially semantic for which there seems to be no regular rule to govern its use – e.g., we can ‘untie’ a bow but not ‘unmove’ a desk. Li’s study illustrates how the semantic features that unite different members of a cryptotype are represented in a complex distributed fashion (where feature overlaps occur across categories); a process that is accessible to native intuition but appears to defy traditional symbolic analysis. In chapter Seven by Joost Schilperoord and Arie Verhagen, “Grammar and language production: Where do function words come from?”, the authors deal with the characterization of linguistic knowledge, in particular, organizational features of the mental lexicon and mental grammar. The practical application of this bigger picture issue is to ask the question, “how are function words selected during language production?”. In this quest, the authors first offer a theoretical consideration of language production models and the predictions that result from them. This is then followed by a usage based consideration of function words (prepositions and articles) and pauses, as they appear in the production of Dutch, oral dictations of routine business letters. The authors use cognitive linguistic views on the nature of linguistic knowledge to explain the evidence they have obtained regarding function words and how they are cognitively processed. In particular, they call into question assumptions in the literature that function words are stored
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independently of their lexical heads, and whether there is a principled difference between functional and lexical words in the mental lexicon. In the final paper of this subsection (Chapter 8), “Word recognition and sound merger”, by Paul Warren, language processing models are again considered, although in this case, the field of research deals with comprehension in the form of psycholinguistic models of spoken word recognition. Warren questions how the human recognition system copes with phonetic variability across inputs: a matter of key interest for cognitive and computational theories dealing with how linguistic units (words and phones) are represented and processed for talk. The primary focus of this paper is a phenomenon Warren refers to as (word) ‘sound merger’, as in New Zealand ear/air neutralization. In NZ English merger occurs when two originally, phonologically distinct words progressively loose phonetic contrast, to become homophones; a progression that can be partial or complete. He then considers strong sociolinguistic literature addressing this phenomenon in New Zealand English to give evidence that merger is definitely in progress. These studies provide the corpus data to consider frequency and context effects, as well as social variables such as age difference, as predictors of when sounds merge and when not. Warren suggests that aspects of the sentential and extralinguistic context will resolve homophone ambiguity in the case of merged ear and air forms just like they do for other homophones. The final subsection of papers in this volume deal specifically with different and sometimes overlapping aspects of linguistic description: semantics, grammar and discourse. The first paper in this subsection, by Goddard, has many features in common with the first paper in this volume (Palmer), in that it also deals with cultural models, computational arguments, and semantic structure. However, Goddard presents a slightly different orientation to the earlier papers, in that he focuses on not only conceptual representations of lexical entries and the semantic relations they involve, but is also concerned with key aspects of the cognitive linguistics theory itself, in terms of the intellectual contribution made to the field by Anna Wierzbicka. In his paper, “Verbal explication and the place of NSM semantics in cognitive linguistics” (Chapter 9), Cliff Goddard considers areas of cognitive linguistics endeavour compatible with or anticipated by Wierzbicka’s approach to conceptual structure. However, the main core of Goddard’s paper is to argue, with examples from Aboriginal cultures, Malay, English and Japanese, that the verbal explication of conceptual categories and lexical entries is indispensable to the field of cognitive linguistics, and to illustrate that diagrams cannot stand alone without verbal support. In fact, Goddard argues that diagrams often rely on complex culture-specific iconographic conventions (to be interpreted), and only a fine-grained approach to verbal explication can the subtle nuances of abstract, culture-rich vocabulary be dealt with. Any theorist who re-
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searches how linguistic and language-relevant information is cognitively stored, retrieved and illustrated, as well as how analysts can illustrate their representations, must also make theoretical decisions concerning the issues raised in this paper. This argument is a very relevant and important to bear in mind with the papers collected in the final subsection of this volume that deal with specific components of linguistic description: semantic analyses (Turner; Ibarretxe-Antuñano; and to some extent Lemmens); grammatical choices (Lemmens; and Uehara); and finally discourse in the form of narrative (Gough; and Pu). Many of the component arguments raised and dealt with in these papers also have resonance with earlier papers placed in other subsections. For example, in chapter Ten, “‘How do you know she’s a woman?’: Features, prototypes and category stress in Turkish ‘kadın’ and ‘kız’” by Robin Turner, a number of concepts raised by Palmer (this volume) are considered with Turkish data, including Noun classification, story schemas and scenarios as well as prototype effects. In this paper, Turner asks the question relevant to the Turkish choice of ‘kız’ (‘girl’) or ‘kadın’ (‘woman’) as a descriptor of an adult woman, “When is a girl a woman?” Using descriptive elements from componential semantics (i.e., + or – some semantic feature) Turner nevertheless illustrates the ‘fluid’ nature of meaning, and that category membership is not absolute; descriptive components like [+virgin] are merely convenient for naive descriptions because it fits the minimum criteria for the prototype of a lexical entry, such as ‘kız’. A number of different approaches to lexical semantics are considered, including Palmer’s (1996) view that categorization is influenced by scenarios that define sequences of (expected) states and actions. An important contribution made by Turner’s paper is the concept of ‘category stress’, which occurs when there is a disparity between the results of feature-based and prototype-based categorizations. This stress has a direct impact on how users deal with category membership in production as well as comprehension. Complementing Turner’s research, the following paper “Cross-linguistic polysemy in tactile verbs” (Chapter 11) by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, looks at how the semantic content of the tactile verb ‘touch’ in three genetically unrelated languages (Basque, Spanish and English) interacts and contributes to the creation of semantic extensions, while taking into account the different lexicalization patterns needed to convey the different senses this tactile verb can convey. The resulting polysemy is explained in terms of different experiential domains, triggered by the different senses of this verb, such as the mapping onto emotions, as well as other semantic fields. Even though the following chapter (12) by Maarten Lemmens, “How experience structures the conceptualization of causality”, is in principle about syntactic choices, it also deals with lexical semantics. In this paper he focuses specifically on verbs of ‘killing’, such as ‘suffocate’, ‘choke’ and ‘kill’. Variations in the conceptual-
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ization of the different causative events are considered, with regard to which verb of ‘killing’ is chosen and the consequences that choice has for the selection of syntactic pattern in which it is to appear. His consideration includes case categories, such as Agent, Affected, Goal and Instigator, and their significance for transitive vs. ergative syntactic choices. For example, he argues that a more volitional participant who is engaged in some causative process, is more likely to be represented as a volitional Actor in a transitive construction. Lemmens’ research uses Old English, corpus data, and goes beyond description to focus on the experiential bases for a speaker’s choice of verb within a specific semantic class. Lemmen’s paper on syntactic choices is then followed by Satoshi Uehara’s cognitive grammar paper “Subjective predicates in Japanese: A cognitive approach” (Chapter 13). Here again, like several earlier chapters, the discussion of grammatical elements involves semantic concepts, in this case feelings and emotional reactions. Uehara’s main interest in this paper is subjectification, and the construal of the speaker (i.e., the conceptualizer), to explain the use of particular grammatical elements in discourse – e.g., account for the use of the nominative particle -ga with grammatical objects. Uehara’s many examples illustrate his claim that subjective predicates in Japanese can best be characterized as ‘deictic’ as they profile the object of conception from the vantage point of the speaker. The final two papers of this collection both deal with narrative. The first by Dave Gough, “Figure, ground and connexity: Evidence from Xhosa narrative”, (Chapter 14). This is a usage-based study of folk narrative discourse, which is the stimulus to show how discourse factors, pragmatic and cognitive processing should be described in terms outside language itself. Like Palmer, in chapter Two, he argues that grammatical terms like ‘mood’ and ‘tense’ refer to quite diverse verbal categories; and similarly, like Pu, in the following chapter, he uses a functionally based account of narrative discourse, with categories such as ‘foregrounding’ and ‘backgrounding’, in addition to the more general process of ‘grounding’, and ‘connexity’ (or ‘dependence’), to reveal systematic (conceptual) organization. His ultimate claim is that the concepts of ‘grounding’ and ‘connexity’ are fundamental to the organisation of the Xhosa verbal system and further that verbal forms, referred to as the participial, consecutive and indicative moods as well as the so-called ‘continuous tense’ are structured around those concepts. In the final chapter in this volume, “Coding events in oral and written discourse” (Chapter 15), Ming-Ming Pu also investigates discourse, although her focus is on discourse organization in terms of thematic structure and information units. In particular, Pu examines episodic structure and how speakers relate events within and between them. This is followed by a consideration of the relation between spoken and written narratives, as well as universality in narrative production. Pu uses narrative data that was produced by English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, drawn from a children’s picture book. Her research is part of a larger tradition that
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sees conversations and written texts as more than unordered strings of utterances; instead she argues for structures with levels of organization that require conceptual management. Pu’s study provides further evidence of the cognitive constraints upon speakers to accommodate their addressee’s processing needs by signaling discourse units and prompting the retrieval of information. A wide range of language issues are relevant to cognitive linguistics research and is reflected in the collection of papers included in this volume. The now traditional cognitive linguistics areas include: lexical semantics, cognitive grammar, metaphor and prototypes, pragmatics, narrative and discourse, and computational models. In this volume however, these general concerns have been considered in harmony with other important fields including: language acquisition, language and culture, video data analysis and gesture, Blending Theory, fictive motion and others. Devising an order for these papers, or my summation of them for this chapter was made all the more difficult because they all illustrate how a full appreciation of particular elements of linguistic description, and the cognitive processing involved in their use, requires a synthesis of different (and traditionally separate) areas of linguistic investigation; and that aspects of situated meaning and cultural semantics are relevant to the cognitive processing of language phenomena, and should not be divorced from them.
References Chomsky, Noam (1980). Rules and Representations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fauconnier, Gilles (1994/1985). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, UK: CUP. Fodor, Jerry A. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell. Fodor, Jerry A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Janda, Laura (2000). Cognitive Linguistics. Paper presented at SLING2K Workshop. Kempson, Ruth (1991). The Language Faculty and Communication. Reading materials, 1991 Linguistics Institute, Univ. of California at Santa Cruz. Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Univ. Chicago Press. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1990). Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books. Langacker, Ron (1987). The Cognitive Perspective. CRL Newsletter. Vol. 1(3). UC, San Diego. Langacker, Ron (1988). An Overview of Cognitive Grammar. In B. Rudzka-Ostyn (Ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Langacker, Ron (1990). The Rule Controversy: a Cognitive Grammar Perspective. CRL Newsletter, 4(3). University of California, San Diego. Newmeyer, F. J. (1986). Linguistic Theory in America: The first Quarter-Century of Transformational Generative Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Palmer, Gary (1996). Towards a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Pylyshyn, Zenon (1984). Computation and Cognition: Towards a Foundation for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Talmy, Len (1996). Fictive motion in language and “ception”. In P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (Eds.), Language and space (pp. 211–276). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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When does cognitive linguistics become cultural? Case studies in Tagalog voice and Shona noun classifiers Gary Palmer University of Nevada at Las Vegas
In cultural linguistics, grammar is seen as governed by cultural schemata rather than universal innate or emergent cognitive schemata. Sources of linguistically determinant schemata include mythology, social structure, repetitive domestic and subsistence activities, and salient rituals. Two noteworthy types of cultural schemata are scenarios, which model social action and discourse, and polycentric categories, which elaborate the complex and radial category types of Langacker (1987) and Lakoff (1987). These concepts will be demonstrated in two case studies: In Tagalog, an Austronesian language, grammatical voice used in emotional expression expresses elementary scenarios of control and non-control. In Shona, a Bantu language, noun classifiers are governed by polycentric categories pertaining to salient domestic and ritual scenarios. Keywords: categories, Bantu, Austronesian, scenarios, cultural linguistics
.
Introduction1
Ronald Langacker (1999: 13) has noted that “language is an essential instrument and component of culture, whose reflection in linguistic structure is pervasive and quite significant” (1999: 16). This observation provides an excellent starting point for cultural linguistics, an approach which foregrounds cultural schemata in explanations of grammar and semantic patterns (Palmer 1996). In this respect, it contrasts with the typical practice of cognitive linguistics, which foregrounds universal cognitive processes such as figure-ground relations, force dynamics, emergent categories, and Idealized Cognitive Models, leaving cultural dimensions of language somewhere in the background, or at least unlabeled as such. Cultural linguistics is not so much a new theory as a shift in emphasis. It draws on the theory of cogni-
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tive linguistics for many essential analytical concepts, but it takes a point of view from the margin of cognitive linguistics as it is typically practiced. It is an extension of cognitive linguistics into cultural domains, as foreshadowed in the writings of Langacker (1987, 1991a, b), Lakoff (1987), and others. Specifically, I am claiming that many grammatical phenomena are best understood as governed by cultural schemata rather than universal innate or emergent cognitive schemata. The sources of such cultural schemata include mythology, such as the Australian Dyirbal myth of the sun and moon, which George Lakoff used to explain membership in Dyirbal noun classes (Lakoff 1987). They also include social structure, repetitive domestic and subsistence activities, salient rituals, and a host of other cultural phenomena. This cultural emphasis makes it essential that the linguist either produce or survey ethnography pertaining to the linguistic topic under study. As Mylne (1995) argued in a critique of Lakoff ’s interpretation of Dyirbal classifiers, linguists can not rely solely upon their own intuitions about the semantics of complex domains, but should instead attempt to discover which concepts have particular relevance for speakers. Unlike postmodernist cultural theory, which posits no fixed points of reference or stable meanings, cultural linguistics depicts grammar as an entrenched system of meaning and form. Following Langacker’s (1987, 1991a, b, 1999) theory of cognitive linguistics, the minimal units of grammar are verbal symbols, each of which represents a linkage of two kinds of units, one phonological, the other semantic. Semantic units are characterized relative to semantic domains (1987: 63). Since these may include any concept or knowledge system, linguistic semantics is encyclopedic and very much a cultural entity. When a class of linguistic expressions is seen as relative to one or more semantic domains of relatively extensive scope with complex category structures and rich details, then cognitive linguistics becomes decidedly cultural. It is this difference in emphasis and elaboration of the cultural dimension, not an underlying difference in theory, which justifies the new label of cultural linguistics. The label also differentiates the approach from that of contemporary linguistic anthropology, which is typically discourse-oriented and heavily invested in pragmatism and political economic or feminist theory, often displaying scant interest in cultural categories or cognitive processes. In my view, culture and cognition are not separate entities, just two views on the process whereby people with minds, which are embedded in physical bodies situated in social and physical environments, communicate, learn, think, and pursue social goals. Similarly, Edwin Hutchins (1996: 354) proposed an integrated view of human cognition, “in which a major component of culture is a cognitive process . . . and cognition is a cultural process.” Certain types of cultural models merit special attention from linguistic anthropologists and culturally oriented linguists. These are scenarios (including discourse scenarios) and polycentric categories. The use of these concepts will be
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demonstrated in two case studies (1) voice and emotional expression in Tagalog, an Austronesian language; and (2) noun classifiers in Shona, a Bantu language. The first case will deal with elemental scenarios underlying grammatical voice in the emotion language that appears in a Tagalog video melodrama dealing with a couple living in transnational circumstances. I will show how the highly abstract scenarios underlying voice are instantiated in the emotional discourse of melodrama and provide the key to understanding that discourse. In the case the study of Shona, I demonstrate that a better understanding of noun classifiers can be achieved by analyzing each classifier as a polycentric category. The latter is a synthesis of Langacker’s (1987) concept of complex category with Lakoff ’s (1987) concept of radial category. Unlike the radial category, which has a single central prototype category, a polycentric category has multiple central categories connected by conceptual metonymies. In the next section I will elaborate on these concepts. Then, in the following sections, I will apply them to the case studies.
. Operational concepts
Scenarios Scenarios are schematic cultural models of action. Cultural linguistics is based on the premise that grammar is relative to cultural models and culturally defined imagery. Cultural models are cognitive entities, but they are often more richly elaborated and further removed from basic physical and cognitive experience than the spatial-mechanical schemas and figure-ground relations typically investigated within cognitive linguistics. Examples of cultural models include the conventional knowledge systems governing kinship, ways of preparing food, navigation, rituals, myths, ceremonies, games, and speech events such as conversations. Imagery arises from construing models at different levels of abstraction, from different points of view, or at different stages in a process,2 and from admitting various features of models within the scope of attention (Langacker 1987; Lakoff 1987; Palmer 1996). Cultural models include some, but perhaps not all, of what Lakoff (1987: 113– 114) termed Idealized Cognitive Models, in which he included propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric, and metonymic models. Universal image-schemas derived solely from the common experience of inhabiting a human body would not in themselves be cultural models. However, universal image-schemas may be incorporated into cultural models, and in fact most physical experience reflects not only universal constraints, but also cultural modifications or culturally specific uses of tools, dwellings, and habitats. Embodied universal categories may simultaneously belong to cultural domains.
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With respect to metaphoric and metonymic models, it seems more accurate to speak of metaphoric relations between models or parts of models, or to say that models comprise functional relations, which provide the material for verbal metonymy. But again, these distinctions are not theoretically crucial so long as cognitive linguistics provides a role for cultural constraints on grammar, as Langacker and Lakoff have done. It is useful to explicitly recognize the elements of convention and social construction by referring to some kinds of linguistically significant models as cultural, while conceding that all cultural models are also cognitive. Most ICMs are cultural products, and the same may be said for domains of experience (Lakoff 1987). Thus, it seems appropriate to refer to an approach which examines such cultural constraints on language as cultural linguistics. By using the term, we make it obvious that existing ethnographic studies contain a wealth of information of potential immediate use to linguistic theory. Relatively abstract or decontextualized images are called schemas or imageschemas. Those involving actions and sequences of actions are scenarios. The scenario concept is particularly important in cultural linguistics because the term directs attention to the imagery of social action and discourse, which has largely been overlooked by cognitive linguistics, particularly in the study of non-IndoEuropean languages. The reason for this neglect may lie in the fact that scenarios are strongly influenced by history and socio-cultural context and therefore relatively independent of more basic cognitive processes of attention, accessibility or saliency of information, and basic concept formation which many linguists regard as the strongest determinants of grammar. It is true that Langacker (1987: 63) included as possible semantic domains “the conception of a social relationship” and “the speech situation”, but at the very least, one can say that social scenarios have not been clearly delineated as a type of imagery having linguistic significance to the same extent as, for example, spatial imagery. And yet, humans probably direct as much verbal attention to orienting in society as they do in space, if not more. Not all of this social orientation can be reduced to metaphors of force and space. The approach pursued here resembles that of Anna Wierzbicka in that her cultural scripts are something like scenarios (Wierzbicka 1996, 1997; Palmer 2000). However, unlike Wierzbicka, I do not reduce scenarios to statements composed of a small set of semantic primes arranged according to the rules of a semantic metalanguage. I take scenarios to be gestalts or constructions built up from lower-level scenarios and event-schemas.
Discourse scenarios and discursives The discourse-relevant content of forms and constructions is not always obvious. Much attention has been devoted to discourse particles, but verbs or verbal morphology may also predicate information pertaining to discourse and human
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interaction, notably information on the agency of actors or interlocutors, as I will show in the Tagalog case study. Cultural linguistics approaches discourse by following two principles: (1) part of the meaning of every lexeme or construction is its habitually situated use in discourse; (2) discourse is governed by scenarios of verbal and social interaction. The first principle follows from Langacker’s premise that “any facet of the context [of an usage event] that consistently recurs across a set of usage events can be retained as a specification of the schema that emerges from them” (Palmer 1996: 40; see also Langacker 2001). The usage principle may seem obvious, but the implications for cognitive linguistics have not been clearly drawn. Of course it means that discourse follows culturally specific patterns and sequences, but it also means that most discourses consist partly of verbal particles, lexemes, and longer utterances whose predicational content is the discourse itself, meaning its participants, verbal events, and prosodic qualities. Since verbal discourse is so pervasive in human life, much of the lexicon and grammar of any language must be about discourse scenarios. Thus, we have metadiscursive terms and expressions like lie, gossip, shut up, be attentive, and be on the stump (give speeches in a political campaign). The domain of terms and expressions that predicate discourse scenarios includes that of speech act terms, but it is more comprehensive. For example, the construction be attentive, is not, strictly speaking, a speech act, but it does predicate a construal of one aspect of a discourse scenario. Terms whose main function is to predicate some aspect of ongoing discourse in which the speaker is engaged may be termed discourse indexicals, or just discursives (Palmer 1996: 207).3 These would include discourse particles such as English um, oh, and uh huh, Japanese yo, some tag questions, and English like when used as a presentative or quotative (e.g. She was like [quote, pseudoquote or experiential state]). The so-called discourse particles are seen not as mere non-propositional forms (Stubbs 1983), non-referential indexicals (Silverstein 1976), conversational reflexes, pointers, meaningless elements, or strategic moves (Clark 1996) that are qualitatively different from other terms, but as terms that predicate much as other terms do. They are verbal symbols whose semantic domain happens to be the ongoing and ambient discourse itself as performed by both speaker and listener. Thus, discursives may even be evaluative, as when English So? is used to question the significance of a preceding statement and is riposted with a Sooo?! that sarcastically questions the validity of the original question. Discursives may pertain to situation, interactional structure, pragmatic intensions, ideological content, or phonological shape of discourse. Since each culture develops its own unique discourse imagery, this is a potentially important topic in cultural linguistics.4 Many other terms and expressions may be said to have discourse indexicality or discursiveness as a peripheral part of their meaning (compare Langacker 1987: 63).
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elaboration PROTOTYPE
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VARIANT
Figure 1. Complex category as envisioned by Langacker (1987)
Langacker (1991b: 318) defined the term ground as “the speech event, its participants, and its immediate circumstances . . . .” Since discursives predicate about ongoing discourse, which is necessarily part of the grounding situation, one might theorize that they will sometimes predicate speakers’ perspectives. One could investigate their distribution across the dimension of subjectivity-objectivity (Langacker 1990). A participant may take a subjective perspective on the speech event, in which case she herself lies outside the perceptual field; or she may construe the event and her own role in it objectively, in which case she herself lies within the perceptual field. Japanese yo, for example, has a sense something like I am telling you or pay attention to what I just said, but the participants are tacit, suggesting a subjective perspective and a focus on the discourse events rather than the participants, whereas an English tag question, such as “Am I right?” with an explicit pronoun for speaker, is a discursive suggesting an objective perspective on speaker in Langacker’s sense. The topic of discursives will not be discussed further in this paper, but I mention it as meriting further cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study.
Categories: Complex, radial, and polycentric Cognitive linguistics presents us with at least two types of complex categories. The first is Langacker’s, which he characterizes simply as a complex category (Langacker 1987: 373; see also Palmer 1996: 96–97). It begins with a prototype and a variant. Since these necessarily have something in common, there is also a schema, which is elaborated by both the prototype and the variant (Figure 1). Langacker’s complex category appears to have no place for conceptual metonymy. Another kind of complex category is the radial category as described by Lakoff (1987). A radial category has a central subcategory and non-central extensions or variants. This is very much like Langacker’s model, except that Lakoff does not include the schemas which can be abstracted from each extension of the prototype to a variant. In his discussion of Dyirbal noun classes, Lakoff also states that “complex categories are structured by chaining; central members are linked to other members, which are linked to other members, and so on” (1987: 95). Some of the links which he describes are conceptual metonymies (the sun is linked to sunburn); others are similarities (sunburn is linked to the sting of the hairy mary grub), or prototype to variant relations (women to the sun, who is a mythical woman).
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Figure 2. Radial category balan as envisioned by Lakoff (1987: 103)
Rather vaguely, he asserted that Experiential Domains and Idealized Cognitive Models can “characterize links in category chains” (1987: 95). A bit of cultural theory seeps in as well: “Experiential Domains . . . are basic domains of experience, which may be culture-specific” [bold face added]. I hold that such linguistically significant experiential domains are in most instances actually cultural scenarios that have been given high salience by virtue of occurring in myth, ritual, crisis, social structure, or even the daily drudgery of domestic life. The functional links within domains are what we regard as conceptual metonymies. In a further suggestion of the importance of conceptual metonymy over schematization, Lakoff asserted that “specific knowledge (for example knowledge of mythology) overrides general knowledge” (1987: 96). We are left with a picture of a category that has a central prototype from which radiate a number of chains based on similarity and conceptual metonymy (Figure 2). Lakoff used this concept to develop a theory of Dyirbal noun classifiers. Three of the four classifiers were characterized as radial categories (bayi, balan, balam). The fourth (bala) was characterized as an ‘everything else’ category. Noun classifiers represent a common and important kind of grammatical category, which was once thought to be arbitrarily organized. Lakoff (1987) demonstrated that a class may have hundreds of members that share no common features of meaning. In my opinion, this important advance in the theory of linguistic categories depended crucially on understanding the governing role of cultural scenarios. Tom Mylne (1995) took issue with Lakoff ’s (1987) analysis of Dyirbal noun classifiers, accusing him of imposing a Western world view on the Dyirbal system because it proposed human males and females as prototypes for the classes bayi and balan. Mylne proposed instead that the linguist should seek to discover which concepts have particular relevance for the Dyirbal and use these as the basis for the analysis. He proposed that the four classes of bala, balam, bayi, and balan
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could each be defined by combinations of values on the dimensions of potency and harmony, which have special relevance in Dyirbal culture and society. Thus, Mylne’s critique appears to be an argument for an explanation that is more cultural than cognitive, but based on parameters or features, rather than on scenarios or cultural models. My analysis of classifiers is like Mylne’s in two respects: First, I am arguing that the important criteria for classification are concepts that are culturally salient. Second, I am arguing that one finds no single prototype at the center of a typical noun class. But unlike Mylne, I do not try to explain the category by replacing the prototype with one or two abstracted dimensions. Similar approaches have been attempted in Bantu studies (Contini-Morava 1994; Spitulnik 1987, 1989) with unsatisfactory results, as discussed by Palmer and Arin (1999) and Palmer and Woodman (1999). A third type of complex category is the polycentric category as proposed by Palmer and Woodman (1999). A polycentric category has multiple central categories, each of which may be a scenario or a prototype derived from the scenario. I show only scenarios in the central region of Figure 3. I treat the central categories as a functional complex, rather than as parameters which must have contrasting values across categories, though I would not rule out the possibility of a level of contrast that would apply across classes to subsets of category members. The central categories are related to one another and to more peripheral categories and instances either by function (contiguity, conceptual metonymy), by similarity (prototype to variant, metaphor), or by schematization (schema to instantiation). I call these complexes polycentric categories. They consist in part of complex categories as defined by Langacker (1987: 373) and of radial categories as defined by Lakoff (1987). Since the cognitive links of polycentric categories are all embedded in cultural scenarios and other sorts of cultural models, the PC is at once both cognitive and cultural.
. Case studies
Case 1: Grammatical voice and emotion language in Tagalog5 The notion of agency itself represents a very abstract schema of social interaction in which the subject or focal participant initiates or performs an action. In many languages it is uncommon to explicitly mention agents of transitive constructions, so that sentence subjects are often experiencers or objects of transitive actions. Mention of a transitive agent may require explicit ergative marking on the noun. In Western Samoa, Alessandro Duranti (1994: 114–143) found that participants in village council meetings were reluctant to define agents in the beginning part of the
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f
f
f f
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elaboration extension
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SCENARIO A
f
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Figure 3. Schematic of polycentric category as proposed by Palmer and Woodman (1999)
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meetings. In transcriptions of the meetings, transitive clauses with ergative agents were not very frequent (1994: 125). They appeared only where participants were receiving credit or blame, or where “the power of certain individuals or groups to affect others through their actions or to cause or initiate events is at least acknowledged” (1994: 126). The person with the highest incidence of ergative agents in his speech was the senior orator who chaired the meeting and also acted as prosecutor or instigator. References to actions of the Almighty also place the Lord in the ergative case, as in example (1) (1994: 126). (1) e fa’alava e le Akua mea ‘uma. ta caus+enough erg art Lord thing all “The Lord makes all things sufficient.”
Speakers avoid focusing the agency of participants by placing actors in prepositional or genitive phrases. While some are fixing responsibility and laying blame with ergative constructions, others are dodging responsibility and denying blame with genitive or prepositional constructions, or with vague language. Duranti pointed out that speaking with ergative agents constructs relations of power as much as it reflects them. The powerful may use ergative constructions to frame the situation, but the less powerful use them at their own risk. By demonstrating the usage of the ergative construction in political scenarios, Duranti has shown that the grammar of agency participates in the culture of power. Making the connection is not as straightforward as relating a deictic term or a spatial preposition to a physical scene, because the construal of social events is much more problematic than the construal of basic spatial conformations. Further complicating the analysis is the fact that the language of agency is not independent of the social process. The discourse and its grammar participate in the scenario, co-constituting it along with other symbolic acts, such as seating arrangements, turn-taking, and presentations of gifts or titles. There are ways to evaluate dimensions of social scenarios independently from their discourse, but for the moment I am resorting to an interpretive approach. This is not an unusual limitation, because linguists are seldom able to provide rigorous proofs of the semantic basis for their grammatical categories. My case study of voice in Tagalog emotion language is parallel to Duranti’s study of ergative constructions in Samoan council discourse. Agency schemas underlie grammatical voice at its semantic pole. Tagalog lacks an ergative case construction, but there are other grammatical similarities, no doubt based on the fact that Samoan and Tagalog are distantly related Austronesian languages. For example, both languages commonly place non-focused agents in genitive phrases.6 In Tagalog, several verbal affixes predicate the agency or the lack of agency of the focal participant in a clause. Interpreting their meaning with respect to agency of participants in a discourse is not always straightforward, because speaker may
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be referring to the agency of self, of interlocutor, or of some third party. Nevertheless, the attribution or denial of agency can be shown to make sense in the discourse context. I will not be arguing that emotion language in Tagalog differs greatly from language in other domains of culture and discourse, only that making the governing scenarios explicit helps us to understand agency and voice in Tagalog. When comparable studies become available, the scenarios governing voice can be compared cross-linguistically. However, it does seem likely that emotional language is particularly sensitive to the nuances of semantic agency evocable by voice constructions. It therefore provides a good domain for the study of voice. This case study examines grammatical voice in the emotion language that appears in a Tagalog video melodrama dealing with a couple living in transnational circumstances. I will demonstrate that the protagonists in this melodrama most often present themselves and one another either as grammatical experiencers or patients. Similarly, others also represent them as patients or as needing to acquire agency. In those instances when they are assigned actor roles, they are seldom placed in grammatical focus.7 It is only in moments of crisis that they assume the language of strong personal agency by using forms in which they, as grammatical participants, take on active focus. Nominal participants in Tagalog are said to be focused if they are preceded by the referential (ref) determiner ang, which contrasts with the genitive (gn) marker ng [nang] and the directional (drc) preposition sa. There are also pronouns and personal name markers that correspond to ang, ng, and sa phrases. Each of the voice affixes places certain kinds of nominal participants in focus. The most common transitive construction occurs with a null voicing affix (though often with the ni- (-in-) realis prefix or -in irrealis suffix which is sometimes regarded as a voicing affix). The construction, regarded as a kind of passive in less technical grammars, requires that a profiled actor – if one is profiled – be genitive and a profiled undergoer be focused, as in (2). Some linguists regard this construction as evidence that Tagalog is an ergative language (Cooreman, Fox, & Givón 1984). Focused undergoers have low topicality. (2) Gagaw-in ko ang lahat upang ma-kamt-an do-irr:uf 1p:gn ref everything in.order.to irr:nc-obtain-loc ito. prox:ref “I will do everything in order to obtain this.”
The non-control affix ma- also places a patient or experiencer in focus, as in (3), which uses the prefix in its realis form na- and the referential focus pronoun ako rather than an ang-phrase.
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(3) na-tatawa ako, hi, hi, hi, hi, sa ‘yo8 nc:rl-incm-laugh 1s:ref hee, hee,. . . drc 2s:drc “I was amused, hee, hee, hee, hee, at you.”
Other affixes (mag-, -um-) place actors in focus. Two examples appear in (4). (4) Ngayon ako’y nag-sisisi kung bakit ako now 1s:ref-inv af:rl-incm-regret cond cond 1s:ref nag-‘I love you’!!!9 af:rl-‘I love you’ “Now I am regretting ever saying ‘I love you’!!!”
Tagalog has many ways of verbalizing or predicating emotional experience. Example (3) illustrates the Use of Emotion Terms (na-tatawa) and the Mimesis of Psycho-ostensives (hi, hi, hi, hi). Example (4) illustrates the Use of English Emotion Terms in Tagalog or Mixed Text. Other ways of verbalizing emotions are listed in (5) to (11). (5) Obscenity the lady just kept swearing banal na aso, santong kabayo10 the lady just kept swearing holy lg dog, pious-lg horse “the lady just kept swearing ‘holy dog, horse saint”’ (6) Description of Psycho-ostensives katakot-takot na kamot si kaka’y napadaing 11 st-fear-r2 lg scratch pn prnm rl:ncf-ger-cry.out “horrific scratches, Kaka cried out” (7) Repetition ako, mahal kita, mahal na mahal12 1s:ref love 2s:1s love lg love “I love you, love of love” (8) Use of Verb with Process that Results in Emotion or Feeling Hindi mo alam kung gaano mo ako sasaktan.13 neg 2s:gn know cond how 2s:gn 1s:ref incm:injure-loc “You don’t know how much you hurt me.” (9) Description of Facial Expressions (Conceptual Metonymy) gumulong at nagkaduling-duling 14 af:roll and af:rl-st-cross.eyed-r2 “he rolled on the floor and got cross-eyed” (10) Use of Metaphor nababato ako gusto kong umuwi15 ncf:rl-incm-stone 1s:ref like 1s:gn af:irr-go.home “I am turned to stone, bored, my desire is to go home.”
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(11) Denial of Emotion Matuto kang maging manhid.16 ncf:irr-learn 2s:ref-lg ncf:irr-become numb “Learn to become insensitive.”
What one quickly notices in these expressions is that many emotion terms have verbal affixes, each of which conveys mood as well as voice. Examples include (3) na-ta-tawa ‘I was amused’, (4) nag-si-sisi ‘I am regretting’ and the interesting nag- ‘I love you’, which uses an English phrase as a verb stem, (6) na-pa-daing ‘he cried out’, (8) sa-sakt-an ‘(someone) hurt (someone), (9) nag-ka-duling-duling ‘got cross-eyed’, (10) na-ba-bato ‘was turned to stone’. These forms all happen to be realis mood. Irrealis forms would be matatawa, mapadaing, magkadulingduling, etc. My arguments regarding voice in Tagalog emotion language hinge mainly on the distribution of non-control (ncf), undergoer-focus (uf), and agent-focus (af) forms. The distinction between realis and irrealis is not without interest, but it is not crucial to the argument. Aspect is most often either completive, which is unmarked, or incompletive, signified by reduplication operating on the first syllable of the root as in (3) na-ta-tawa, (4) nag-si-sisi, and (10) na-ba-bato. Voice affixes ma-, - i- and -an put non-agentive participants in focus. The focal participant of ma- may be merely an experiencer, but i- and -an require focal participants to be undergoers. All three may be said to have undergoer focus (ug), but they are usually designated as stative focus (sf), undergoer-focus (uf), and locative focus (lf). Rather than stative, I use the term non-control (ncf), because it more accurately subsumes the variety of meanings. The undergoer-focus affixes i- and -an contrast with affixes mag- and -um-, which have active agent-focus (af). The forms with initial m- (ma- and mag-) are irrealis. They have realis counterparts na- and nag- and gerund forms pa- and pag-. Related to mag- is maN-, a form that has more idiosyncratic semantics. Suffix -in is irrealis, but it occurs frequently in undergoer focus constructions. The semantics of the voicing affixes is summarized in Table 1.17 The concern in this paper is how these forms are used in actual discourse to communicate agency or lack of agency on the part of the central participants. Since I am positing that the affixes of voice predicate elemental scenarios of action and agency, it seems useful to represent their semantics with a few heuristic diagrams, as in Figures 4 to 9 in which the stick figures represent the protagonists Alice and Jerry, when they are speaking or when they are being spoken to by others. As speakers, they may speak to each other, or more often to a third person. I have no examples in which Agnes or Jerry are spoken about as third persons. The stick figures may seem gratuitous, but I use them to emphasize that the voice affixes in the verbs of emotion language predicate scenarious with human agents and patients.
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Table 1. Focus and semantics of Agency in the voicing affixes Focus
Morphology Semantics of figure
Non-control (NCF) maUndergoer (UF) -i-
Locative (LF) Agent (AF)
-an -ummagmaN-
Experiencer or patient Reason for doing; Conveyance of patient; Instrument Goal or location Performs or initiates action “ “
Example ma-rinig ‘(x) be able to hear’ i-kukwento ‘tell story-(x)’
sasakt-an ‘injuring (x)’ um-uwi ‘(x) went home’ nag-sisisi ‘(x) is regretting’ nang-galing ‘(x) came from’
* In full clauses the arguments corresponding to “(x)” in the examples would appear as focused nominals. The prefix ni-/-in- is treated as modal rather than voicing, though it commonly occurs with otherwise unmarked undergoer focus.
I am regarding Tagalog grammatical focus as a means of profiling participants and processes. Profiling means that an expression specifically designates a particular substructure within a conceptual base or scope of predication (Langacker 1999: 27). “The entity designated by a predication – what I will . . . call its profile – is maximally prominent and can be thought of as a kind of focal point” (Langacker 1987: 118). Thus, I take grammatical focus in Tagalog to be a marker of salience. If an actor has grammatical focus, I take it as a marker of the salience of agency. If an experiencer or undergoer has grammatical focus, I take it to mark lack of agency. In Figures 4–8, profiled elements are drawn with bold lines. Figure 4 represents the situation in which an actor or agent is in focus, and it follows that the action must also be salient, so the arrow also appears in bold. Actually, the grammatical actor in Figure 1 is ang kalooban, ‘inner feelings’, which I have represented with the gray circle in the chest region of the stick figure. Figure 5 reverses the focus, placing it on an undergoer. Participants in this scenario lack personal agency – they are acted upon. Figure 6 represents the participant as experiencer, another situation in which personal agency is lacking. Figure 7 represents the conceptualization underlying a clause in which the agency of a central participant is denied. Predication of denial is accomplished by the construction hindi hindi . . . kayang ‘neg neg . . . be able’. Figure 8 shows a scenario in which an actor surrenders personal agency by a metaphorical act on an object in the body. The bold box represents an abstract entity, here instantiated by pride, which was metaphorically swallowed (ni-Ø-lunok), or the heart (puso), which was allowed to prevail (< ni-pa-iiral). Both constructions require undergoers, as indicated by the prefix pa- and the null prefix. The ni-/-in- prefix in both verbs is realis mode rather than voice. The dotted line indicates that the two figures represent the same person. The metaphorical actor is the actual experiencer. The figure in the target concept (box) is drawn in light lines to show that the resulting status is not explicitly verbalized. The scenar-
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-um-, magNag-su-s-um-igaw ang kalooban ko*
ma-, i-, -an, Ø-
‘I am shouting out my inner feelings’
Na-niwal. Bakit niya ako ni-Ø-loko? ‘I believed him. Why did he fool me?’
*‘My inner feelings are shouting out.’
Figure 4. Agent Focus (AF)
Figure 5. Non-control, Undergoer & Locative Focus (NCF, UF, LF)
ma-
Alam mong hindi hindi ko kayang mag-mahal...
Na-ba-bato ako. ‘I am turned to stone (bored)’.
‘You know I can’t love...’
Figure 6. Experiencer (Non-Control) Focus (NCF)
Figure 7. Denial of Agency
metaphor target source
pa-, Ø-
Experiencer
Undergoer Focus (UF) Ni-Ø-lunok ko ang pride ko. ‘I have swallowed my pride.’ Hindi puweding ang puro puso p-in-a-iiral. ‘You cannot let the heart prevail.’
Figure 8. Metaphorical surrender of Agency
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ios in these figures are sufficient to characterize most of the emotion language in Sana’y Maulit Muli. The video Sana’y Maulit Muli ‘I Hope It Will Be Repeated Again’ dramatizes several facets of the predicament of the Tagalog transnational community, at least as experienced by two young middle-class lovers, Agnes and Jerry.18 The two experience anguished separation from home, family, and friends, as well as from each other. They encounter dehumanizing ideologies and onerous social demands of the market economy. They are exploited by callous employers and immigration officials. Agnes discovers the freedom, danger, and loneliness of feminine selfreliance. Both succumb to the temptations and comforts of consumerism. The emotional conversations of Jerry and Agnes, and of each with others, appear to be largely about the loss and recapture of personal agency. Of special interest in the film is the frequent use of emotional expressions suggesting lack of control. Expressions revealing active control with protagonists in grammatical focus (af) appear only as directives received by them and as uncharacteristically assertive outbursts occurring in moments of crisis. Jerry is ambitious and spends a lot of time with his attractive boss, Cynthia, often leaving Agnes alone. Agnes’s mother wants her to come to the United States, where the mother is living. Jerry’s cousin Nick arrives from America, looking rich and important. After a difficult interview with an immigration officer, Agnes is moping about the house, dreading the thought of leaving Jerry. Her aunt tells her to take control of her life. She perceives Agnes as allowing the heart to rule. Here Agnes is the tacit actor for p-in-a-i-iral ‘let prevail’ (< ni- + pa- + i- + iral), but she shows a lack of agency by letting the heart prevail (12). Rather than Agnes being focused as actor, it is the heart, itself a metaphor for lack of control, that is focused as grammatical patient. Pa- is the gerund form of non-control focus ma-. Here it has the sense of ‘let’. (12) hindi puweding puro puso ang p-in-a-i-iral neg can.be-lg pure heart ref rl-ger-incm-prevail “You can’t allow the heart to rule” ∼ “you cannot let the heart prevail.”
When departure seems imminent, Agnes says, “Don’t let me go; I don’t want to go.” Jerry says “Remember, you are loved, loved, loved (by me).” (13). Mahal kita is usually translated as ‘I love you’, but it is non-control focus, meaning that the person loved is given grammatical focus.19 Because focus is on the patient, this construction does not highlight the agency of either participant. Kita is a portmanteau form that conflates second person singular experiencer and first person singular actor. At the denouement of this story, we will hear Jerry use the active form mag-mahal, highlighting the role of human agency.
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(13) mahal na mahal na mahal kita. irr:ncf-loved lg irr:ncf-loved lg irr:ncf-loved 2s:ref “You are loved, loved, loved (by me).”
Agnes goes to San Francisco, where she becomes ‘stoned’ with boredom, using the non-control prefix na- (14). Her non-agency is salient. (14) na-ba-bato ako rl:sf-incm-stone 1s:ref “I am stoned [turned to stone].”
Agnes’s brother and sister mistreat her. Her mother, urging a more active role on her, tells her she has to use her brain: gamitin mo ang utak mo. Agnes says, (15) Ayoko dito. dislike:1s:gn prox:loc “I don’t like it here.” (16) Wala akong ka-kampi, ma-ma-matay ako sa lack 1s:ref-lg incm-take.side ncf:irr-incm-die 1s:ref drc lungkot. melancholy “I’m not taking sides, I’m dying of home sickness.”
In (15), ayoko is a contraction of ayaw ko, so this is an instance of Agnes taking the role of agent, as indicated by genitive ko, but ko is not a focus-pronoun, so her agency is non-salient. In (16), Alice is again the agent of taking sides, but she denies her agency. In the next clause, the metaphor mamamatay ‘dying’, is non-control and Agnes is the focal participant, so her non-agency is salient. Back in Manila, Jerry’s mother interferes with their phone calls. Due to lack of communication and miscommunication, their relationship is starting to get blurry (nag-ka-halabu-an < labo ‘blur’). The prefix is active, but neither Agnes nor Jerry is the agent. Jerry is torn over his relationship with his boss. As Jerry and the boss sit in his car, he speaks of his feelings, using the term pa-ki-ramdam ‘feelings’, a conventional form based on the gerund form of non-control ma- (17). The term is used for transient feelings caused by outside events that effect the body or the emotions. Jerry speaks of hearing the crying of Alice, using the non-control nari-rinig (18), and realizing that she has resentment towards him (19). His nonagency is salient. The word tampo predicates a feeling of anger and hurt, a sense of sulkiness, often felt between two people who are close or love each other. Tampo is presented as a bare root, suggesting a nominal interpretation, which is reinforced by the referential preposition ang. Alice has some agency here, as her feeling is directed towards Jerry, but the pronoun referring to Alice is the genitive niya. She is not in grammatical focus, so her agency is has low salience. If there is a focus at
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all in this clause, it is the resentment itself, which is preceded by ang, the referential preposition used with focal participants. (17) Ang pa-ki-ramdam ko tama ang g-in-a-gawa ko pag ref ger-soc-feel 1s:gn right ref rl:ug-incm-do 1s:gn when ikaw ka-usap ko. 2s:ref st-talk 1s:gn “My feeling is that what I am doing is right when you talk to me.” (18) Pero pag na-ri-rinig ko ang iyak ni Agnes, but when rl:sf-incm-hear 1sg:gn ref cry pr:gn prnm “But when I hear the Agnes’s crying,” (19) Malaki na nga ang tampo niya sa akin. great now emph spc hurt∼anger 3s:gn drc 1s:drc “She is really feeling hurt and resentful towards me.”
Jerry won’t let Agnes come home. She is then attacked in an alley. She escapes and tries to call him, but he is at Cynthia’s place. Agnes goes crazy (na-ba-baliw, another non-control form in which non-agency is salient). She characterizes herself as stupid, using the nominal root tanga ‘stupidity’ plus the genitive first person pronoun (20). She uses a non-control form of believe, suggesting that she was caused to believe and she places herself in undergoer-focus to talk about being fooled.20 (20) Ang tanga ko, ang tanga ko, ang tanga tanga ko. ref stupidity 1s:gn ref stupidity 1s:gn ref stupidity stupidity 1s:gn “My stupidity, my stupidity, my great stupidity.” Bakit, bakit ganoon? why why like.this “Why, why like this?” Na-niwal. Bakit niya ako ni-loko? rl:sf-believe why 3s:gn 1s:ref rl:ug-fool “I believed him. Why did he fool me?”
The film continues in this vein, until it reaches a crisis. Jerry now realizes that he has been a passive participant. He uses a flurry of realis forms with default grammatical undergoers to speak of swallowing pride (21), sacrificing principles (22, 23), and enduring (24). These all give Jerry agency, but Jerry as agent is not in focus, so his agency has low salience. Rather, his rantings place pride, principles, and hardship in focus. (21) ni-lunok ko ang pride ko rl-swallow 1s:gn ref pride 1s:gn “I have swallowed my pride.”
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(22) S-in-akripisyo ko ang magandang kinabukasan ko sa Pilipinas. rl-sacrifice 1s:gn ref beautiful future 1s:gn drc prnm “I sacrificed a beautiful future in the Philippines.” (23) Ni-lamon ko ang prinsipyo ko. rl-eat.big.piece 1s:gn ref principle 1s:gn “I ate a big piece of my principles.” (24) T-in-iis ko ang hirap ng buhay dito. rl-endure 1s:gn ref difficult gn life prox:drc “I endured a hard life here.”
This passage reaches a climax with Jerry’s use of two active forms describing his attempts to overcome the oppression of his circumstances nag-su-s-um-igaw ‘shouting out’ and nag-babakasakali ‘hoping to repeat the past’ (25, 26). The former is doubly active, in that it uses two active affixes, nag- and -um-. But even here, Jerry is apparently not the active grammatical agent, or he would be represented with the first person pronoun ako. The sense is that his internal feelings, presented in the ang-phrase, are actively impelling (nag-) active (-um-) shouting out. A consultant said: Nagsusumigaw ang kalooban ko does not necessarily mean that the person is ‘literally’ shouting or letting out his feelings to a person(s). It just means that the person has this (intense) feeling, clamoring/bursting inside of him, wanting to be let go. Now, the person has a choice whether to let it (the feeling) out or not but he doesn’t have to “shout” it out. The shouting was inside of him.
The explanation suggests that the underlying scenario involves force dynamics in which the will is striving against the inner feelings (Talmy 1988). Agency involves both motivation and choice, which may act in opposition or synergistically. In this instance, Jerry is choosing to suppress the motivation. It will be interesting to search for further instances of the affix combination mag-__-um___ to discover whether it always predicates a force-dynamic scenario. (25) Kahit nag-su-s-um-igaw ang kalooban ko, dahil mahal in.spite.of rl:af-af-incm -shout ref inner.feeling 1s:gn because love kita, 2s:ref “In spite of this I am shouting out my inner feelings, because I love you,” (26) dahil nag-ba-baka-sakali ako-ng maulit because rl:af-incm-perhaps-in.case 1s:ref-lg ncf:irr-repeat yung dati. rem:ref-lg former “because I am perhaps hoping to repeat the past.”
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Near the end of this saga, Jerry realizes that his capacity to love is something over which he should have control, even though he feels himself losing it. He uses the agent focus form mag-mahal (27). (27) Alam mong hindi ko kayang mag-mahal nang hindi buo ang know 2s:gn-lg neg 1s:gn ex-lg irr:af-love when neg whole ref pagkatao ko. humanity 1s:gn “You know I can’t love when my humanity is not whole.”
Jerry doesn’t want to lose Agnes and her respect for him, so he returns to Manila, where he takes up his old role as an assertive advertising man. One day, Agnes shows up in Makati, the upscale business district of Manila. The film ends on their encounter, leading the viewer to conclude that the couple resumes their relationship. Perhaps their language also takes a more active turn. I hope my analysis has demonstrated that grammatical voice in Tagalog emotion language is sensitive to very abstract social scenarios. In the scenarios played out in the melodrama Sana’y Maulit Muli, personal agency of the participants is a major element. The repertoire of Tagalog verbal affixes provides ample resources for predicating nuances of personal agency. Voicing affixes may focus agents, experiencers, goals, or patients. By focusing an agent with -um- or mag-, an affix may also focus the agency involved, so long as the actor is a human participant. Lack of personal agency may be expressed directly with a focused experiencer (ma-) or patient (-in, i-, -an). Lack of personal agency may be expressed indirectly by denial of the agency implied by an active form. Occasionally, some component of identity, such as inner feelings, takes the grammatical role of focal participant in an active construction. I do not feel sufficiently conversant with Tagalog theory of agency to offer a judgement as to whether or not this construction in fact highlights personal agency. Controlled surrender of personal agency is expressed metaphorically with an unfocused actor in a genitive phrase, as in ni-lunok ko ang pride ko. ‘I have swallowed my pride’ (21) (ko is the genitive form of the first person pronoun).
Case 2: Shona noun classifiers as polycentric categories Many languages have gender classifiers that segregate nouns. There are, for example, the genders of German and Latin, the numeral classifiers of Chinese, Japanese, Maya, Ojibway and many languages of southeast Asia, the verbal classifiers of Navajo, and the 20 or more classes of the Bantu languages. Other languages have substantive affixes that can function as classifiers. These would include, for example, the anatomical suffixes of Tarascan and Coeur d’Alene (Friedrich 1979: 394– 395; Palmer 1996: 60, 145–146).21 For decades linguists have struggled to make semantic sense of classifiers. Most commonly they have concluded that the as-
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signment of lexemes to classes is arbitrary or that the classes center on such basic physical qualities as shape, texture, number, and animacy. While there is some explanatory value in the physical prototype approach, it has ultimately proven to be limited, leaving unexplained such interesting phenomena as the occurrence in some Bantu languages of the human term chief in the same class as wild animals (Guthrie’s 9/10; Guthrie 1967). Another approach was needed. As early as 1959, the famous paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey proposed in his Kikuyu lesson book that the noun classes are ranked on a hierarchy of spiritual value. For example, humans appear in Leakey’s class I (Guthrie’s 1/2), the highest in spiritual value; class II (Guthrie’s 3/4) is for “second class spirits;” and class III (Guthrie’s 9/10) is for all other living creatures. Regarding Guthrie’s class 5/6, Leakey (1955: 13) asserted that “every single word in this class is an object which is used, or has been used until recently, in connection with religion, magic or ritual or some other form of ceremonial.” To my knowledge, Leakey’s proposal was never consciously followed up by linguists. The year 1987 saw a breakthrough in the understanding of classifiers. The key to their explanation was most widely publicized by George Lakoff in the book that drew its title Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things from a noun class of the Dyirbal language of Queensland. Lakoff was actually reshaping a middle-level theory proposed by Dixon (1982). Lakoff held that each noun class had a central member and that other members were linked to the central member by category chaining. The basis of the chaining was a common domain of experience, which was culturespecific. The Dyirbal classifier balan (one of four) marks a category whose central member is human females. In Dyirbal mythology, the sun was a woman. Other members of the class were birds (mythical females) and plants and animals who either appeared in the myth or were seen as somehow similar to fire (they were hot or they had stingers). Fire belongs to the class because it belongs the same domain of experience as the sun. Thus, with some exceptions, category membership seems neatly explained by this approach. Problems with the approach have been raised by Mylne (1995), whose critique was previously discussed. In the same year, Debra Spitulnik (1987) published a study of Chewa (Bantu) classifiers.22 Her approach leaned heavily on highly abstract schemas, which she called “central notional values”, but she also proposed that some nouns belong in their classes by virtue of cultural associations. “The [ChiBemba] noun ímfumu ‘chief ’ occurs in the class dominated by nouns for wild animals (Cl. 9/10) because of the cultural association of the chief with the animal world” (Spitulnik 1987: 110) [italics added]. She did not lean heavily on the cultural approach, because in her view, grammatical factors compete for control over the classifiers. At about the same time, Ellen Contini-Morava proposed in a paper made available on the internet that the Swahili (Bantu) noun classes were dominated by “super-
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schemas” that were linked by schematicity and extension to spatial, supernatural, and psychological features and schemas.23 To sum up these approaches to understanding classifiers, Leakey described classification by spiritual hierarchy, Dixon and Lakoff showed clear mythical motivations for Dyirbal classifiers, Spitulnik presented a plausible cultural explanation for the apparently anomalous classification of Chewa chiefs, and Contini-Morava saw supernatural schemas underlying Swahili classes. These observations suggest that it might be worthwhile to apply a cultural approach to the Bantu classifiers with special attention to the supernatural and to apply the approach more systematically than had been previously attempted. That is what I and students Dorthea Neal Arin, Claudia Woodman, and Russell Rader have begun to do for the Shona language of Zimbabwe. But before discussing those findings, I will present a brief description of the classifier system involved: Bantu noun classifiers are defined by characteristic prefixes on the nouns and concordial affixes on adjectives, verbs, and deictics. The classes are usually designated by numbers from 1 to 22. In classes 1 to 13, odd numbers are singulars, even numbers are plurals. Thus, for Shona singular class 1, mu-, the plural is class 2, va-, and for singular class 3, mu-, the plural is class 4, mi-. Of the first 15 classes identified by Guthrie (1967), the only ones to which he attributed clear semantic correlates are 1/2 (persons) and 9/10 (animals). He observed that parts of the body appeared more frequently in 3/4 and 5/6, but otherwise found no definite correlations of meanings to classes. Fortune (1955) observed that “class 3 contains nouns indicating trees, parts of the body, atmospheric phenomena, things characterized by length, and miscellanea” [emphasis added]. The only atmospheric phenomena that he listed are m]ando ‘breeze, wet weather’ and possibly m]ea ‘air, soul’ and cando ‘cold.’ (Palmer & Woodman 1999)
Specifically, Palmer (1996) and Palmer and Arin (1999) proposed that the semantics of classifiers in Shona and other Bantu systems are governed by salient ritual scenarios that are more culturally specific and richer than the stereotypes and features proposed by Spitulnik (1987, 1989) and Contini-Morava (1994). After reading all available ethnographies of Shona culture and society, Palmer and Arin identified nine specific and two general scenarios that might govern the distribution of Shona noun classes. Close reading of Shona ethnography was the only systematic method used to identify these scenarios. Therefore,we cannot guarantee that Shona speakers would agree with us on their salience or structure them in the same way. It would be preferable to conduct interviews and make correlated observations in the field.24 Scenarios 1, 2, 10, and 11 are listed below. The numbers of these scenarios do not correspond to the numbers used by Bantuists to identify the noun classes.
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1. The spirits of ancestral chiefs live in the bodies of lions (mhondoro). 2. The chiefly ancestral spirits (mhondoro) reign over both the things of the wild and human affairs. They are the protectors of the land and the wild animals. 10. There is a scenario of protection in which the central participants are dominating protectors, protected ones, and the victims of domination. 11. There is ritual danger, stemming mainly from foreign ancestors with grievances or from contact with the paraphernalia of mediums. Palmer and Arin (1999) proposed that Guthrie’s class 9/10 is governed by scenario 10 (which also subsumes 1 and 2), and that Guthrie’s 5/6 might be governed by scenario 11. Subsequent research by Rader (1998) suggests that class 5/6 is more directly governed by the imagery and mythology of fertility.25 Palmer and Woodman (1999) examined Guthrie’s class 3/4, finding that its central members involve an important domestic scenario and an ethno-ecological model as well as mythical and ritual scenarios. Central physical items in this class are those used in ritual and domestic activities. There is a network of salient categories and chains of extension, which justify using the term “central” for the salient categories. We concluded that a noun class is more than a radial category centering on a prototypical member or a single domain of experience. It is more like a network of radial categories based on a cross-section of the cosmos, including physical experience, domestic scenarios, ritual scenarios, and world view. We proposed that a classifier organized like this be termed a polycentric category. Shona noun class 3/4 grammaticizes and lexicalizes four scenarios and one ethno-ecological model which are salient themes of Shona culture. Scenario 3 was among the 11 previously defined. Three new ones include two new ritual scenarios (12, 14) and a domestic scenario (13). Item 15 is an ethno-ecological model. 3. 12. 13. 14. 15.
The spirits of ancestral chiefs bring rain, thunder, and lightning. People pray to the ancestors. Grain is pounded daily with a mortar and pestle. Doctors cure with herbal medicines that are ground in a mortar and pestle. Trees, shrubs, and herbs are associated with coolness, moisture, and medicine.
The conceptual elements provided by these models find lexical expression in many of the members of Shona class 3/4 – see Figure 9. Those lexemes in the class that do not predicate any of the major elements in the five models are semantically linked in various ways as described in Table 2 (in Appendix). The more inclusive cognitive model of a noun class that emerges from inspection of the semantics of the lexical members and their associative links to the ethnographic models is what I refer to as a polycentric category. The general structure of such a category is summarized with example terms in Table 2 (in Appendix).
f
MOULT
SCATTER
PEOPLE PRAY TO ANCESTORS
f
f
DAILY POUNDING OF GRAIN
f
SCATTERED MEAL
f
NOISE
f
f
f
MORTAR AND PESTLE
f
POLES
elaboration
Key extension
f metonymy
BAD HABITS
REPETITION
DURATION
LENGTH
EXTENSION
f
END-POINT TRANSFORMATION
WITCHCRAFT
f CRUSHING
GRINDING OR POUNDING
f
MEDICINES
f
CURING PRACTICE
GROUND MEAL
ANCESTORS ANCESTORS GIVERAIN RAIN GIVE
Figure 9. Shona class 3/4 as a polycentric category
WAYS OF SPEAKING
LANGUAGE
f
f
FOOD OFFERINGS
RAIN
TREES SHRUBS HERBS MOISTURE
LIQUIDS
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When does cognitive linguistics become cultural?
A polycentric category has more complexity than a radial category, but it does not seem to display unnatural or excessive complexity for the semantic system of a natural spoken language. It is natural for people to have salient ideas based on rituals and daily domestic tasks, and it is natural for them to model their environmental surroundings. It is natural to identify clusters of models that are functionally related and to regard them as a cultural unit. It is natural to abstract schemas from the elements of those models and to discover similarities and metaphors across conceptual domains. And it is natural to recursively apply such thought processes to the derived categories. Finally, it is natural for a lexeme to be polysemous within the domains of a polycentric category. When such a complex is grammaticized, the result is culture-specific and based on models that can be discovered by the methods of ethnography, but dependent upon mental processes that have been best described in the literature of cognitive linguistics. This approach explains the numerous instances of nouns which appear to satisfy the criteria for more than one class but characteristically appear in only one class. The archetypal example in Bantu studies is the classification of chiefs with wild animals, rather than with humans (Creider 1975). Many terms do in fact satisfy the criteria for multiple classes, but they are judged by their speakers to fit one better than another. Each class has multiple criteria, and these may be activated by the context of a discourse. The selection and classification of a term is the product of multiple competing and synergistic activations. In Bantu, some nominal roots have more than one common classification. It is likely that some classifications are well-entrenched, while others are more subject to reassignment. This approach raises a question of boundaries. Where are the boundaries between classes, if any? If every class has multiple criteria and nominal participants are sufficiently complex in their semantics to satisfy multiple criteria, then classes will necessarily compete for members in an ecology of classification. In fact, there are no fixed boundaries between classes. The overriding criterion is cultural salience, which varies with situations, but how can cultural salience be evaluated by the linguist? How can one predict which classifiers will be used with Bantu nominal roots? Currently, conclusions regarding the motivations for particular classifications are largely a matter of interpretation based on familiarity with the culture gained through participant observation or reading of ethnographies. One could devise tests that would manipulate the salience of criteria and observe the assignments of nominal participants to categories, but such tests may not reproduce the motivations presented by naturally occurring discourse. Nevertheless, in the event that such tests are undertaken, two hypotheses are suggested: 1
Reassignments will be more likely to occur where a domain which is inherent in both the semantics of the nominal root and in an alternative classifier is saliently evoked by the discourse situation.
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2
It will be more difficult to elicit reassignments to more entrenched category members, where entrenchment is independently measured by frequency of usage or infrequent reassignment in natural discourse.
We must ask also how one can evaluate this analysis in comparison to other possibilities. Are there other analyses that would be just as convincing? Can our analysis predict which nouns will be classified together? There are a number of possible criteria that could be used to evaluate competing analyses. They do not entirely solve the problem of arriving at an analysis that is both replicable by others and true to native-speaker thinking, because they remain subject to judgement and interpretation, but if taken seriously, I think they are better than having no criteria. The criteria are as follows: 1 2
3 4 5
An analysis should be based upon thorough and comprehensive ethnography with attention to salient cultural scenarios. Given an adequate description of the cultural scenarios, an analysis should be plausible, that is, it should consist of obvious connections. Non-obvious connections may be adduced only where they are supported by native speaker attestations. A plausible analysis that is supported by native speaker attestation and reasoning is to be preferred over one that is not supported. A plausible analysis which explains the largest number of terms in a class is to be preferred. A plausible analysis of a classifier which excludes terms normally found in other classes is to be preferred, though even in a correct analysis many terms will not be excluded, only preferred more strongly by their canonical classifier.
Finally, we must ask whether the cultural approach with polycentric categories can predict the emergence and structure of classifier systems cross-linguistically. The theory predicts that some kind of classifier system can emerge wherever there are salient and stable cultural practices and institutions. These are the necessary conditions. Certainly, many of the languages around the world have classifier systems, though some are hardly recognized as such. For example, the anatomical suffixes of the Salish languages are usually not regarded as constituting classifier systems, yet they function in much the same way as they take on abstract values of shape (Palmer 1996). Also marginal to our notion of noun classifiers are the click classifiers of the Khoisan and the verbal classifiers of Apache, but they have similar functions (Bernárdez n.d.; Basso 1990). One might even regard a finite paradigm of honorifics, as in Japanese or Korean, as a classifier system in the social domain. The approach does not currently specify the conditions that are sufficient to motivate the emergence of classifiers. Further cross-linguistic studies along these lines are needed.
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. Conclusions Many lexical domains and grammatical constructions link directly or indirectly to significant cultural models, notably including scenarios. Understanding the grammar and lexicon of a language requires grasp of cultural models and culturally defined imagery. The most appropriate term for this approach is cultural linguistics. Application of this approach to voice in Tagalog emotion-verbs shows that the semantics of voice affixes can be described in terms of elemental scenarios that variously profile agents, experiencers, or objects. Analysis of the grammar in the emotional language of a Tagalog melodrama reveals that choice of voicing affix causes the agency of emotional participants to be profiled (given grammatical focus, either as agents or experiencers) or relegated to the base of predication with reduced prominence (actors appear in genitive or oblique phrases, or not at all). Thus, cultural linguistics helps to elucidate the emotional semantics of very dynamic discourse situations as portrayed in a popular medium. The grammar is seen operating in its socio-cultural context. The scenarios of voice presented here in diagrams 4–8 provide a basis for graphic comparisons across languages and domains, so comparable cross-linguistic studies are needed. Video melodramas are particularly useful for the study of grammatical voice, because emotional speakers are attuned to the nuances of semantic agency and because melodrama reveals and highlights the agency of participants in other ways, such as the presentation of facial expressions and the portrayal of scenarios of fortune and misfortune. The perspective of cultural linguistics shows obvious utility compared to a more narrowly cognitive approach in its application to the problem of Bantu noun classifiers, where the use of ethnographic methods to identify salient cultural models and scenarios is a necessary step in the research. In this application, it was possible to show how cognitive processes of complex category formation and category chaining operate within culturally specific models to create the polycentric categories that we know as Bantu noun classifiers. The polycentric category introduced by Palmer and Woodman (1999) has multiple central scenarios and prototypes, from which radiate category chains and complex categories as defined, respectively, by Lakoff (1987) and Langacker (1987). The approach of cultural linguistics and its theory of polycentric categories improves on previous accounts of classifier systems in a number of ways. It makes extensive use of ethnography, which enables the content of categories to be related to a variety of salient scenarios of domestic and ritual life. The attention to ethnography reduces the risk of forcing native terms into non-native categories. The approach avoids reducing each classifier category to a few features, or even to a single radial category based on a single domain of experience. Instead, it posits a number of functionally related scenarios, each of which provides a rich semantic field of linkage for
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dozens of nouns. It is more complex than previous approaches, but appropriately so, because classifiers are motivated by metonymies and metaphors that are often explicit in ethnographic descriptions, in the construction of terms, or in multiple definitions of a single term. Finally, this approach highlights a number of interesting scientific questions pertaining to how one may establish the cultural validity and psychological reality of polycentric categories.
Notes . The research on Tagalog was supported by a Site grant and a sabbatical leave from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for a study of “Popular Discourse in Manila and Las Vegas”, by the Department of Anthropology, and by grants from the Faculty Travel Committee. My understanding of Tagalog linguistics has benefited from discussions and correspondence with Ricardo Nolasco, Videa P. de Guzman, Lawrence Reid, and Stanley Starosta, though none would necessarily subscribe to this analysis of Tagalog voice. I am indebted to Nikolaus Himmelmann for generously sending me his papers in progress and to Eric Pederson for many constructive comments. All correspondences concerning this article should be sent to Gary Palmer at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, USA. . The construal of schematic processes at different stages has been termed image-schema transformation (Lakoff 1987: 440–444, 1988: 144–149). . For an example case study of a discursive term, see my discussion of Japanese yo in Palmer (1966: 206–212). . For examples of conceptions of discourse in various cultures, see Kuipers (1998), Scollon and Scollon (1995: 94–121), Feld (1982), Kochman (1981), and Basso (1979). . This case study of Tagalog emotion language draws heavily upon my paper “Sana’y Maulit Muli: The Grammar of Agency and Emotion in a Tagalog Transnational Video Melodrama,” which is a revision of a paper presented to the Linguistics Colloquium, University of the Philippines, Diliman Campus, February 11, 1999 and the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadephia, December 2–8, 1998. That paper contains additional examples and more discussion of cultural and historical dimensions. The glosses of abbreviations are as follows: 1, 2, person; af, agent focus; drc, directional; emph, emphasis; ex, existential; gn, genitive; ger, gerund; incm, incompletive reduplication; irr, irrealis; lf, locative focus; lg, ligature; loc, locative; ncf, non-control focus; neg, negative; pr, pronoun; prnm, proper name; prox, proximate; r2, augmentative reduplication; rl, realis; ref, referential; rem, remote; s, singular; sf, stative focus; st, stative (not involved in focus); soc, social; uf, undergoer focus. . “In Austronesian languages generally, agency and posssession are marked in the same way. In other words, the agent of non-actor focus verbs co-occurs with the genitive marker, usually a reflex of PAn *ni ‘genitive of human nouns; agent of non-actor focus verbs” (Blust 2002: 67). . Henceforth, the term focus will refer only to grammatical focus as defined for Tagalog. . Banal na Aso, Santong Kabayo ‘Holy Dog, Horse Saint’ by YANO. YANO. 1994. Yano. Produced by Yano & Poch Concepcion. Alpha Records Corporation (audiotape).
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When does cognitive linguistics become cultural? . Maniwala Ka Sana ‘Your Belief Is Hope’ by Parokya Ni Edgar. KHANGKHUN GKHERRNITZ THE ALBUM. Parokya Ni Edgar: Backbeat. Pasig, Metro Manila (audiotape). . Banal na Aso, Santong Kabayo ‘Holy Dog, Horse Saint’ by YANO. YANO. 1994. Yano. Produced by Yano & Poch Concepcion. Alpha Records Corporation (audiotape). . Kaka, ‘Joe,’ by YANO. . Senti ‘Sentimental’ (from YANO). . Sana’y Maulit Muli. Regal Films. Star Cinema Productions, Inc. (videotape). . Kaka, ‘Joe,’ by YANO. . Sana’y Maulit Muli. Regal Films. Star Cinema Productions, Inc. (videotape). . Sana’y Maulit Muli. Regal Films. Star Cinema Productions, Inc. (videotape). . For a more detailed analysis of the semantics of the mag- forms, see Palmer (2003). . Sana’y Maulit Muli. Regal Films. Star Cinema Productions, Inc. (videotape). In the film, Lea Salonga plays Agnes, a young middle-class woman who has a boyfriend Jerry, who is in advertising. Jerry is played by Aga Mulach. . One could also say minamahal kita. If we think of mahal as the base, then the only senses explicitly added by morphology are the incompletive, by means of reduplication of ma, and realis, by means of the infix -in. Thus, it is probably best to think of this form as predicating the default lack of control on the part of the one who is loved, i.e. the referential focal participant, kita. It is usually translated with the more active English expression I love you. . My consultants translated the expression as ‘Why did he fool me?’, but since niya is genitive, a more structure-preserving translation would be ‘Why was I fooled by him?’ . The figure of 20 for the Bantu classes includes singular and plural forms. If these are not counted separately, the figure would be ten. Classes 1 and 2 (or 1/2), for example, labels the singular and plural of the class that includes most terms for humans. . See also, Spitulnik (1989). . The paper was eventually published in Contini-Morava (1994). . Palmer was also able to draw on memories of eight months of field experience with several Bantu ethnic groups in a rural community in Kenya in 1969 and extensive reading in Bantu ethnographies in preparation for that work. . In spite of the earlier date of publication, Rader’s paper was published after the Palmer and Arin paper.
References Basso, Keith (1990). Western Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bernárdez, Enrique (n.d.). Categorization through phonetic symbolism: Radial categories based on the clicks in the San languages. Unpublished Ms. in possession of the author. Blust, Robert (2002). Notes on the history of ‘focus’ in Austronesian languages. In Fay Wouk & Malcolm Ross (Eds.), The History and Typology of Western Austronesian Voice Systems (pp. 63–78). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.
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Clark, Herbert (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contini-Morava, Ellen (1994). Noun Classification in Swahili. Publications of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. Research Reports, Second Series. Cooreman, Ann, Barbara Fox, & Talmy Givón (1984). The discourse definition of ergativity. Studies in Language, 8, 1–34. Creider, Chet (1975). The semantic system of noun classes in Proto-Bantu. Anthropological Linguistics, 17, 127–138. Dixon, R. M. W. (1982). Where Have All the Adjectives Gone? Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Duranti, Alessandro (1994). From Grammar to Politics. Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feld, Steven (1982). Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fortune, G. (1955). An Analytical Grammar of SHONA. London: Longmans, Green and Company. Friedrich, Paul (1979). Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guthrie, Malcolm (1967). Comparative Bantu: An Introduction to the Comparative Linguistics and Prehistory of the Bantu Languages. Amersham, England: Gregg Press, LTD. Hannan, M. (1984). Standard Shona Dictionary. Revised. Harare, Zimbabwe: The College Press. Hutchins, Edwin (1996). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press. Kochman, Thomas (1981). Black and White Styles in Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuipers, Joel C. (1998). Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Cambridge: C.U.P. Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George (1988). Cognitive semantics. In Umberto Eco, Marco Santambrogio, & Patrizia Violi (Eds.), Meaning and Mental Representations (pp. 119–154). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Langacker, Ronald (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics, Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald (1990). Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 5–38. Langacker, Ronald (1991a). Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics, Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald (1991b). Concept, Image, and Symbol. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald (1999). Assessing the cognitive linguistic enterprise. In Theo Janssen & Gisela Redeker (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology (pp. 13–59). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald (2001). Discourse in cognitive grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 12(2), 143– 188. Leakey, Louis S. B. (1955). First Lessons in Kikuyu. Nairobi: The Eagle Press. Mylne, Tom (1995). Grammatical category and world view: Western colonization of the Dyirbal language. Cognitive Linguistics, 6(4), 379–404. Palmer, Gary (1996). Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Palmer, Gary (2000). Review of Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Semantics: Primes and Universals. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 10, 279–284. Palmer, Gary (2003). Metonymy and polysemy in the Tagalog voicing prefix PAG-. In Gene Casad & Gary B. Palmer (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics and Non-Indo-European languages (pp. 193–222). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Palmer, Gary & Dorothea Neal Arin (1999). The domain of ancestral spirits in Bantu Noun Classification. In Masako Hiraga, Chris Sinha, & Sherman Wilcox (Eds.), Cultural Typological and Psycholinguistic Issues: Selected Papers of the Bi-annual ICLA Meeting in Alburquerque, July 1995 (pp. 25–45). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Palmer, Gary & Claudia Woodman (1999). Ontological Classifiers as Polycentric Categories, as Seen in Shona Class 3 Nouns. In Martin Puetz & Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.), Explorations in Linguistic Relativity (pp. 225–249). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rader, Russell (1998). Life and land-ownership: the autochthonous nature of Shona noun class 5 and 6. California Anthropologist, 25, 8–17. Scollon, Ron & Suzanne Wong Scollon (1995). Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Cambridge/Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. Silverstein, Michael (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Keith Basso & Henry Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Spitulnik, Debra A. (1987). Semantic Superstructuring and Infrastructuring: Nominal Class Struggle in ChiBemba. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Spitulnik, Debra A. (1989). Levels of Semantic Structuring in Bantu Noun Classification. In R. Botne & P. Newman (Eds.), Current Approaches to African Linguistics, Volume 5 (pp. 207–220). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris. Stubbs, Michael (1983). Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talmy, Leonard (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science, 12, 49–100. Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, Anna (1997). Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Appendix Table 2. The structure of a polycentric category: Shona class 3/4a (1) Multiple Central Models: A class may be governed by one, two, or more salient cultural models and/or scenarios that are different from those governing other classes. The central models of Shona class 3/4 are: The spirits of ancestral chiefs bring rain, thunder, and lightning. People pray to the ancestors. Grain is pounded daily with a mortar and pestle. Doctors cure with herbal medicines that are ground in a mortar and pestle. Trees, shrubs, and herbs are associated with coolness, moisture, and medicine. (2) Multiple Prototypes: A central model may be sufficiently complex to offer more than one prototype concept. For example, trees provide large poles and sticks, shrubs provide small poles and sticks. All provide medicinal leaves and fruits. The term for tree, muti, also means ‘medicine.’ Any of these items may serve as prototypes. The scenario of pounding grain with the pestle and mortar presents pounding, grinding, crushing, and grain as salient elements from which abstractions and extensions can be derived. The grain itself assumes the form of piles of grain, piles of finely ground meal, and scattered grains. These provide additional prototypes for spatial distribution of dry granular or powdery solids. The ancestral scenarios of curing and rain-making offer component scenarios of propitiation of ancestors and grinding and giving of medicines. They also offer physical models of cool liquids. Lexemes for all these elements appear in Shona class 3/4. Examples: muhwi ‘pestle’, musi ‘pestle’, mutsi ‘pestle’, muti ‘tree, medicine’, mudzukwa ‘tall, straight object (e.g. tree; skyscraper)’, mudzvurwa, mutwiwa ‘meal ground in duri (mortar)’, muchaka ‘meal from green mealies’, muchinjwa ‘mealie meal ground by engine-driven grinding mill’, mubvau ‘young, green mealie’, mudede ‘green mealies’, muguri ‘mealie cob (with the grains on it)’, munyuchu ‘mealie-rice’, mubukirwa ‘green maize cob’, mudakunanzva ‘sweet-tasting liquid’, mudzamba ‘porridge made with milk as the liquid’ mujururu ‘any liquid thinner than it should be’, muchenga muchenga ‘abundance of grain’, muchenganherera ‘general rain and • represent the intrinsic force tendency towards action or towards rest, that the + and – signs indicate the “balance of strengths”, and the line at the bottom of each diagram gives the “resultant of the force interaction” (either action or rest, as in (a) and (b), respectively). In short, the diagrams are not semiotically “self-contained”. Even apparently self-explanatory diagrams such as Figure 1a for ‘containment’ are not necessarily as simple as they look. Compare that Figure with the very similar Figure 4a below. This was employed by Hawkins (1984) to designate not in (or ‘containment’), but on. Hawkins’ drawing makes sense, however, within his own set of conventions, which include him having adopted the ellipse shape as representing surface, as in Figure 4b. Once again, the point is that the captions play a vital interpretive role. Notice that I am not saying that the diagrams are perfectly equivalent to the verbal glosses of what they mean. I accept that diagrams have the capacity to convey gestalt or figural properties in a way that cannot be duplicated in words, and that properties of this kind may be very important for our understanding of how language works as part of the overall cognitive system.3 I am not saying that cognitive linguists should give up diagrams and use only verbal paraphrases instead. However, diagrams cannot achieve their purpose without verbal support, and we therefore must have some theory about the nature of the verbal items that form an essential part of the representational system. What,
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TR LM
Figure 4a. ON (profile only)
Figure 4b. SURFACE configuration
for example, is the status of terms such as ‘vector’, ‘Agonist’, ‘force tendency’, and ‘path’? Are these terms primitives of the representational system, and if not, how can their own conceptual content be analysed? Does it matter that such terms are technical and unknown to the speech community at large? Does it matter that they have no equivalents in most languages of the world, thus effectively tying the representational system to one language – i.e., English? In my view there are some fundamental issues here for cognitive linguistics. One further point: even simple diagrams often (perhaps always) rely on culture-specific, ‘Western’ interpretive conventions and iconography. Interpretive conventions that arise from Western literacy practices (such as the institution of writing, the convention that print is read from left to right, and the existence of books and other printed materials as portable individual objects) can seem so natural to the encultured person that their artificiality is seldom noticed. For example, it seems very natural to Westerners that the ‘top’ of the page (i.e., the side canonically held furthest from the body) can represent a higher position than the ‘bottom’ of the page. It seems natural that moving from left to right across the page can represent the passage of time (as when in generative parlance we speak of a word or phrase being ‘in left-most position’, meaning that it is pronounced before the rest of the sentence). Furthermore, the institutions of representational art, and more recently photography, have entrenched the convention that, all other things being equal, images will be read as representing shapes viewed from one side and “in perspective”. We are reminded of the culture-specific nature of these conventions when we consider cultures that lack literacy (as most cultures do) and representational art. In the traditional Aboriginal cultures of the Australian Western Desert, for example, visual representations are usually made on the ground (as sand-drawings) or on the human body (as ceremonial designs). The usual viewpoint is from above (an aerial view) rather than from one side. In sand-drawings the placement of elements is usually done with respect to an absolute, external frame of reference; for example, a figure placed on the east side of the drawing represents someone who is on the east in the scene being depicted. For someone raised in this tradition, even Western diagrams like those in Figure 1 above will not convey the intended meanings. Figures 5 and 6 show some figures from typical Western Desert sand-drawings (Bardon 1979; Munn 1973: 120). In their own cultural context, figures such as the
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Figure 5a. A person
Figure 5b. A camp
Figure 5c. Two people in camp
Figure 6a. Kangaroo track
Figure 6b. Emu track
Figure 6c. Dingo track
U-shape and the concentric circles are instantly recognisable as depicting human figures and camp or waterhole, respectively. Similarly, depictions of animal tracks (such as kangaroo, emu, and dingo) are instantly recognisable as indicating the presence or movements of those animals. Taking the perspective of a non-Western culture can dramatise the fact that something like the arrow symbol (→) of Western iconography, which is heavily relied upon in cognitive linguistic diagrams, is by no means a transparent and purely iconic sign of movement or directionality. For someone raised in the traditional Central Australian cultures, for example, it looks more like an emu track (Figure 6b) than anything else. The culture-specific character of visual representation warrants more detailed treatment, but for present purposes it is enough to note that signs such as the arrow symbol and the use of left-to-right sequencing to represent the passage of time are another way in which schematic diagrams may covertly assume verbal support – at least, if we aspire to a representational system which can be used across languages.
Scenarios, models and conceptual metaphor I turn now to the role of verbal (or quasi-verbal) representation as used in work on prototypical scenarios, cultural models, etc. and in work on conceptual metaphor. My position is that the value of much of this work is compromised because the language of the representations is not sufficiently theorised. As representative of prototypical scenarios, consider the influential treatment of anger in Lakoff (1987; cf. Lakoff & Kövecses 1987: 213f.). This is a five-stage scenario which opens as follows: Stage 1, Offending Event: Wrongdoer offends S. Wrongdoer is at fault. The offending event displeases S. The intensity of the offense outweighs the intensity of the retribution (which equals zero at this point), thus creating an imbalance. The offense causes anger to come into existence.
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Stage 2, Anger: Anger exists. S experiences physiological effects (heat, pressure, agitation). Anger exerts force on the Self to attempt an act of retribution.
Subsequent stages portray an attempt to control the anger, a loss of control leading to an outbreak of ‘angry behaviour’, and a final stage of retribution such that the intensity of the retribution balances that of the offense and the anger disappears. The basic idea behind the proposal is widely accepted: that the meaning of the English word anger is based on an ideal or prototypical scenario which involves an experiencer construing someone else as having done something bad, and because of that, experiencing a ‘bad feeling’ and a concomitant desire to do something bad to this person in return. However, the formulation as given above does not actually say this. Instead of using simple terms such as ‘do’, ‘bad’, ‘want’, ‘because’ and so on, it is phrased in complex words such as offending event and retribution, which obscure the semantic content rather than making it explicit. Words like offend and retribution are surely of comparable (or greater) complexity than anger itself, and just as deserving of explication. Presumably, additional prototypical scenarios will be required for them. How are they to be phrased? What are the implications of “scenarios within scenarios”? Does it matter that a child may know the word anger (or angry) prior to acquiring the words offend and retribution?4 These are serious questions and it is unsettling to think that they have not yet been widely identified and addressed within cognitive linguistics. Another cognitive linguistic tool which employs a propositional (or quasipropositional)5 style of representation is conceptual metaphor, a notion which has proved enormously fertile since it was introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Canonical examples include those shown in (1a) and (1b) below, along with some of the expressions which are supposed to instantiate them. These illustrate conceptual metaphors of the so-called ‘ontological’ type, which are supposed to establish a set of figurative correspondences between the elements of two domains: a concrete source domain and an abstract target domain. (1) a.
THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS We will show that the theory is without foundation. We need to buttress that argument with more support. Some of the arguments are well constructed. b. ANGER IS THE HEAT OF LIQUID IN A CONTAINER She really got steamed up. He was seething. He just exploded.
As work on conceptual metaphors advanced, however, certain problems became apparent. On the one hand, the correspondences between source and target domains are not comprehensive; one cannot, for example, speak of a theory having
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walls or a roof, or as having inhabitants. On the other hand, many attested correspondences are not specific to particular source domains or target domains; rather, the mappings are many-to-many (Kövecses 1995; Grady 1997). One proposal which may alleviate both problems is to re-cast the formulation in terms of broader and more general metaphorical mappings.6 For example, Grady (1997) proposed the metaphors shown in (1c); cf. Kövecses’ (1995: 326–328) Complex Systems Metaphor. (1) c.
ORGANISATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE PERSISTING IS REMAINING ERECT
I have a lot of sympathy for Grady’s proposal, but from the point of view of the language of representation, the metaphors in (1c) are framed in terms (such as ‘organisation’, ‘structure’, and ‘persisting’) which are more abstract and remote from ordinary usage than those in (1a) and (1b). If these terms were supposed to have a privileged theoretical status this could be problematical, but my impression is that Grady does not intend them as such. He evidently does not intend them to be semantically transparent – i.e., self-explanatory, because he goes to some effort to explain them. For example, he explains (quoting the American Heritage Dictionary) that the term ‘structure’ is to be understood as implying “a complex entity composed of arranged parts”. The ‘parts’ of a theory (such as its premises, claims, arguments, and supporting facts) can be seen as “arranged in certain logical relationships” in an analogous fashion to the arrangements of the physical parts of a complex physical object. In similar fashion, Kövecses (1995: 328) explains that ‘complex systems’ (which include theories, society, and complex interpersonal relationships such as marriage and friendship) resemble complex objects in the following ways: “they do not exist first and then they are made; they are made for a purpose; they have a function; they have a large number of parts that interact with each other; they require effort to make and maintain; the stronger they are the longer they last”. This kind of conceptual unpackaging is moving in the right direction. Complex notions are being resolved (or partially resolved) into simpler notions, and in the process semantic relations, which were implicit, are being made explicit. For example, Grady and Kövecses have identified two key components of ‘structure’ as ‘something which has many parts’, and which is ‘made by people’. Once this unpackaging has been done, the proposition that the same schema can be applied both to abstract objects and to concrete physical objects becomes much easier to appreciate, and, in my view, much easier to accept. Of course there is still more to ‘structure’ in the relevant sense but for present purposes we need not grapple with the substantive details. My concern is rather with the language of the representation. If complex terms like ‘structure’, ‘organisation’ and ‘persisting’ are not the end of the line, but merely “shorthand” (Grady 1997: 274) for other, more articu-
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lated meanings, then what is their theoretical status? Are they intermediate steps in the chain of analysis (in the same way that, for example, certain complex organic molecules can be broken down into simpler molecules before being further decomposed into atoms of their constituent elements)? Or are they merely approximations on the road to more elaborate and explicit analyses? In either case, no analysis is complete until it has been resolved into the simplest possible terms. It is legitimate to expect some theoretical account of the role of verbal elements in the representation of conceptual metaphors (schemas, etc.). One further theoretical issue is the question of language-specificity in the representational system. Does it or does it not matter if, at a particular level of analysis, the terms of the analysis are specific to the language at issue? Plausibly, the answer could depend on the level of the analysis. At an initial and fairly concrete level, one might expect the conceptual metaphors of Russian, Japanese, or Yankunytjatjara to fall out in terms of language-specific words of Russian, Japanese or Yankunytjatjara. At a deeper or more articulated level of analysis, however, one might expect the terms of the analysis to become less language specific. Endorsing a proposal by Lakoff (1993) to this effect, Cienki (1998: 141) provides comparative evidence from English and Russian that “higher-level metaphors for event structure are the ones that are more likely to be shared cross-culturally, while the lower-level metaphors are more likely to vary across cultures”. In my view this is a very interesting proposal, worthy of systematic research across a range of languages and cultures. On the other hand, an equally provocative (and incompatible) proposal has also been made in the literature, namely, Mühlhäusler’s (1995) claim that even the most fundamental metaphorical mappings can have a language-specific character, so that what is literal in one language is metaphorical in another. An issue like this goes to the heart of the cognitive linguistic project to understand the nature of human conceptualisation. Though we cannot enter this debate here (cf. Goddard 1996a), I am mentioning it to support my general point that issues of profound theoretical importance hinge on the metalanguage of representation, and to urge cognitive linguists to engage with these issues in a more sustained fashion. In summary, I have argued in this section: (a) that no matter how valuable diagrammatic representations may be they cannot do without verbal representation, (b) that in any case, verbal representation has played a leading role in cognitive linguistic practice, in the areas of scenarios, schemas, and conceptual metaphors. However, I have also argued that (c) cognitive linguistics has not sufficiently problematicised the role of verbal representations, and thus (d) runs the risk of unwittingly employing contradictory or self-defeating practices, and (e) at the same time misses the opportunity to focus on certain fundamental theoretical issues. As far as I am aware, the only stream of cognitive linguistics that has a welldeveloped position on these issues backed by wide-ranging empirical research, is
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the natural semantic metalanguage approach. That is, only this approach problematicises and theorises the role of verbal elements in semantic/conceptual representations.
. The challenge of abstract, culture-laden vocabulary From a methodological point of view, the need for verbal explication seems particularly pressing in relation to complex abstract vocabulary, such as terms for emotions and attitudes (e.g., happy vs. joyful, love vs. pity), values and social ideals (e.g., honest vs. sincere, freedom vs. duty), and speech-acts (e.g., praise vs. compliment, vow vs. swear). For words like these there seems to be no alternative to a propositional style of representation: essentially, a verbal explication. The fact that words of this kind tend to be highly culture specific poses an extra descriptive challenge, while at the same time adding a dimension of theoretical importance for any approach to language that seeks to articulate culture-specific conceptualisations. As mentioned, Anna Wierzbicka is responsible for numerous studies of abstract culture specific vocabulary, especially in European languages and in Japanese; see especially Wierzbicka (1992, 1997, 1999, in press). In this section, however, I draw on research by other NSM researchers, myself and Catherine Travis, in specific relation to value terminology. The studies to be summarised here both involve explicating subtle differences between apparently close translation equivalents across languages (Malay and English, Japanese and English). My intention is to illustrate the effectiveness of the paraphrase method in cross-linguistic applications, and at the same time to throw up a challenge to cognitive linguists who reject this methodology to show how they would cope with the same data.
Malay ikhlas vs. English sincere Goddard (2001a) presents a contrastive semantic analysis of the Malay cultural key word ikhlas, and its conventional English translation equivalent sincere. In English language newspapers in Malaysia, it is not uncommon to see sincerity identified as one of the most important values. For example, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, was reported as telling the 1996 General Assembly of the UMNO political party that the party supported a culture based on “good manners, discipline, hard work, sincerity and fairness” (New Straits Times 11/10/96, 17). The National Literature Laureate, Abdullah Hussain, included sincerity among the list of values he said could be strengthened by literature (New Straits Times 10/4/96, Life and Times, 9). A newspaper column by an Islamic educator was headed “Sincerity is pure and absolute and the panacea against all vices” (New Straits Times 20/4/96).
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Reading examples like this one gets the feeling that the word sincerity is being used in a peculiarly Malaysian sense – perhaps something more akin to ‘selflessness’. It comes as no surprise to find such usages have their source in the Malay word ikhlas. Though ikhlas is usually given the gloss ‘sincere’ in bilingual MalayEnglish dictionaries, it can be used in a broader range of contexts than English sincere or sincerely. There is certainly an overlap in the range of use. In particular, ikhlas can be used to indicate that a person who is conveying some kind of ‘positive message’ deserves to be believed. In formal contexts, this use of ikhlas can often be translated as ‘sincere’, as in (2). In informal situations, it sounds more natural to translate ikhlas using a phrase such as ‘(to) really mean it’. For example, someone offering a compliment could back it up by saying (3).7 (2) Nampak-nya dia ber-cakap dengan ikhlas. look-3 3sg intr-talk with sincere He seemed to be speaking sincerely (with ikhlas). (3) Percaya-lah. Saya betul-betul ikhlas. believe-emph I really-really sincere Believe me. I really mean it.
There are, however, many contexts in which English sincere can be used but in which ikhlas is quite impossible. For example, in English one can speak of sincerely believing something, sincerely admiring someone, or sincerely wanting something (see below). None of these uses are possible with Malay ikhlas. Conversely, unlike sincere, Malay ikhlas is frequently coupled with beri ‘give’, tolong ‘help’, and other benefactive verbs. For example, to urge someone to accept a gift one could say: (4) Saya beri dengan ikhlas, terima-lah. I give with sincere receive-emph I’m giving (it) with ikhlas, accept it.
The former Malaysian P.M., Dr. Mahathir, a well-known commentator on Malay culture, has said that Malay people have a tendency to suspect a “hidden agenda” (the proverbial udang di balik batu ‘prawn under the rock’) behind any good gesture: Tetapi kita orang Melayu terutamanya suka sangat memikir, ‘Kalau dia memberi kepada saya sesuatu apa tujuan di sebaliknya?’ Kita selalu bertanya’, But people, especially Malays, tend to harbour thoughts (suspicions). “‘If he gives me something, what’s the hidden motive behind it?’ we always ask” (Utusan 7/8/96, 6). To say that something is done dengan ikhlas is to repudiate the idea that there is any hidden, self-interested motive. In a similar vein, ikhlas is often used about cinta (roughly, ‘romantic love’) and about domestic relationships. Used about love, ikhlas has about the same emotional “weight” as the English word true in the expression true love. It is a common word in pop songs; for example, the singer Nurul’s (Sept. 1996) album and hit
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song Ikhlasnya Cintaku ‘My love is so ikhlas’. In saying this, I don’t want to suggest that ikhlas means the same thing as true as in true love, where, roughly speaking, what is at issue is the “faithfulness” of the love. Rather, ikhlas is concerned with the “purity” of the lover’s motives. For example: (5) Cinta sejati lahir dari hati yang ikhlas dan niat-nya untuk love genuine born from heart lig sincere and desire-3 for kekal selamanya. Bila hati-nya ikhlas kita, men-cinta-i dia lasting forever when heart-3 sincere 1du.incl tr-love-appl 3sg akan ber-kawan dengan kita tanpa niat buruk. will intr-friend with 1du.incl without desire bad Genuine love is born of a heart which is ikhlas and it seeks after permanence. When someone loves with an ikhlas heart he befriends us without any bad motives.
So far we have seen ikhlas being used in contexts where, to speak metaphorically, it indicates that a person acts with a “pure” motive. Ikhlas can also be used to indicate that something is done “freely”, and not as a result of being under pressure or coercion. In discussing love and marriage, it is not uncommon to find ikhlas opposed to terpaksa ‘forced’; for example: (6) Per-kahwin-an itu biar-lah ikhlas. I tak setuju kahwin noml-marry-noml that let-emph sincere I not agree marry ter-paksa. inv-force Marriage should be free (ikhlas). I won’t agree with a forced marriage.
The same usage can be found in politics too. For example, in July 1996 a group of members from one political party crossed over en bloc to a rival party. In an English language newspaper, a spokesperson was reported as saying that “he and the other members of S46 were sincere in declaring themselves as members of Pas. . . ‘We were not forced or persuaded by any party to join Pas’, he said” (New Straits Times 25/7/96, 4). With this broad range of use, how can the meaning of ikhlas be explicated? In particular, is it polysemous or not? Some Malay dictionaries give unitary definitions such as hati suci ‘pure of heart’ and putih hati ‘white hearted’, but figurative expressions like these do not really make the meaning explicit (plus, they would not be translatable into some languages). Other dictionary definitions are disjunctive, for example rela atau jujur ‘willing or honest’ (Kamus Harian Federal), implying polysemy. I suggest that ikhlas can be explicated as in [A]. This depicts an act (which could include a speech-act) as being ikhlas if (a) the person wants to do it, (b) because he or she thinks it would be good to do so, and (c) not for any other reason.
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The first components combine the elements of “voluntariness” and “good intentions”, and the final component rules out any other causal factors being involved (thus excluding self-interest or coercion).8 [A] X did something dengan ikhlas = X did something because X wanted to do it X wanted to do it because X thought like this: it will be good if I do this not because of anything else
Turning now to English sincere, English dictionaries tend to concentrate on the “genuineness” aspect of the meaning. For example, the Little Oxford Dictionary gives ‘free from pretence or deceit, genuine, frank, not assumed or put on’. This formulation is satisfactory, as far as it goes, but it does not make explicit the fact that one speaks of someone saying something sincerely, being sincere, etc., only in relation to words or actions that can be seen in a positive light. For example, one can sincerely thank, sincerely apologise, or sincerely praise, but not *sincerely threaten or *sincerely abuse; similarly, one can sincerely admire or sincerely appreciate someone, but hardly *sincerely despise them; one may smile sincerely, but not *snarl sincerely. Although sincere (sincerely, etc.) can be used in a wide variety of contexts, it is always connected with what we can call “self-expression” on behalf of the speaker. Obviously this applies in the case of the verb say itself and other speech-act verbs, and also with expressive actions such as smile and weep. The ‘self-expression factor’ is less obvious in connection with attitude verbs such as admire and appreciate, verbs of intention such as seek, try, and intend, and with believe (or related nouns such as belief and conviction). However, when one considers examples such as the following, it is clear enough that they all imply some verbal expression by the subject. (7) a. We sincerely appreciate your efforts. b. Her admiration for him was sincere and unreserved. (8) a. We sincerely hope you will take advantage of our offer. b. Brezhnev sincerely sought peace. (9) a. We sincerely believe that wisdom will prevail. b. He sincerely believed that he had a mission from God.
Often, as in the (a) examples, the subject is first-person (I or we), in which case the sentence amounts to a profession of attitude, intention, or belief by the speaker. But even with third-person subjects, as in the (b) examples, the term sincerely (sincere, etc.) implies some ‘act of saying’. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to say that She sincerely admired Bill Clinton unless she had expressed this admiration to
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someone. One reflection of this fact is that such sentences become unacceptable if adverbs like secretly or privately are inserted into them (e.g., *Secretly, she sincerely admired Bill Clinton; *Privately, he sincerely believed he had a mission from God). Since it seems that sincerely has a special affiliation with saying, explication [B] below sets out its meaning in the frame involving saying something. The first part alludes to the potential perception that X spoke not from the heart, so to speak, but because of an expectation that someone else would approve of it (because of thinking ‘someone will think it is good if I say this’). The phrasing here is compatible with various possible motives, such as to create a good impression or to satisfy social expectations. The next component repudiates this potential perception. X’s real reason for speaking is that X was thinking: ‘I want to say what I think, I want to say what I feel’. [B] X said it sincerely = X said something someone could think that X said it because X thought like this: someone will think that it is good if I say this X didn’t say it because of this X said it because X thought like this: I want to say what I think, I want to say what I feel people think that it is good when someone does this
Comparing explications [A] and [B], it should be plain that the resemblance between sincere and Malay ikhlas is rather superficial. As Trilling (1972: 2) says, sincere “refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling”. Ikhlas, in contrast, is not primarily about one’s true motives and feelings, but about the goodness of one’s intentions. How could such differences could be brought out purely in terms of diagrams, without recourse to verbal explication?
Japanese omoiyari vs. English empathy Travis (1998a) presents an insightful contrastive semantic analysis of the Japanese cultural key word omoiyari, and its nearest English translation equivalent empathy. (Other glosses found in Japanese-English dictionaries, and in scholarly commentaries, include ‘kind’, ‘considerate’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘sympathetic’, ‘compassionate’, ‘sensitive’, and ‘caring’.) Travis argues that a full understanding of omoiyari provides valuable insights into Japanese culture, revealing a great deal about the Japanese indirect communicative style, the importance of being “in tune” with others’ unexpressed desires and feelings and the “interdependence” on which group relations are based in Japan. Drawing on a wide range of intercultural commentaries (e.g., Lebra 1976; Barnlund 1975), she argues that omoiyari represents a
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kind of intuitive understanding of the unexpressed feelings, desires and thoughts of others, and doing something for those others on the basis of this understanding. For example, sentence (10) is about the writer’s ex-husband.9 The use of omoiyari implies that the ex-husband did these things for the writer without her communicating to him that she would like him to do them. It implies an understanding of the writer’s feelings, and also her desires, in terms of what she would need to live on ‘without any trouble’ in the manner to which she has become accustomed. (10) Watashi ga hyaku-made ikite-mo komaranai-yoo ni, I subj hundred-until live:ger-even.if trouble:neg-ensure dat bantan totonoete okuridashite kudasai-mashi-ta. (Rikon everything get.ready:ger set.up:ger give.to.me-pol-past divorce shi-ta-to iu koto.) Konna yasashii, omoiyari no aru do-past-quot called thing this.much kindness empathy poss be otto iya, wakare-mashi-ta node otoko-tte hajimete desu. man no separate-pol-past therefore man-quot first.time:ger is:pol He sent me away (I mean, divorced me), setting up everything for me so that I wouldn’t be in any trouble if I lived to be 100. I have never known such a yasashii (‘kind’) husband – no, I mean man, we’ve split up – with omoiyari.
Consider also the following example, where not having omoiyari (omoiyari ga nai) implies a lack of understanding of others. This comes from the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi’s (1971: 4) discussion of Japanese and American entertaining styles, in which he comments on the markedly different treatment guests receive in these two countries. While in America the guest is given a series of choices about what to drink and how they would like it served, in Japan the host assesses what the guest would like and serves it. The host is expected to know the guest’s desires, and to automatically satisfy them. As for the possibility in the West of inviting guests to “help themselves”: (11) ‘Go jibun o tasuke-nasai’ de wa funare-na kyaku ni hon self obj help-imp well.then top unfamiliar-adj guest dat taishite amari ni mo omoiyari no nai kotoba-to regarding:ger very dat also empathy poss neg word-quot omowarenai ka. think:neg ques To leave a guest unfamiliar with the house to ‘help himself ’ would seem excessively lacking in omoiyari.
In addition to having an understanding of another person, an essential part of omoiyari is actually doing something on the basis of this understanding. This has already been evidenced in the two examples given above, which imply that the person with omoiyari has done or would do something for another. Similarly, a
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person could not be described as having omoiyari for someone who was sick or in trouble simply on account of “empathising” with that person. It would be necessary to actually go on and do something about it – otherwise, one would be said simply to kawaisoo ni omou ‘feel sorry for him/her’, rather than to have omoiyari. Another subtle point about the meaning of omoiyari is that it does not necessarily imply a focus on the other person’s feelings (specifically, wanting the other person to feel good). The following quote describes the writer’s grandmother as having omoiyari, and refers specifically to the grandmother’s wish to die at a time when it was neither too hot nor too cold, so as not to cause her family the meiwaku ‘trouble’ of holding a funeral at an inconvenient time. Clearly there is no implication that the grandmother wanted to die at the right time of year so that others would feel something good. (12) Watashi-tachi wa, donna toki-mo minna no koto o I-plural top how.much time-even we.all poss thing obj kangaete kure-ta sobo no koto o sonna fuu think:ger give.to.me-past granny poss thing obj that.much manner ni hanashi, ima-made no yasashi-sa omoiyari o aratamete dat story now-until poss kind-ness empathy obj again:ger kanji-ta no desu. feel-past prt it.is.so:pol When saying such things about our grandmother, who always used to think of us, we all felt even more strongly her yasashii-ness (‘kindness’) and her omoiyari.
On the basis of this and a good deal of other evidence, Travis (1998a) proposes an explication for the frame omoiyari ga aru ‘to have omoiyari’. It is presented here in a modified form. [C] X has omoiyari = X often thinks like this about other people: I can know what this person feels I can know what this person wants this person doesn’t have to say anything about it to me I can do some good things for this person because of this I want to do these things X does some things because of this
The explication is framed in terms of how X ‘often thinks about other people’ to capture the notion that it refers to a permanent characteristic of someone’s personality, as opposed to something that manifests itself in a one-off incident, and that it is not uniquely directed towards any particular other person or group of people. Subsequent components represent the notion of having an understanding of
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another person, or of being “in tune” with them, without verbal communication. The penultimate pair of components reflect the subject’s (imputed) belief that they can do things which would be to the other person’s benefit and that they wish to do so. The final component reflects the fact that omoiyari implies that this attitude translates into practice in some way, i.e., that the subject actually does some things (without specifying whether or not they are in fact beneficial to the other person in a particular situation). As Travis says, an explication like this is not particularly lengthy or complicated. Presented in this way, omoiyari is relatively easy to understand, as opposed to the very complex concept it seems to be when explained via a list of apparently close English equivalents (such as empathetic, caring, sensitive, thoughtful, considerate, and so on), each of which is both somewhat similar and somewhat different to omoiyari. To underscore this point, Travis presents a parallel analysis of the English concept of empathy. This word is not, of course, a particularly salient concept in Anglo society, but it is frequently employed in the cultural literature on Japan as a gloss for omoiyari. Essentially, Travis’ explication (slightly modified) presents empathy as a capacity to appreciate someone else’s bad feelings, based on being able to imagine how it would feel to be in the same situation. [D] X has empathy = X can think like this about someone else: I know that something bad happened to this person I know that this person feels something bad now because of this I can know how this person feels because when I think about it, I can know how I would feel if something like this happened to me
There are at least three differences between omoiyari and empathy. First, empathy is focused specifically on bad feelings; one cannot empathise with someone who is feeling good (for example, if someone announces that they have won a trip around the world, the response I really empathise with you is quite inappropriate unless intended sarcastically). Second, the kind of understanding evident in empathy is not based on intuition, but on imagining oneself in the same situation as another person, “putting oneself in their shoes”. Third, empathy does not imply that one actually does anything for that person on the basis of one’s understanding, as omoiyari does. The existence of these various differences does not diminish the fact that omoiyari and empathy both imply some kind of understanding of others, but equally the importance of the shared component should not be overstated. As Travis (1998a) says, the most illuminating perspective is to be found not in the recognition that the meanings are somehow similar, but by ascertaining exactly where the meanings coincide and where they vary. How this exploration of
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cross-cultural semantics could possibly be conducted without verbal explication is entirely unclear.
. Concluding remarks In Section 2, I argued on theoretical and methodological grounds for the indispensability of verbal explication. In particular I argued that diagrams cannot stand alone without verbal support, and, moreover, that cognitive linguistic diagrams often rely on complex culture-specific iconographic conventions, which are “smuggled in” without the necessary acknowledgment or explanation. In Section 3, I sought to show that by taking a fine-grained approach to verbal explication one can deal with subtle nuances of culture-rich vocabulary with a degree of success which would be unattainable by other means. In this concluding section I will take the argument one step further, by briefly considering the status of the NSM approach to verbal explication as compared with other possible approaches. Before that, however, I want to reiterate my view that the indispensability of verbal explication does not mean that one can or should give up diagrammatic representation. On the contrary, diagrammatic (schematic, figural) representation can have a valuable role to play in depicting meaningful aspects of language which are not symbolic or conceptual in nature, such as iconic-indexical effects, psycholinguistic processes, and experiential image schemas;10 see Goddard (2002b). I would still insist, however, that even when used for these purposes diagrammatic representation cannot stand alone. It always requires some semiotic support in the form of verbal explanation. Now as Dirk Geeraerts (p.c. 2001) has pointed out to me, even if the arguments advanced in the main body of this paper convincingly establish the need for verbal explication (paraphrase, definitional analysis), they are largely neutral with respect to the choice of natural semantic metalanguage as the descriptive language: “The argument against a purely diagrammatic form of representation supports any form of propositional representation, whether it is couched in the NSM language, a featural representation, dictionary-like entries, or even formal semantics”. I will therefore briefly mention several arguments in favour of the NSM approach in comparison with these alternatives. The most basic point is that cognitive linguistics cannot continue to approach verbal explication in a casual manner, disregarding theoretical and empirical grounding. If one compares dictionary-style entries and feature-based representations, on the one hand, with the NSM approach, on the other, then in my view one sees a very sharp contrast. The NSM approach has a well developed theoretical basis and a large body of empirical support from cross-linguistic studies conducted over several decades (see Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard & Wierzbicka Eds. 2002 and
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the works listed in Appendix 2), while the alternatives do not. As for formal semantics, it has a well-developed theory and methodology but its range of application is very narrow, and its theoretical commitments are orthogonal to those of cognitive linguistics. In any case, I would like to see cognitive linguists who reject the notion of paraphrase within a constrained metalanguage take up the challenge of developing a systematic alternative method of verbal explication – be it structuralist feature-style representations, or conventional dictionary-style explanations, or even some modified form of formal semantics. Better to see a range of positions being debated and discussed, than to have continued theoretical indifference to a fundamental issue. Unlike the abstract and technical categories of feature-style analysis and formal semantics, semantic primes are demonstrably present as word-meanings in basic vocabulary. They are grounded in the everyday linguistic experience of language users – apparently in all languages. On account of their definitional simplicity, they provide for a maximally fine-grained, explicit and transparent depiction of conceptual meanings. Being framed in natural language (albeit a standardised and constrained subset of natural language), NSM explications can be substituted directly or indirectly into contexts of use and their accuracy assessed against the evidence of usage and against native speaker intuitions.11 Finally and importantly, the natural semantic metalanguage approach is committed to avoiding the terminological ethnocentrism that arises when the vocabulary of English, and other European languages, is uncritically used as a descriptive vocabulary for semantics. It seems obvious that to represent the concepts of widely divergent languages and cultures in English-specific terms is necessarily to distort the linguistic conceptualisations inherent in those languages – unless, that is, one assumes that English and other European languages are specially “gifted” as tools of conceptual representation. Is this indeed the assumption of those who steadfastly ignore the non-translatability of their descriptive metalanguage?12 Or are we to assume that ethnocentrism is inevitable in cognitive linguistics (perhaps in the interpretive sciences generally) and that one must simply “grin and bear it”? Even so, one would like to see this position explained and defended, and to ask how the concomitant analytical relativism can be minimised or counteracted. The NSM approach provides cognitive linguistics with a well theorised, empirically grounded, and non-ethnocentric methodology for verbal explication. To what extent “mainstream” cognitive linguists will choose to adopt and implement the approach in their own work remains to be seen. I have the impression that interest in NSM work is growing, especially among the new generation of younger cognitive linguists. In any case, I hope to have shown in this chapter that the cognitive linguistics “mainsteam” can benefit from considering the principles behind the NSM approach.
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Notes * For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank Nick Enfield, Catherine Travis, June Luchjenbroers, Dirk Geeraerts, and an anonymous reviewer. All correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Cliff Goddard, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of New England, Armidale N.S.W. 2351, Australia. . A good deal of Geeraerts’ (1999) critique is directed against what he sees as Wierzbicka’s excessive reliance on semantic intuition and her “outspoken idealistic commitments”. Against this he counterposes a so-called “empiricist” approach which proceeds “not by denying the importance of intuition, to be sure, but by supplementing and supporting any reliance on introspection with corpus analysis or experimentation” (1999: 170). In recent years, however, Wierzbicka has been relying increasingly on corpus-based evidence, e.g., Wierzbicka (2002b, in press). Geeraerts also accuses NSM researchers of a “monosemous bias”, but this charge appears ill-conceived when one considers the meticulous documentation of grammatical and lexical polysemy undertaken in NSM studies such as Wierzbicka (1988, 1998), Goddard (2000, 2003), among others. . Exponents of semantic primes in different languages are of course not expected to be equivalent in every respect. While their primary (simplest) senses can be matched across languages, their secondary, polysemic meanings may differ widely. For example, English feel and Malay rasa have the same primary sense, but English feel has a secondary meaning related to ‘touching’ which is not shared by the Malay word, while Malay rasa has a secondary meaning ‘taste’ which is not shared by English feel (Goddard 2002a). It should also be pointed out that the term ‘lexical’ is used in a broad sense to include not only words, but also bound morphemes and phrasemes. Even when exponents of semantic primes take the form of single words, there is no need for them to be morphologically simple, and they can also have variant forms (allolexes or allomorphs). All these factors mean that testing the cross-linguistic viability of the proposed lexical primes is no straightforward matter. It requires rich and reliable data, and careful language-internal analysis of polysemy and allolexy (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka Eds., 2002). . That is, I am not falling into the “standard trap”, as characterised by Johnson (1987: 4), of saying that “since we are bound to talk about preconceptual and non-propositional aspects of experience always in propositional terms, it must follow that they are themselves propositional in nature”. . A defender of the “retribution scenario” could perhaps argue that the wording is unimportant because the scenario is not intended to represent a propositional meaning, but this “catch all” move would considerably weaken the verifiability of the scenario. From the point of view of representing the conceptual reality of a young child, it would surely be preferable to re-formulate the scenario into simpler terms which are familiar to young children. For NSM studies of early conceptual and lexical acquisition, see Goddard (2001c) and Tien (forthcoming). . Lakoff (1993) has argued that, despite appearances, conceptual metaphors are not propositional but are merely shorthand for a set of preconceptual correspondences or mappings. This would make statements of conceptual metaphor “quasi-propositional”, rather than literally propositional in nature. . An interesting consequence of generalising conceptual metaphors is that it partially undermines the original claim of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) that abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete, experience-near concepts. As noted by Grady (1997: 273), a metaphor such
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as ORGANISATION IS STRUCTURE is framed in terms which are too general to represent experiential domains. . Interlinear gloss symbols are as follows. 1du.incl first-person dual inclusive, 3: 3rd person, 3sg: third-person singular, adj: adjectiviser, appl: applicative suffix, dat: dative marker, emph: emphatic, ger: gerundive, hon: honorific, imp: imperative, intr: intransitive prefix, inv: involuntary prefix, lig: ligature, neg: negative, noml: nominaliser, obj: object marker, past: past tense, pol: politeness marker, poss: possessive, prt: particle, ques: question particle, quot: quotative, subj: subject marker, top: topic marker, tr: transitive prefix. . Although the NSM approach assumes that words have stable meanings which can be captured in paraphrase explications, such as [A], this does not mean that the approach is committed to a narrow invariance hypothesis. It is recognised that in natural discourse the interpretation of words in context is always influenced by linguistic context and by situational and cultural factors. Important aspects of such interpretative processes can be modelled using the theory of cultural scripts (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka Eds., 2004). . Interlinear glosses have been added to the following three Japanese examples from Travis (1998a). . Since this point is sometimes misunderstood, it is worth stating explicitly that upholding the irreducibility of symbolic (conceptual) meaning in no way commits one to denying the existence of experiential schemas. One may very well accept that embodied, preconceptual experiential schemas underlie, constrain, and support the emergence of conceptual meaning without accepting that conceptual meaning is reducible to experiential schemas. Johnson (1987: 5) expresses a similar view, though from the opposite perspective, so to speak: “I am perfectly happy with talk of the conceptual/propositional content of an utterance, but only insofar as we are aware that this propositional content is possible only by virtue of a complex web of non-propositional schematic structures that emerge from our bodily experience” (italics in original). . Needless to say, these merits do not safeguard the analyst against all error. No doubt a good deal of the extant NSM work could be revised and improved, as shown in fact by successive revisions and improvements undertaken by NSM scholars themselves, in various domains. . I do not wish to imply that NSM researchers are the only cognitive linguists who are concerned with these issues. In particular one thinks of anthropologically oriented researchers, such as Palmer (2003), who has argued that indigenous conceptualisations are best revealed by the language-internal explanations and commentaries of native speakers.
References Amberber, Mengistu (in press). Semantic primes and their grammar in Amharic. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Crosslinguistic Semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Amberber, Mengistu (2003). The grammatical encoding of thinking in Amharic. Cognitive Linguistics, 14(2/3), 195–220. Amberber, Mengistu (2001). Testing emotional universals in Amharic. In J. Harkins & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective (pp. 35–67). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ameka, Felix (2002). Cultural scripting of body parts for emotions: On ‘jealousy’ and related emotions in Ewe. Pragmatics & Cognition, 10(1), 1–25.
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Ameka, Felix (1996). Body parts in Ewe. In H. Chappell & W. McGregor (Eds.), The Grammar of Inalienability (pp. 783–840). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ameka, Felix (1994). Ewe. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and Lexical Universals – Theory and Empirical Findings (pp. 57–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Athanasiadou, A. & E. Tabakowska (Eds.). (1998). Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualization and expression. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bardon, Geoff (1979). Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert. Adelaide: Rigby. Barnlund, Dean (1975). Public and Private Self in Japan and the United States: Communicative styles of two cultures. Tokyo: Simul. Bugenhagen, Robert D. (2002). The syntax of semantic primes in Mangaaba-Mbula. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and Universal Grammar – Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume II (pp. 1–64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bugenhagen, Robert D. (2001). Emotions and the nature of persons in Mbula. In J. Harkins & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective (pp. 73–118). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bugenhagen, Robert D. (1994). The exponents of semantic primitives in Mangap-Mbula. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and Lexical Universals – Theory and Empirical Findings (pp. 87–108). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chappell, Hilary (2002). The universal syntax of semantic primes in Mandarin Chinese. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and Universal Grammar – Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I (pp. 243–322) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chappell, Hilary (1994). Mandarin semantic primitives. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and Lexical Universals – Theory and Empirical Findings (pp. 109–148). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chappell, Hilary (1986). The passive of bodily effect in Chinese. Studies in Language, 10, 271– 296. Cienki, Alan (1998). straight: An image schema and its metaphorical extensions. Cognitive Linguistics, 9, 107–149. Doi, Takeo (1971). Amae no Koozoo [The Anatomy of Dependence]. Tokyo: Koobundoo. Enfield, N. J. (2002). Combinatoric properties of Natural Semantic Metalanguage expressions in Lao. In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and Universal Grammar – Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume II (pp. 145–256). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Enfield, N. J. (1999). On the indispensability of semantics: Defining the ‘vacuous’. In J. Mey & A. Boguslawski (Eds.), ‘E Pluribus Una’. The One in the Many. Special Issue of RASK, International Journal of Language and Communication, 9(10), 285–304. Geeraerts, Dirk (1999). Idealistic and empiricist tendencies in cognitive semantics. In T. Janssen & G. Redeker (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, scope and methodology (pp. 163– 194). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Goddard, Cliff (2003). Dynamic ter- in Malay (Bahasa Melayu): A study in grammatical polysemy. Studies in Language, 27(2), 287–322. Goddard, Cliff (2002a). Semantic primes and universal grammar in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). In C. Goddard & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and Universal Grammar – Theory and Empirical Findings, Volume I (pp. 87–172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goddard, Cliff (2002b). Ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, sign-functions, and culture. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Ethnosyntax. Explorations in Grammar and Culture (pp. 52–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, Cliff (2001a). Sabar, ikhlas, setia – patient, sincere, loyal? A contrastive semantic study of some “virtues” in Malay and English. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 653–681.
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Appendix 1 Semantic primes – English exponents (after Goddard & Wierzbicka Eds., 2002) Substantives: Determiners: Quantifiers: Descriptors: Evaluators: Intensifier: Mental predicates: Speech: Events and actions: Existence and possession: Life and death: Time: Space: Logical concepts: Augmentor: Taxonomy, partonomy: Similarity:
i, you, someone, something/thing, people, body this, the same, other/else one, two, all, much/many, some big, small good, bad very want, feel, think, know, see, hear say, word, true do, happen, move there is, have live, die when/time, now, after, before, a long time, a short time, for some time, moment where/place, here, above, below, side, near, far, inside, touching, be (somewhere) not, maybe, if, can, because more kind of, part of like
Notes: • primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not at the level of lexemes) • exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes • they can be formally, i.e. morphologically, complex • they can have different morphosyntactic properties, including word-class, in different languages • they can have combinatorial variants (allolexes) • each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.
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Appendix 2 Selected NSM studies of languages other than English
Language Korean Lao (Tai) Mangaaba-Mbula (Austronesian) Malay (Austronesian) Mandarin Chinese (Sinitic) Polish (Indo-European) Spanish (Indo-European) Hawaii Creole English
Primes and syntax
Descriptive semantic studies
Comprehensive studies Yoon (2003) Yoon (2004) Enfield (2002) Enfield (1999) Bugenhagen (1994, 2002) Bugenhagen (2001) Goddard (2002a) Chappell (1994, 2002) Kornacki (1995, 2001) Wierzbicka (2002a) Travis (2002) Stanwood (1997, 1999)
Goddard (1996b, 1997, 2001a, b) Chappell (1986), Ye (2001, 2002, 2004) Wierzbicka (1997) Travis (1998b, 2003)
Partial studies Amharic (Ethiosemitic) Arrernte (Pama-Nyungan) Cree (Algonquian) Ewe (Niger-Congo) French (Indo-European) Japanese Yankunytjatjara (Pama-Nyungan)
Harkins/Wilkins (1994) Junker (in press a) Ameka (1994) Peeters (1994, 1997b) Onishi (1994, 1997) Goddard (1991a, 1994)
Amberber (2001, 2003, in press) Harkins (2001), Wilkins (1986, 2000) Junker (2003, in press b) Ameka (1996, 2002) Peeters (2000, 2002) Hasada (1998, 2001), Travis (1998a) Goddard (1990, 1991b, 1992)
For a more comprehensive listing, consult the NSM Homepage: www.une.edu.au/arts/LCL/disciplines/linguistics/nsmpage.htm
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chapter
“How do you know she’s a woman?” Features, prototypes and category stress in Turkish kadin and kiz Robin Turner Bilkent University, Turkey
This paper examines Turkish words for girls and women in order to investigate the relationship between categorization, culture and personal interaction. In doing so, it serves as a test case for a model which attempts to integrate prototype and featured-based categorisation based on a distinction between defining and typical features, both of which are subdivided into strong and weak features (the latter being more heavily dependent on context). I also consider a phenomenon I term category stress resulting from situations where there is a conflict between feature-based and prototype categorisation. Keywords: Turkish, categorization, prototype, stress
.
Introduction
It has become a common-place observation that different cultures categorise phenomena in different ways. We “cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way” (Whorf 1956: 214). If we can avoid the armchair cultural linguistics of the “Eskimos have twenty words for snow” variety, a comparison of categories across cultures can reveal much, not only about the cultures involved, but also about the nature of categorisation itself.1 This is perhaps clearest where ‘natural kinds’ and ‘functional kinds’ (Lehrer 1990: 372) overlap. It may not come as a surprise that some languages draw no distinction between a turtle and a tortoise, or a solicitor and a barrister, but when the boundaries of such basic concepts as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ are drawn differently, we might expect this to be indicative of a difference in attitudes towards these concepts which is not merely linguistic. The categories woman and girl provide a good example of the interaction between ‘natural’ and ‘functional’ kinds. Humanness (as distinct from humanity)
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and femaleness (as distinct from femininity) can be regarded as the result of natural discontinuities. Apart from a few extremely fuzzy cases, one requires no specific cultural apparatus to perceive what is or is not human or female. In contrast, the other major element in the categorisation of these terms in English is adulthood, which is not only culturally specific but also context-specific: someone may be referred to as a ‘girl’ in one context and a ‘woman’ in another, and choosing the appropriate term requires considerable sociolinguistic competence. Of course, there is much more to the category, woman, than the supposedly simple features of [+human][+female] and [+adult]. However, as I shall argue later, there is some value in adopting such a traditional semantic analysis alongside the more current prototype-based view. In deciding whether a particular human female should be classed as a woman or a girl, simply looking for the presence or absence of the feature [adult] is obviously simplistic; nevertheless, we can assume that, in English, our idea of adulthood, and the extent to which it applies to a particular person in a particular context, is the most important factor in the equation. In other languages and cultures, though, adulthood may not be the most significant factor involved. The Turkish terms, kiz and kadın approximate to ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ respectively, but to refer to an unmarried woman as a kadın would be a serious faux pas, since the most important factor in distinguishing between kiz and kadın is not age but sexual experience; all things being equal, a kiz is a virgin and a kadın is not. It is important to bear in mind that there is an asymmetry between terms for men and women here. Not only is sexual experience not important in the transition from o˘glan (‘boy’) to erkek (‘man’), in fact the former term is rare: when it is necessary to specify a male child, the term erkek çocu˘gu (‘man child’) is more common. Erkek seems to have only one defining feature, [+male], since it is commonly used for male animals as well (e.g. erkek köpe˘gi – ‘dog’ as opposed to ‘bitch’). In traditional semantic terms, this cultural difference in categorisation can be explained quite simply: in both English and Turkish a woman is [+human] [+female], but the languages differ in ascribing the feature [+adult] in one case, and [–virgin] in the other. This approach is, however, inadequate in explaining examples such as “I’m going out with the girls”, which in English may be uttered by a seventy-year-old, or in Turkish where kız can be used to greet any female friend, irrespective of age. (1) N’aber, kız? what news girl? ?“How’s things, girl?”
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Furthermore, there are terms such as ‘International Women’s Day’ or ‘women’s sports’, which in both languages refer to all female humans, not just adults or nonvirgins. On the other hand, a ‘fuzzy’ prototype-based analysis is on its own equally inadequate. A middle-aged, unmarried woman (spinster) is almost as far-removed from the prototype of kiz as she is from that of girl, but outside certain specific contexts, she still may not be placed in the kadın category: category boundaries, while changeable, are often anything but fuzzy. In this study of the terms kiz and kadın, I will argue that both feature-based and prototype-based models are necessary in order to explain categorisation acts; however, instead of a simple binary feature bundle I use a variable weighted feature approach that involves a distinction between ‘defining’ and ‘typical’ features (which indicate category membership and prototypicality respectively), and a further distinction between those features that remain fairly constant and those whose salience varies according to context and communicative intent. Furthermore, I also propose the concept of ‘category stress’, which can be seen as a kind of cognitive dissonance resulting from disparity between feature-based and prototype-based categorisation processes. This may result from a number of factors, both contextual and cultural; it also often results in infelicitous categorisations or a search for alternative categories. Thus, in situations where the “strictly speaking” use of kız would apply to an item far removed from the prototype (as in the middleaged spinster example), alternative terms such as bayan or hanım (both roughly meaning ‘lady’) may be used.
. Views of categorisation Since the publication of Lakoff ’s (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, it has become common to divide theories of categorisation into traditional, featurebased semantics in one camp, and cognitive approaches based on prototypes, metonymy and metaphor in the other, with Aristotle cast as the villain of the piece (Wierzbicka 1990: 364). However, Aristotle himself had a more sophisticated view of categorisation than is commonly supposed, and, with his distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ attributes was the first to introduce the idea that not all features are of equal importance. The problem with the Aristotelian view lies not so much in the distinction between essential and accidental attributes as in its failure to realise that some accidental (i.e. non-defining) attributes are anything but accidental. To give one of Aristotle’s favourite examples, “white man” (Metaphysics, VII(6): 1031), the attribute ‘white’ is obviously not essential to being a man, but falls within an accepted colour-range that is probably an element in the process of categorising a creature as a ‘man’: “white man” and “black man” indicate dif-
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ferences between men, but “green man” or “purple man” imply something odd is going on (maybe what we are referring to is not actually a man but a leprechaun or an alien, or maybe the colour term is being used metaphorically). If we view features as “focal values in a continuous cognitive space” (Jackendoff 1992: 205), we need some set of rules for determining their relationship and relative importance, rather than simply lumping them together. The realisation that not all features are created equal gave rise to the “weighted feature-bundle” approach (Coleman & Kay 1981). A simple feature bundle fails to describe the internal structure of a category, nor does it give an accurate picture of its relationship with other categories (Langacker 1987: 19–20). Therefore an alternative is to rank features from most to least essential. However, while the idea of assigning different weightings to features is useful, it is still necessary to draw a distinction between types of feature in terms of those that define a category and those that establish centrality within that category. For this reason Lehrer (1974) proposed a distinction between ‘obligatory’ and ‘optional’ features, and similar approaches have been adopted by Lipka (1986), and Wierzbicka (1985). What these approaches have in common is an attempt to reconcile feature- and prototype-based categorisations. From a different perspective, Jackendoff (1983) and Pustejovsky (1995) have also addressed this problem. Jackendoff in particular suggests that the combination of an atomistic feature-based system with preference rules can explain “categories with fuzzy boundaries and family resemblance properties á la Wittgenstein and Roth” (1992: 206). In any case, it is obvious that mere resemblance to a prototype is in itself insufficient as a basis for categorisation. As Wierzbicka (1990: 350) points out, resemblance does not explain why “an ostrich is a bird but a bat is not”, as the latter is in many ways closer to our celebrated prototypical robin than the former. Furthermore, Cruse (1990: 388) argues, “It is not easy to see how the boundaries of a category can be derived from its prototypes.” Another problem is raised by context. Cruse points out that “It is at least possible that different criteria are used with different categories, and perhaps even different criteria on different occasions of judgement with the same category, under different sorts of contextual pressure” (1990: 384). Following Hymes, the role of language as a device for categorizing experience and its role as an instrument of communication cannot be so separated, and indeed, the latter includes the former. This is the more true when a language, as is often the case, affords alternative ways of categorizing the same experience, so that the patterns of selection among such alternatives must be determined in actual contexts of use. (Hymes 1972: 33)
It is clear, then, that categorisation is partly determined by contextual factors and partly by the speaker’s state of mind and intention in communicating.
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A categorisation act may also be influenced by a scenario: “a culturally defined sequence of actions; a story schema” (Palmer 1996: 75). Holland and Skinner claim that female American students’ categorisations of types of men are based on “a taken-for-granted relationship between males and females”, and that by using specialised terms, such as ‘jock’, ‘nerd’ and so on, women “relate types to a set of scenarios in which the prototypical male/female relationship is disrupted” (1987: 103). Disruption of a scenario results in what I have termed ‘category stress’, and often occurs in the search for alternative categories. In this case, such categories as ‘jock’ or ‘nerd’ could be seen as a way out when a male fails to meet the requirements of the scenario (e.g. by spending the whole of a date talking about football or computers). Our middle-aged unmarried Turkish woman is another example, since in the prototypical scenario she would have married sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five (Atalay 1992: 271), and would have made the transitions from [+virgin] to [–virgin] and [–adult] to [+adult], moreor-less simultaneously. In Turkey, as in many cultures, the concepts of adulthood and marriage are intertwined, especially for women; marriage provides a rite of passage that enables the normally fuzzy boundary between child and adult to become much more clear-cut. A late, or a very early marriage can thus give rise to category stress. Finally, it is important to remember that diachronic factors are also important in categorisation and category stress; in fact historical linguistics as a field is largely concerned with the process of change in categories, such as amelioration and so forth. Societies change, and their languages change with them “through time and incessant patter” (Palmer 1996: 6), although there is frequently a time lag. Because cultural models organise large amounts of information successfully and are thus resistant to change (Holland & Skinner 1987: 105), the result is category stress. From this review of the literature, we may raise the following hypotheses: 1. Both features and prototypes play an important role in categorisation; neither approach on its own is adequate. 2. Features are not of equal importance in assigning items to a category, and can be broadly grouped into ‘defining features’ and ‘typical features’. 3. While the status of some features remains fairly constant, that of others varies according to a number of contextual and communicative factors. 4. Contextual and cultural factors may lead to disparity between feature- and prototype-based categorisation (category stress). In the rest of this paper I will test these hypotheses using the terms kiz and kadın as benchmarks. With the exception of example (13), which is presented as a “theoretically possible” sentence, the phrases and sentences used are examples of Standard Turkish. These data include utterances by friends and relatives (referred to by their initials) and popular media.2 Some examples come from concordances
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provided by Petek Kurtböke from her “Ozturk Corpus” (for a more detailed description of the data-collecting procedure and results of the concordancing, see Turner 1998).3
. Defining features of kiz and kadin I have claimed that in assigning items to the categories kiz and kadın, the feature [±virgin] is more important than [±adult], in contrast to the English categories girl and woman, where the reverse is the case. However, this claim obviously needs to be tested if it is not to fall into the “twenty words for snow” category. The first case is that the question given in (2) would receive an answer based on the referent’s sexual experience or marital status rather than age; it can function either as “Is she a virgin?” or “Is she married?” (2) kız mı, kadın mı? girl int. woman int. “Girl or woman?”
In the prototypical scenario, loss of virginity and marriage coincide, but in practice, of course, they often do not. It is therefore necessary to establish which criterion – [±virgin] or [±married] – is more important in categorising such peripheral cases. After all, in some languages, such as Greek, it is marriage which makes one a woman (gineka), rather than a girl (kopela). An example that illustrates the priority of [±virgin] is given in (3). (3) Sen orta-okul-da-yken kadın ol-mu¸s-sun you middle-school-loc.-while woman become-said-2ndsing. “They say you became a woman when you were at Middle School.” (Comedian “Huysuz Virjin” to singer Ajda Pekan, Star TV, 11/7/98)
Kadın olmak, ‘to become a woman’, is also defined as ‘to have one’s hymen broken’ (Türk Dil Kurumu 1998). Additionally, the medical test to establish virginity (still legal, though widely condemned) is colloquially known as, kız kontrolu, ‘girl test’. We may conclude, then, that [+virgin] is a more important feature of kiz than [–adult], though not as vital as [+human] and [+female], since it may on occasions, be over-ridden, as we shall see later. [+virgin] in kiz and [–virgin] in kadın are defining features, but weak ones; an absence of strong defining features, such as [+human] and [+female], marks its usage as clearly metaphorical, as in the case of, kiz neyi, the smallest size of reed flute (ney), which is a metaphorical extension of the kiz category.
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. Typical features If [±adult] is not of prime importance in distinguishing between kız and kadın, it is obviously important in establishing centrality in a category, and thus may be termed a ‘typical feature’. I would also argue that it is a ‘strong’ typical feature, in that in some contexts it may override [±virgin]. One case is where someone is not a virgin, but is nevertheless very young. An example was provided by the media furore surrounding the marriage of Sarah, a fourteen-year-old English tourist, to a Turkish waiter. Had Sarah been Turkish this might not have been worthy of comment, since in this area of Turkey (Kahramanmara¸s) marriage at this age, though illegal, is still common; she would thus have made the normal transition from kiz to kadın. However, once the case made the press, Sarah was largely referred to as kiz rather than the technically accurate kadin. When I pointed this out to a Turkish-speaker, the reaction was “well, I suppose strictly speaking she is a kadın, but . . . ” (¸SH). Similarly, outside medical contexts, children who are the victims of rape are generally referred to as kız, as would a girl who had broken her hymen accidentally (TK, AA). What seems to be happening here is a disruption to the normal scenario, or, as I have called it, category stress. Lack of a typical feature is not usually enough to justify exclusion from a category, but extreme cases can change the weighting of features, so that a strong typical feature can override a weak defining feature. In the case of Sarah, her age was seen as sufficiently atypical as to override the [–virgin] feature, and placing her in the kiz category, added to the sense of moral outrage that draws on other typical features (or connotations) of kiz, such as innocence and vulnerability. These are associated with the feature [–adult] but probably more so for girls than boys. On their own, these weak typical features would not be sufficient to override a defining feature, but may add their weight to this process in combination with [–adult]. Not all cases need be as extreme as that of Sarah, though, and there is a fair degree of latitude in whether to refer to a married woman as kadın or kız. In addition to the absolute age of the person referred to, her age relative to the speaker can play a part. An older woman may refer to a younger woman as kız irrespective of the marital status of the latter.4 It is, however, very rare for the reverse to occur – i.e., for [+adult] to override [+virgin]. Outside contexts in which [±adult] becomes irrelevant (which will be discussed later), I have observed hardly any instances of virgins being referred to as kadın. Another typical feature of kiz is [+intimate], since one thing girls prototypically do is form close peer friendships. The phrase kız kıza (“girl-to-girl”) conjures up images of intimate conversation, while erkek erke˘ge has the same connotations as its English equivalent, “man-to-man”: the emphasis is less on intimacy (though
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that may be involved) and more on honesty, or in competitive situations, fairness (erkek erke˘ge dövü¸smek translates as “fight fairly”). Kız kıza is a popular title for websites dealing with “girl-talk” (e.g. Turkstudent.net 2005) and the peer intimacy aspect has been used to market products. As we have seen in the case of “going out with the girls”, in both English and Turkish [+intimate] can be regarded as a strong typical feature, since it may override both [+virgin] and [–adult], though this is not true for all languages.5 In Turkish a woman going out with her workmates may say a sentence like (4), even though nearly all the ‘girls’ in this case were married or divorced. Interestingly, there seems to be no male equivalent (cf. “going out with the boys/lads”). Again, then, we see an asymmetry between gender-specific terms. (4) kız-lar-la gid-iyor-um girl-pl.-with go-prog.-1stsing. “I’m going with the girls”
(NT)
There seem to be two processes at work in this apparent miscategorisation, along with other examples, such as hadi kızlar! (‘Come on, girls!’). The first is that the presence of even one unmarried woman in the group would make the use of kadın infelicitous; the second is the peer-friendship element. As in English, the term would probably not be used by an outsider, especially a male one, since what would be understood there would not be [+intimate] but [–adult]; in other words, it would be seen as patronising. The case is clearer when only one person is being addressed. As we saw earlier, N’aber kız? (‘How’s things girl?’), may be used to greet any female friend, though its use is probably rather more common in female-female than malefemale exchanges. kiz is also used paternalistically, emphasizing the [–adult] feature, and this use is particularly common with the first person singular possessive (kızım, ‘my girl’). This may well be a metaphorical extension of the polysemic meaning of kiz as ‘daughter’, which I will discuss later. Like the intimate use, it may be felicitous or infelicitous depending also on whether the speaker is seen as occupying an appropriate social/discourse role. Older friends, relatives and sometimes even strangers are often expected to play a fatherly/motherly role, so this use of kiz or kizim may be appropriate, but it can equally well be seen as condescending. For example, in a television debate (Siyaset Meydanı), an older male participant repeatedly addressed a young woman with whom he was arguing as kızım, and although she did not verbally object, her anger was visible. As a viewer put it: (5) Görü-yor mu-sun nasıl a¸sa˘gılı-yor see-prog. int.-2ndsing. how lower-prog. “Do you see that? He’s really putting her down.”
(NT)
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Note that there is no danger of infelicity when referring to a third party as kız, as mentioned earlier.
. Context and topic
Women and men We have seen how context and communicative intent can cause a strong typical feature to override a weak defining feature. In addition, strong contextual or topical pressure may sometimes simply eliminate a weak defining feature, such as the aforementioned ‘International Women’s Day’ example. As in English, topicbased categorization based on “women as opposed to men” results in kadın being stripped down to its strong defining features [+human] and [+female].6 Thus, it is possible to say kadın, to someone who would normally be a member of kiz, (6) Dünya Kadın Gün-ün kutlu olsun world woman day-2ndpos. celebrated be-3dimp. “Congratulations on ‘International Woman’s Day.”’ (NT, to NH, opening telephone conversation)
Similar cases arise when kadın is found in collocation with erkek (‘man’) or with haklar (‘rights’) as in the following examples: (7) kadın mi, erkek mi? woman int. man int. “Male or female?” (8) kadin ve erkek i¸s-çi-ler-i woman and man work-er-pl.-pos. “male and female workers”
(SH) ¸
(Ozturk Corpus)
(9) köprü-ler-in altı-ndan, kadın hak-lar-ı-ndan, kadın-erkek bridge-pl.-gen. under-abl. woman right-pl.-pos-abl. woman-man e¸sit-li˘g-i-nden yan-a çok su-lar geç-ti˘g-i için equal-ness-pos.-abl. side-dat. very water-pl. pass-part.-pos. for “As for women’s rights and male-female equality, much water has flowed under the bridge.” (Milliyet, 7/12/92)
This raises the question of whether we have a case of polysemy: one distinct meaning of kadın as [+human][+female] and [–virgin], and another meaning as simply [+human] and [+female]. However, as Wierzbicka (1992: 14) argues, “polysemy must never be postulated lightly”. Since all members of the first kadın category postulated are automatically members of the second, it might be more parsimonious to assume that there is just one kadın category, and this category
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may expand, in certain cases, by losing the [–virgin] feature. The same applies, of course, to English woman, where the [+adult] feature is dropped under the same circumstances.
Other collocations Common collocations to do with services have the effect of eliminating the [±virgin] distinction. No one would assume that a kadın kuaförü (‘women’s hairdresser’) would only cut the hair of married women. Similarly, it is rare to think that sexual experience is a prerequisite for seeing a kadın doktoru (‘gynaecologist’), and if one were thrown out of a kız yurdu (‘girl’s hall of residence’) for not being a virgin, it would be on moralistic rather than semantic grounds. The first two cases employ the ‘women as opposed to men’ sense of kadın, while with kız yurdu [–adult] overrides [+vırgın]. In the case of occupations, the prototypical member of the collocated category pushes out exceptions. Thus a kadın doktor (without the accusative/possessive -u suffix) simply means ‘female doctor’. Aside from the use of kadın to mean woman as opposed to man, it is the case that most doctors are married, and the small number of doctors in the kiz category is insufficient to warrant use of the phrase kız doktor. A similar consideration applies in the case of kiz ö˘grencisi, which literally means ‘girl student’ but in practice conveys, ‘female student’. Turkish tends to force a choice between kız and kadin for ‘female’, since the literal word for female, di¸si, is generally only used for (i) animals, (ii) as an insult through metaphorical extension (BÇ), (iii) as a way of emphasising female sexuality, again perhaps using the animal metaphor, or (iv) in collocations that are seen as somehow ‘odd’, such as di¸si Rambo, ‘female Rambo’ (Milliyet 27/3/99). Prototypically female students are members of kız, and this is even extended to those students who obviously do not belong to this category. The following television news headline illustrates this: (10) Profesör-ler, kiz ö˘grenci-ler-i kullan-ıyor Professor-pl. girl student-pl.-acc. use-prog. “Professors are using girl students.”
(Star TV News, 2/2/98)
‘Use’, in this case, means ‘have sex with’, referring to a scandal at Izmir University. Obviously if the students in question have been ‘used’, they are not strictly speaking members of kız, but the collocation overrides this and perhaps also adds to the sense of outrage. There is also a certain ambiguity here, though, since there may be a sense that the professors are actually deflowering students, who would, at the time, be classed as kız. Note that again the asymmetry applies: the male counterpart of kiz ö˘grencisi is erkek ö˘grencisi (‘man student’), not o˘glan ö˘grencisi (‘boy student’), as seen in example (11).
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(11) Brighton College, yakla¸sık 500 erkek ve kız ö˘grencisi olan Brighton College close-to 500 man and girl student-pos. being yatılı bir okuldur boarding a school-is “Brighton College is a boarding school for around 500 male and female students.” (Promeths.com 2005)
Collocation requires lexical conformity almost by definition. It is therefore not surprising that collocations are based on prototypical instances, and these exclude atypical cases.
. Causes and effects of category stress I have argued that category stress occurs when there is a disparity between the results of feature-based and prototype-based categorisations. Sometimes this disparity is inconsequential, as when we call something a cup because it is used for drinking, even though it may actually look more like a bowl. However, with categories like woman and kadın, there is more at stake. The prototypes have more psychological impact; miscategorisation can have undesirable consequences; and difficulty in categorisation is more stressful. All three defining features of woman have a direct impact on social identity, and fuzziness or ambiguity, in that any of these can result in discomfort, humour or even fear. How these reactions can be exploited, consider: Lolita ([±adult]), Twelfth Night ([±female]), or Invasion of the Body Snatchers ([±human]). Normally, we would expect category stress to be a rare phenomenon; if this routinely occurred at the boundaries of categories, such categories would probably be altered over time to avoid confusion or infelicitous usage. It would be premature to say whether features are abstracted from prototypes, or that prototypes are constructed from commonly occurring features. In either case, the two work in parallel, otherwise they would not work at all. Nevertheless, at the periphery of a category there are bound to be some items that strike us as ‘odd’, like flightless birds or promiscuous priests. A more interesting cause of category stress is social change. I have stated that there is usually a lag between social change and linguistic change, and this is probably greater the more socially and psychologically salient a particular aspect of the cultural model is. In Turkey, the main causes of category stress in kız and kadın are the rise in the average age of marriage and cultural Westernisation. In the past, early marriage was the norm, but now it is rare for women to marry before the age of twenty.7 Despite the strong social sanctions still in operation, this has inevitably
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led to an increase in pre-marital sexual activity amongst young women (something which had always been considered normal in young men). As previously mentioned, one occasional result of category stress is humour. An ostrich is seen as a funny kind of bird, and a promiscuous priest might be the subject of a joke.8 An example of this in the case of kiz is the following line spoken by a stereotypical ‘schoolmarm’ in a comic film: (12) Ya¸s-ım otuz be¸s. Ve kizim. El de˘g-me-mi¸s. . . age-gen.1st thirty five and girl-1st hand place-neg.-part. “My age is thirty-five. And I am a ?girl. Undefiled . . .” (Hababam Sınıfı)
This is quite culture-specific humour, arising from the contrast between the strict definition (‘she is a girl’) and the prototype (‘she is not what one would expect on hearing the word’), plus the fact that one would not normally allude so obviously to one’s virginity. A more common effect of category stress is alternative categorization – i.e., use of a different word. Hanım and bayan are both acceptable alternatives, though somewhat formal. These can be used when one is not sure of the status of the person in question, although it is also common for older, unmarried women, in order to avoid the [–adult] implications of kiz. Bayan, although literally meaning ‘lady’ (and also a formal title similar to ‘Ms’) seems to be becoming a neutral term with defining features [+human] and [+female] with a typical feature [+adult].9 It is, for example, the normal term used in sports, such as in (13), (13) tek bayan-lar-da single lady-pl.-loc. “In the women’s [tennis] singles.”
(Ozturk Corpus)
An extreme example of bayan shedding its ‘ladylike’ associations is (14) bayan terörist-i ?lady terrorist-pos. “female terrorist”
(TRT News)
However, this use was still greeted with amusement by a Turkish colleague (AA), which seems to indicate that escaping from one form of category stress may lead to another. As for the features of kız and kadın themselves, it is possible that these may eventually change to reflect changes in the cultural model. However, given the continued importance given to virginity in Turkish society as a whole (rather than the progressive urban elite), this seems highly unlikely in the near future.
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. Caveats and conclusions Perhaps because of the fluid nature of ‘meaning’, it is all too easy to think up a semantic theory and find language examples that seem to justify it. In using kadın and kız, I have deliberately chosen terms and contexts that place considerable strain on a semantic model, and an ability to perform successfully in interpreting the linguistic data should not be taken as proof of the validity of that model, but merely serve as an indication that it has potential. In particular, it should be stressed that this model makes no claims with regard to neurology; it attempts to explain linguistic behaviour in cognitively plausible terms, but does not presume to assert that the brain processes semantic information in exactly the same way as the model proposes. A point worth emphasising is that the use of traditional semantic notation should not be interpreted as support for the idea of atomistic binary features. Features are themselves categories, and are subject to fuzziness, prototype effects, metaphorical extension, and so forth. Writing, for example, [+virgin] is simply a convenient way of indicating that in the view of the person performing the categorisation act, the item to be categorised fits their minimum criteria for virginity. Even such an apparently non-gradable category as virgin has peripheral members, such as “technical virgin”; criteria for membership may also vary across cultures, so strictly speaking I should have used the term [±bakire] rather than [±virgin].10 Assignment of a positive or negative sign to features is also somewhat arbitrary. [+female] could be, and often is, written as [–male]. My choice of the former is simply a reflection of an assumption that femaleness is not perceived simply as the absence of maleness. I retained the conventional [–adult], rather than using [+child], because children may be viewed teleologically as potential adults, while women are not viewed as potential men. In the case of [+virgin] a positive rather than a negative feature was used because in both English and Turkish virginity is seen as a positive attribute or even a possession; something that may be ‘lost’ (English) or ‘broken’ (Turkish). This may not only be due to the cultural importance attached to virginity, but also to the physical existence of the hymen. It would also be possible to develop the model further to give a better idea of the internal structure of a category. Some features are subordinates of others; for example [+virgin] implies [+human], since one would not normally speak of a virgin cat. Similarly, some features are typical features of categories alluded to by other features; for example [+vulnerable] is a typical feature of [child] – i.e., [–adult]. One application of the model that has not been much examined in this study is its use in describing metaphor. For example, the item kız neyi (the smallest ney, or reed flute) is clearly metaphorical, as in (15),
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(15) kız gibi araba girl like car “beautiful new car”
In kız neyi, the weak typical feature [+small], itself a typical feature of [–adult], is used to create the metaphor; in (15) a metaphorical extension of [+virgin] is used – kız gibi is explained as bozulmami¸s – literally meaning ‘unbroken’ or ‘unspoiled’ (AH). We can postulate, therefore, that a metaphor may not simply involve a transfer of features from a source to a target domain, but a creative metaphorical extension of features themselves: a kind of ‘meta-metaphor’. This follows naturally from the assumption that features are themselves categories. This type of feature-based approach could be useful in distinguishing between deeply-buried metaphors, and ‘obvious’ metaphors of the kız neyi or ‘female joint’ type. It is possible that the obviousness of the metaphor has an inverse relationship to the number and strength of features transferred from the source to the target domain; it may also depend on whether features are transferred “as is” or are themselves metaphorically extended. For example, when Captain Kirk says of the Enterprise “She is a beautiful woman, and I love her!” he is deliberately confusing an object with a human. The starship lacks the features [+human] [+female] and [+adult], and the metaphor succeeds by taking the one feature [+female] and metaphorically extending it. On the other hand referring to a pet as ‘she’, rather than the customary ‘it’ for animals, is less obviously metaphorical, since it possesses at least one defining feature of woman [+female] in its original feature-bundle, rather than being an extended form. The notion of category stress is, I have suggested, of use in illuminating some types of sociolinguistic behaviour, language change and even art (as in the Twelfth Night example), whether or not it is coupled to the particular feature analysis discussed here. Categorisation, as I have argued, reveals much about culture and I would suggest that ‘stressful’ categorisation acts may be particularly revealing. In fact, my interest in the kadın and kız categories, and a realisation that virginity is not only socially but linguistically significant followed from the following embarrassing exchange (in English) with a Turkish student: (16) Author: “She’s a nice woman.” Student: “How do you know she’s a woman?”
Notes . The idea that Eskimos have twenty words for snow is a linguistic ‘urban myth’ ably exploded by Geoffrey Pullum in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991).
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How do you know she’s a woman? . Subjects referred to are: AA: Female, 25, English teacher BÇ: Male, 19, student AH: Male, 55, news photographer NH: Female, 25, travel agent. SH: ¸ Female, 45 (?), housewife TK: Female, 28, English teacher NT: Female, 28, ceramics teacher All are native speakers of Turkish, living in Ankara and born in either Ankara or Izmir. . The Ozturk Corpus is collected from Australian Turkish community newspapers. With a few exceptions (Kurtböke 1996) which are not relevant to this study, the corpus can be seen as representative of Standard Turkish. . I recently noticed my wife doing this, and when asked why, received the answer “I don’t know – probably because she’s ten years younger than me.” . In Greek, for example, an adult female does not ‘go out with the girls’, but with the women – ginekes (Sophia Piperis, personal communication, 1998). . This also eliminates the asymmetry of kadın and erkek, by providing erkek with the feature [+human], since we are obviously not talking about ‘women as opposed to male creatures of any species’. Incidentally, erkek, the commonest term for ‘man’, is never used in the sense of ‘human being’. Occasionally its near-synonym, adam, is used like this, but normally one would say insan (‘person’). Similarly, the problem of the ambiguous male third person pronoun does not arise, since Turkish pronouns have no gender. . For example, in 1991 only 28% of female 15 to 19-year-olds were married, compared to 82% of women in the 50–54 age range who had married at 19 or younger (calculated from figures in Atalay 1992: 271). . It is interesting that jokes may employ both stereotypes and peripheral category members, as in the Turkish joke about the frustrated housewife and the blind imam (unfortunately so culture-specific as to be virtually untranslatable). . One may refer to a child as bayan, but it is normally modified as küçük bayan, ‘little lady’. . The Turkish for ‘virgin’, bakire (from Arabic), simply means a female with an unbroken hymen, so a technical virgin is still a virgin. This can in turn lead to category stress, since the importance placed on the hymen encourages a lot of ‘technicality’, in a manner reminiscent of 1950’s America.
References Aristotle (1987). Metaphysics. In J. L. Ackrill (Ed.), A New Aristotle Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Atalay, Besir (1992). Türk Aile Yapısı Ara¸stırması. Ankara: DPT Sosyal Planlama Genel Müdürlü˘gü. Coleman, Linda & Paul Kay (1981). Prototype Semantics: the English word, lie. Language, 57, 26–44.
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Cruse, D. A. (1990). Prototype theory and lexical semantics. In S. Tsohatzdis (Ed.), Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in linguistic categorization (pp. 382–402). London: Routledge. Holland, Dorothy & Debra Skinner (1987). Prestige and intimacy: the cultual models behind Americans’ talk about gender types. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Hymes, Dell (1972). Towards Ethnographies of Communication: the analysis of communicative events. In Pier Paolo Giglioli (Ed.), Language and Social Context. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1992). Languages of the Mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge, MA. Kurtböke, N. Petek (1996). A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Turkish Community Newspapers in Australia: a progress report. In Proceedings of the VIIIth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics. August 7–9 1996. Ankara. Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Univ. Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: volume I: theoretical prerequisties. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lehrer, Adrienne (1974). Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Lehrer, Adrienne (1990). Prototype theory and its implications for lexical analysis. In S. Tsohatzdis (Ed.), Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in linguistic categorization (pp. 368–381). London: Routledge. Lipka, Leonhard (1986). Semantic Features and Prototype Theory in English Lexicography. In D. Kastowsky & A. Szwedek (Eds.), Linguistics Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Palmer, Gary (1996). Towards a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. ˙ Promeths.com (2005). [Online] “Ingiltere’de Ortaokul ve Lisede Misafir Ö˘grencisi” Available at http://www.promeths.com/programlar/ortaokullise/ingiltere.php Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1991). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, and other irreverent essays on the study of language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pustejovsky, James (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Türk Dil Kurumu (1998). Güncel Türkçe Sözlük [on line] Available at: http://tdk.org.tr/ sozluk.html Turkstudent.net (2005). Kız kıza. [Online] Available at: http://www.turkstudent.net/cat/558 Turner, Robin (1998). Culture, context and categorisation: a feature- and prototype-based study of Turkish terms for women. Unpublished MA dissertation, Surrey University. Whorf, Benjamin L. (1956). Language, Thought and Reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Ed. John B. Carroll). New York: Wiley. Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). ‘Prototypes Save’: on the uses and abuses of the notion of ‘prototype’ in linguistics and related fields. In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Meanings and Prototypes: studies in linguistic categorization. London: Routledge. Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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chapter
Cross-linguistic polysemy in tactile verbs* Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano University of Zaragoza
The link between the semantic field of tactile perception and that of emotions has been long established (Kurath 1921; Buck 1949). Within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, Sweetser (1990) analyses the semantic extensions that occur in perception verbs. Taking Sweetser’s study as a starting point, in the first half of this paper, I analyse the metaphorical scope of tactile verbs, not only in English, but also in two other languages, Basque and Spanish. In the second half, I explain how these polysemous structures are obtained, what the semantic packaging of these extended meanings is. In other words, how the semantic content of the lexical items (tactile verb and arguments) interacts and contributes to the creation of each semantic extension. Keywords: polysemy, metaphor, touch, cognitive linguistics
.
Introduction: Tactile perception and emotions
The link between the semantic field of tactile perception and that of emotions has been long established. Authors such as Kurath (1921) and Buck (1949) pointed out the relationship between these two domains in Indo-European languages already in the first half of the twentieth century. Although these studies are thorough investigations into the etymology and polysemous senses of tactile words, they do not provide a motivated account of why these different meanings are related to these words in particular. More recent studies within the cognitive semantics framework (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Langacker 1987, 1991) have tried to show that the polysemous structure of tactile words is motivated. That is to say, the fact that a lexical item has different meanings is not whimsical, but motivated by our experience and understanding of the world. These different meanings are not random, but structured by means of cognitive devices such as metaphor. Within the cognitive semantics model, Sweetser (1990) analyses the semantic extensions that occur in perception verbs. Like Kurath and Buck, she relates the physical sense of touch to emotional feeling and to the general sense of percep-
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tion.1 She also proposes that these extended meanings are not particular to English only, but cross-linguistic. Taking Sweetser’s study as a starting point, in the first half of this paper, I have analysed the different meanings conveyed by tactile verbs, not only in English but in two other languages: Basque and Spanish. Following Kövecses’ (1995, 2000) terminology, the ‘metaphorical scope’ of the verbs of touch in these three languages seems to be broader than that proposed by the studies mentioned above.2 The aim of this paper, however, is not only to give an account of the meanings conveyed by these verbs in these three different languages, but also to explain how these polysemous structures are obtained, what the semantic packaging of these extended meanings is. In other words, how the semantic content of the lexical items (tactile verb and arguments) interact and contribute to the creation of each semantic extension. Previous studies on polysemy (Brugman 1981; Vandeloise 1991; Herskovits 1986; among many others) offer detailed descriptions of the different polysemous senses of specific lexical items, the relations that hold among themselves, the conceptual motivation for such relations, and so on. However, what these analyses do not explicitly do is to address the question of whether these different meanings are the result of the different senses of a polysemous verb through the interaction between the semantics of the verb and its arguments or whether it is the choice of a particular argument what really determines different meanings. I examine this issue in the second half of this paper.
. Metaphorical scope of tactile verbs revisited The semantic field of tactile perception is usually linked only to the domain of emotion. However, if we review the different meanings that these verbs can convey in English, Basque and Spanish, it is found that these verbs not only map onto the field of emotions but also onto other semantic fields as well.3 The verbs used in this case are touch in English,4 ukitu in Basque,5 and tocar in Spanish. The linguistic data come from three different sources: (i) monolingual and bilingual dictionaries; (ii) several corpora: English (The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus-LOB, The British National Corpus-BNC),6 Basque (Present-day Basque Reference Corpus-EEBS), and Spanish (Reference Corpus for Present-day SpanishCREA); and (iii) examples for the most part constructed by me, occasionally on the basis of an utterance that I have seen or heard used.7 Native speakers were always consulted concerning the naturalness of these examples. In the first instance there are two concrete extended meanings found in the three languages. One meaning is ‘to partake of food or drink’ as in (1), (2) and (3). (1) John hardly touched the food
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(2) Jonek ez du ia janaria ikutu john.erg neg aux.3s hardly food.abs touch.per “John hardly touched the food” (3) Juan apenas ha tocado la comida john hardly has touched the food “John hardly touched the food”
In these three examples we learn that John did not eat much of his food, so in these cases, the meaning is ‘to partake of food’. If we change the direct object food for drink, then the meaning will be ‘to partake of drink’ instead. It has been suggested (Barcelona, p.c.) that instead of having the meaning ‘to partake of food or drink’, which is too specific, it would be better to propose a more general meaning like ‘to partake of something’. That would cover not only sentences like John hardly touched the food, but also examples like I didn’t touch a penny of your money. Although this proposal is sensible to some extent, I keep the former for two reasons. First, because several dictionaries contain this entry as a separate one (cf. am, col). Second, because intuitively these two sentences do not imply exactly the same meaning. In my opinion, the inferences resulting from the two examples are different. A sentence like John hardly touched the food can only make reference to one action ‘to eat’ (or ‘to drink’ if we change the direct object to a drink), and the verb ‘to touch’ can be replaced by the verb ‘to taste’. In the second sentence, the verb ‘to touch’ is not related to the meaning ‘to eat’ (or ‘to drink’) and therefore, this substitution for ‘to taste’ is not possible. Here the meaning refers more to the fact that I have not taken any money from that person, where ‘taken’ can be understood as the physical action of grabbing something, if not ‘to steal’ it. Another physical meaning is ‘to affect’ as in (4), (5) and (6). (4) Just don’t touch anything in my room
(am)
(5) Nork ukitu nau, nork ukitu ditu nire soinekoak? who.erg touch.per aux.1s who.erg touch.per aux.3s my dress.abs.pl “Who touched me, who touched my dresses?” (is) (6) ¿Quién tocó mis vestidos? Who touched my dresses “Who touched my dresses?”
These three examples imply that not only has physical contact occurred, but there has also been a change of location. In (4), the speaker does not want the other person to change anything in his/her room; whereas in both (5) and (6), the person is asking about the person who did change the position of the dresses from the place they were before. This meaning, which I term ‘to affect’, has also a metaphorical extension as we shall see below.8
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As far as metaphorical meanings are concerned, there are three meanings: ‘to affect’, ‘to reach’ and ‘to deal with’. We have already seen that ‘to affect’ can be understood physically as in (4), (5), and (6), but it also has a metaphorical interpretation as in the examples below. (7) The appeal touched her heart
(lob)
(8) Edertasunak ukitu du azkenean Iñakiren bihotz gogorra beauty.erg touch.per aux.3s end.loc iñaki.gen heart strong.abs “In the end, beauty changed Iñaki’s hard feelings” (is) (9) Juan le tocó el corazón a María john she.dat touched the heart to mary “John touched Mary’s heart”
(cse)
In these examples what is affected is the emotional side of the person in question. In (7), the appeal was very emotive to this person; she was not able to remain with the same feelings or ideas she had before hearing it. In (8), Iñaki’s feelings are changed too, as a result of the beauty that he saw in a person or thing. Finally, in (9), John also affected, i.e. changed, Mary’s feelings. Although the emotional perspective of touch has been seen as an independent metaphorical mapping (Sweetser 1990: 37/43), I would like to include it as part of this wider meaning domain ‘to affect’. There are other examples in these languages where we have the same ‘contact-to-effect’ chain and that can also be included under this label. For instance, in Basque there is the expression ardoa ukitu, (lit.) ‘touch wine’, which means that the wine is spoilt and can no longer be drunk. In Spanish, when a person wins the lottery it is very common to say Me tocó la lotería, (lit.) ‘the lottery touched me’, in which case the lottery is the agent that provokes the change in me; that is to say, I became rich. A second metaphorical meaning is ‘to reach’ as in (10), (11), and (12) below. (10) He touched the high point in his career (11) 1685etik aurrera agintearen gailurra ukitu zuena 1685.abl forward mandate.gen top.abs touch.per aux.3s.who “He who reached the top of his mandate from 1685 onwards” (12) Ha tocado el punto más alto de su carrera has touched the point most high of his career “He has reached the peak of his career”
(col)
(is)
(osd)
These three examples imply that there is a point, an aim to be reached or that the moment to do something or end-point has arrived. In (10), (11) and (12), this end-point is the success achieved in a career.9 In other cases, as in (13) and (14), the end-point is spatial.10
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(13) The ship touches at Tenerife (14) meros transeúntes que han tocado puerto mientras hacían mere.p passerby.p which have touched port while made cruceros. . . cruises “. . .Just travellers who arrive here while they are on a cruise. . .”
(col)
(crea)
The ship in (13) and the passengers in (14) have arrived at their destination, at the dock. In both examples, the fact that the ship is going to stay in the dock for a brief period of time is also implied.11 In Spanish, however, this is not always the case: (15) El barco tocó puerto ayer the ship touched port yesterday “The ship arrived yesterday”
In (15), the information we are given is simply that the ship arrived, but not about the length of time it will stay. In Spanish there is a further usage of this meaning ‘to reach’ in the sense of ‘reaching the time to do something’ as in (16), where it is implied that the time to pay has come, and in (17), where we are about to reach the end of a five year period. What (16) implies is that the time to pay has come. This usage is very interesting because it is etymologically related to the onomatopoeic origin of the verb tocar. In old times the tolling of the bells used to announce events in villages. Still in current times one can hear the church bells calling people to prayer. In Spanish this is referred to as tocar a misa, (lit.) ‘touch to mass’. Nowadays, we do not use bells for these matters anymore, but we use the same construction tocar a, which reflects this tradition, to indicate that the time to do something has come. The end point is temporal in these examples. (16) Tocan a pagar touch.3.p to pay “It is time to pay”
(rae)
(17) Durante estos cinco años que ya tocan a su fin. . . while these five years which already touch.3.p to their end “In this five year period that is about to end. . .” (crea)
A third metaphorical meaning in the sense of touch is ‘to deal with’ as in (18), (19), and (20). (18) I wouldn’t touch that business (19) Nik ez nuke gai hori ikutuko I.erg neg aux.1s topic that.abs touch.f “I wouldn’t touch that issue”
(am)
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(20) Hasta el momento no ha tocado el tema de la alfabetización until the moment neg has touched the topic of the literacy “Until now he hasn’t dealt with the literacy issue” (crea)
In these examples we are told that these people do not want or have not yet had the chance to deal with a specific subject (a business in (18), and some kind of issue in (19) and (20)). If we insert adverbial expressions such as luzez, ‘for a long time’, or en muchas ocasiones, ‘on many occasions’, the meaning ‘deal with’ changes a little bit, as in examples (21) and (22). (21) Unibertsitate-gaia luzaz ukitu dut university-topic.abs long.in touch.per aux.1s “I’ve dealt with university matters for a long time”
(is)
(22) En muchas ocasiones hemos tocado el tema de una posible on many occasions have.1p touched the topic of a possible intervención de las fuerzas armadas intervention of the forces armed “We have dealt with a possible intervention by the armed forces on many occasions” (crea)
Due to the semantics of these specific adverbial expressions, what we imply is that we have dealt with the same subject for quite a long time, repeatedly. As a result we become very familiar with the subject, and come to know it fairly well. The meaning shifts from ‘deal with’ to ‘be familiar with’ (know by experience). Tocar can also mean ‘to deal with superficially’, such as in English, when a word like barely, and/or the preposition on is inserted, as in (23) and (24) respectively. (23) He barely touched on the incident in his speech
(amgd)
(24) To some extent I shall be touching on points already made by previous speakers (lob)
In summary, the four major semantic extensions in tactile verbs analysed in this section include: ‘partake of food/drink’, ‘affect’ (physically and metaphorically), ‘reach’, and ‘deal with’. These semantic extensions represent four different ways in which the domain of tactile perception is conceptually linked to different experiential domains. These ‘links’ or mappings between domains are shared by the three languages under investigation, English, Basque and Spanish. The fact that these polysemes are found in different genetically unrelated languages must not be taken as a surprise. These mappings take place at a conceptual level. As has been argued in the Cognitive Linguistics literature (cf. ‘embodiment’, Johnson 1987), this conceptual level represents the way we understand and interact with the world; our own experience of what surrounds us. We, as human beings, have the same perceptual apparatus for the sense of touch, and therefore, it is only natural that
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the experiences that we have with the sense of touch – how we perceive with this sense, its limitations and advantages, the type of information available through this sense – are used as the conceptual basis for these metaphorical meanings.12 But, in the case of Basque, English, and Spanish speakers, we also have to bear in mind that they are entrenched in the same Western culture (cf. Gibbs 1999), and therefore, they share – at least, as far as these meanings are concerned – a common view and conceptualisation of the tactile sense. The role of culture in conceptualisation is an important issue because it has been shown that in some cases, the ‘embodiment’ of the senses is not sufficient enough to explain why certain sensory modalities are linked to certain cognitive processes (cf. Classen 1993; and Howes 1991, for an enlightening exposition of how the senses are conceptualised by different cultures). As Ong (1967 [1991: 26– 27]) puts it: Cultures vary greatly in their exploitation of the various senses and in the way in which they relate their conceptual apparatus to the various senses. It has been a commonplace that the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks differed in the value they set on the auditory. The Hebrews tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing, whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing, although far less exclusively as seeing than post-Cartesian Western man generally has tended to do.
The relation between visual/auditory perception and cognition is a good example to show that culture really matters. In Cognitive Linguistics, the link between vision and cognition has been generally accepted as one of the most consistently universal mappings in this domain. Authors such Sweetser (1990) suggest that vision has primacy as the modality from which verbs of higher intellection, such as ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘thinking’, are recruited, whereas hearing verbs, such as hear or listen, would not take these readings, because they are more “connected with the specifically communicative aspects of understanding, rather than with intellection at large” (1990: 43). Although it is true that this correspondence is systematically found in many languages, and certainly, in the three languages under investigation here (cf. Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999a, 2002), it is far from been universal. Evans and Wilkins (2000) have shown that Australian languages do not conceptualise intellection as vision, but as hearing. Furthermore, these authors claim that one of the possible reasons that could explain why Australian languages behave differently has to be found in the cultural and social practices of the Aboriginal people. In our case, we find that there are not significant differences in the conceptualisation of the sense of touch in English, Basque, and Spanish. Speakers of these three languages, therefore, seem to share both their experience and understanding
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of the tactile sense, and the background and practices of Western culture – despite individual differences. Another issue that I would like to point out is that the semantic extensions that we have discussed in this paper are not the only ones that can be found in English, Basque, and Spanish. As discussed elsewhere (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999a, 2002), each of these languages creates further mappings from the domain of touch onto other semantic domains. In English, for example, the verb touch can convey the meaning of ‘to ask for a loan’, as in Touch a friend for five dollars (am). In Basque, we also find the semantic extension ‘to consider, to weigh up’ with the verb haztatu ‘touch’. In Spanish, the verb tocar ‘touch’ also means ‘to be a relative’ and ‘to fall to’. However, it is important to notice that the usage of these meanings is quite peripheral in comparison with the other extensions discussed above. There are two reasons that support this: (i) these extensions – especially in the case of English and Basque – are restricted to certain dialectal variations. The meaning ‘to ask for a loan’ is typical of American English, and the Basque verb haztatu is more common in northern dialects; (ii) these meanings are hardly ever used. Although we would need a statistical analysis of corpus data to be really sure about their status, a random search of a hundred examples on the corpora that we have used in these three languages retrieves no cases of these usages. The following sections examine how these polysemous senses are lexicalised. The main goal is to test whether these semantic extensions emerge from interaction between the semantic content of the verb and that of its arguments; and then, to determine what elements intervene in the lexicalisation, as well as to what extent each element is semantically responsible for such meanings. Contrary to the results in Section 2, the lexicalisation tools and techniques that languages possess vary from one to another. As a consequence, the lexicalisation patterns of these semantic extensions apply only to one language, and not cross-linguistically.
. Compositional polysemy: The semantic packaging of lexical items A word is understood as polysemous if all its multiple meanings are systematically related. One of the most important goals in Cognitive Linguistics has been to show that the multiple semantic extensions of a lexical item are related not in an arbitrary but in a systematic and natural way by means of several cognitive mechanisms such as image schemas, metaphor and metonymy. Numerous studies within this framework have shown that this is a strong hypothesis. A classical example is the analysis of the preposition ‘over’ (Brugman 1981; Lakoff 1987). These authors offer a very detailed exposition of the relationships among the different semantic extensions of the preposition ‘over’. However, neither of them explicitly acknowledges that these meanings are possible not only thanks to the
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semantic content of the preposition itself, but also to the insertion of very specific lexical items. Let us draw some examples to illustrate this point. The central meaning of ‘over’ is one that combines elements of both ‘above’ and ‘across’ as in (25). The ‘above-across’ meaning has several variants as in (26), (27), and (28): (25) The plane flew over (26) The bird flew over the yard (27) Sam climbed over the wall (28) Sausalito is over the bridge
These are just four different examples taken from Brugman’s analysis of the preposition ‘over’. According to this author, the central sense of the preposition ‘over’ (‘above-across’), has different variants depending on (i) the contact or no contact between the LM and TR; (ii) the position and extension of the LM, and (iii) the endpoint focus. However, not all these extra bits of information are contained in the preposition itself; instead, they are contained in other elements of the sentence. For instance, the fact that in some cases ‘over’ implies contact, is not inferred from the preposition but from the verb used. In (27), the information provided by the verb, ‘climb’, automatically entails that there is contact between the subject, “Sam” (the TR) and “the wall” (the LM), because it is impossible to climb a wall without touching it. In a similar way, the no-contact characteristic of ‘over’ in (25) and (26) is also implied by the verb ‘to fly’. In most cases, when we say that something is flying, we visualise the flying object (bird, plane. . .) as not touching any surface. In (27), the additional information that the LM is vertical, is not only provided by the LM (“the wall”) itself, but also by the verb ‘to climb’, which by default implies an upward movement. Even in the case of an end-point focus, as in (28), this meaning is not added by anything in the sentence, but is “the result of a general process that applies in many, but not all English prepositions” (Lakoff 1987: 424), the other members of the sentence contribute to this meaning. Without the static verb ‘to be’, which implies that there is no movement, and ‘the bridge’ (a structure with a beginning and an end), the end-point focus could not be inferred. Based on these examples,13 it can be argued that the polysemy in the preposition ‘over’ is not only obtained by the semantic content of this preposition, but also in conjunction with the semantic content of the words that accompany it in the sentence in which it occurs. The emergence of different senses from an interaction between a preposition and co-occurring elements is not an isolated case. A similar situation can be found in the case of the semantic extensions of tactile verbs described in Section 2. For example: (29) John hardly touched the food
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One of the cross-linguistic extensions of tactile verbs is ‘to partake of food (or drink)’ as illustrated in (1), reproduced here as (29). The reason why we interpret this sentence with this sense lies not only on the presence of the verb ‘to touch’, but also on those elements that directly complement it, such as “the food” and the adverbial “hardly”. Without either of these two elements, it would be impossible to infer a meaning like ‘to partake of food’. If we removed the adverbial, as in John touched the food, the meaning would correspond to either the prototypical meaning of touch, or to the semantic extension ‘affect’. If we change the complement that denotes some kind of edible object for some other concrete element as in John hardly touched the table, the interpretation of this sentence would be the same as in the case before: a prototypical ‘touch’ or ‘affect’. The same situation occurs both in Basque and Spanish. (30) Jonek janaria ikutu du john.erg food.abs touch.perf aux.3s (31) Juan tocó la comida john touched the food (32) Jonek ez du ia mahaia ikutu john.erg neg aux.3s almost table.abs touch.perf (33) Juan apenas tocó la mesa john hardly touched the table
If the adverbs ia ez and apenas are got rid of, as in (30) and (31),14 or if the complement is exchanged for one such as mahai and mesa, as in (32) and (33), we obtain similar interpretations as those in the English examples. Therefore, it is possible to predict that whenever the complement of the verb ‘to touch’ refers to an edible object, then the meaning is ‘to partake of food’. The situation is somehow different in the following examples.15 (34) Nork ukitu ditu nire soinekoak? who.erg touch.perf aux my dress.abs.p “Who touched my dresses?” (35) Ha tocado el punto más alto de su carrera has touched the point more high of his career “He touched the highest point in his career”
In (34), the extended meaning is ‘to affect, physically’. Someone has changed the state in which the clothes were and we want to know who that person is. In order to infer this meaning we need an entity that is able to carry the action of touching, as well as an entity that can be touched by the subject. Unlike in (33), where the choice of both subject and complement is not very wide; there are many entities
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that can carry out both tasks (see previous examples (30), (31), (32), and (33)). This meaning does not depend upon such a restrictive choice of arguments. The same statement can be made about the second sentence. In (35), the meaning is ‘to reach’. In this case, the fact that an end-point is implied is not only conveyed by the nature of the tactile verb itself, but also by the complement el punto más alto, ‘the highest point’, that denotes a limit to that metaphorical action of ‘touching’. And since el punto más alto is without dimension, we get the achievement reading of ‘to reach’. As in the other examples, there are many other entities, like ‘bottom’ and ‘eternity’, that can be placed in this position. In these two examples, the semantics of the other elements of the sentence plays a role in the overall meaning, but the importance of these elements is not as decisive as in the previous example (33). In order to obtain the meanings ‘to affect, physically’ and ‘to reach’, it is necessary to have subjects who are able to touch, and complements that can be touched. The achievement of that meaning, however, is not as dependent on these arguments, as in (33). In (34) and (35) the intrinsic meaning of the verb itself plays a much more important role, than that of its arguments. Finally, we have sentence (36) with the meaning ‘to affect’. (36) John touched Mary
This sentence is highly ambiguous; there are simultaneous interpretations of this sentence. (36) can infer a physical contact between John and Mary, i.e. the prototypical meaning of touch; the meaning ‘to affect, physically’ as in a situation where John is not expected by Mary and when he touches her, he makes her shiver; and the meaning ‘to affect, metaphorically’, in which case an emotional reaction from Mary is implied. Without any more information about the context in which this sentence is uttered, one cannot decide whether (36) should be interpreted physically or metaphorically. Unlike the other examples, (36) cannot be predicted by the semantic properties of the arguments that the verb takes. “John” and “Mary” are too vague to constrain the semantic extension that takes place in this example. In the case of the meaning ‘to partake of food’, the complement, “the food” constrains the semantic extension of the verb, because there are not too many things that can be done with food, apart from eating, cooking. . . With “John” and “Mary” the case is different: the possibilities for these two entities are infinite; and yet the meanings include only the prototypical meaning, and ‘to affect’ (both physically and metaphorically). In sum, based on these sets of examples, we can divide these polysemous senses into two groups. On the one hand, examples like (36), where it is not possible to predict what the interpretation is by means of the choice of arguments, are called ‘unpredictable’ cases of polysemy; and on the other hand, those where the
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choice of arguments leads to a specific predictable extension of meaning are called ‘predictable’ cases.16 The latter is further classified depending on the degree of influence of the semantics of the arguments involved. Where a meaning such as ‘to partake of food’ is mainly determined by the arguments and other elements in the sentence and in other meanings like ‘to affect, physically’ and ‘to reach’, where it is the verb that mainly governs the choice of arguments and meaning. The former are called ‘argument-driven extensions’ and the latter, ‘verb-driven extensions’. These two groups, therefore, reveal that the weight of the semantics of the different elements in the overall meaning of a sentence is not the same in all extended meanings, but hierarchically organised according to the degree of influence of the lexical items involved. I call ‘compositional polysemy’ to this graded involvement of elements in the creation of polysemes. Although three different types of semantic extensions have been proposed so far, it is important to notice that all these meanings must have something in common in order to be extended from the physical sense of touch, and also in order to explain why the same extensions of meaning happen in English, Basque and Spanish. Otherwise, it will be impossible to say why other sentences like (37) are ruled out. (37) Peter touched the joke
The reason why this example is not felicitous when no context is given lies in the fact that “the joke” is not a ‘touchable’ type of concept – i.e., a joke cannot be touched in any abstract possible way, as el punto más alto, ‘the highest point’, is in example (35) above. From a cognitive linguistics point of view, the fact that “the joke” is not licensed with the verb ‘to touch’, stems from the way we experience this sense in our lives, in the human embodiment of this sense (Johnson 1987). Therefore, all these meanings must fulfil the ‘verb property requirement’, which in the case of tactual verbs is the condition of being ‘touchable’. That is, the verb arguments must be able to touch, if they are subjects, or be able to be touched, if they are complements.
. Cross-linguistic polysemy: Meaning and lexicalisation across languages In the previous section, I have shown that extended meanings are obtained by the interaction of the semantic content of both the perception verb and its complements. The role of the semantics of both the perception verb and its complements is not the same in all extended meanings; in some cases, the verb is more important and in some other cases, the complements are. One common characteristic of all the examples analysed in Section 3 is that the explanations provided were applicable to the same cases in the three languages
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under investigation. In other words, the same elements were crucial in the lexicalisation of those meanings in English, Basque and Spanish, and as a result they were classified under the same degree of compositionality. However, this situation does not always happen. In most cases, as authors such as Talmy (1991, 2000) have shown, languages show a great deal of variation in mapping lexical resources onto semantic domains. The systematic relations between semantic elements – meaning – and surface elements – linguistic forms – do not usually show one-to-one correspondence across language types. In fact, this relationship may take different forms, with multiple semantic elements being expressed by one surface element, or a single semantic element being expressed by multiple surface elements. Let us illustrate this point with the example of unpredictable polysemy, as in John touched Mary. If we translate this sentence into Basque (38), and Spanish (39), using exactly the same elements (“John”, “Mary”, and “touch”), the results are quite different. (38) Jonek Miren ukitu zuen john.erg mary.abs touch aux.3s “John touched Mary” (39) Juan tocó a María john touched to mary “John touched Mary”
In both languages, the only possible interpretation of (38) and (39) is the prototypical meaning of physical touching. In these sentences, it is understood that ‘John physically touched Mary’. In no way can they have the metaphorical ambiguity that exists in the English version. This is not to say that it is impossible to express the metaphorical reading ‘to affect’ in these two languages with tactile verbs. This is perfectly possible as we saw in examples (8) and (9) in Section 2. In Basque as well as in Spanish the mapping between the physical domain of ‘touch’ and that of ‘to affect’ is also allowed; but in order to obtain this meaning it is necessary to add a verb complement that denotes feelings. The direct object – bihotz gogorra ‘hard heart’ in (8), and el corazón ‘the heart’ in (9) – fulfils this necessity. The heart in these examples is not understood as a physical object, but as the seat of feeling. In the cognitive approach literature, ‘heart’ is a metaphorical realisation of the image schema of a container, where heart is a container for feelings (Kövecses 1986; Lakoff & Johnson 1980). In fact, as Moliner (1983) points out, in Spanish the verb tocar needs expressions, such as el corazón, ‘the heart’, el amor propio, ‘one’s own pride’, la dignidad, ‘dignity’, in order to imply this interpretation.17 These examples show that, although the same semantic mappings between different domains take place cross-linguistically, the strategies that each language follow to express such meanings are different. What in one language can be ex-
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pressed by a single lexical item (i.e., a verb), in other languages may require several lexical items (i.e., a verb and arguments) to generate the same meaning. This statement has important implications for our theory of polysemy and its cross-linguistic character. First of all, it is important to make a distinction between conceptual mappings on the one hand, and overt realisations of those conceptual mappings on the other; between the links established between different domains of experience – those discussed in Section 2 – and the different strategies that languages follow to overtly express those links. In other words, one issue appeals to our conceptualisation of the world, which is shared by all humans with the same cultural background, the other, to the linguistic means that each language in particular has to lexicalise those conceptualisations. In previous analyses of polysemous lexical items (cf. Brugman 1981; Lakoff 1987), there was no distinction between these two concepts. If a lexical item was to be taken as polysemous in itself, that is to say if polysemous senses were localised in one lexical item without taking into account the semantic content of the other words that co-occur with this lexical item, then both conceptual structure and overt expression of such conceptual structure were the same. If the conceptual structure were cross-linguistic, and conceptual structure and the overt expression of such conceptual structure were the same, then, transitively, it could be argued that both were cross-linguistic. However, I have shown that this is not the case. Lexical items are not generally polysemous in themselves, unless they are cases of ‘unpredictable polysemy’. They need the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those polysemous senses, and as shown in this section, which lexical items are required to trigger and build the different extended polysemous readings are not the same in every language. It is for these reasons that I will consider that the verbs themselves are not polysemous, but that the conceptual domain of sense perception is polysemous. The different mappings presented in Section 2 are not to be taken as semantic extensions of the perception verbs themselves, but polysemous senses of the conceptual domain of sense perception. I will call the group of these extended meanings ‘conceptual polysemy’. In sum, I argue that when we analyse the meanings that take place in a semantic field, we need to distinguish and address two different sides. On the one hand, we need to establish its ‘conceptual polysemy’, i.e. the conceptual mappings that take place between different domains of experience. This conceptual polysemy is constrained by the bodily basis of the semantic field under analysis. Because this bodily basis is shared by and common to all humans with the same cultural background, conceptual polysemy is cross-linguistic. On the other hand, it is necessary to establish which elements are involved in the creation of such conceptual
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polysemy, and to what extent their semantic content participates in the creation of such extended meanings. Therefore, conceptual polysemy can be considered a cross-linguistic phenomenon, but the classification of extended meanings under the three different degrees of compositionality only a language particular one.
. Conclusions In this paper I have examined the polysemy that exists in tactile verbs, one per language, in three genetically unrelated languages, English, Basque and Spanish. The two major concerns raised include on the one hand, a description of the semantic extensions that take place in this domain of tactile perception; and on the other, the study of lexicalisation patterns and elements needed to convey these polysemous senses. As I have shown, tactile verbs do not only express physical contact. There are four semantic extensions shared by these three languages: ‘to partake of food/drink’, ‘to affect, physically’, ‘to affect, metaphorically’, ‘to reach’, and ‘to deal with’. The last three senses prove that the metaphorical scope of this domain is much more productive than that described in other studies (Sweetser 1990). With respect to the lexicalisation of these meanings, I have proposed the idea of ‘compositional polysemy’, i.e. different polysemes of a lexical item – the tactile verb in this case – are obtained through the interaction of the semantic content of both the lexical item itself and its different co-occurring elements. The weight of the semantics of these elements in the creation of these semantic extensions is not the same; it varies according to the degree of semantic influence of these elements on the overall meaning. That is to say, in some meanings, the role played by the arguments of the verb is crucial. In some other meanings it is the verb that governs the choice of arguments and meaning. These cases are predictable polysemous meanings: the former is an ‘argument-driven extension’, and the latter a ‘verb-driven extension’. Finally, there is a third class of meanings, where interpretation is not predictable by means of the choice of arguments. These are unpredictable cases of polysemy. Our model for the analysis of polysemy, therefore, can be situated between what is known as the maximization of polysemy, i.e. the word itself carries most of the polysemous workload and speakers just have to choose correctly in context, and the minimization of polysemy, i.e. most of the workload is on the speaker’s side who has to interpret the meaning from the context (see Behrens 1999; Cruse 1986, 2000; Lyons 1977, 1995, among others). On the one hand, our proposal recognises the importance of contextual elements in the creation of polysemous senses, but on the other, it establishes the necessity for (i) a graded typology of contextual involvement, and (ii) a constraint that restricts the participation of co-occurring elements to those that are compatible with
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the conceptual properties characterising the polysemous word analysed – tactile verbs in this paper. These last two elements differentiate our analysis from more traditional pragmatic approaches to polysemy, where many of these polysemous senses are the result of contextual effects (cf. Sperber & Wilson 1995; see Nerlich & Clarke 2001, for more information about polysemy in relation with pragmatics). Finally, it has been shown that the phenomenon of compositional polysemy is found cross-linguistically. What differs from language to language is the degree of compositionality of the same semantic extension which is language specific.
Notes * This research is supported by Grant BFI99.53.DK from the Basque Country Government’s Department of Education, Universities and Research. I would like to thank June Luchjenbroers and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments, and especially June for her never-ending patience. The author can be contacted at . . Sweetser argues that in all Indo-European languages, the verb to feel is the same as the verb indicating general perception. For instance, the verb sentir (< Latin sentire) in Spanish. However, this is overstated because it does not hold in languages such as Russian (Moiseeva 1998: 160). . “The scope of metaphor is simply the full range of cases, that is, all the possible target domains, to which a given specific source concept (such as war, building, fire) applies” (Kövecses 2000: 81). . Due to space constraints, in this paper I limit myself to enumerate and describe what those semantic fields are, I do not get into much detail about the cognitive mechanisms – metaphor and metonymy, for example- that make such mappings between conceptual domains possible. Those interested in this topic may consult Ibarretxe-Antuñano (1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2003). . In each of these languages there are more verbal realisations of the sense of touch than just the specific verb I have chosen to illustrate the main theoretical points put forward in this paper. The fact that I only analyse one per language is only due to length restrictions. The theoretical claims are therefore applicable to any tactile verb, or to any perceptual verb for that matter, as I have shown elsewhere (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999a). . Ukitu is the verb used in Standard Basque. In some of the examples discussed in this section, the verb ikutu is also used. This is a variant in the Guipuzcoan and Biscayan dialects. . The right to use the BNC is granted by Oxford University Press to researchers working on the FrameNet project, International Computer Science Institute and the Univ. California, Berkeley. . These examples occur without any bracketed indication of the source. . It has been suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers that these two physical semantic extensions in touch, ‘partake’ and ‘affect’, could be considered different interpretations of the literal physical touch calculated from the minimally necessary condition of touching for each of these activities (eating, taking, etc.), instead of conventional meanings. It is true that both activities, either when we eat/drink or cause a physical effect on something, require physical contact to be performed. It we are going to eat something, we have to necessarily touch the food, if we want to change the place where something is, we have to touch it. However, I think that these activities go beyond physical touch and cannot be considered as simple implicatures of
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touching. Touching is a necessary condition for these activities, but not a sufficient explanation. In both cases, the physical activity – partaking, affecting – stands for the action that caused this result, the touching, and therefore, they can be considered cases of the metonymy result for action. . This positive interpretation is explained in Lakoff and Johnson (1980). (10), (11), and (12) are examples of what they call ‘orientational’ metaphors: “metaphorical concept that organises a whole system of concepts with respect to one another” (1980: 15). Up is always related to good, high status and it is opposed to down, which implies bad, low status; as in the expression to touch bottom. . The fact that the endpoint in these examples is spatial, i.e. there is a physical destination to which these people arrived – the dock –, causes an ambiguous interpretation. On the one hand, there is a physical contact between the ship and the dock and therefore, this interpretation could be understood as metonymical. However, on the other hand, there is a metaphorical mapping in these sentences because the expression touch at refers to the activity of arriving or reaching a destination. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing this point to my attention. . This is possible thanks to the semantic contribution of the preposition at in (13) and that of the phrase mientras hacían cruceros ‘while they were cruising’ in (14). As I will explain in more detail in Section 3, these are cases of compositional polysemy. . For a detailed discussion on the conceptual basis of the semantic extensions of tactile verbs, see Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2000). In this paper, the sense of touch is characterised in terms of prototypical properties. These are drawn from psychological and physiological descriptions of this sense. Each semantic extension selects a number of these properties. These selected properties are to be taken as the bodily basis for the semantic extensions. For instance, the meaning ‘to reach’, selects three properties: (i) : the perceiver must have physical contact with the object perceived, (ii) : the object perceived must be in the vicinity of the perceiver, and (iii) : the perceiver is aware of the boundaries imposed by the object perceived. . More discussion on other extensions of over can be found in Ibarretxe-Antuñano (1999a: 183). . The Basque equivalent to the English adverb hardly is the adverb ia ‘almost’ together with the negation ez. . In order to save some unnecessary repetition of the same explanations in each of these examples, I only include one example per language. The same explanations are applicable to the equivalent sentences in the other two languages reproduced in Section 2. . The labels ‘predictable’ and ‘unpredictable’ are to not be taken just as descriptive terms for the individual examples analysed in this section. In our opinion, in every polysemous word, we can find semantic extensions that can be easily ‘predicted’ or ‘guessed’ by the semantics of the co-occurring elements, and semantic extensions that cannot be ‘predicted’ or ‘guessed’. . As I have shown elsewhere (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999c), there is another possibility to lexicalise this meaning in Basque: to change the verb ukitu for the etymologically related hunkitu. The latter is generally used in the metaphorical sense, and does not refer to the physical touching unless an adjunct denoting a physical instrument such as eskuz ‘with the hand’ is inserted.
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References Aulestia, Gorka (1989). Basque-English Dictionary. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. (au) Behrens, Leila (1999). Aspects of polysemy. In David A. Cruse, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job, & Peter Rolf Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexicologie – Lexicology, Vol. 1 (pp. 135–167). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Brugman, Claudia (1981). The Story of Over. MA Thesis. University of California at Berkeley. Buck, Carl D. (1949). A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Classen, Constance (1993). Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. London: Routledge. Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus (1993). Italy: Harper Collins Publishers. (col) Collins Spanish-English-Spanish Dictionary (1996). Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers. (cse) Cruse, David A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cruse, David A. (2000). Meaning in Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española (1984). Madrid: RAE. (rae) Evans, Nick & David Wilkins (2000). In the mind’s ear: The semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language, 76(3), 546–592. Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. (1999). Taking metaphor out of our heads and putting it into the cultural world. In Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. & Gerard J. Steen (Eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 145–166). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Herskovits, Anna (1986). Language and Spatial Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Prepositions in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, David (Ed.). (1991). Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (1999a). Polysemy and Metaphor in Perception Verbs: A Crosslinguistic Study. PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (1999b). Metaphorical mappings in the sense of smell. In Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. & Gerard J. Steen (Eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 29–45). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (1999c). Predictable vs. unpredictable polysemy. In S. J. Hwang & Arle Lommel (Eds.), LACUS Forum, 25, 201–211. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2000). An inside look at the semantic extensions in tactile verbs. In Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza (Coord.), Panorama actual de la lingüística aplicada. Conocimiento, procesamiento y uso del lenguaje (pp. 1053–1060). Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2002). Mind-as-body as a cross-linguistic conceptual metaphor. Miscelánea. A Journal of English and American Studies, 25, 93–119. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2003). El cómo y el porqué de la polisemia de los verbos de percepción. In Clara Molina, María Luisa Blanco, Juana Marín, Ana Laura Rodríguez, & Manuela Romano (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics in Spain at the turn of the century / La Lingüística Cognitiva en España en el cambio de siglo (pp. 213–228). Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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Kövecses, Zoltán (1986). Metaphors of Anger, Pride, and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Study of Concepts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kövecses, Zoltán (1995). American Friendship and the Scope of Metaphor. Cognitive Linguistics, 6(4), 315–346. Kövecses, Zoltán (2000). The Scope of Metaphor. In Antonio Barcelona (Ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective (pp. 79–92). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kurath, Hans (1921). The Semantic Sources of the Words for the Emotions in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the Germanic Languages. Menasha, WI: George Banta. Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. II: Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyons, John (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyons, John (1995). Linguistic Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moiseeva, Nadezda (1998). Verbs of perception in Russian. In M. Giger, T. Menzel, & B. Wiemer (Eds.), Lexicologie und Sprachveränderung in der Slavia. Studia Slavica Oldenburgensia 2 (pp. 153–164). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg. Moliner, María (1983). Diccionario del Uso del Español. Madrid: Gredos. Nerlich, Brigitte & David D. Clarke (2001). Ambiguities we live by: Towards a pragmatics of polysemy. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 1–20. Oxford Spanish Dictionary (1994). Oxford, New York, Madrid: OUP. (osd) Ong, Walter J. (1967). The shifting sensorium. In D. Howes (Ed.), Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (pp. 25–30). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sarasola, Ibon (1984–1995). Hauta-lanerako Euskal Hiztegia. Zarauz: Itxaropena. (is) Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson (1995). Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweetser, Eve E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard (1991). Path to realisation: A typology of event conflation. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 480–519). Talmy, Leonard (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The American Heritage Dictionary (1992). Houghton Mifflin Company. 3rd edition. (am) Vandeloise, Claude (1991). Spatial Prepositions: A Case Study from French. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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chapter
How experience structures the conceptualization of causality* Maarten Lemmens Université Lille 3, France
The present article sketches some variations in the conceptualization of causative events, in particular as coded by a subgroup of lexical causatives – i.e., verbs of killing. However, my analysis aims to go one step further than a mere description of these variations by showing their experiential alignment, adopting a moderate experiential point of view. By examining a considerably large corpus of lexical causatives, and the variations between the event construals that they entail, the present paper will outline some of the factors that play a role in structuring our experience, and thus our coding of causation. The analysis shows how the choice between two different models at work in the grammar of causative events, viz. the transitive or the ergative model, aligns in subtle ways with the specifics of the event experienced. Keywords: lexical causatives, causative alternation, transitivity, ergativity
.
Introduction
One of the basic tenets of Cognitive Grammar is that meaning is equated with conceptualization. That is, semantic structure is defined as conceptualization “tailored to the specifications of linguistic convention” (Langacker 1987: 99).1 The meaning of a linguistic expression is a cognitive structure characterized relative to cognitive domains “where a domain can be any sort of conceptualization: a perceptual experience, a concept, a conceptual complex, an elaborate knowledge system, etc.” (Langacker 1991a: 3). As Lakoff (1987) has shown, most of these are idealized cognitive models (icms). Such models are similar to Fillmore’s frames, defined as “unified frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizations of experience” (Fillmore 1985: 223). Against the background of such larger conceptual structures, linguistic structures impose their own specifications, which brings us to another pivotal claim of Cognitive Grammar, viz. that “linguistic expressions and grammatical construc-
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tions embody conventional imagery” (Langacker 1988: 7). Meaning thus relies on our ability to conceptualize the same object or situation in different ways. As Casad summarized it: “the speaker’s ability to conceptualize situations in a variety of ways is, in fact, the foundation of cognitive semantics” (1995: 23). The present article sketches some of such variations in the conceptualization of causative events, in particular as coded by a subgroup of lexical causatives – i.e., verbs of killing. However, my analysis aims to go one step further than a mere description of these variations by showing their experiential alignment, adopting a moderate experiential point of view, as proposed by Lakoff (1987) and others. Lakoff defines the experientialist strategy as an attempt “to characterize meaning in terms of the nature and experience of the organisms doing the thinking” (1987: 266). In line with what was said before, experience is not to be understood in an individual sense, but in a broad sense: “the totality of human experience and everything that plays a role in it” (1987: 266). By examining a considerably large corpus of lexical causatives, and the variations between the event construals that they entail, the present paper will outline some of the factors that play a role in structuring our experience, and thus our coding of causation.2 The choice of a causative model, viz. transitive or ergative, aligns in subtle ways with the specifics of the event experienced. For example, the ergative predilection of the suffocate verbs (e.g., ‘asphyxiate’, ‘suffocate’, or ‘choke’), as emerging from both historical and contemporary data, can be explained as having an experiential basis. My data further suggest that the opposition between external and internal causation aligns firstly with the paradigmatic opposition between the transitive and the ergative; and secondly, within the ergative model, with the opposition between ‘effective’ and ‘non-effective’ constructions (or ‘causative’ vs. ‘non-causative’ in more traditional terminology). Experience from a more culturally or ideologically coloured point of view will be at the heart of the changes that have occurred in the semantic and constructional evolution of ‘abort’. By looking at the data in this way, we can arrive at a better characterization of the conceptual structures of these verbs as well as the constructions in which they occur, revealing coding patterns and/or tendencies that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
. Two models of causation In general, my analysis of lexical causatives follows Davidse’s (1991, 1992) account which posits that the English grammar of actions and events is governed by two distinct causative models, viz. the transitive and ergative paradigms. These two models represent different ways of conceptualizing causative processes, implying different conceptual centres and different participant relations. In Halliday’s terms, they are said to project different ‘inherent voice’ relations. The following summary
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The conceptualization of causality
hardly does justice to Davidse’s innovative work and merely mentions the most basic distinctions relevant to my present purpose.3 The transitive paradigm, as realized in the example, John killed Mary, centres around an Agent, who directs a prototypically volitional action onto an inert Affected. In more specific terms, in the transitive system the Actor-Process combination is the nuclear building block: it can be isolated in an objectless transitive (e.g., Soldiers trained to kill), where the Actor is the transitive instantiation of a more schematic Agent. This system is a linear one that prototypically extends to the right to incorporate a fully passive Affected, called the ‘Goal’. The ergative paradigm, in contrast, centers around the Affected, which in addition to being affected is also active. Its conceptual independence is reflected in the fact that this participant can be isolated in a one-participant construction with an ‘agentive’ participant – e.g., Mary suffocated. In an ergative construal (with either one or two participants), the process is conceptually dependent on the ‘Medium’, which is the entity that is affected yet also co-participates in the event (much like a medium in the ESP sense). The process-medium cluster is semiautonomous vis-à-vis the ergative Agent, called the ‘Instigator’. In other words, unlike the linear transitive, the ergative system is a nuclear one with two processual layers: the instigated process and the instigation of the process, which need not be co-extensive in time or space (Davidse 1991: 67ff.). It is left oriented, in that the basic conceptualization may be opened up to include the instigator. Unlike many Asian, Australian or Amerindian languages, English does not indicate transitivity and/or ergativity by overt case marking. They manifest themselves in more covert ways as reflected in, among other things, different alternation patterns. In his cognitive reinterpretation of nominative/accusative and ergative/absolutive case marking, Langacker also observes that the transitive and ergative patterns are not only coded by morphological markings, but find “numerous other linguistic manifestations” (1991b: 381). On the basis of the most essential alternation patterns, the transitive and ergative paradigms can be distinguished as in Table 1. The effective constructions are more specific instantiations of the agentprocess-affected schema. While formally identical, the underlying semantics is different for the transitive and the ergative instantiations: for the latter the Affected still co-participates, as reflected in the possibility of forming an ergative non-effective.4 The objectless transitive maximizes the transitive focus on the actor-process unit. However, it is to be regarded as an effective construction, since the Goal is still very much implied (cf. Rice 1988; see also Lemmens 1998b: 140–146 for a more elaborate description).5 Such an objectless agentprocess construction is not possible with ergative verbs as they centre on the Affected. For example, in the sentence, John suffocated, John cannot be interpreted as the Agent who causes someone else’s suffocation; only as the entity who has
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Table 1. Paradigmatic instantiations Construction
Transitive
Paradigmatic instantiations Ergative
EFFECTIVE Ag-Proc-Af
John killed Mary Actor-Process-Goal
OBJECTLESS
John killed Actor-Process-(Goal)
NON-EFFECTIVE AcMe-Proc
John suffocated Mary Instigator-Process-Medium
Mary suffocated Medium-Process Mary died Actor-Process
PSEUDO-EFFECTIVE (φ)Ag-Proc-(φ)Af
Mary died a slow death Actor-Process-Range
The house blew a fuse Setting-Process-Medium
suffocated (i.e., affected by the verb). The semantic value of the ergative, noneffective construction is that it neutralizes whether the process was self-instigated or instigated by an external Instigator. As Smith (1978) has argued, a construction is positively marked for the features of external control, as well as independent activity (cf. also Haspelmath 1993: 90). The ergative effective resolves the voice vagueness. The traditional intransitive, here called ‘transitive non-effective’ (e.g., Mary died; John stumbled), is regarded as a subtype of the transitive paradigm, as it too centres around a volitional or non-volitional Agent. The pseudo-effectives, not really relevant to the present discussion, have one participant that is not a true participant (marked by the symbol φ); for the transitives, it is a pseudo-Goal (called a ‘Range’); and for the ergatives, a setting functions as a pseudo-Instigator (see Davidse 1991: 115–140). Note that the area of variability is different for both, and pertains to a non-nuclear participant.
. Transitivity and ergativity in the field of killing In her classification of verbs, Levin (1993) distinguishes two categories of verbs of killing, the murder verbs which are manner-neutral and the poison verbs which “lexicalize a means” – i.e., are “verbs which relate to actions which can be ways of killing” (1993: 232). Next to these, she distinguishes a group of suffocate verbs, as a subgroup of processes involving the body and defines them as “[relating] to the disruption of breathing” (1993: 224). While Levin’s classification is correct for the murder verbs, her semantic grid is not refined enough when it comes to her class of poison verbs, which is a relatively heterogeneous group both lexically and grammatically, something of which she herself is well-aware. To remedy some of these shortcomings, I propose an alternative classification of the field which does
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The conceptualization of causality transitive murder lynch butcher kill ergative slaughter execute slay massacre murder assassinate suffocate decapitate throttle suffocate decollate stifle behead strangle asphyxiate choke smother instrument drown knife starve garrot starve action famish stab shoot hang
Figure 1. General classification of verbs of killing
more justice to the verbs’ lexical as well as constructional prototypes. Diagrammatically, my classification can be represented as in Figure 1 (the labels of the categories have been underlined; members are in italics). While this figure is a gross oversimplification, it nonetheless sheds some light on the internal structure of the field and the paradigmatic home-ground of some of the items. Most obvious is the transitive predilection of the whole field. The reason is straightforward: the concept of killing someone is quite compatible with the meaning of the transitive paradigm, in which an inert Goal is affected by the action of a volitional Actor. As indicated by the thickness of the circle, the murder verbs are prototypical within the field, and their markedly transitive character radiates to the rest of the field. The other group relevant to the present article is that of the suffocate verbs. Levin’s original group of suffocate verbs has been extended to include the prototypically transitive verbs ‘smother’, ‘strangle’ and ‘throttle’. Despite these three, the suffocate verbs are prototypically ergative (as are the starve verbs), as will be elaborated below. Two important nuances need to be added to the diagram. First, there are differences in the prototypicality of the different subgroups, which also show prototype effects. Moreover, the boundaries of the subgroups cannot always be sharply delineated. In other words, the lexical field of killing emerges as a prototypebased category, whose external boundaries are not sharply delineated, and whose internal structure shows considerable flexibility and differences in salience (see Lemmens 1998b for more discussion). Finally, the diagram presents a constructional (i.e., paradigmatic) classification of verbs as fixed and stable; whereas, in fact, these are features of the specific clause construal in which the lexical and
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constructional meanings combine to form a complex semantically well-motivated unit (cf. Note 4; see also Lemmens 1998b for detailed descriptions of semantically motivated paradigmatic shifts).
. Examples of experiential grounding In view of the different conceptual nuclei of the transitive and the ergative models, Actor vs. Medium, it is sensible to assume that events that are perceived as centring around either of these participants will activate a different coding model. While watertight predictions are impossible to make, the data examined confirm this view. As said, the field of killing generally tilts to the transitive side, which aligns with the typical experience of a kill-event as involving a (typically) volitional Agent who does something to an inert (and involuntary) Goal. In some events, the Affected is experientially more salient, leading to an ergative coding. The following subsection describes some specifics investigations into this experiential grounding.
Focus on volitionality The more salient the volitionality of an Actor, the more likely that a typical transitive coding will be used. In the field of ‘killing’, this usually means a conceptualization in terms of a murder verb. Consider the case of a premeditated murder. In such events, the intentionality of the Actors is quite salient, as they definitely plan to kill someone. Given the availability of a particular lexical term to code such an event, ‘murder’, this will most likely be the coding used. As Geeraerts, Bakema and Grondelaers (1994) have shown, the more unique a referent, the more likely it is that a unique term will be used. Conversely, the more a referent is described in terms of a certain concept, the more that concept can be said to be entrenched. Clearly, a given event may be coded in alternate ways, and thus, the choice of ‘murder’ cannot be rigidly predicted. It can be noted in passing that the said importance of the victim in an assassination event does not constitute evidence that the construction should be ergative. As for the ergative system, it is not the Affected’s importance tout court, but their degree of (co-)participation in the event – i.e., its importance vis-à-vis the process itself – that opens up ergative constructions (e.g., the ergative non-effective). This, it can be added, is definitely not possible with ‘assassinate’.
Accidental causation The murder verbs saliently incorporate the notion of volitionality into their semantic structure, and resist codings with unvolitional or inanimate Actors. Ironi-
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The conceptualization of causality (a)
(b)
(c)
setting
(d)
setting
in
tr
lm
in
tr
die in a crash
lm
tr
be killed in a crash
tr
be killed by a crash
lm
the crash killed 112 people
Figure 2. Settings and Agents
cally, the verb in the literature most often cited as typically transitive, is the general verb ‘kill’, which in fact, conforms least to the intentional Actor prototype of transitives. Its generality as well as non-prototypicality are explained by the interaction of a number of factors: 1. its high lexical flexibility (the data show a 22% metaphor ratio vs. less than 9% for the other murder verbs) 2. a less stringent implication of goal-achievement (as for instance reflected in the common hyperbolical use, mostly in the progressives – e.g., my feet are killing me.) 3. the possibility of a non-volitional Actor – e.g., he killed the woman without will or conscious mind. 4. the possibility of an inanimate Actor – e.g., they were killed by stray bullets or shrapnel. It is precisely the latter environment that may at first be difficult to explain, yet allows interesting comparisons with die verbs (e.g., die, perish, etc.). While the semantic difference between ‘kill’ and ‘die’ may typically be unproblematic, there seems to be a strong degree of overlap when it comes to coding casualties in accidents, diseases, and the like. A coding in terms of ‘kill’ for casualties in accidents is quite frequent and occurs in more than 71% for such events described in the wsj corpus, as opposed to 23% in terms of ‘die’ (cf. Table 2 below). This may be surprising, given the absence of a volitional Actor, which would typically trigger a transitive coding. Taking a ‘plane crash’ as an example, the most common codings can be represented as in Figure 2 (see Langacker 1991b, for the diagrammatic conventions). In all four constructions, the event (‘the crash’) is nominalized and consequently represented as a thing (indicated by a circle), lethally affecting the victim (the change of state is represented by the squiggly line). The difference between (c) and (d) represents the semantic purport of the passive construction, viz. a trajector/landmark reversal (Emanatian 1993; cf. also Langacker 1987: 120ff.).
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Of the codings with ‘kill’, some 45% code the accident as the Actor, diagram (c) or (d), which makes it the largest subgroup of inanimate Actors with ‘kill’ (60%). This presents clear counterevidence to Dirven’s (1993: 95) claim that “killed by [. . .] is incompatible with circumstantial causes such as accidents”, from which he deduces that the circumstances can be expressed only by means of ‘in. . .’, as in, be killed in an accident. What is true, of course, is that for the latter construction, the agent is highly schematic (as indicated by the cross-hatching), and the accident cannot be added overly as the agent – e.g., *in that crash 111 people were killed by it. The reason is that within one series of temporally contiguous segments of an action chain, which Ryder (1991) conveniently terms ‘episodes’, one and the same participant cannot simultaneously function as Setting and as Agent.6 The absence of an overt Agent in a ‘circumstantial passive’ construction is experientially grounded: in events like the ones reported, there is usually no Agent more salient than the event itself. If anything is to function as Agent it is either the event itself or a participant situated ‘within’ that event, and one that furthermore acquires sufficient prominence to be construed as Agent. While the latter is in principle possible (e.g., In the explosion, seven people were killed by flying shards, one person died from a heart attack), it is marked, as indicated by its total absence in all corpora consulted (containing over 500 passives with the verb ‘kill’). Sansò (2000) correctly observes that the passive leaves the trajectory (here the victim) on stage while removing the causer: “the speaker can choose to focus on the patient, thus displaying empathy with him, or can choose to embrace the maximal scope of what is on-stage, thus conceptualizing the event as a whole” (2000: 3). At first sight, the use of ‘kill’ in the above context may not seem to align with our immediate experience, whence probably Dirven’s observation. The relationship between ‘kill’ and ‘die’ in the above contexts can indeed be puzzling (cf. DeLancey 1984), and probes into the difference between Agents and Causers. Within the scope of this paper, I cannot elaborate on this issue (see Lemmens 1998b: 123–126), but merely indicate that a coding with ‘kill’ still furnishes a more active construal; whereas that with ‘die’ brings in a cause that straddles the border between a nuclear participant and a circumstantial setting (see also Davidse 1991; Talmy 1985). Given the overlap between the two verbs in the coding of accidents and diseases, an absolute generalization is impossible to make. Nevertheless, the corpus reveals a clear pattern, tabulated in Table 2. As can be deduced from the table, the ratio of ‘kill’ and ‘die’ is reversed for the two different events. It can be noted in passing that neither the type of accident or disease, nor the number of people killed, can account for the different conceptualizations; on the whole, the contexts are comparable if not identical. Table 2 nevertheless indicates the prototypical conceptualizations: ‘kill’ will more readily be used for events that are prototypically caused by external and perceptually distinguishable causes; whereas ‘die’ will be more typical in cases of less percepti-
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Table 2. Distribution of kill and die for accidents and diseases Lexical item
Type of event accident disease
Total
die
Freq Col Pct Row Pct
36 23.2% 26.1%
102 85.7% 73.9%
138 50.4%
kill
Freq Col Pct Row Pct
111 71.6% 86.7%
17 14.3% 13.3%
128 46.7%
other
Freq Col Pct Row Pct
8 5.1% 100%
Total
Freq Row Fct
I55 56.6%
8 0.% 119 43.4%
274 100.0
ble causation, often of the kind that comes ‘from within’. I hold the view that in the prototypical case a transitive construal entails a maximally ‘external’ point of view: the Actor is an entity external to the Goal and directly impinging on it, from the outside.
The ergative predilection of the suffocate verbs The internal-external alignment emerges even more strongly from the group of suffocate verbs where it motivates not only the opposition between the (prototypically) transitive members of the group (‘strangle’, ‘throttle’, and ‘smother’) and the ergative ones, but also within the latter group, the typical occurrence of an effective construction when combined with an external cause. The suffocate verbs can be distinguished by which part of the respiratory system is affected (lungs, throat, mouth, nose), and how it is typically affected (constriction, immersion, coverage, etc.). This distinction can be represented as in Figure 3. Although this distinction does not represent a rigid dichotomy, it gives a first assessment of the experiential basis of the ergative preference of the group as a whole, as well as the transitive character of some of its members and the mixed external zone transitive struggle throttle
internal zone transitive-(ergative) smother
stifle
Figure 3. Internal/external and ergative/transitive correlation
ergative drown choke
suffocate asphyxiate
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character of some others. The latter group are those that oscillate (both synchronically and diachronically between the two paradigms. Within the confines of this article, these cannot be elaborated in full detail; some discussion of such particular uses are found in Lemmens (2005a, subm.). That is, the ergative conception seems to align strongly with how a suffocation process is experienced, for a number of reasons. First, the causes of suffocation events, although multifarious, are typically imperceptible, as in the case of gases or (lung) diseases. This imperceptibility encourages a conception of suffocation as independent of the cause or instigation, which is an essential feature of an ergative construal. The lower perceptibility of a cause often leads to different (metaphorical) conceptualizations of it (e.g., as covering, enveloping, etc.), which gives rise to different lexical choices (‘smother’, ‘drown’, etc.). Clearly a transitive conception (e.g., with the cause as Actor) is not fully excluded, but the corpus shows that this is uncommon with these types of clauses. Secondly, the conceptual independence of the caused process is reinforced by the (prototypical) temporal distance between the instigation and the consequences, leading to an enhanced focus on the process itself. Moreover, as is also typical of an ergative conception of events, there is a low salience of goalachievement, which contrasts sharply with the foregrounding of this property in the case of prototypically transitive verbs, such as the murder verbs, but also ‘strangle’ and ‘throttle’. The latter two verbs typically code a process that ends in the death of the victim; whereas for the ergative suffocate verbs this feature is much less salient (though not excluded). Consider, for instance, the common usage of ‘choke’, in reference to (mostly non-lethal) swallowing the wrong way. The suffocate verbs also often occur in hyperbolical uses, in which speakers (deliberately) exclude the end point of the process from the conceptualization, focusing instead on the suffering of the Medium. (Recall that for the murder verbs only ‘kill’ occurs in such hyperbolical constructions.) Such usage is also common with ‘starve’, when it refers to the state of being very hungry and excludes the lethal outcome; for some speakers this has been attested as the default case. In other words, an ergative conception can come to focus strongly on the Medium’s activity, thereby not only excluding the instigation but also the end-point of the process. It can be noted that the hyperbolical uses only occur in the ing form, in line with the semantics of this form, viz. the exclusion of the endpoints of the process coded by the verb. Thirdly, the distinction between the external and internal parts of the affected respiratory system, is an additional experiential factor that motivates the transitive/ ergative distinction. It is quite logical that the external perspective lines up with the focus on the Agent, since, most naturally, the affected parts are those that can be easily accessed by an external Agent. Moreover, the more external parts of the respiratory system are also those not really active in the respiration process. As is typical of transitives, ‘smother’, ‘strangle’, and ‘throttle’ altogether omit the
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notion of the victim’s participation. These verbs conceptualize the interruption of normal respiration as ‘externally’ inflicted on a fully inert patient. In other words, the more perceptible (and consequently also more external) the cause, the more likely it is that a transitive conception is used to encode the event. Clearly, it is not excluded that typically ergative verbs, like ‘suffocate’ or ‘choke’, are selected to encode events where the cause is clearly and exclusively external. Strikingly, however, is that in those cases the coding is typically effective (‘causative’); an intuition that is confirmed by both diachronic and synchronic data – see examples below. (1) The broider’d band That underbraced his helmet at the chin. . . Choaked him. (oed, 1790) (2) The man who choked the Emir (3) . . . suddenly he’d . . . grab him by the throat and choke him.
(oed, 1866) (wsj)
Alternatively, both diachronic and synchronic data indicate that a non-effective construction occurs with internal causes. For example, one of the typical uses of ‘choke’ is in the context of swallowing the wrong way; an event in which the cause is maximally internal (an unbreathable substance entering the trachea), and the bodily (re)action of the victim is quite salient. As can be expected, a non-effective construction is used, and is, in fact, the only possibility: (4) a. Riddle laughs so hard he starts to choke on his salad. b. *the salad choked Riddle. (5) a. Sorrille almost choked on his tongue. b. *Sorrille was almost choked by his tongue.
The b-sentences can only be acceptable when the salad and the tongue are, in one way or another, seen as external causes. It could be argued that in reference to swallowing the wrong way, ‘choke’ no longer codes an instigatable process, but realizes an intransitive construal of the event, with the cause, the unbreathable substance, in a periphrastic coding in a ‘on-’ complement.7 Once again, one should not misinterpret these observations as indicating that the ontological situation rigidly predicts the construal. Nevertheless, the data unequivocally reveal a subtle alignment between the specifics of the event and the occurrence of an effective or a non-effective construal, or an ergative and transitive coding. The ergative predilection of the suffocate verbs (as opposed to the Agentoriented murder verbs) also emerges from a diachronic analysis of verbs of killing. Halliday (1985: 146) observes that “the coming of [the ergative] pattern to predominance in the system of modern English is one of a number of related developments that have been taking place in the language over the past five hundred years or more”. My data show that such an ergativization may show up unexpectedly
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(e.g., with prototypically intransitive ‘die’), but also that particularly the suffocate verbs seem to have been subject to ergativization (see Lemmens 1998a). From the late 16th century up to the early 20th century, all suffocate verbs started to occur in ergative constructions. On top of that, there was considerable lexical overlapping, with some verbs encroaching on the semantic space of others. For example, the verb ‘strangle’, in present-day English, is fairly restricted in semantic coverage, and came to be used to report on deaths caused by the sword, disease, poisoning, drowning or suffocation by gases, etc. In these cases ‘strangle’ often occurred in ergative non-effective constructions – consider examples (6)–(9) below. (6) Hanybal . . . stranglyd with poisoun.
(oed, 1443)
(7) The swearde shal strangle them
(oed, 1535)
(8) She fell into the pond yesterday . . . She nearly strangled . . .
(nov)
This lexical and constructional flexibility is absent for the murder verbs, for which no ergativized use has been attested in any of the copora. They are too strongly tied to their Agent-centredness to allow a conceptual shift of focus to the second participant involved in the process. The ergativization process that characterized Early Modern English has not yet been analysed to the fullest, and it is unclear what motivates it for the whole of the English lexicon. I like to believe that it can be explained by changes in how humans came to see (i.e., experience) the world, but this is an hypothesis that needs to be verified in a much larger context than I have done so far. In any case, the ergativization of the suffocate verbs can be explained against the background of the typical conceptualisation of a suffocation event.
Ideologically determined transitivization That the experience of events is highly influenced by cultural and ideological assumptions is nicely illustrated by the lexical and constructional evolution of the verb ‘abort’. This has been described in full detail elsewhere (see Lemmens 1997, 1998a), but it can be reiterated here that changes in the way we interact with the world have had a definite impact on the conceptualization of an abort-event. Previously, the conceptualization underlying the item pertained to a spontaneous termination of a pregnancy, and logically, it activated the ergative model. Indeed, the second participant, the fetus, was experienced as having the potential of selfinstigating and sustaining the process, which escaped the control of the woman. However, medical and technological advances have given us greater control over such processes: parents and doctors are now more in control, as volitional beings who can target the abortion process onto a fetus or, in more recent usages, onto
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the woman. Logically, then, the causative model, activated by present-day ‘abort’, is the transitive one in which the fetus is reduced to an inert Goal, or even omitted from the episode altogether in an objectless transitive – e.g., the mother can abort, if she so chooses; or in a relatively recent type of construction with the woman as Affected – e.g., the doctor aborted the woman, or fewer women are aborted. Here are two recent examples (returned by a Google search) (9) Many Tibetan women are aborted and sterilised after the first birth (www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/ SAsia/repro3/tibet.html) (10) in Communist China where women are aborted by government order when pregnant for the second time (www.creationism.org/csshs/v14n1p15.htm)
Apparently, ‘abort’ is also evolving in its lexical structure. While in the wsj corpus dating from 1989, the literal (prototypical) use can still be argued to be that of prematurely terminating a pregnancy (75% of the cases), recent data (and recent comments by native speakers) suggest that more and more, the prototype is shifting to the more schematic meaning of, “to terminate a process”, of which the halting of a pregnancy is a specific instantiation. It can, however, not be denied that this instantiation differs from the others in its selection of a causative model, as it only activates the transitive, whereas the others can invoke the ergative model – e.g., the takeoff aborted, vs. the pilot aborted the takeoff. This type of usage has become quite common in the domain of computer terminology – e.g., the program will abort.
. Conclusions and prospects The above analyses have illustrated that the characteristics of a specific event subtly influence the way in which this event is conceptualized, in ways that may not be immediately obvious from introspection. While variations in conceptualization cannot be excluded, some clear tendencies have been highlighted, from which certain predictive power can be distilled. In a nutshell, the more volitional a participant seems to be whilst engaged in some causative process, the more likely it is that s/he will surface as a volitional Actor in a transitive construction; the more autonomous the process, vis-à-vis its cause, the more likely an ergative conception will be triggered. Moreover, within the field of ‘killing’, another parameter has been shown to be relevant – i.e., the internal or external nature of the cause. While these conclusions are quite compatible with what is commonly assumed in Cognitive Linguistics (e.g., Lakoff 1987: 54– 55), I do not characterize it in terms of directness or indirectness of causation, but in terms of participation in the process, which for the transitive and ergative construal is quite different.
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The present study presents only the onset of a more fully-fledged onomasiological analysis – i.e., one that starts from the referent and examines how it is coded. Further research is warranted, preferably of the type that does not start from textual material. Clearly, corpus analysis, as that underlying the present research, is most relevant for discovering certain tendencies that would otherwise go unnoticed. For example, in addition to the observations above, my analysis of unprototypical (i.e., inanimate) Actors with ‘kill’ has revealed that there is a certain alignment with the type of Affected: Goals that are lower on the Silverstein hierarchy (e.g., low-level organisms) tend to take a low-level Actor as well (e.g., the antibody kills infected cells). This correlation is worth exploring further with other types of events, and may correct some of the widely held views on the prototypicality of certain types of Agents. A possible drawback inherent to corpus analysis is that it is still fairly much a posteriori: it starts from a conceptualization and tries to discover the experiential motivation behind it. To counterbalance that bias, one could set up experiments to elicit narrations from speakers when watching a filmed event, for example (cf. also Slobin 1996, 2000; Lemmens 2005b on this type of research). Such an investigation can shed further light on different mental imagery employed in encoding an event and what triggers it.
Notes * All correspondences concerning this article should be sent to Maarten Lemmens, at Université Lille3, U.F.R. Angellier (English), Lille, France. Email:
[email protected] . This paper regroups and reconsiders some of the more elaborate descriptions in Lemmens (1997, 1998b). I thank the anonymous reviewer for the valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Responsibility for the final product is of course mine. . The corpora used are the ACL-Wall Street Journal Corpus (WSJ: 5,353,500 words); the Leuven Drama Corpus (1,029,660 words); a collection of contemporary American short stories (1,066,875 words); a collection of 19th centuy novels (746,525 words); and citations from the OED on CD-ROM (11,713 citations). . The reader is referred to Davidse (1991, 1992) for more elaborate descriptions. For my own modifications to her theory and some changes in terminology, see Lemmens (1998b). . Not all constructions with prototypically ergative verbs allow the non-effective construction – e.g., John opened a tin of baked beans (Davidse 1991: 63) or The horn drowned out the opening bell (see Lemmens 1998b: 178–187). These constructions no longer activate the ergative model. For further discussion, see the cited works. . Among other things, the two works cited will provide ample illustration that virtually all transitive verbs allow the objectless transitive in the proper context. . See also Langacker’s notion of “scope of predication”, Nishimura’s (1994) “coherent actions chain”, or DeLancey’s (1984) “event schema”. . On the use of on (and with in other contexts), see Lemmens (1998b: 168–173).
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References Casad, Eugene (1995). Seeing It in More than One Way. In John Taylor & Robert E. MacLaury (Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (pp. 23–49). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Davidse, Kristin (1991). Categories of Experiential Grammar. Unpublished PhD Thesis, K. U. Leuven. Davidse, Kristin (1992). Transitivity/Ergativity: The Janus-Headed Grammar of Actions and Events. In M. Davies & L. Ravelli (Eds.), Advances in Systemic Linguistics (pp. 105–135). London: Pinter. DeLancey, Scott (1984). Notes on Agentivity and Causation. Studies in Language, 8, 181–213. Dirven, René (1993). Dividing up Physical and Mental Space into Conceptual Categories by means of English Prepositions. In Cornelia Zelinsky-Zwibbelt (Ed.), The Semantics of Prepositions. From Mental Processing to Natural Language Processing (pp. 73–97). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Emanatian, Michele (1993). Figure-Ground Reversal in Grammar. Paper presented at the Third International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference, Leuven, 18–23 July. Fillmore, Charles J. (1985). Frames and The Semantics of Understanding. Quaderni di Semantica, 6, 222–254. Geeraerts, Dirk, Peter Bakema, & Stefan Grondelaers (1994). The Structure of Lexical Variation: Meaning, Naming, and Context. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Haspelmath, Martin (1993). More on the Typology of Inchoative/Causative Verb Alternations. In Bernard Comrie & Maria Polinsky (Eds.), Causatives and Transitivity (pp. 87–120). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1988). An Overview of Cognitive Grammar. In Brygida RudzkaOstyn (Ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 3–48). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. (1991a). Concept, Image, and Symbol. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. (1991b). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Lemmens, Maarten (1997). The Influence of World Conception on Transitivity and Ergativity: a Case Study. In Eve Sweetser, Kee Dong Lee, & Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.), Lexical and Syntactic Constructions and the Construction of Meaning (pp. 363–382). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lemmens, Maarten (1998a). The experiential basis of lexical and constructional flexibility: a diachronic and synchronic study. Leuvense Bijdragen, 87, 79–113. Lemmens, Maarten (1998b). Lexical Perspectives on Transitivity and Ergativity. Causative Constructions in English [CILT 166]. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
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Lemmens, Maarten (2005a). Des constructions causatives sans objet: un complément à l’analyse récente de Goldberg. In Claude Delmas & Mireille Quivy (Eds.), 6 Etudes en linguistique anglaise, CERCLES Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone [Occasional Papers] (pp. 79–113). Université de Rouen. Lemmens, Maarten (2005b). Motion and location: toward a cognitive typology. In Geneviève Girard-Gillet (Ed.), Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais [CIEREC Travaux 122] (pp. 223–244). Lemmens, Maarten (forthcoming). More on objectless transitives and ergativization patterns in English. Thematic issue of Constructions. Levin, Beth (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nishimura, Yoshiki (1994). Agentivity in Cognitive Linguistics. In W. Noth (Ed.), Origins of Semiosis (pp. 487–530). Berlin, New York: Mouton. Rice, Sally (1988). Unlikely Lexical Entries. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 14, 202–212. Ryder, Mary-Ellen (1991). Mixers, Mufflers and Mousers: The Extending of the -er Suffix as a Case of Prototype Reanalysis. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 17, 299–311. Sansò, A. (2000). The domain of demotion: a new view of passive constructions. Paper presented at the 2nd International conference on Contrastive Semantics & Pragmatics. Cambridge, 10– 13 September, 2000. Smith, Carlota S. (1978). Jespersen’s ‘Move and Change’ Class and Causative Verbs in English. In M. A. Jazayery, E. C. Polome, & W. Winter (Eds.), Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Archibald A. Hill. Vol. II: Descriptive Studies (pp. 101–109). The Hague: Mouton. Slobin, Dan I. (1996). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M. S. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their form and meaning (pp. 195–200). The Hague: Mouton. Slobin, Dan I. (2000). Saturation of a semantic field. Paper presented at the conference on Language Culture and Cognition, Leiden, 22–23 March, 2000. Talmy, Leonard (1985). Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms. In Timothy Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. III: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon (pp. 57–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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chapter
Internal state predicates in Japanese A cognitive approach* Satoshi Uehara Tohoku University, Japan
This paper examines internal state predicates, or “subjective predicates”, in Japanese, which exhibit some grammatical behavior different from their counterparts in other languages like English. It employs Langacker’s framework on subjectivity (1985, 1991a), and argues that these predicates represent those that Langacker calls “egocentric viewing arrangement”, in which the construal of the event/situation is optimally subjective. The consideration presented in this paper demonstrates that this “subjective construal” analysis of Japanese internal state predicates can uniformly account for the grammatical behaviors exhibited by them, namely, the person restriction, the implicit reference to their experiencer subject, and their formation of the so-called “double nominative” constructions. It furthermore discusses implications on the cognitive framework’s cross-linguistic applicability. Keywords: subjectivity, internal state predicates, viewing arrangement, person restriction, Japanese
.
Introduction
It is widely known that Japanese possesses a large group of internal state predicates called subjective predicates (Kuroda 1973; Kuno 1973; Aoki 1986; Iwasaki 1993; Backhouse 1993; Uehara 1998b). They are so called because they denote, by default, the speaker’s internal states, such as feelings and emotional reactions. They have attracted linguists’ attention because they exhibit some grammatical behavior different from internal state predicates in other languages like English. In this paper I will employ a cognitive linguistic framework for subjectivity (Langacker 1985, 1991a) in order to analyze the internal state predicates in Japanese, and I will argue that these predicates represent what Langacker calls “subjective construal” (1991a: 316), in which the construal of the situation (by, the conceptualizer) is highly subjective. I will also demonstrate that this framework can uniformly ac-
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count for the grammatical behaviors exhibited by internal state predicates, and also that it is compatible with, and thus receives strong support from, the recent discourse studies on Japanese (Iwasaki 1993; Uehara 1998b).
. Japanese internal state predicates Following Iwasaki’s (1993: 15) description, internal state predicates are said to be those “adjectival predicates showing sensations (atui ‘hot’), emotions (kanasii ‘sad’) or desires (hosii ‘want’)”. Of course, other languages like English have words with similar semantic functions (e.g., the English glosses for the Japanese internal state predicates given above). The most basic and widely known characteristic of internal state predicates in Japanese is that they strictly require the sentence subject to be in the first person when used in simple declarative sentences. An example is uresii ‘glad’, illustrated in (1) and (2):1, 2 (1) Watasi wa uresii. 1.sg top glad.nonpast “I am glad.” (2) *Zyon wa uresii. John top glad.nonpast “John is glad.”
To express the proposition in (2) in Japanese, one must make explicit reference to the evidence on which it is based. For example, one must say something like “John looks glad”, “John is showing the signs of being glad”, and so on, as illustrated in (3) and (4) below: (3) Zyon wa uresii yoo-da. John top glad appear.nonpast “John appears to be glad.” (4) Zyon wa uresi-gatte iru. John top glad-showing the sign of.nonpast “John shows the signs of being glad.”
Two points should be noted here about the person restriction of Japanese internal state predicates. First, this restriction is lifted in ‘non-reportive’ or noncommunicative discourse such as the literary mode (Kuroda 1973). This seems to be because the point of view in sentences in the literary mode is not necessarily associated with the narrator, but can be freely interpreted with respect to a specific character in the story.3 Thus, although the sentence in (2) sounds infelicitous and is starred in naturally-occurring, communicative discourse in Japanese, this would be acceptable in the literary mode. Secondly, manifestation of this restric-
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tion in the internal state predicates of a language is a matter of degree, and its degree seems to vary from language to language. Thus some may point out that internal state predicates in other languages (e.g., in English) do show a similar restriction. In the case of Japanese however, this structural restriction appears to be relatively strong, which may explain the attention this restriction in Japanese has attracted in the linguistics literature, as well as the large variety of Japanese evidential markers used to get around this restriction (see Aoki’s 1986 discussion of Japanese evidential markers).
Other properties of Japanese internal state predicates The most well-known of the characteristics of internal state predicates in Japanese is the restriction regarding the person of predicate subjects discussed in the previous section. However, it is not the only characteristic property, and I will discuss here two other properties that are much less well-known but are highly relevant to an understanding of this phenomenon. First is that the experiencer subjects of these internal state predicates are typically unexpressed in Japanese discourse. Japanese is a ‘pro-drop’ language, and utterances frequently do not linguistically code their clausal arguments. This is especially true of the experiencer subject argument of internal state predicates – i.e., the subject argument whose role is experiencer (cognizer) of the state denoted by them, such as watasi, ‘I’ in (1). Thus, Uehara (1998b), who analyzed an English novel and its Japanese translation, has shown that by default the first person (cognizer) subject of the internal state predicates is unexpressed unless some discourse factors favor explicit mention of it. For example, example (1) given earlier is typically expressed without the first person subject, as in (5): (5) Uresii. glad.nonpast “I am glad.”
One can easily see a functional link between this second property of the internal state predicates in Japanese and the first. Since the predicate form can carry the function of expressing the (first) person of its experiencer (i.e., if the predicate form is not marked with any evidential markers, then the experiencer is in the first person), there is no need for the first person experiencer to be overt; it can be unexpressed without causing any ambiguity. The other property of internal state predicates in Japanese to be noted here, which does not appear to be any way related to the other two, is that internal state predicates are among those predicates which take what Kuno (1973: 79) calls “Ga for Object Marking”. The particle ga is a nominative marker, and is usually used to mark the subject of a sentence (while the particle o is used to mark the
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object). However, according to Kuno, ga is used to mark the object for these predicates in question. Since the ‘real’ subject whose role is experiencer is marked with ga as well (or frequently topicalized and marked with the topic marker wa), internal state predicates form what is known as a ‘double nominative’ (or ‘double subject’) construction, as illustrated by using an internal state predicate of desire hosii, ‘want’, in (6): (6) (Watasi ga/wa) sake ga hosii. 1.sg nom/top sake nom want.nonpast “I want sake.”
In fact, they constitute a major group of the double nominative constructions, and Kuno lists the following in (7) as subjective predicates in his list of predicates which take ga for object marking:4 (7) -tai ‘be anxious to’ arigatai ‘to be grateful for’ hazukasii ‘to be bashful/ashamed of ’ hosii ‘to want’ itosii ‘to think tenderly of ’ kawaii ‘to hold dear’ kutiosii ‘to be regretful of ’ natukasii ‘to miss, to feel yearning for’ netamasii ‘to be jealous of ’ nikurasii ‘to be hateful of ’ omosiroi ‘to be interested in’ osorosii ‘to be afraid/fearful of ’ urayamasii ‘to be envious of ’
-Tai ‘be anxious to’ at the top of (7) combines with verbal stems to yield compound adjectives ‘be anxious/want to do . . . ’, and marks the verbal object with ga as in (8) and (9): (8) (Watasi wa) sake ga nomi-tai. 1.sg top sake nom drink-be anxious to.nonpast “I am anxious to/want to drink sake.” (9) (Watasi wa) kono hon ga yomi-tai. 1.sg top this book nom read-be anxious to.nonpast “I am anxious to/want to read this book.”
As a result the number of subjective predicates involving ga for object marking is not limited to a dozen listed above in (7); the instances can be easily multiplied. In this section, internal state predicates in Japanese have been examined in terms of the characteristic properties that distinguish them from their close equiv-
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alents in other languages like English. They are namely: (1) there is a strong structural restriction in terms of the person of their subjects; (2) they typically appear without their (experiencer) subjects; and (3) the nominative marker ga in these constructions marks what are considered to be grammatical objects. Although these three properties of internal state predicates in Japanese have been discussed, or described, separately from each other in the existing linguistic literature, they have never before been treated as a single system. In the next section I will consider a cognitive semantic analysis of these internal state predicates, to see if these three characteristics can come together to reveal common, underlying principles.
. Cognitive Grammar approach to subjectivity One of the foundational claims of cognitive semantics is that “an expression’s meaning cannot be reduced to an objective characterization of the situation described: equally important for linguistic semantics is how the conceptualizer chooses to construe the situation and portray it for expressive purposes” (Langacker 1991a: 315). In analyzing subjective predicates in Japanese, a formal framework is needed by which the relationship between the speaker (i.e., the conceptualizer) and event described (as well as the role the speaker plays in conceptualizing the event) can be explicitly described and examined. Langacker’s (1985, 1991a, and 1991b) cognitive semantic theory of subjectivity represents one such framework, and provides a theoretical vocabulary for analyzing the internal state predicates in Japanese; the necessary constructs are briefly introduced below.
Definition of linguistic subjectivity Langacker explains ‘subjectivity’ as follows: “Subjectivity pertains to the observer role in viewing situations where the observer/observed asymmetry is maximized” (Langacker 1985: 109). Consider such a viewing situation, which he calls an optimal viewing arrangement, diagramed in Figure 1a. In the diagram, ‘S’ stands for the subject of conception (or observer), ‘O’ for the object of conception (or observed), the arrow for the direction of conception, and the broken-line circle for the objective scene. With respect to an optimal viewing arrangement in Figure 1a, he notes, “S can be characterized as maximally subjective, and O as maximally objective” (Langacker 1985: 121). This optimal viewing arrangement is contrasted with what he calls the egocentric viewing arrangement, diagramed in Figure 1b, where the locus of viewing attention is expanded to include the position of S and his/her immediate surroundings. The subject of conception S is no longer simply an ob-
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Satoshi Uehara (a) optimal viewing arrangement
S
O
(b) egocentric viewing arrangement
S
O
Figure 1. From Langacker (1985: 121)
server, but to some degree an object of conception as well, and in this situation, S receives a more objective construal while the scene conceived becomes more subjective. Thus, the conceptualization diagrammed in Figure 1b represents the semantic structure of ‘subjective’ expressions, and Langacker defines a subjective expression “as one that includes the ground – or some facet of the ground – in its scope of predication (i.e., its base)” (Langacker 1985: 113, emphasis in the original). (The term ‘ground’ is used in Cognitive Grammar to indicate the speech event, its setting, and its participants.)
The subjectivity scale As it is obvious from expressions like ‘maximally subjective’ and ‘more subjective’, subjectivity is a matter of degree, depending on how prominent the ground is conceived in the overall conceptualization. Thus, Langacker introduces the notion of a subjectivity scale, along which linguistic expressions can be ranked. The pair of sentences in (10) illustrates two levels of the gradience (Langacker 1991a: 326). (10) a. Vanessa is sitting across the table from Veronica. b. Vanessa is sitting across the table from me.
So far as the locative relationships are concerned, the sense of across in (10a) is fully objective in that it profiles the spatial configuration without regard to speakerhearer position.5 (10b) is more subjective in that one of the participants, namely, the reference-point for the across relation is the speaker (first person); the expression includes the ground in its scope of predication, as in the conceptualization pattern represented by the diagram in Figure 1b above. Langacker identifies a further subjective level of construal, using the same situation for the already subjective construal in (10b). The contrast between the two levels, according to Langacker (1991a: 328), is reflected in the following pair of sentences in (11): (11) a. Vanessa is sitting across the table from me. (=10b) b. Vanessa is sitting across the table.
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(a)
(b)
Figure 2.
The two describe precisely the same spatial configuration, and they both presuppose the reference point for the spatial configuration they describe (so (11b) may sound awkward without context). The only structural difference is that the presupposed reference point is covert in (11b). Conceptually, they are both subjective in that they take the speaker as the reference point. However, the formal distinction between overt (11a) and covert (11b) reference to the speaker, iconically reflects its being construed with a lesser or greater degree of subjectivity.6 (11a) suggests a detached outlook in which the speaker treats her own participation as being on a par with anybody else’s (‘objective construal’ of the speaker), whereas (11b) identifies the reference point with the speaker and portrays the situation “through her eyes”. In other words, the scene depicted by the sentence in (11a) and that in (11b) are like (a) and (b), respectively, in Figure 2. In Figure 2a, the person with the glasses is the speaker, myself, while in Figure 2b, I the speaker sit on this side of the table, the vantage point for the scene. The thick line in Figure 2b represents the speaker’s camera angle and indicates that the vantage point is specified with the speaker. In (11b), as Traugott (1995: 49) puts
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it, “what is strengthened is specifically the subjective stance of the speaker.” Thus, of the two already subjective expressions in (11), b is the more subjective. The representations in Figure 2 of the scenes depicted by the sentences in (11a) and (11b) illustrate why (12a) is considerably more natural than (12b): (12) a.
Look! My picture’s in the paper! And Vanessa is sitting across the table from me! b. ?Look! My picture’s in the paper! And Vanessa is sitting across the table!
Langacker (1991a: 329) explains as follows: “Examining a picture of oneself involves self-construal that has a high degree of objectivity, for it literally implies an external vantage point. This is consistent with the objectivity conveyed by the speaker’s explicit self-reference in the final clause of (12a), but inconsistent with the subjectivity signaled by the lack of the speaker’s explicit self-reference in (12b).” A formal way of representing the fine-grained contrast between two subjective structures like the pair in (11) is due, since they both represent the same situation in the diagram in Figure 1b, and since those in Figure 2 depict only one specific instance (with the two ‘slots’ elaborated with Vanessa and myself). In fact, the sitting-across case in (11) represents a productive, spatial configuration pattern in English as illustrated in (13) and (14) [taken from Langacker 1985, 1991a]: (13) a. There is snow all around me. b. There is snow all around. (14) a. The store is through the tunnel from here. b. The store is through the tunnel.
Thus, many spatial configuration expressions in English have a pair of established senses analogous to those of sitting-across. The difference between the two semantic structures are shown in Figure 3, using Cognitive Grammar style representations. In Figure 3, abbreviated as tr is the trajector, the technical term for ‘figure within a profiled relation’ and lm is the landmark, ‘less prominent entity in the relation’. In the case of (11), the trajector is Vanessa, and the landmark is the table in the across relationship. The profiled across relationship is represented by the thick dotted arrow, whose starting point indicates R, the reference point with respect to which the trajector is located. In (a), Sp, the speaker, takes a vantage point external to the described situation (Sp’), where the reference point happens to be the speaker, while in (b), the reference point is identified with the speaker’s vantage point.
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(b)
(a)
lm
lm tr
rp
tr
rp Sp
Sp
OS
OS
Sp’
OS: onstage region : across relation tr: trajector lm: landmark rp: reference point Sp: speaker
Figure 3.
. Subjective construal and Japanese internal state predicates Having examined the Cognitive Grammar analysis on the sitting-across predicate in English, one can easily see exactly the same analysis holds for subjective, spatial configuration expressions in Japanese as well, such as the me-no-mae-ni-suwatteiru (‘sitting-right-in-front’) predicate in (15): (15) a.
Hanako ga watasi no me no mae ni suwatte iru. Hanako nom 1.sg gen eye gen front at sitting be.nonpast “Hanako is sitting right in front of me.” b. Hanako ga me no mae ni suwatte iru. Hanako nom eye gen front at sitting be.nonpast “Hanako is sitting right in front.”
Thus, basically Figures 2a and 3a and their discussions apply to (15a) and Figures 2b and 3b to (15b). The Cognitive Grammar analysis can uniformly apply to the subjectivity phenomena in spatial configuration expressions in English and Japanese. I now will propose a similar line of analysis for the internal state predicates in Japanese, which are also called subjective predicates. By examining similarities and differences between the two phenomena, I will demonstrate that the Cognitive Grammar approach to subjectivity not only has a cross-linguistic applicability but also can help explicate cross-linguistic variations in linguistic subjectivity.
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The speaker’s role Internal state predicates in Japanese resemble the (English) sentences of spatial relation in (11) in that the speaker (the conceptualizer) plays a prominent role in their conceptual structure. Whether or not encoded linguistically, the speaker occupies the role of experiencer/cognizer of a state denoted by the predicate in the former, and that of viewer of a denoted situation in the latter. Consider the hosii ‘want’ example reproduced in (16): (16) a.
Watasi wa sake ga hosii. 1.sg top sake nom want.nonpast “I (explicit) want sake.” b. Sake ga hosii. sake nom want.nonpast “I (implicit) want sake.”
The hosii ‘want’ sentences in (16) describe a cognizer’s psychological state, where the speaker is the cognizer, and functions as the subject (as opposed to the object) of cognition. In a very similar manner, the sitting-across sentences in (11), describe a spatial configuration, where the speaker is the reference point for the figure in the across relationship, and functions as the viewer, i.e., the subject of perception. Thus, in either case, the speaker functions as the subject of conception. The Japanese internal state predicate patterns resemble the patterns of spatial configuration in another respect. In both, the (b) pattern, where the subject of conception is not linguistically coded, typically assumes the speaker for that implicit role. Thus ‘speaker’, not just a schematic ‘person’, is present in the semantic structure of (b) sentences. These two points of resemblance motivate to posit for the two subjective ‘want’ sentences in (16a) and (16b), the semantic structures illustrated in Figures 4a and 4b, respectively. In Figure 4a, the cognizer of Japanese internal state predicates (i.e., the speaker) is explicitly encoded as in (16a), and the speaker is somewhat objectively construed since he puts himself more or less onstage and sees himself as if through the eyes of someone else. In Figure 4b, in contrast, the speaker is not linguistically encoded but is necessarily evoked as in (16b), and the construal of the situation is highly subjective since the speaker is equated with the cognizer and serves as the vantage point for what is conceptualized. The scenes depicted by the specific sentences Watasi wa sake ga hosii ‘I (explicit) want sake’ in (16a) and Sake ga hosii ‘I (implicit) want sake’ in (16b) can be shown in Figure 5a and Figure 5b, respectively. In the scene in Figure 5a, the person with the glasses on the left, who is wanting and imagining the sake, is the speaker, myself. The scene in Figure 5b, on the other hand, is what I the speaker cognize, that is, what appears in the conceptual space of
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(a)
cd
cr Sp
Sp’
(a)
(b)
Figure 5.
cd
Sp
OS
Figure 4.
cr
OS
OS: onstage region : cognizing relation cr: cognizer cd: cognized entity Sp: speaker
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the person on the left in Figure 5a, whose viewpoint is the assumed vantage point for the conceptualization. Again, the thick line represents the speaker’s cognition and indicates that the vantage point is specified with the speaker.7
Difference in the default pattern in subjectivity Japanese internal state predicates differ most from spatial configuration expressions (in English and Japanese) in the default degree of subjectivity. Although construals of different degrees of subjectivity are available in both types, a close examination into the behavioral and structural patterns of each construal in the two types reveals a different construal for the default one in each. Objective construal seems to be more of the default case in the spatial configuration expressions, while in the Japanese internal state predicates the subjective perspective is the norm. This can be seen in the fact that the most subjective construal in spatial configuration expressions is compositional in its formulation, while that in Japanese internal state predicates is non-compositional and its subjectivity is inherent to the lexicon (as their alternative name subjective predicates suggests). The (English) predications of spatial relations (e.g., across, around) have nothing inherently subjective in their semantic structure. In other words, their profile does not involve any element of the speaker (the ground). Thus around, for example, has a profile whose trajector and landmark are both instantiated by things in the objective scene, so that the composite structure has the whole profile in the on-stage region. The composite relational profile becomes subjective only if the spatial predication is combined with the ground (as in Figure 1b) in its compositional process. In sharp contrast with the spatial configuration expressions, Japanese internal state predicates can be analyzed as subjective in their lexical structure. The cognizer slot (‘e-site’) of their lexical semantic structure is specified with the ground, which can be made overt by the compositional process with its overt form such as watasi, ‘I’. In terms of the lexical structure organization, Japanese internal state predicates thus resemble a ‘deictic verb’, come (Langacker 1985), or kuru, ‘come’, in Japanese, for that matter, where the goal position of its movement is specified with the ground. Its ground element can be made overt, as in, He came here, but its phonological presence is not required (or “subcategorized”) as in, He came. Thus the subjective pattern in spatial configuration expressions in (11) is subjective only by virtue of its composition with the ground, while the subjective pattern in Japanese internal state predicates in (16) is subjective by itself. This contrast in the default structure status is in fact compatible with other observations about them. The compositional status of the subjectivity of the spatial configuration patterns is evident in Langacker’s description of the subjective
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construal as the extension of an objective one, and the fact that in some situations, like in (12) above, the most subjective construal becomes infelicitous. The lexical and default status of the subjectivity of the Japanese internal state predicate patterns in (16) is nicely in line with its typological markedness pattern.8 Japanese internal state predicates can be used in three patterns: with the unexpressed first person cognizer, with the explicit first person cognizer, and with the third person cognizer. Of the three, the pattern with the third person cognizer is the most marked, since the predicate has to be structurally marked (i.e., with evidential markers, as in §2). Of the two less marked patterns with the first person cognizer, the unexpressed cognizer pattern is the less marked one behaviorally since it is the typical and most frequently attested pattern for them (as in §2). Thus, in the case of internal state predicates in Japanese, the markedness order (from less to more marked) is: (i) the subjective construal of the speaker (i.e., (16b)); (ii) the more objective construal of him/her (i.e., (16a)); (iii) the objective construal of the third person (e.g., (3) and (4)). In fact, for the obligatory use of evidential markers in the most objective pattern, it can be postulated that the most subjective construal (the first person cognizer) is so much inherent to the semantic structure of internal state predicates in Japanese that the maximally objective construal, where the third person takes the cognizer role, is rendered unacceptable as it is. Such obvious markedness patterns, structural or behavioral, do not appear to exist in the example of spatial relations. In sum, the two conceptual structures, spatial configuration expressions and Japanese internal state predicates, resemble each other as seen in the previous section, but shared similarity is present only at the composite structure level. They differ in their compositional pattern, and, more importantly, in their component lexical structure.
The role in the event structure The analysis of Japanese internal state predicates so far presented offers an interesting account of the nominative ga for object marking, the other of their characteristic properties. In Cognitive Grammar, the grammatical subject is defined as the trajector of the clause level relational predication, and the trajector is in turn defined as the primary figure in a profiled relation. The most salient figure in the unmarked type of conceptual structure (the most subjective construal) of internal state predicates in Japanese is what the speaker conceives – i.e., the object of her cognition (see Figure 4b and, more specifically, Figure 5b). In fact, it is the only profiled ‘thing’ in her conceptual space,9 where the construal of the cognizer speaker is subjective and she is away from the scope of her conception into its background. This means that this cognized thing is the trajector, and therefore the subject rather than the object of the predicates. Thus, the use of the nomi-
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Figure 6.
native case marker ga for the cognized thing is not without reason: the cognized thing is marked with the nominative because it is the subject in the lexical semantic structure of internal state predicates in question. This pattern parallels that of the fore-mentioned deictic verb kuru, ‘come’, where the thing moving toward the speaker is the trajector/subject and is marked with the nominative marker ga in Japanese. Let us compare the scene depicted by an internal state predicate hosii ‘want’ in Figure 5b to that for the deictic verb come in Figure 6 [slightly modified from a visual aide for the verb come in Hatasa et al. (www.sla.purdue.edu/fll/JapanProj/FLClipart/)]. In Figure 6, the thing/person moving toward the speaker is the object of perception (or ‘the perceived thing’) from the vantage point of the speaker at the goal point of the profiled movement, but its position in the overall conceptual structure (with the speaker simply assumed in the background) motivates it being marked with the nominative. This analysis of the cognized entity as the subject, rather than the object of internal state predicates in Japanese naturally raises another question regarding the status of the other overt nominal (i.e., the speaker) in the somewhat objective construal in Figures 4a and 5a. The present analysis, accordingly, analyzes it more or less as an entity in the discourse space, somewhat external to the lexicosyntactic semantic structure of the internal state predicates. As Uehara (1998b) has shown, the speaker is made overt only when discourse factors (e.g., focus) favor explicit mention of the cognizer role for Japanese internal state predicates. In other words, the somewhat objective construal in Figure 4a holds only when the discourse space is evoked. Hence, the overt cognizer role is in the discourse space, and need not be assigned any grammatical role in the lexical or sentence level conceptual structure.10
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This can be illustrated again with the parallel case of the deictic motion verb kuru, ‘come’. The speaker’s role as the perceiver of the thing moving toward her is crucial in the deictic motion profile whether she is linguistically encoded or not. However, its crucialness lies in its function as the vantage point for the conceptualization, and differs from that of the subject, the most salient figure in a relational profile. Thus, the moving thing is the subject; the cognizer speaker is not. A large corpus text analysis conducted and published in 1997 by Kokuritu Kokugo Kenkyujo (The National Language Research Institute) strongly supports the claim here. They examined a total of 3146 instances of the nominative particle ga in the text corpus, and made a list of all the semantic roles they occupy and the predicates they occur with. All and only instances of ga for such internal state predicates as listed in (7) above are used with what is cognized (among what they call ‘objective’). They attested instances of ga with the cognizer role for internal state predicates as well (among what they call ‘experiencer’), but all their predicate forms are marked with the evidential marker -garu, ‘to show the signs of ’, such as hosi-garu, ‘show signs of wanting’, indicating that the cognizer in question is not the speaker (see (4) in §2). Unfortunately, they do not extend their analysis to cover the 3477 nouns marked with the topic particle wa in the data, except that they note that they would posit ga as the underlying case marker for 3382 instances (97.3%) of them (1997: 210). Therefore, the text discourse data shows that only the cognized thing is marked with the nominative particle ga for the unmarked forms of internal state predicates, while for their forms with evidential markers, the (third person) cognizer is marked with ga. The first person cognizer might be overt when the form is most likely to be marked with the discourse marker of topic. In sum, the cognitive semantic analysis presented here can nicely account for the otherwise problematic use of the nominative particle ga for the grammatical object, as well as the other characteristic properties of internal state predicates in Japanese. Their lexical semantic structure is inherently specified with the speaker as the cognizer, which is realized as their person restriction to the effect that some extra morpheme (evidential marker) is required to rid themselves of the lexical specification in expressing the third person’s internal states. The same inherent specification with the speaker leads to their default and most frequent use in which the cognizer speaker is assumed and covert. The cognizer role of Japanese internal state predicates, which is specified with the speaker, is in the background (like the speaker’s role in the verb come), leaving the stimulus role for the most salient figure on the onstage region – the best candidate for the predicate subject – and thus motivating its nominative marking. The construal patterns of internal state predicates in Japanese motivate their behavior in morphology, syntax and discourse.
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Subjective construal in the Japanese language The discussion so far demonstrates that internal state predicates in Japanese can be best characterized as ‘deictic’ verbs (Langacker 1985) on a par with the verb come in English or kuru, ‘come’, in Japanese. Their lexical semantic structure is characterized with the inherent presence of the speaker, or the ground element, in the base somewhere off of its central, onstage region. What they profile is the object of conception from the vantage point of the speaker. In the case of internal state predicates in Japanese, what they profile is what is cognized by the speaker, where the speaker’s role as the cognizer is assumed and in the background. The fact that the lexical entries of a deictic nature exist not only for motion verbs but also for internal state predicates in Japanese, and that such internal state predicates are large in number and productive as well in forming other subjective predicates combining with stem forms of verbs in general, suggests the following: the speaker’s perspective is rather frequently assumed in Japanese and prominent for the viewing arrangement for expressions in the language. In other words, the subjective construal more or less represents the unmarked pattern in Japanese, unlike other languages such as English. Some universalists may doubt that the speaker’s perspective is typically assumed and represents the unmarked pattern in Japanese, despite strong support from recent studies on Japanese discourse (Iwasaki 1993; Uehara 1998b). These studies have demonstrated that the relationship between the speaker’s perspective and the sentential subject in Japanese is more direct than other languages like English. For example, Uehara (1998b) analyzed an English story and its Japanese translation, and observed that when the speaker is coded as the subject in English sentences such as in (17), these are typically rendered into Japanese like in (17’) [see also Iwasaki 1993: 80]: (17) Then I saw a girl standing there. (17’) Suruto, onnanoko ga soko ni tatte ita. then a girl nom there at standing be.past (lit.) “Then, a girl was standing there.”
In the contrastive patterns in (17) and (17’), the speaker’s role as discoverer of a situation, which is encoded explicitly as the subject of the main (discovery) predicate in English, is structurally missing altogether along with the predicate of the discovery in the typical Japanese construal. Here again, the speaker’s perspective is assumed and linguistically unencoded in Japanese. Getting back to the cognitive analysis of the nominative ga for the grammatical object, we can see the parallelism in the sentences in (17) and (17’). One can see that a girl is the grammatical object in, I saw a girl standing there, but not in, a girl was standing there. Ga appears to mark the grammatical object only if we
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(force ourselves to) take the more objective construal typical in English, for the originally ‘subjective’ predicates in Japanese. The ga-marked nominal is in fact functioning as the grammatical subject in the unmarked subjective conception of them, as in (17’). The cross-linguistic variation in the unmarked viewing arrangements pointed out here, has a profound implication for the theories of verbal semantics. In cognitive as well as many other linguistic theories, discussions of event structures assume the optimal viewing arrangement as the unmarked one, where “the roles of the observer and the observed are fully distinct” (Langacker 1991b: 550). Thus, in Cognitive Grammar the ‘canonical’ event model represents “the normal observation of a prototypical action. . . a single event observed from a vantage point external to its setting” (1991b: 545 [emphasis added]), and accordingly, the canonical viewing arrangement “incorporates the canonical event model” [emphasis in the original]. Languages like Japanese, therefore, present a counter-example to the canonical status of such a viewing arrangement. In the viewing arrangement prominent in Japanese, the roles of the observer and the observed are not fully distinct, and events are frequently observed from a vantage point internal to its setting. The canonical event model is in fact canonical as the event structure model for languages like English, but not so for Japanese. The term ‘canonical’ in the ‘canonical event model’, then, should not be taken in the cross-linguistic sense, but in a language-specific sense. Taking a cross-linguistic approach and characterizing the event structure model in terms of different viewing arrangements does not, of course, undermine any of the previous, fruitful work in verbal semantics. Rather, it adds another dimension to them, by making it possible now to discuss the canonical viewing arrangement and the canonical event model for each language, and differences in the degree of subjectivity among languages’ canonical viewing arrangements. This newly added dimension is the “subjective axis” (Achard 1996: 1168) viewing arrangement, and without it events are assumed to hold in the “objective axis” (Achard 1996) alone. The subjective axis is, as it were, the ‘third’ dimension added to the former, ‘two dimensional’ event structure model. (Event structures are depicted two-dimensionally, anyway.) The cognitive analysis presented above for the problematic case marking of internal state predicates in Japanese thus represents an approach using this new event structure model. The traditional ga for the grammatical object analysis, on the other hand, is a natural consequence of its theoretical presupposition that event structures be of two dimensions. Furthermore, the current research can arguably shed new light on the study of linguistic subjectivity itself. For example, the existence of speaker-perspective oriented languages like Japanese seems to suggest cases of objectification, as opposed to those of subjectification, exemplified by Langacker (1991a) with the synchronic
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compositional process of spatial configuration expressions.11 The semantic compositional process of internal state predicates in Japanese, in fact, represents the synchronic process of objectification: lexically subjective, internal state predicates become less subjectively construed in their compositional process to the sentence and discourse levels. Taking an evidential marker in expressing the third person’s internal states as in (3) and (4) is literally a process of objectifying lexically subjective, internal state predicates, with the evidential marker functioning as an objectifying morpheme. Cases of the diachronic objectification process in Japanese must await future research,12 but Uehara’s (1998a) analysis on the major parts-of-speech in Japanese suggests a positive outlook. Uehara has shown that adjectival predicates are structurally divided into the two categories, (Canonical) Adjectives and Nominal Adjectives, and that the former are represented by words in the native stratum, while the latter are words of later coinage, mostly of non-native origin. Interestingly, most, if not all, of subjective predicates (including all of those listed in (7) above) belong to the Canonical Adjective category. This suggests that later additions to the language’s lexical stock are all words of non-subjective type, possibly leading to an objectification of the overall lexical structures. Of course, further and more detailed research on this aspect of linguistic subjectivity is necessary.13
. Conclusion In this paper I have given a cognitive semantic account for the grammatical behaviors exhibited by internal state predicates in Japanese. In this account, their grammatical behaviors, such as ga being used for object marking and the impossibility of a third person subject, all come together and have conceptual motivations. The analysis of internal state predicates in Japanese presented here crucially relies on, and therefore provides support for, the Cognitive Grammar theory of subjectivity. This approach has cross-linguistic applicability in that it is possible to uniformly examine and analyze subjectivity-related phenomena in more than one language, and thus provide a mechanism for considering cross-linguistic variations in subjectivity, as well as handle language-specific realizations of this phenomenon.
Notes * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Research Issues for Cognitive Linguistics Workshop at the Australian Linguistics Institute in July 1998; and at the Fourth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, in October 1998. I am grateful to the au-
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diences of those conferences, especially to Eve Sweetser and Ron Langacker for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank June Luchjenbroers, the editor of the volume, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and encouragement. Bob Sanders and Andrew Barke also deserve my thanks for checking my English. All the remaining faults are my own. The research was supported in part by a 1998 Grant-in-Aid from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (# 10680303). All correspondences concerning this article should be sent to: Satoshi Uehara, Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, Japan. Email:
[email protected] . The following abbreviations are used in the gloss: ACC = Accusative; GEN = Genitive; NOM = Nominative; NONPAST = Nonpast tense marker; PAST = Past tense marker; PL = Plural; POL = Politeness marker; SG = Singular; TOP = Topic marker. . In normal circumstances, the subjective predicates in Japanese can be used only with the 1st person singular experiencer. Only in some contexts, however, where the speaker can know and representatively express the emotion shared by her group members, the plural form is possible: (18) Konna kekkoona mono o itadaite, watasitati wa hizyooni uresii desu. this valuable thing acc receiving 1.pl top extremely glad.nonpast pol ‘We are extremely glad receiving this valuable thing (from you).’ It should be also noted here that the term subjective subsumes a number of related concepts even in cognitive linguistics alone, and that the term here is different from that in Achard (1996), which analyzes the French equivalent of want (vouloir) to be inherently subjective. The current analysis examines the subjectivity of main predicates while his discusses that of complement clauses. The following French data from his analysis (slightly modified) shows that the person restriction dealt here for Japanese subjective predicates does not apply to French vouloir ‘want’: a. b.
Je veux revenir. ‘I want to come back.’ Jean veut revenir. ‘John wants to come back.’
. Similar distinctions in mode of discourse in other languages are noted in Benveniste (1971) and Banfield (1982). Banfield (1982: 12), for example, compares Kuno’s ‘non-reportive’ style in Japanese to “a literary style known to modern grammarians under the French term style indirect libre and the German erlebte Rede.” . There are predicates, other than subjective ones, which also form the double nominative constructions in Japanese (e.g. dekiru ‘capable/possible’ as in Taroo wa tenisu ga dekiru (Taro top tennis nom capable.nonpast) ‘Taro is capable of/good at playing tennis.’). See Croft (1991) for an analysis from a cognitive and typological perspective on such non-subjective, double nominative (and other non-canonical case-marking) constructions in Japanese and other languages. The double nominative construction in Japanese arguably constitutes a case of constructional polysemy, where non-subjective senses can be argued to be extensions from the core, subjective ones. However, it is beyond the scope of the current paper. See the discussion on the diachronic objectification process below for a relevant point. . Thus, Langacker intends that (10a) is spoken by someone other than Veronica: As shown in Figure 1a, Veronica is fully distinct from the speaker as his object of conception O in (10a). Interestingly, however, we can also think of a situation in which (10a) is spoken by Veronica herself (a more felicitous example would probably be Talk to George uttered by the former US President George Bush pointing to himself). Such an interpretation of (10a), which is called
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(10a’) here, is more subjective than (10a) because the former does refer to the speaker. (10a’) is more objective than (10b) because the former uses a non-deictic expression. It should be noted in this connection that Langacker (1991a) discusses the ‘maximally objective’ level (e.g. Vanessa jumped across the table), compared to which, the senses of across in (10a) and (10b) are more subjective in that they represent not concrete motion, but the abstract construal of a conceptualizer (the speaker) tracing a mental path “in order to locate the trajector vis-à-vis the reference point” (ibid.: 327). This is another kind of subjectification phenomenon and often referred to as “subjective motion”. . Traugott and Dasher (2002: 98) argues against Langacker’s analysis here observing the fact that the reference point is not necessarily the speaker, but it could be someone else for the sentence (11b) giving certain contexts for it. However, they seem to be confusing “maximally subjective” in the basic level and that in the secondary level or the cases of what I call “perspective transfer” (Uehara 1998b), where the speaker/narrator more or less takes, and describes the situation from, the perspective of someone else. The case under discussion for (11b) is the basic level case where the speaker is the default reference point. (11b) in that sense depicts what the speaker sees in real time. It should also be noted in passing that according to Traugott (1995), this principle that zero expression is iconic of maximum subjectivity holds only for subjectification processes involving “constructions which originate in argument structure (events, particularly motion events, and the participants in them)” (Traugott 1985: 48), but not for those of others such as adversative connectives and focus particles. In contrast with Langacker’s, Traugott’s discussion of subjectification originated with the latter. . Without that specification, the viewpoint can be anybody else’s, and such scenes are objectively construed ones, like the one for the expression Sake ga aru (sake nom exist) ‘There is some sake.’ . The concept of markedness, as typologically interpreted, can handle multi-valued categories (e.g. “most/more/less/least marked” in addition to “marked/unmarked” in the classical twovalued model) and thus connect markedness patterns to typological hierarchies. Please see Croft (1990), for example, for a detailed discussion of the model of typological markedness. . ‘Thing’ here is a technical term in Cognitive Grammar, which designates a region in some domain, and corresponds to the semantic pole of a noun. . It should be noted that whether a certain role is external or internal to the lexical semantic structure is a matter of degree (Cognitive Grammar assumes the lexicon-syntax-discourse continuum). Thus, some internal state predicates in Japanese may have their cognizer role almost as inherent as those internal to them, which may explain why many take the cognizer role for the subject argument of such internal state predicates degrading their stimulus role to their object argument. . Traugot (1995) points out that “Langacker’s work focuses primarily on ‘subjectivity’ as a gradient phenomenon found synchronically,” (p. 32). . Some native speakers of Japanese have pointed out that in their speech some of the internal state predicates no longer require any evidential markers in expressing the third person’s internal states. If research finds that more internal state predicates have lost their person restriction in more people’s speech, it can constitute an instance of diachronic objectification.
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Internal state predicates in Japanese . Ikegami (1999: 93) claims that the so-called “pro-drop” nature of Japanese, whereby thirdperson (and other person) subjects are frequently omitted, is the result of an extension from the “cognizer-less” nature of “prototypical” subjective predicates.
References Achard, Michel (1996). Perspective and syntactic realization: French sentential complements. Linguistics, 34, 1159–1198. Aoki, Haruo (1986). Evidentials in Japanese. In Chafe & Nichols (Eds.), Evidentiality: The linguistic encoding of epistemology. Norwood: Ablex. Backhouse, A. E. (1993). The Japanese language: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable sentences. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Benveniste, Emile (1971). Problems in general linguistics. (Translation by Mary E. Meek). Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Croft, William (1990). Typology and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William (1991). Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitive organization of information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ikegami, Yoshihiko (1999). Nihongo rashisa no naka no “syukansei” (“Subjectivity” in Japaneselike-ness). Gengo (Language), 84–94. Tokyo: Taishûkan. Iwasaki, Shoichi (1993). Subjectivity in grammar and discourse: Theoretical considerations and a case study of Japanese spoken discourse. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyûjo (1997). Nihongo ni okeru hyôsôkaku to shinsôkaku no taiôkankei (Cases and Japanese postpositions), Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyûjo Report 113. Tokyo: Sanseidô. Kuno, Susumu (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 25 Kuroda, S.-Y. (1973). Where epistemology, style and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese. In S. R. Anderson & P. Kiparsky A Festschrift for Moris Halle (pp. 377–391). New York: Rinehart and Winston. Langacker, Ronald W. (1985). Observations and speculations on subjectivity. In Haiman (Ed.), Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1, Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. (1991a). Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. (1991b). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2, Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Traugot, Elizabeth Closs (1995). Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In Stein & Wright (Eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives (pp. 31–54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uehara, Satoshi (1998a). Syntactic categories in Japanese: A cognitive and typological introduction. Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers. Uehara, Satoshi (1998b). Pronoun drop and perspective in Japanese. In Akatsuka, Hoji, Iwasaki, Sohn, & Strauss (Eds.), Japanese/Korean linguistics Vol. 7 (pp. 275–289). Stanford: CSLI.
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chapter
Figure, ground and connexity Evidence from Xhosa narrative David Gough Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, New Zealand
This article examines how the discourse concepts of background/foreground and connexity are significant organisational factors in the Xhosa verbal system. After defining background/foreground and connexity, evidence from Xhosa folk narrative is presented to show how these features provide a richer and more coherent explanation of the structure of the verbal system than the traditional analysis. The article advocates an orientation to language which holds that its nature can and should be explained in terms discourse/cognitive factors rather than seeing it as a discreet and separate and internally describable ‘module’ Keywords: background, foreground, connexity, discourse, Xhosa (Bantu)
.
Introduction
In this paper the perspective taken is that discourse pragmatic and cognitive factors are essential to understanding the way in which language is organised and structured. Such an approach focuses on the notion that the nature of language can and, indeed, should be described in terms outside language itself – beyond, that is, the dominant conceptualisation of language which sees it as an independent mental module or faculty and therefore being the way it is because it is the way it is (for a convincing critique of this perspective, see Givón 1990). This paper will argue specifically, that the concepts of ‘grounding’ and ‘connexity’ contribute significantly to explaining the structure of, at least, the Xhosa verbal system. It will do so by focussing on data taken from folk narratives.
. Connexity/dependence Analysis of discourse reveals a basic principle: the relative syntactic dependence of a clause signals its relative conceptual connection or integration to its dis-
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course context (Gough 1986: 79; see also Givón 1990 for a similar perspective). The concept of connexity in this regard refers to the degree to which information in a particular clause is seen as, on the one hand, independent from or, on the other hand, integrated with or ‘dependent on’ the information in a previous clause. While there are a variety of lexical and grammatical features that encode such connexity (cf. Thompson 1987), of particular interest to this paper is the fact that in many languages ‘dependent’ or ‘subordinate verb’ forms tend to display less prototypical features of verbs, such as tense-aspect, modality and agreement (see Gough 1986), which together constitute the traditional category of ‘finiteness’ (see also Givón 1990; Carlson 1992).
. Background and foreground information The distinction between background and foreground is, of course, basic to human perception. It is also one of the most basic concepts in discourse analysis (see Wallace 1982; Givón 1987; and Tomlin et al. 1997 for overviews). In metaphorical terms the foreground event clauses of a narrative form its skeleton – its basic structure, which advances the story itself. The event clauses are arranged in terms of temporal sequence forming an event line. According to Hopper and Thompson (1980) background information adds flesh to this skeleton, not advancing the story but rather characterising the backdrop against which the story develops. For this reason it is also known as durative descriptive information (to be referred to as d/d information in the discussion below). (1) a. b. c.
d. e. f. g. h.
Yahamba lahamba. He travelled and travelled. Lithe lisahamba njalo ladibana nomvundla. While he was so travelling, he met a rabbit. Lafika ijoni labuza kumvundla ukuba khange liwubone umvundla. The soldier arrived and asked the rabbit whether it had seen a rabbit at all. Umvundla lo nawo wayenxiba indevu apha phezu komlomo. (The rabbit was wearing a moustache here above the mouth) Wabuza umvundla, ‘kunjani lo mvundla uwufunayo?’ The rabbit asked, ‘What’s this rabbit like that you’re looking for?’ Lathi elijoni ukuphendula ukuphendula, ‘Ufana nawe.’ The soldier answered, ‘He looks like you.’ Wathi umvundla, ‘Hayi, zange ndiwubone umvundla oneendevu.’ The rabbit said, ‘I’ve never seen a rabbit with a beard.’ Wathi umvundla, ‘Hayi, hamba, mlhawumbi uphazamile.’ The rabbit said again, ‘No, go, maybe you’re mistaken.’
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i.
Hayi ke, nejoni laqonda okokuba mhlawumbi liphazamile. Anyway, the soldier too thought he was perhaps mistaken. j. Lahamba, labuyela umva. He travelled and went back. k. Lithe lisahamba njalo, laqonda ukuba, ‘Hayi. . . ’ While he was so travelling, he thought, ‘No. . . ’
Here we may note that each successive event clause advances the story line and that it is either temporally or causally consequential to the clause that precedes it. Changing the order of any of these clauses would change our interpretation of the events they encode. The d/d information, however, is off the event line. We may note that (d) for example, is not temporally or causally related to the events that precede or follow it. Rather it represents parenthetical background information necessary for the comprehension of the events. In conceptual terms, the distinction between durative descriptive and foregrounded ‘event’ information can be seen in terms of temporal grounding. Such temporal grounding is parallel to the organisation of visual information. According to Eysenck (1984: 33) a fundamental way in which visual information is organised is the ‘segregation of the visual field into one part called the figure and another part called the ground’. In general, the figure has ‘thing-like’ qualities, is well-defined and bounded; while the ground in which the figure is perceived is, in contrast, continuous, less definite and boundless. An example of this is the figure of a house perceived against the background of the sky. Events can be seen as temporal figures: perceived as temporally bound and discrete against a temporal background of continuous and durative situations. Such grounding ,which is basic to perception, thus also appears to form an important organisational principle in language. Wallace (1982: 214) for instance, presents the hypothesis that certain linguistic categories “function to differentiate linguistic figure from linguistic ground”, a perspective more recently illustrated in Langacker’s Cognitive grammar, as discussed by Ungerer and Schmid (1996). Similarly, Longacre (1981: 329) notes that the figure-ground categories, once distinguished solely on semantic basis, are “more and more seen to correlate with the morphosyntactics of the world’s languages”. My analysis supports this particular perspective.
. Some points on past approaches The framework sketched above is of significance for two broad reasons. Firstly, it allows an alternative analysis of Xhosa verbal categories as opposed to the dominant taxonomic framework which continues to hold sway in the categorisation of Bantu verbal forms. Traditionally, this framework, known as the Dokean frame-
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work, uses the terms ‘mood’ and ‘tense’ as convenient labels to refer to quite diverse verbal categories. (The framework was named after the Bantuist Clement C. Doke. For a critique see Khoali 1993.) The result was a mixed bag of verbal inflections all falling under the same general rubric with little indication of systematicity. Mood itself is rather vaguely defined (beyond simply being a ‘form of the verb’), and the the discussion of these various ‘forms’ does not posit any underlying systematicity. Traditional accounts (e.g. Davey 1973) typically simply name the ‘moods’ (typically indicative, consecutive, participial and subjunctive) and then go on to describe these as disparate items. With regard to two of the verbal categories discussed in this chapter for instance, the consecutive is described simply as a ‘subordinate mood type’ signalling consecutive actions in the past (Davey 1973: 106), while the participial mood is merely described as a verb form used for actions simultaneous to those in a main clause (Davey 1973: 106; Du Plessis 1978: 135). As will be demonstrated in more detail in this chapter, these verbal categories appear though to be systematically structured around key discourse concepts. The second reason why a functionally oriented framework is significant is that it allows some insight into some of the debates that have emerged on discourse pragmatic accounts of grammar, particularly surrounding the coding of foreground and background information. Research has specifically questioned the claim that there is a straightforward relationship between subordinate clauses and background information on the one hand; as well as independent clauses with foreground information on the other (cf. Thompson 1987; and Wallace 1987 for some questions in this regard). As grounding and dependence are treated separately here, this may present an alternative approach to the issues involved.
. Connexity, grounding and Xhosa narrative The concepts of grounding and connexity referred to above appear to form the organisational basis of a good deal of the Xhosa verbal system. In particular I will show that the verbal forms, referred to as the participial, consecutive and indicative moods as well as the so-called ‘continuous tense’ rather than being isolated grammatical structures, form a sub-system that is structured around grounding and connexity.
The consecutive mood The consecutive marker is -a- (to be referred to here as cons). The structure of the consecutive is: Subject concord-a-Verb Stem), for example,
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(2) ixhego li-a-thetha > ixhego lathetha old-man he-cons-talk “and the old man spoke”
The consecutive has been traditionally described as a ‘subordinate mood type’ with the function of, inter alia, encoding consecutive actions in the past (Davey 1973: 106). Consider the following example: (3) UThemba uye evenkileni wathenga ukutya Themba he-perf-ind-go loc-shop he-cons-buy food wagoduka he-cons go-home “Themba went to the shop, bought food and went home.”
Here the first (non-consecutive) clause of the sentence uses the ‘independent’ indicative mood (perfect) while the second (consecutive) clause uses the dependent consecutive mood. Connection is thus not expressed through an overt conjunction such as ‘and’ in English, but rather through a verbal inflection. It is significant to note that the consecutive is not marked for tense; it inherits polarity from a preceding main clause; and it has limited aspectual marking in relation to verb forms traditionally regarded as ‘independent’. It is thus marked for less finiteness than other verb forms. The following is a textual example of the consecutive taken from a folk narrative: (4) a.
wabetha kuyo ephondweni he-cons-hit to-it loc-hom “He hit it on the horn” b. kwasuka kwaphuma ukuyta it-cons-go it-cons-come-out food “and some food came out” c. watya He-cons-eat “and he ate” d. wahlutha he-cons-full “and got full” e. wagoduka he-cons-go-home “and went home.”
The consecutive according to this approach encodes two things: connexity and foregrounded event information. Unlike the indicative past or perfect, the consecutive is marked for connexity, signalled by its less than finite form, to the clause that precedes it. Furthermore, unlike the participial which, as we shall see, also
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encodes such connexity, it does not involve a focus on the internal structure of the situation it encodes. All the consecutive clauses in (3), for example, refer to temporally bounded situations that move the time of the story forward, and all can be answers to the question, “what happened then?”. With no focus on either the internal structure of situation, nor its temporal orientation, the focus of the consecutive is the occurrence of the event itself. If the consecutive signals connexity, then breaks in the conceptual relatedness of the narrative should be indicated by the non-use of the consecutive. In such places the so called independent indicative mood should occur. This is indeed supported by the following example (here indperf indicates the indicative perfect) taken from a Xhosa folk narrative. Note here that example (4.2) follows on from example (4.1). (4.1) a.
hayi ke uhambile ke umntwana nenqwelo yakhe no-then she-travel-perf then child with-carriage of-her “So then, the child travelled with her carriage.” b. wayifihla ke lo mtwana inqwelo etyholweni she-cons-it-hid then this child carriage loc-bush “Then the child hid the carriage in the bush.” c. wafika apha emdanisweni she-cons-arrived here loc-dance “She arrived here at the dance.” d. yaye inkosi idanisa nezaa ntombi zimbini he-pct chief he-part-dance with-those girls they-two “The chief was dancing with those two girls.”
(4.2) a.
hayi okunene uyithathile le ntombi isangena no truly he-her-take-perf this girl she-part-enter emnyango loc-doorway “So then truly, he took the girl as she entered the door.” b. wayixhwila ngoko he-cons-her twirl then “He twirled her around then,” c. wathi nanku umfazi ungenile he-cons-say here-is wife she-part-enter-perf “and said, ‘This is my wife, she has entered,”’ d. wadinisa naye ngobusuku bonke he-cons-dance with-her with-night all “and he danced with her the whole night.”’
In both of these cases, the sections are distinct: in Givón’s terms (1990: 826), there is a thematic break between these sections. In (4.1) the common orientation of the clauses is the series of events leading up to the girl’s arrival at the chief ’s party. The
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ideas in (4.2) are distinct from those in (4.1) as the orientation now switches to focus on the chief ’s actions. Just as there is a break in conceptual connexity, there is a matching break in syntactic connexity or dependence with the occurrence of a clause using the indicative mood.
The participial mood The form of the positive participial is: Subject Concord + Verb stem, for example, (5) ixhego li-cula > ixhego licula old-man he-part-sing “the old man singing”
The participial morpheme itself is realised supra-segmentally through certain perturbations of the tonal form of the verb (historically as the result of a high toned morpheme -*ki-) and it has a durative significance. It occurs in subordinate clauses and while it displays both polarity and a range of aspectual markings, it is not marked for tense, with the time orientation being an inherited feature of the associated independent clause. Consider the following individual examples with their associated discourse contexts: (6) a.
baya emdanisweni elila njalo lo mntwana they-cons-go loc-dance she-part-crying like-this this child “They went to the dance, this child crying so.” b. wahamba ethwela umthwalo she-cons-travel she-part-carry load “Then she travelled, carrying her load.” c. wafika engekho he-cons-arrive she-neg-part-there “Then he arrived, she not being there.”
Traditionally participial clauses of the above type have been described as a mood type occurring only in subordinate clauses and encoding actions simultaneous to those in the main clause (for example, Du Plessis 1978: 135). If this were an adequate description then the information encoded in the participial would have the same status as that encoded in consecutive clauses, that is, encoding foreground events. However, it appears that the information is of a different status encoding rather background information as defined above. The participial clauses in the examples above, as well as participial clauses more generally, do not, I claim, code events and do not thus form part of the event line advancing the story line. They, like the consecutive, encode syntactic connexity to the clauses they follow. Unlike the consecutive, however, they are marked for ‘durative’ aspect, and thus,
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rather than representing actions or events, they encode unbounded temporally continuous situations. It is in terms of these situations that the associated consecutive, representing bound events, are foregrounded. The situation is therefore not, as traditional descriptions would have it, simultaneous to the event, but forms, rather, its durative background so that the bounded and momentary event is located within the temporally durative framework established by the participial. In (6a) above, for example, the event of the girl’s going to the dance is given the temporal backdrop of the girl’s crying and in (6b) the girl’s travelling is similarly located in the durative backdrop of her carrying a load. Neither of these clauses contributes to the movement of narrative time. Research into the participial in other Bantu languages supports this view. Wald (1975) and Poulos (1982) argue, respectively, that in Swahili and Zulu the participial is, in both form and function, a temporal relative clause. Poulos (1982: 210) states that the participial, like other relative clauses, has a ‘restrictive force’; what participial clauses restrict as relative clauses is the “dimension of time” (1982: 219). This approach is supportive of the present view of the participial in terms of its backgrounding function.
The continuous tense The form of the so-called continuous tense is Subject Concord-a-(ye/be) participial, for example: (7) si-a-(yebe) sihamba > sasihamba we-past-pct we-part travel “we were travelling”
The form given above has been traditionally labelled the (remote) past continuous tense (pct) which has been described as indicating “an action which was in progress . . . at some time in the past” (Davey 1973: 87). The pct, typically a fully finite form, is a compound utilising an auxiliary verb -be (also realised as -ye and optionally elided), which encodes the notion of ‘being’, preceded by the past tense marker -a-. As complement to this auxiliary, the participial indicates the temporal domain or durational situation of this being. In the illustration above the being is restricted to the temporal domain of ‘travelling’. The pct encodes, in terms of this durational basis, an unbounded situation as opposed to an event. It is important to note in this respect that the pct does not as a whole form the durative background of a contingent event as does the participial on its own. Rather, the pct indicates an independent ‘scene’. In narrative, pcts usually cluster together to form the initial settings of the tale which functions as an orientation to the body of the story events. Consider the following example:
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(8) a.
kwakukho umntwana ekwakusithiwa ngujon nabanye It-pct-it-present child part-it-pct-said cop-John with-others abantwana bakokwabo children of-home “There once was a child called John and other children at home.” b. ke ngoku ke lo mntwana wayengathandwa kokwabo Then now then this child he-pct-neg-like-pass cop-home enikwa iinkonzo zombona he-part-give-pass husks of-maize “Now then, this child was not liked at home, being given maize husks.”
In such settings there is no focus on the movement of narrative time as such. Rather, the durative setting orientating the audience to the story world is described before the events occurring in this backdrop are described. The following examples illustrate the use of pcts, not in the initial setting, but in the body of the narrative itself: (9) a.
laflka ijoni labuza kumvundla ukuba khange He-pct-arrive soldier he-pct-ask loc-rabbit that ever uwubone na umvundla he-it-see-subj ques rabbit “The soldier arrived and asked the rabbit whether it had seen a rabbit at all.” b. umvundla nawo wayenxiba indevu apha phezu komlomo Rabbit with-it he-pct-wear moustache here above of-mouth (“The rabbit was wearing a moustache here above the mouth”) c. wabuza umvundla unjani lo mvundla uwufunayo He-cons-ask rabbit it-how this rabbit you-it-want-rel “The rabbit asked, ‘What’s this rabbit like that you’re looking for’?”’
In these examples we may see that pct clauses are clearly off the event line, representing background information. The pct forms are thus backgrounding in function. They encode, not the bounded events holding only for the moment of their occurrence, but temporally unbounded situations which hold for the narrative world in general. Furthermore, unlike the participial, the pct indicate independent scene. We are now in a position to see how the concepts of grounding and connexity are fundamental to the organisation of the Xhosa verbal system. This can be represented in the following diagram:
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Table 1. Grounding and Coherence relations GROUNDING:
Foregound event
Background non-event
COHESION: Consecutive mood
Participial mood
Indicative mood
Non-continuouns Aspect
Connected
Nonconnected
. Discussion The framework proposed here is an attempt to show that in Xhosa there is a systematic basis, in terms of discourse functions, to what have been labelled fairly arbitrarily as ‘moods’ . Through this paper, I hope to have demonstrated the value of an orientation to language which holds that its nature can and should be explained in terms of factors outside of language , as narrowly conceived by some branches of both traditional taxonomic and current theoretical language study. Without this orientation that does not see language as the product of a separate ‘module’, we will remain at the whim of a view of language that is effectively removed, abstracted and isolated from the humans whose cognitive activities it is supposed to define. From this perspective, it is hoped that the concept of connexity, in addition to that of grounding as explored in this paper, may allow some insight into language study as an essentially human endeavour.
References Carlson, R. (1992). Narrative, subjunctive and finiteness. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 13, 59–85. Davey, A. S. (1973). The Moods and Tenses of the Verb in Xhosa. Master’s dissertation, University of South Africa, Pretoria. Du Plessis, J. A. (1978). Isixhosa 4. Goodwood: Audiovista. Eyesenck, M. W. (1984). A Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Givón, T. (1987). Beyond Background and Foreground. In R. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse (pp. 175–187). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Givón, T. (1990). Syntax: A Functional Typological Introduction, Vol. 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gough, D. (1986). Xhosa Narrative: An Analysis of the Production and Linguistic Properties of Discourse with Particular Reference to Iintsomi Texts. Doctoral thesis, Rhodes University. Hopper, R. J. & S. A. Thompson (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language, 56, 251–299. Khoali, B. T. (1993). Cole’s Dodean model: Issues and Implications. South African Journal of African Languages, 13(1): 29–32. Longacre, R. (1981). A spectrum and profile approach to discourse analysis. Text, 1(4), 337–359. Poulous, G. (1982). Issues in Zulu Relativization. Department of African Languages, Rhodes University. Communication No. 7. Thompson, S. A. (1987). “Subordination” and Narrative Event Structure. In R. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse (pp. 435–452). Philadelphia: Benjamins. Tomlin, Russell S., L. Forrest, M.-M. Pu, & H. K. Myung (1997). Discourse Semantics. In T. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Structure and Process (pp. 63–111). London: Sage. Ungerer, F. & H.-J. Schmid (1996). An introduction to cognitive linguistics. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Wald, B. (1975). Variation in the System of Tense Markers of Mombassa Swahili. Doctoral thesis, Columbia University, New York. Wallace, S. (1982). Figure and Ground: The Interrelationships of Linguistic Categories. In P. J. Hopper (Ed.), Tense-aspect between Semantics and Pragmatics (pp. 201–223). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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chapter
Discourse organization and coherence Ming-Ming Pu University of Maine at Farmington
This chapter investigates discourse organization and coherence from a cognitive perspective and demonstrates that stories produced in different forms and languages are strikingly similar with regard to their structural organization, coherence building, and event coding. Speakers/writers are generally quite sensitive to the episode boundary information, and organize narratives into separate yet interrelated episodes. They seek and achieve coherence through establishing story frame, focusing on the central character, systematically tracking references, and maintaining topic continuity. The discourse organization and coherence establishment seems to be a systematic and even automatic process, which is governed by our underlying cognitive activities and driven by our subconscious attempt to enable our addressee to establish mental representations congruent with our own in discourse processing. Keywords: discourse structure, discourse coherence, cognitive activities, episode and episode boundaries
.
Introduction
Researchers in various fields have investigated and shed light on how speakers and writers organize discourse to achieve coherence in terms of thematic structure and information units. It has been shown that coherence is not only an observable artifact of the external text or discourse, but also a cognitive phenomenon in the mind that processes the discourse. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), for example, propose the construction of a mental representation of text as consisting of both microstructure and macrostructure, reflecting local and global organization respectively. Similarly, Givón (1995: 63) argues that text is represented in part as a network of connected nodes (chunks). This network structure displays both hierarchical organization, where nodes are connected both ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ to other hierarchically adjacent nodes, and sequential chaining, where nodes are connected to both preceding and following sequentially adjacent nodes. Furthermore, many studies (Chafe 1992, 1994; Fox 1987; Lichtenberk 1996; Pu 1995; and
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Tomlin 1987) have not only explicated the importance of speakers’ and writers’ underlying cognitive constraints but also their awareness of the addressee in discourse processing by signaling discourse units and prompting the information retrieval. These studies demonstrate how speakers employ explicit versus implicit anaphora to mark changes of episode, shifts in location, and interventions of main storyline. Chafe (1992, 1994), in particular, describes the constraints upon speakers in casual and unplanned conversation and how speakers assess the current status of a given idea/event/referent in their listeners’ mind and systematically verbalize it as given/old, accessible, or new information in an ongoing discourse. Although researchers have agreed that cognitive operations underlie the overall discourse structure to guarantee coherence in the external discourse, it is not always clear how mental representations of discourse are construed during comprehension, and how they are realized during production. One of the most evasive and slippery issues is discourse structure, which is paramount in the study of discourse organization and coherence, but the structural units such as episode, paragraph, event, theme, etc. are not conceptually and theoretically well defined and prone to misinterpretation. The identification and discussion of mental representations of these discourse units, on the other hand, are also problematic because they are based mostly on some text-oriented notions such as ‘paragraph’, ‘discourse segment’, ‘sequence of thematically related sentences’ etc., and hence risk the problem of circularity. While also taking a cognitive approach to discourse organization and coherence, the present study aims to investigate cognitive activities underlying discourse organization and coherence, specifically the structure of episodes and its mental representations. The study first tries to define and identify, independent of linguistic information, conceptual structures of episode, and then addresses the issue of how these structural units are construed and represented in discourse comprehension and production. The study uses narrative data elicited from both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers to demonstrate the universal characteristics of discourse organization and information packaging regardless of the speakers’ linguistic background since discourse processing is constrained by general human cognitive activities (Chafe 1994; Gernsbacher 1990; Tomlin 1987). The following section details a narrative study, and in subsequent sections I will consider a number of arguments and claims that have appeared in the literature relating to discourse structure and coherence, using speech and written samples taken from the study.
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. The narrative study The narrative study was conducted to examine how speakers process incoming information and organize it into a structured and coherent discourse, and how they deliver such a structure in discourse production. The different conditions and tasks were designed to test if the structural unit of episode has psychological relevance, and what are common characteristics or ‘universal rules’ of structural organization and information packaging in producing narratives, given some general cognitive activities underlying discourse processing.
Episode and episode boundary The present study argues that the basic structural unit of narrative discourse is the episode, which corresponds to the speaker’s mental representations of a narrative. Since the construction of episodes plays a crucial role in the present study, definitions are given below for the theoretical concepts of episode and episode boundary, which are drawn basically from Chafe (1994), van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), Pu (1995) and Tomlin (1987). An episode is defined cognitively as a memory unit in the flow of information processing. Linguistically, it is a semantic unit subsumed under a macroproposition, which functions to unify ideas of the unit. The macroproposition is generally a topical expression, featuring a global predicate (that denotes a global event or actions), a specific cast of participants, and/or time and place coordinates. Episodes in a discourse may be of varying length or scope. An episode is conceived of as a part of a whole discourse, having a beginning and an end. The beginning and end of an episode are defined in terms of propositions subsumed under the same macroproposition, while the propositions preceding the first and following the last proposition of an episode should be subsumed under different macropropositions. The transition between macro-propositions represents episode boundaries. They are normally marked by expressions denoting changes in time, place, scenery, participants, perspective, possible world, etc. Cognitively, boundaries may also be manifestations of attention shifts. Studies have shown the existence of episodes as chunks in narrative memory and episode-formation appears to be a virtually automatic process in story processing (Black & Bower 1979; Guindon & Kintsch 1982). Other research into story comprehension (Haberlandt, Berian, & Sandson 1980; Gernsbacher 1990) suggests that cognitive processes inside an episode are different from those at or around the episode. Comprehenders map the current information onto a developing structure within an episode when incoming information coheres with the previously presented information, while they shift from actively building one structure to start another between episodes when incoming information is less co-
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herent. The process of shifting costs more mental effort than mapping and thus comprehenders have more difficulty accessing information that occurs after an episode boundary than before a boundary (Anderson, Garrod, & Sanford 1983). It seems that comprehenders are quite sensitive to the cues that prompt them to carry out either a mapping or a shifting process. On the other hand, in order to convey their intended message successfully, speakers and writers must give their addressees signals or cues to help them build up a discourse representation congruent with his/her own. The present study aims to investigate and demonstrate how speakers and writers organize narrative discourse into episodes during narrative production and how they orally convey the structural network to their addressees.
Stimulus material The stimulus material came from a children’s picture storybook (Krahn 1981), which has no written text and depicts several adventures of a little boy on a certain day. The book consists of 8 episodes, each of which has 8 pictures and is headed by a subtitle denoting a particular adventure with a picture clock showing the time of the day. In each of the episodes, the main character, a little boy named Alex Pumpernickel, is accompanied by a different secondary character of either the same- or different-gender. Three episodes were chosen for our study. A total of 24 pictures (Krahn, F. (1981). Here comes Alex Pumpernickel! Boston: Little, Brown & Co), with the subtitle and picture clock removed, were made into an adapted picture book of 12 pages (2 pictures per page). The purpose of the experiment was to establish whether the subjects would perceive, organize, produce and retrieve the non-verbal information as episodes, as would be predicted by the episode theory (Schank & Ableson 1977; van Dijk & Kintsch 1978). Visual rather than the verbal material was chosen because (1) the processing and organization of information is considered general, rather than languagespecific cognitive activities (Bagget 1979); (2) with the subtitle and picture clock removed from the stimulus material, the subjects’ recognition of episodes in this experiment would be independent of linguistic information, and we would thus avoid risking the problem of circularity in defining and identifying episodes in discourse; and (3) the picture book consists of separate but related episodes. If episodes have psychological content, subjects should be able to identify and store these episodes as memory representations, and recall them verbally as separate episodes.
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. Method and procedures There are two narrative tasks for the subjects: an oral on-line (i.e., impromptu) description of the picture sequence and a recall of the pictures afterwards. The instruction was presented to the subjects in written form, which did not mention or suggest that the pictures ‘tell a story’ or ‘stories’. In the on-line task, subjects were asked to describe each picture while paging through the picture sequence for the first time. It was expected, as explained earlier, that subjects would recognize visual cues at the beginning of an episode, and would employ larger coding material at such junctures, to lay a foundation for the new substructure and signal the shift to the listener. In the recall task following the on-line description, subjects were asked to retell the picture sequence from memory. The purpose of the dual-narrative task was to see how a speaker would construct a narrative without a specific discourse plan (i.e., without knowing what was happening next), as contrasted to a planned or structured oral narrative from memory. The recall task, on the other hand, was carried out in either oral or written forms: half of the subjects retold the story orally and the other half wrote the recall. Forty subjects participated voluntarily in the experiment. Twenty were native English speakers from Northern State University in the United States, and twenty were native Mandarin Chinese speakers from the Central China University of Finance and Economics in China. All subjects are undergraduates and about half in each group are women.
. Results and discussion In general, the speakers and writers of both languages produced very similar narratives in terms of episode organization, event coding and information patterning. They recognized the three episodes in the picture sequence and used them in their story construction. They followed the main story-line and encoded the important events of each episode. They also processed story information such as given-new and background-foreground in a consistent way. The remaining sections of this paper will discuss the general characteristics of episode construction, information processing and event encoding. I will use oral and written narrative samples from both languages to illustrate these characteristics, with each example coded to capture: the relevant language (E-English or C-Chinese); task type (O-on-line or R-recall); recall mode (RS-spoken recall or RW-written recall); and the subject number (1 to 20).
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Episodic structure Many studies have demonstrated the existence of episodes as memory chunks in discourse processing. Speakers, who are constrained by working memory limitations, would try to organize the overall discourse contributions into smaller semantic units, each of which is dominated by a macroproposition. Comprehenders, on the other hand, would capture this episode structure in their mental representation by building separate substructures to represent each episode (Gernsbacher 1990) because whatever portion of the incoming information that is to survive in longer-term memory must be translated rapidly into some form of episodic mental representation (Givón 1995: 62). The results of the present study give support to the psychological relevance of episode structure in discourse production and comprehension: although there was no written/linguistic clue in the stimulus material suggesting there were three episodes in the picture sequence, subjects of both languages recognized them, often with overt remarks. In both on-line and recall conditions, subjects consistently organized the picture sequence into three semantic units in their narrative production (as was intended by the author in the original picture storybook), and frequently signaled and separated the units linguistically. More interestingly, in the recall task five subjects (three English and two Chinese) could only recall two of the episodes at first and then realized that one (always the middle) episode was missing from their recall. The way they finally recalled the second episode (‘Boy and Fly’) was informative. Each subject first recalled the macroproposition, and then the whole episode came flowing out. Some exact wordings used by the subjects are: “Well, I remembered it’s the boy chasing the fly”, “Okay, it’s about the kid swatting a fly,” or “Yes, it’s about the child and the fly.” The memory relapse in the recall task gives further evidence to the existence of episodes as chunks in memory and the monitoring role that macropropositions play in discourse processing: information is organized, stored, retrieved, and forgotten as episodes, and macropropositions function to unify ideas of the episode. In the on-line description task, speakers were very sensitive to the nonlinguistic cues of episode shifts, such as change of location, change of scenery, change of activities, and change of characters, which were used in building episode structure. Most speakers recognize boundaries between excerpts in the picture sequence and mark the beginning of a new episode in their oral narratives accordingly. A new episode normally starts with an adverbial phrase of time or location, as exemplified by the following. (1) Outside in the backyard, the boy is playing tennis with a girl. . . .
(EO3)
(2) And then, the boy is walking on the street. . . .
(EO6)
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(3) zhe yi.ding shi ling.yi.ge gu.shi, yin.wei zhe nan.hai xian.zai zai this must be another story because this boy now at ke.ting li, . . . living-room in “This must be another story because the boy is now in a living room. . . . ” (CO2) (4) ran.hou, zhe nan.hai chu.qu he yi.ge nu.hai da wang.qiu, . . . then this boy go-out with a girl play tennis “After that, the boy goes out to play tennis with a girl. . . . ” (CO4)
In most cases, the adverbial phrase is accompanied by a reinstatement of the major character with a full NP. The function of the full NP, however, is two fold. First, building a new mental structure for a new episode consumes more cognitive effort on the part of the speaker, for whom information of the previous episode becomes less accessible at this point (Chafe 1994; Gernsbacher 1990). The speakers would then use a full NP or a proper name to quickly reactivate reference because “[t]he less predictable the information is, or the more important, the more prominent or larger coding it will receive” (Givón 1993: 196, emphases in the original). Second, the use of a full NP at the beginning of a new episode serves as a signal to the listener, who needs to build a new mental structure for the incoming episode. In the written narrative the episode boundary was made even more explicit. In addition to adverbial phrases, eight out of ten English writers and all ten Chinese writers used blank lines, numerical devices, or paragraph structure with or without indentation to separate episodes. Of the two English subjects who recalled their story in one written piece without any visual demarcation, one managed to indicate a new episode by repeating and underlining an adverb at the beginning of the episode: “next, . . . ”. The general characteristics of the language user’s perception and formation of discourse units demonstrate the nature of discourse organization and the importance of episode structure in language production and comprehension. The story information was not only hierarchically organized and produced as a series of episodes, but also so stored and retrieved.
Achieving and maintaining coherence This section examines how speakers construct macrostructures for episodes, and how they relate events within an episode both linearly and hierarchically to achieve local and global coherence. Our data show that during the on-line description task when the episodic structure was being built, subjects tried to seek coherence both externally in non-verbal materials and internally in mind. Specifically, they construed a story frame (with temporal and spatial reference and central character
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effect), and maintained referential and topical continuity to achieve coherence of the discourse.
Story frame Although ‘story-telling’ was not mentioned in the instruction of the narrative tasks, almost all subjects were prepared to tell a story of some sort at the beginning. They tried to organize the not-yet-known information into a familiar and controllable structure or frame – a story, thus making their first attempt at obtaining discourse coherence. The story frame sets a macrostructure for the discourse, to which incoming information can be related and explained. The following examples are the typical start of the on-line description. (5) Once upon a time, there was a little boy
(EO4)
(6) The story starts with a boy . . .
(EO2)
(7) zai zhe.ge xiao gu.shi li, wo kan.jian yi.ge nan.hai, . . . at this little story in I see a boy “In this little story, I see a boy . . . ”
(CO7)
(8) xian.zai wo yao gei ni.men jiang yi.ge gu.shi now I want to you tell a story “Now I’m going to tell you a story . . . ”
(CO3)
Once the ‘story-frame’ was set but little other information was available, subjects tried to derive macropropositions as quickly as possible so as to relate subordinate actions and information to the macro-proposition (see also Guindon & Kintsch 1982; Kintsch 1995) in a story. One such macroproposition is the establishment of the central character. Subjects quickly identified the central character at the beginning of on-line task (as shown in (5)–(7) above), and then concentrated on his actions and purposes to achieve discourse coherence. Though required to describe each picture in the storybook, which contains a great deal of information, subjects did not describe indiscriminately everything in the picture sequence but were more concerned about the actions and goals of the central character, and the cause and outcome of the actions and events. They elaborated on the pictures that were regarded as important in carrying out the story line, and explained the events and actions that added to the understanding of the story, but only touched upon (some even omitted) the pictures that were not critically related to the theme of the story. Our data show that the overall mentions of the main character are more than twice as many as those of any secondary character. In the first episode (‘Boy and Tennis Ball’), for example, despite both characters appearing together in each of the eight pictures, two thirds of the subjects focused on the boy, describing his actions and adventure in detail yet mentioned the other character only occasionally. Examples are given in the following passages.
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(9) He’s climbing up the window, and he’s looking into the house for the ball. He goes into the house and tries to find the ball, . . . and all the while, the little girl is standing there, watching. . . . (EO1) (10) ta pa.shang chuang.zi, wang wu li kan, ta faxiang na qiu zai he climb-up window toward room in see he find that ball at yige guo li. yu.shi ta pa.jin wu li, xiang ba na.ge qiu cong guo a pot in so he get-in room in want om that ball from pot li lao chu.lai, . . . zui.hou ta ba qiu lao.le chu.lai, shang.mian in scoop out finally he om ball scoop out around-side zhan.le xu.duo tang.xi ran.hou ta he xiao nu.hai ba qiu na.dao stick much candy then he and little girl om ball take-to (om=object marker) hou.yuan li, . . . back-yard in “He climbs up the window and looks into the room, and he finds the ball in a pot. So he gets into the room and tries to scoop the ball out of the pot. . . . Finally he gets the ball out of the pot, which is wrapped in sticky candy. Then he and the little girl take the ball to the back-yard, . . . ” (CO2)
The central character is the back-bone of the story, chaining actions and events throughout the main storyline. Focusing on the central character is a very important strategy in storytelling, which affords speakers to be selective in presenting the incoming information, enables them to stay on the main storyline, and hence allows them to obtain and maintain coherence. The ‘central character’ strategy plays an important role not only in achieving discourse coherence but also in facilitating comprehension. A story is considered coherent and easy to comprehend as long as the actions, intentions and purposes of the central character are stated and explained, while those of secondary characters can be marginalized. Indeed, as observed by Garrod and Sanford (1988: 174), “an unexplained action on the part of a main character results in a delay to processing the sentence in which that action occurs, while such an action on part of a secondary character results in no such delay.” Accompanying the central character in the early stage of the on-line task is the set-up of the temporal and spatial reference, which not only delineates the story frame but also functions to mark the shift or transition at the beginning of a new episode. For example, (11) Once upon a time, there was a little boy, . . .
(EO4)
(12) Late that day, the boy is out on the street walking, . . .
(EO11)
(13) tian wan.le, nanhai hui.dao wu.li, . . . it late boy return house “It’s late now, the boy goes back to the house, . . . ”
(CO2)
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(14) yige qing.lang.de xiawu yige nanhai he yige nuhai zai . . . a fine afternoon a boy and a girl are “One fine afternoon, a boy and a girl are playing . . . ”
(CO3)
It is of interest here that the time of an episode or events only existed in the speaker’s mind since nothing in the visual stimuli themselves indicates time with the removal of the picture clock. The spatial reference, on the other hand, is established when speakers take cues from the pictures. As mentioned previously, these subjects were very sensitive to boundary information and employed them in encoding events. In the picture sequence the most readily available episode-shift information was a change of location, such as from a living room to a street, from the street to a backyard, etc. Subjects immediately recognize the shift, and mark it linguistically in their narratives to lay the foundation, so to speak, for the new episode. Some of the examples are: (15) Outside on the street, the boy . . .
(EO7)
(16) xian.zai zhe nan.hai chu.xian.zai da.jie shang. . . now this boy appear at street on “Now the boy appears on the street. . . . ”
(CO5)
Once temporal and/or spatial references are set globally, they are maintained locally throughout an episode to give the listener a coherent time frame and the spatial orientation of the episode. The following examples contain some of the typical episode-medial time and locative phrases, which help achieve and maintain local coherence of the episode. (17) Just as he puts the newspapers together, . . . (18) He climbs onto a chair next to the couch, . . . (19) deng lao tai.tai yi zhuan.guo jie jiao, . . . wait old lady just turn-over street corner “As soon as the old lady turns around the street corner . . . ” (20) chuangzi li shi yi.ge chu.fang, . . . window in is a kitchen “It’s a kitchen (inside the window), . . . ”
(EO6) (EO15) (CO9)
(CO17)
The use of temporal and spatial reference is another attempt that speakers make to obtain and maintain coherence of the discourse. Although explicit cohesion markers, as mentioned above, occurred frequently in our narrative data, they are not necessary nor sufficient to make a discourse coherent. During the on-line description, subjects also maintained temporal and spatial coherence implicitly by connecting the order of events sequentially, and moreover, they sought and achieved discourse coherence by relating subordinating actions and events hierarchically to the higher level goal or dominant macroproposition of the episode,
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once the temporal and/or spatial framework was set. This was shown in speakers’ descriptions when they were puzzled by an action or a motive of the central character in an episode. Though unsure of the goal or purpose of a particular action or scene, subjects would try to tie it to the macroproposition of the episode. For example, in the second episode (‘boy and fly’), many speakers were not certain why the boy was messing with the newspapers in pictures 6 and 7. They paused, hesitated, and/or expressed uncertainty about the ongoing event, but managed nevertheless to come up with explanations that contribute to the theme of the episode, viz., the boy’s attempt to swat a fly. The following excerpts exemplify such an effort. (21) He’s going through the papers . . . I guess he’s looking for the fly.
(EO8)
(22) ran.hou, ta ba bao.zhi pao qi.lai, ren.de dao.chu dou.shi. ta zai then he om newspaper throw up throw everywhere he is ta yi.ding shi xiang rang na.ge cang.ying fei chu.lai he must is want let that fly fly out “Then, he throws the newspapers everywhere. He must be trying to get the fly to fly out.”
Furthermore, when a surprising outcome or climax occurred late in an episode, subjects would try to make sense out of it and incorporate it into the developing episode, especially if it did not meet the speaker’s earlier expectations. For example, in the third episode (‘boy and lobster’), the main character’s true objective did not become evident until the 7th picture, in which the boy opens the bag he helps the old lady carry. Every subject described the event and many commented: (23) The boy didn’t really want to help the lady, he was just too curious.
(EO9)
(24) ta hen xiang zhi.dao bao li cang.zhe she.me dong.xi, suoyi ta cai he very want know bag in hide what thing so he just yao bang.mang offer help “He was curious about what’s in the bag. That was why he offered help.” (CO13)
Our narrative data have given further support to the linear and hierarchical organization of discourse, demonstrating how subjects link micropropositions to one another at a local level, and at the same time relate them to the global macroproposition of an episode. In general, subjects used cues from the picture sequence to maintain local coherence, but more importantly, it is their extensive background knowledge, along with the picture information, that enabled them to achieve global coherence, i.e., to infer goals and plans, and use them to explain actions and events throughout discourse. These inferences hold over large distances in a
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network and are made regardless of local coherence being possible (Trabasso, Suh, & Payton 1995: 212). In the recall task, on the other hand, subjects used the same strategies in achieving temporal, spatial and thematic coherence, but were more organized and concise in their recall since they had already had the settings, plans, actions and goals of the episodes in mind and were freer in their choice of picture/event description. The following passages are exemplary of the orally recalled episode that follows the main story-line and describes only the major events. (25) The next episode has to do with the boy attempting to swat a fly. He is on a chair trying to swat a fly. He leaps off the chair to get the fly and swats the newspapers on his dad instead. His dad sits up, looks around, and loses the newspapers on the floor. The boy searches through the papers to find the fly swatter and once again goes after the fly. (ERS5) jia le. zai lu.shang kanjian yige (26) tian wan le, xiao nan.hai hui it dark little boy return home at street see an old lao taitai lin.zhe liang.ge hen chen.de daizi. xiao nan.hai hen xiang lady carry two very heavy bag little boy very want zhidao bao.li shi sheme jiu pao guo.qu yao bang lao tai.tai ti know bag in is what just run over want help old lady carry dai.zi. lao tai.tai hen gan.dong jiu ba yige dai.zi gei ta bei bag old lady very touched just om a bag give him carry dang lao tai.tai zhuan.shen jin.ru yi.ge xiao xiang.zi, xiao.hai when old lady turn enter a small alley little-kid gan.jin dun.xia.lai, ba dai.zi da.kai. mei xiang.dao dai.zi li hurriedly squat down om bag open not expect bag in pa.chu yi.zhi da long.xia, yao.le ta yi.kou. ta teng.de zhi.du, climb.out a big lobster bite him a.bite he hurt cry dan.ye zhi.hao wu.ke.nai.he.di geng.zai lao tai.tai houmian hui but have.to helpless follow old woman behind return jia.le home “It was late and the little boy went home. (He) saw an old lady on the street, carrying two heavy bags. The boy very much wanted to know what’s inside the bag, so (he) ran over to help the old lady. The old lady was touched and gave him a bag to carry. When the old lady turned into an alley, the kid hurriedly squatted down and opened the bag. Out climbed a big lobster unexpectedly and bit him. He was hurt and crying, and helplessly followed the old lady home.” (CRS2)
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Reference tracking Another implicit way of establishing and maintaining coherence is reference tracking, which subjects managed in consistent ways. It has long been noted that there is a correlation between the cognitive status of a referent and the linguistic form encoding the referent. Researchers have demonstrated that forms that signal the most restrictive cognitive status (in high focus) are always those with less or least phonetic content, namely unstressed pronouns, clitics, and zero pronominals (Chafe 1987; Givón 1989; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski 1993; Pu 1995; Tomlin & Pu 1991). Indeed, our narrative data show that once the central character, ‘the little boy’, was established at the beginning of the storytelling, it was very frequently encoded by pronominals (e.g., lexical and zero pronouns) throughout the remainder of the narrative because it was the focus of attention of subjects in their description tasks. The supporting character (i.e., the old lady, the man, and the little girl, respectively), on the other hand, has to reside mostly outside of subjects’ focus of attention due to the limited capacity of focal attention (Just & Carpenter 1992; Gathercold & Baddeley 1993; Gundel 1998), and therefore frequently referred to by full NPs. Examples (25) and (26) above are taken from the spoken recall data, where both subjects systematically pronominalized the central character and nominalized the secondary character within the episode, even though the secondary character (i.e., ‘his dad’ in (25) and ‘the old lady’ in (26)) was just mentioned in the preceding sentence. Examples (27) and (28) below are taken from the on-line task and the written recall respectively, which reveal the same patterns of reference tracking in the narrative. (27) A little boy is walking on the street. He meets an old lady carrying some bags. He asks the lady what’s in the bags, and the lady gives him one of the bags. The lady walks off and he’s holding the bag. . . . (EO11) (28) ta zhai.zai yi.ge yi.zi shang da cang.ying. cang.ying fei wang he stand-on a chair on swat fly fly fly toward sha.fa shang de yi.dui bao.zhi shang. ta hui.pai da quo.qu, sofa on a-pile newspaper on he raise-swatter hit over que bu.liao jin.xin.le bao.zhi di.xia tang.zhe.de yi.ge nanren zhe but not-expect awake newspaper under lie a man this nanren zheng tang zai sha.fa hang shui.jiao, bei ta da.xin.le, hen man just lie on sofa on sleep by him hit-awake very sheng.qi. nan.ren yi.xia.zi zuo.qi.lai, . . . angry man suddenly sit.up “He was standing on a chair to swat the fly. The fly flew toward a pile of newspapers on the couch. He raised the swatter to hit it, only to wake a man who was lying under the newspapers. The man was sleeping on the couch and was (CRW2) very angry when woke up by him. The man sat up suddenly . . . ”
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Table 1. Reference-tracking results English
NP PN Zero Total
Chinese
Central N %
Secondary N %
Central N %
N
246 494 191 931
297 116 40 453
239 285 347 871
313 29 58 400
26.42 53.06 20.52
65.56 25.61 8.83
27.44 32.72 39.84
Secondary % 78.25 7.25 14.50
Total 1095 924 636 2655
Table 2. Boundary results for all tasks NP English Chinese Total
50 51 101
On-line task PN Zero 10 9 19
0 0 0
NP 29 28 57
Oral Recall PN Zero 1 2 3
0 0 0
Written Recall NP PN Zero
Total
28 30 58
120 120 240
2 0 2
0 0 0
Table 1 indicates the results of anaphor use in tracking reference in our narrative data, in which the tokens of full NPs (=NP), lexical pronouns (=PN), and zero anaphors (=Zero) and their respective distribution rates are calculated with regard to the central and secondary character. Table 1 shows the distinct patterns of tracking characters in narrating the story: subjects focused their attention on the central character throughout the narrative (the anaphoric tokens for the central character are twice as many as those for the secondary characters), and consistently used less explicit coding forms to refer to it due to its restrictive or privileged cognitive status. On average, lexical and zero pronouns account for about 73% of all anaphors referring to the main character, whereas these reduced forms account for only about 28% of all references made to the supporting characters. Also of interest in the reference management is the ‘boundary effect’, which accounts for the relatively higher rate of full NPs referring to the central character (about 27% on average), as discussed briefly in the section of Episodic Structure. Although the central character of the story remains the same throughout the three episodes, subjects would nonetheless use a full NP (e.g., a definite or demonstrative NP, or a repeated proper name) to reinstate the referent at the beginning of a new episode, regardless of its referential distance (i.e., the number of clauses between the current and the last mention of the referent; see Givón 1987). The boundary results are presented in Table 2, where the alternative anaphoric forms used at the beginning of an episode for the first mention of the central character are listed for each of the narrative tasks. The boundary effect is found to be very strong in our narrative study. In the on-line task, the majority of subjects (13 in Chinese and 14 in English groups)
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used a full NP for the first mention of the central character in each episode. In the recall task, be it oral or written, when subjects had established the three episodes in their mental representations, the boundary effect is shown to be even stronger: the overwhelming majority (19 in Chinese and 18 in English) consistently used a full NP to reinstate the central character at the beginning of each of the three episodes. The boundary effect is again a manifestation of our cognitive constraints and activities underlying the pronominalization process. Within an episode when speakers’ attention sustains, a referent that has been focused on (e.g., the central character) can keep its cognitively privileged status of being most accessible and identifiable, and speakers would use a less explicit anaphor to code the referent. However, between episodes when speakers’ attention shifts, a referent that has been focused on would lose its privileged activation status due to the change in the memorial and attentional process and becomes less accessible, at which juncture speakers would use an explicit anaphor to reactivate the referent. Not only is speakers’ referential choice governed by their own cognitive activities, but it is also based partially on their assessment of the hearers’ cognitive status with respect to a particular referent in order to facilitate comprehension. Speakers would use pronominals for the central character within an episode to maintain referential coherence and to keep listeners focused on the same character. At the beginning of a new episode, however, they would facilitate listeners’ shifting process by using a self-defining NP for the quick and easy reactivation of the same referent because shifting is cognitively more costly than mapping, and thus comprehenders have more difficulty accessing information that occur after a unit boundary than within a boundary (Gernsbacher 1990).
Topic continuity Closely related to the strategy of reference tracking is the establishment of topic continuity, another important means of maintaining local discourse coherence. Topic continuity is best embodied in a topic chain that consists of several clauses over a span of discourse, within which each clause is understood as being about the same topic (Li & Thompson 1979: 33). In a topic chain, the topic is set up in the first clause and typically left unspecified (i.e., with zero anaphora) in subsequent clauses because its referent is most accessible, identifiable and recoverable from discourse context. It has been argued that topic chains are largely responsible for the prevalence of zero anaphora in Chinese discourse. Indeed, our recall data show that topic chains are a common device used by Chinese speakers in their coding of events within an episode, where a topic persists over a span of discourse. For example,
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(29) ta zhan.zai yi.zi.shang, ju.zhe cang.yin pai, kan.jian cang.ying luo he stand in chair-on raise swatter see fly fall zai bao.zhi shang, jiu hao.bu.yu.yu.di pai.le xia.qu, que bu.liao at newspaper on just not.hesitate swat down but not-expect pai.zai yi.ge ren shen.shang, . . . hit-at a man body “He stood on a chair, Ø poised his flyswatter, Ø saw the fly fall onto a pile of newspapers, and Ø swung the flyswatter down without hesitation, but Ø hit a man instead . . . ” (CRS15) (30) ta zou shang.qian, re.xin.di yao bang lao nai.nai na na.ge xiao he walk forward eagerly offer help old granny carry that small bao, jie.guo cheng nai.nai guai.wan shi tou.tou da.kai kou.dai, bag end-up as granny turn-corner time stealthily open bag jie.guo fa.xian shi yi.dai pang.xie end-up find is a-bag crab “He steps forward, Ø eagerly offers to help the old granny carry a small bag, as the old granny turns the corner, Ø secretly opens the bag, and Ø finds a bag full of crabs.” (CRS9)
Passage (29) describes, in a topic chain, an action sequence of the boy swatting a fly. The topic chain is all about the topic, the boy. Once the topic is established in the first clause of the action sequence, it is encoded by a zero anaphor in the remainder of the sequence. In fact, topic chains can be formed in Chinese discourse regardless of whether there is intervening material between two clauses containing the topic, and regardless of whether there is another discourse entity that may cause referential ambiguity. Passage (30) above is another excerpt taken from the Chinese oral recall data. The topic is again ‘the boy’. Although there is an intervening clause in the middle of this event sequence, i.e., ‘as the old granny doesn’t pay attention,’ the topic chain resumes after the preceding clause mentioning a referent other than the topic. Moreover, there are two characters described in the event sequence, but the chain of zero anaphora refers unambiguously to the topic even though the last two zero anaphors could syntactically be coreferential with the secondary character, ‘the old lady’. It is not surprising that Chinese speakers used topic chains to keep the story flowing within an episode because Chinese is considered a discourse-oriented and topic-prominent language. English, in contrast, is regarded as a subject-oriented language, where an explicit subject is usually required. Nevertheless, the use of topic-chains is not uncommon in English recalls. When the topic persists over a span of discourse and can be easily identified, English speakers leave it unspecified, as do Chinese speakers. For example,
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(31) Then the curiosity of the boy got the better of him and he stopped. He opened up the bag, but Ø was bitten by this big lobster that jumped out of the bag. He was scared, Ø cried a little bit, Ø picked up the bag, and Ø followed his mother back into the house. (ERS12)
The excerpt is taken from the English spoken recall data, which describes the climax and ending of the third episode (Boy and Lobster). Within the episode, the central character, ‘the boy’ is repeatedly referred to by either a lexical pronoun or a zero anaphor because the referent is continuous and is already activated in the preceding clause. Nevertheless, example (31) shows that even zero anaphora and lexical pronouns are not used indistinguishably in English discourse. In this passage, the climax of the episode is described in two clauses (i.e., ‘he opened up the bag, but Ø was bitten . . .’), the first of which creates some kind of suspense and the second reveals the unexpected outcome. If a lexical pronoun had been used to refer to ‘the boy’ in the second clause, the tight cause-result sequence would have been broken, and the continuity of the climax lost. Similarly, the next four clauses describing the ending of the episode are chained by zero anaphora, illustrating an action sequence of the topic, viz., the boy. Much like Chinese, such topic chains indicate maximum coherence within an episode, which are used to encode action or event sequences of the same topic, among other things. However, when such maximum coherence is disrupted in an episode, the topic chain would end. In the above example, there is a transition or minor thematic gap between the climax and the ending of the episode (i.e., ‘he was scared, Ø cried a little bit . . .’), where the speaker used a lexical pronoun to end the last topic chain and starts the next one. The alternative use of lexical versus zero pronouns are further exemplified in (32) below. (32) The boy looks fairly upset. He starts to try to straighten the newspapers, but he (uh), kind of gives up, Ø gathers them together, Ø throws them toward the man, and Ø continues to pursue the fly with the flyswatter. (ERS15)
This passage depicts the boy’s persistent pursuit of the fly in the second episode (Boy and Fly), where the first clause describes how ‘the boy’ looks, and then a series of clauses are used to describe what he does (i.e., ‘he starts to try to straighten the newspapers , but he . . .’). Although the series of clauses are about the same topic, there is a minor thematic gap between the first and the rest of the clauses, namely, the boy’s attempt to straighten the newspapers is in conflict with his purpose to swat the fly. Hence the topic chain does not start at the first clause of the series, but after the occurrence of the minor discontinuity. Whereas zero anaphora is employed in the topic chain to describe the boy’s continued effort to pursue his goal, a lexical pronoun is used (‘but he (uh), kind of gives up . . .) at the juncture of the minor thematic gap.
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The correlation between minor thematic gap and the use of lexical pronoun within an episode is further evidenced in our on-line data. In the on-line description task, minor discontinuity exist not so much in the picture sequence of an episode as in subjects’ mental representations because the page-turning itself creates a gap between the description of the last pair of pictures and that of the next pair, at which point subjects did not know what to expect but had to get prepared to quickly comprehend and connect the incoming information with the previously presented information in order to tell a coherent story. Therefore after turning a page when the description continues, speakers would use a lexical pronoun to resume the central character even though the new pairs of pictures continue to depict the same action or event sequence of the same referent. For example, (33) The old lady walks off, and he’s holding the bag. And he looks into the bag, he looks interested. (laugh . . . ) A crab comes out and bites him on the hand. The (EO13) boy looks pretty upset, and he follows the old lady home. (34) ranhou ta ba bao.zhi ren xiang ta ba, ta kan.jian cang.ying then he om paper throw to his dad he see fly from cong bao.zhi li fei chu.lai, ta you qu zhui cang.ying le from paper in fly out he again go chase fly “He then threw the paper at his dad, he saw the fly fly out from inside the papers, and he ran after the fly again.” (CO11) (35) The boy goes through all the papers, looking for something, maybe the fly. The boy throws the newspaper onto the man on the couch. He then finds, . . . spots the fly, and he continues chasing the fly. (EO9) (36) ta gou bu.zhao cang.ying, suoyi ta cong yi.zi shang tiao xia.lai he reach not fly so he from chair on jump down da, dan ta que yi.pai.zi pai.zai bao.zhi shang swat but he instead a-swatter hit-at paper on “He can’t reach the fly, so he jumps off the chair, but he swats the newspapers instead.” (CO17)
The passages (33)–(36) describe the same scenes from the second and third episodes as do passages (29)–(32). However, the latter frequently employs topic chains, while the same topic is realized in the former by a more explicit anaphora in each of the clauses. As I have explained, the page-turning imposes a minor gap in our sustained attention in the description task, and an attention gap in mind results in a thematic discontinuity in text. The operation of topic continuity in both English and Chinese narrative production reflects a general cognitive principle in language processing: “Expand only as much energy on a task as is required for its performance” (Givón 1983: 18). In other words, the least explicit anaphora assumes the most thematic or topic continuity, while more explicit anaphora bridges thematic gaps or signals thematic discontinuity of various degrees.
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Discourse organization and coherence
. Conclusion The present study has demonstrated, with data taken from a narrative study, that stories produced in different forms and languages are strikingly similar with regard to their structural organization, coherence building, and event coding. Speakers and writers are largely responded to the episode boundary information, and generally organize their narratives into separate yet interrelated episodes. Within an episode when the incoming information is mapped onto the previously presented information, speakers sought and achieved local and global coherence through establishing story frame, focusing on the central character, systematically tracking references, and maintaining topic continuity. Between episodes when speakers (and listeners also) shift from actively building one structure to start another, they would try to mark the episode boundary. The boundary effect not only reflects speakers’ mental representations of episodes in discourse production, but also serves to signal to their addressee the advent of such a boundary in order to facilitate comprehension. In general, discourse organization and coherence establishment seems to be a systematic and even automatic process, which is governed by our underlying cognitive activities and driven by our subconscious attempt to enable our addressee to establish mental representations congruent with our own in discourse processing.
References Anderson, A., S. Garrod, & A. Sanford (1983). The accessibility of pronominal antecedents as a function of episode shifts in narrative text. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 35A, 427–440. Baggett, P. (1979). Structural equivalent stories in movie and text and the effect of the medium on recall. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 18, 333–356. Black, J. B. & G. H. Bower (1979). Episodes as chunks in narrative memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 18, 109–118. Chafe, Wallace (1992). The flow of ideas in a sample of written language. In W. C. Mann & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analysis of a fund-raising text (pp. 268–294). Amsterdam: John Benjamims. Chafe, Wallace (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fox, B. A. (1987). Anaphora in popular written English narratives. In R. S. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 121–167). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Garrod, S. C. & A. J. Sanford (1988). Thematic subjecthood and cognitive constrains on discourse structure. Journal of pragmatics, 12, 57–72. Gathercold, S. E. & A. D. Baddeley (1993). Working memory and language. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gernsbacher, M. A. (1990). Language comprehension as structure building. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
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Givón, T. (1983). Topic continuity and word order pragmatics in Ute. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: Quantitative cross-language studies (pp. 343–363). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (1987). Beyond foreground and background. In R. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 173–188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (1989). Mind, code and context: Essays in pragmatics. New Jersey: Erlbaum. Givón, T. (1993). English Grammar: A Function-based Introduction, Vol. I & II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (1995). Coherence in text vs. coherence in mind. In A. M. Gernsbacher & T. Givón (Eds.), Coherence in spontaneous text: Typological studies in language 31 (pp. 59–115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Guindon, R. & W. Kintsch (1982). Priming macrostructures. Technical report. Colorado: University of Colorado. Gundel, J. K. (1998). Centering Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy: Towards a Synthesis. In W. Walker, A. Joshi, & E. Prince (Eds.), Centering theory in discourse (pp. 183–198). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gundel, J., N. Hedberg, & R. Zacharski (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274–307. Haberlandt, K., C. Berian, & J. Sandson (1980). The episode schema in story processing. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 19, 635–651. Just, M. A. & P. A. Carpenter (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99(1), 122–149. Kintsch, W. (1995). How readers construct situation models for stories. In A. M. Gernsbacher & T. Givón (Eds.), Coherence in spontaneous text: Typological studies in language 31 (pp. 139–160). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Krahn, F. (1981). Here comes Alex Pumpernickel! Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Lichtenberk, F. (1996). Patterns of anaphora in To’aba’ita narrative discourse. In B. Fox (Ed.), Studies in anaphora: Typological studies in language 33 (pp. 379–411). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Li, Charles N. & S. A. Thompson (1979). Third person pronouns and zero-pronouns in Chinese discourse. In T. Givón (Ed.), Discourse and syntax (pp. 311–335). New York: Academic Press. Pu, Ming-Ming (1995). Anaphoric patterning in English and Mandarin narrative production. Discourse processes, 19(2), 279–300. Schank, Roger C. & R. P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tomlin, Russell S. (1987). Linguistic reflections on cognitive events. In R. S. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse: Outcome of a symposium (pp. 455–479). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Tomlin, R. S. & M. M. Pu (1991). The management of reference in Mandarin discourse. Cognitive linguistics, 2(1), 65–93. Trabasso, Tom, Soyoung Suh, & Paula Payton (1995). Explanatory coherence in understanding and talking about events. In A. M. Gernsbacher & T. Givón (Eds.), Coherence in spontaneous text: Typological studies in language 31 (pp. 189–214). John Benjamins: Amsterdam. van Dijk, T. & W. Kintsch (1978). Cognitive psychology and discourse: retelling and summarizing stories. In W. U. Dressler (Ed.), Current trends in text linguistics (pp. 61–81). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. van Dijk, T. & W. Kintsch (1983). Strategies in discourse comprehension. NY: Academic Press.
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Name index
A Achard, Michel , , Allan, Scott , Amberber, Mengistu Ameka, Felix Anderson, A. , Aoki, Haruo , Ariel, Mira Arin, Dorothea Neal , , , Aristotle , Aslin, R. Atalay, Besir , Athanasiadou, A. B Backhouse, A. E. Baddeley, Alan , Baggett, P. Bakema, Peter Baker, C. Ball, T. M. , Banfield, Ann Bardon, Geoff Barnlund, Dean Barsalou, Larry W. Basso, Keith , Bates, Elizabeth A. , , , Bauer, Laurie Bell, Allan , –, Bensch, P. A. Benveniste, Emile Berian, C. Bernárdez, Enrique Bever, T. Black, J. B. Blumstein, Sheila E. Boomer, David S. Boroditsky, L. Bower, G. H. Bowerman, Melissa , , , –,
Bownds, M. D. Brown, G. , , Brown, Roger , , Brugman, Claudia , , , Buck, Carl D. Bugenhagen, Robert D. Burgess, C. –, , C Carlson, R. Carpenter, K. , Carroll, David W. , , Carroll, Pat , , Casad, Eugene Chafe, Wallace , , –, , Chalkley, M. Chao, Y.-R. Chappell, Hilary Chater, N. Chomsky, Noam Church, Kenneth W. , , , , –, Cienki, Alan , Clark, Eve , , , , , , , , , Clark, Herbert H. , , , , , , , , , Cocude, M. Coleman, Linda Colston, H. Comrie, Bernard Contini-Morava, Ellen , , , Cooper, L. A. Coulson, Seana , , , , , , , Creider, Chet Croft, William , , , Cruse, D. A. , Cutler, Anne
D Davey, A. S. , , Davidse, Kristin –, , Dechert, Herbert W. , DeLancey, Scott , Denis, M. Deutsch, W. Deverson, Tony Dirven, René , Dixon, Robert M. W. , Doi, Takeo Du Plessis, J. A. , Duranti, Alessandro , E Elman, Jeffrey, L. , , , , , , , , Emanatian, Michele Enfield, Nick J. , Erman, Britt Evans, Zoe Eysenck, M. W. F Fauconnier, Gilles , , , , Feld, Steven Fillmore, Charles J. , , Finch, S. Fodor, Jerry Forceville, Charles Fortune, G. Fox, Barbara A. , Friedrich, Paul G Ganong, William F. Garrod, S. C. , Gaskell, M. Geeraerts, Dirk , , , ,
JB[v.20020404] Prn:21/04/2006; 9:24
F: HCP15NI.tex / p.2 (198-338)
Name index Gernsbacher, M. A. , , , , Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. , , , , Givón, Talmy , , , , , , , , , Glenberg, A. M. , , Goddard, Cliff , , , , , , – Goldberg, Adele , Gordon, Elizabeth , , Gough, Dave , , , Grice, Paul Grondelaers, Stefan , Guindon, R. , Gundel, J. Guthrie, Malcolm – H Haaften, Ton van Haberlandt, K. Halliday, M. A. K. , Hannan, M. Harkins, Jean Hart, B. Hasada, Rie Haspelmath, Martin Hawkins, Bruce Hebb, Donald Hedberg, N. Herskovits, Anna Hinton, Geoffrey Hoenkamp, Edward , , –, Holland, Dorothy Holmes, Janet , –, Hopper, R. J. Hutchins, Edwin Hymes, Dell I Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide , , , , , Ikegami, Yoshihiko Iwasaki, Shoichi , , J Jackendoff, Ray , , , –, Janda, Laura Johnson, Mark H. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Johnson-Laird, P. N. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Junker, Marie-Odile K Karmiloff-Smith, Annette , , Kay, Paul , Kempen, Gerard , , –, Kempson, Ruth Kendon, Adam Kennedy, J. M. Kerzel, D Khoali, B. T. Kintsch, W. , , , Kitto, Catherine Klahr, D. , Klatt, Dennis H. , Kohonen, T. Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyûjo Kornacki, Pawel Kosslyn, S. M. , Kövecses, Zoltán , , , , , Krahn, F. Krauss, R. M. Kuczaj, S. Kuipers, Joel C. Kuno, Susumu , , , Kurath, Hans Kuroda, S.-Y. , Kurtböke, N. Petek , L Lachter, J. Lakoff, George , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Lambrecht, Knud Langacker, Ronald W. , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , Leakey, Louis S. B. , Lebra, Takie Sugiyama Lee, P. U. , ,
Lehrer, Adrienne , Leinbach, J. , Lemmens, Maarten , , , , , , , , , Levelt, Willem J. M. –, , Levin, Beth , Li, Charles N. , , , , , , , , –, –, Li, Ping , , , , , , , , –, –, Liddle, Scott Lipka, Leonhard Longacre, R. Lucas, Margery M. Luchjenbroers, June , , , , , , , , , , , , Lund, K. –, ,
M Maclagan, Margaret A. , MacWhinney, Brian , , , , , , , , –, , , Mandler, Jean M. Mann, V. A. , Maratsos, M. Marchand, H. Marchman, Virginia A. Marslen-Wilson, William D. , , , Matlock, Teenie , , , , , , Matsumoto, Yo , McCawley, James D. McClelland, James L. , , , McCloud, S. McNeill, David , Metzler, J. Miikkulainen, R , Miller, G. A. Moiseeva, Nadezda Moliner, María Munn, Nancy D. Mühlhäusler, Peter Mylne, Tom , , ,
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F: HCP15NI.tex / p.3 (338-480)
Name index
N Newmeyer, F. J. Newport, E. Niemeier, Susanne Nishimura, Yoshiki Nolan, Francis J , Noordman, Leo Nooteboom, Sieb O Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. Onishi, Masayuki P Palmer, Gary , –, , –, , , , , , –, , , , Pardoen, Justine A. Parisi, D. , Parker, Simon Payton, Paula Pederson, E. , Peeters, Bert , Perelman, C. Pinker, Steven , , Plunkett, Kim , Prince, Alan Pu, Ming-Ming –, , , Pullum, Geoffrey K. Pustejovsky, James Pylyshyn, Zenon R Radden, G. Rader, Russell , , Raupauch, Marius , Redington, M. Reiser, B. J. Repp, Bruno H. , Rice, S. , Risley, T. Rumelhart, David , , , Ryder, Mary-Ellen
S Saffran, J. Sanders, G. , Sanders, Ted , Sandson, J. Sanford, A. J. , Sansò, A. Saussure, Ferdinand de Schank, Roger C. Schilperoord, Joost , , , , , , , Schmid, H.-J. Schvaneveldt, Roger W. Scollon, Ron Seidenberg, Mark Shepard, R. N. Shirai, Y. Silverstein, Michael , Skinner, Debra Slobin, Dan I. , , Smith, Carlota S. Spitulnik, Debra A. , , , Spitzer, M. , , Spooren, Wilbert , Stanwood, Ryo E. Starks, Donna , Stevens, Kenneth N. Stubbs, Michael Suh, Soyoung Sweetser, Eve , , , , , , , , , Swinney, David A. T Tabakowska, E. Talmy, Leonard , , , , , , , , , Tanenhaus, Michael K. Thompson, Sandra A. , , , Tomasello, Michael Tomlin, Russell S. , , , , Trabasso, Tom Traugot, Elizabeth Closs Travis, Catherine , , , , , ,
Trilling, Lionel Turner, Mark , , , , , , , Turner, Robin , , , , , , , Tversky, B. , , , Tyler, Lorraine K. , U Uehara, Satoshi , , –, , , – Ungerer, F V van Dijk, Teun A. , , Vandeloise, Claude Vendler, Z Verhagen, Arie , , , , – W Wald, B. Wallace, S. , – Warren, Beatrice , , , , , Warren, Paul , , , , , Watson, Catherine I. , , Whorf, Benjamin Lee –, , , , , Wierzbicka, Anna , , –, , , –, , , Wilkins, David P. , Williams, R. Wong Scollon, Suzanne Woodman, Claudia , , , , , Y Ye, Zhengdao Yoon, Kyung-Joo Z Zacharski, R.
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F: HCP15SI.tex / p.1 (48-178)
Subject index
A accessibility , accessible (information) , , , , , acquisition , , , , –, –, –, , , activation , , , , , , , , , , , actor , , –, , , , , , –, , addressee , , , , , , , affective, affected (case) , , , , , , , , –, , , , agent (case) , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , agreement , , , , , , ambiguity , , , , , , , , animacy , argument , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , association , , , , attention –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, Australian , , , , , , , , , , , Austronesian , , , , , autonomous B back-propagation , , background (v. foreground) , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, ,
Bantu , , , , –, , , , , , Basque , , , , , –, , , , – beats Blending Theory , , , (Conceptual Integration Theory) , , completion , composition , , elaboration , , blends , , , , , ‘bottom-up’ (processing) C case , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , categorization , , , , , causality , causation , , , , causative , , , , external , , , , , , –, , , , , , , internal , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , –, , non-causative causatives , , Chewa ,
Chinese , , , , , , , , –, – cluster tree , cognition , , , , , , , , , , cognitive domain , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , factors , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , Grammar –, , , , , –, , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , model , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , Semantics –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , status , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , – coherence , , , , , , –, , , cohesion
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F: HCP15SI.tex / p.2 (178-312)
Subject index cohesion markers ‘comfort zone’ , , –, completion , composition , , comprehension –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , concept , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , conceptual –, , , , , –, , , , , , –, –, , , , , –, , , , , –, , , , –, –, , , , –, , , , , –, , –, –, , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , blending , , –, –, , dependency , , structure , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, –, , conceptual blends Conceptual Integration Theory (Blending Theory) , , conceptualizer , , , , , configuration , , , –, , , connectionism , connexity , , , –, , constraint , , , construal , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , –,
construction , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , context , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , conversation –, , , , , cooperative corpus , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , cross-linguistic , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , cryptotype , –, –, – cue , , , , –, , cultural linguistics –, , culture , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , culture-specific , , , , , , , , , , D decontextualized (image) default , , , , , , , , , , , deictic , , , –, , – deixis dependence , , , discourse function discourse production , , discourse structure , , , , discourse unit discursives – Dokean (framework) domain , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , ,
double subject durative , , – Dutch , , , –, , –, , Dyirbal , , –, , E effective constructions egocentric , elaboration , , emblem , embodiment , , emergent , , , , , , , , , – emergent structure , emotions , , , , , , , , , , English , –, , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , –, , , , –, , , –, , , , , , , –, –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , –, – episode , – episode boundary , , , , ergative , , , , –, – event , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , –, –, , , , – experiencer , , –, , , , , –, , , experiential , , , , , , , , , , , , , , F F-space , , , – ‘inside’ , , , , , –, , , , , , , ‘outside’ , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , ,
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F: HCP15SI.tex / p.3 (312-446)
Subject index
feature overlap , , fictive (motion) , , , –, –, – figurative , –, , figure , –, , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , –, –, –, –, , , , –, , , focus (of attention) , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , force dynamics , , foreground (v. background) , , , Formal, Formalist , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , frame , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , –, function words , , , –, –, –, – functional , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , functorization –, , –, , G gender , , generativist gesture –, , , , –, , complex gestures , , deictic gestures simple gestures , given (information) , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , goal (case) , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , ground , , , , , , , , , , ,
grounding , , , , , , , , , , , H hidden units homophony , , , , I iconic , , , , , , Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) , , , ideology image schema (schemata) , Incremental Procedural Grammar indexicals , , Indo-European , , inference , innateness input , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, data (information) –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – spaces , , , , , , , , , –, – input spaces , instigator , , , integration , , , –, , , –, , , , interactive , , internal state –, , , – L Landmark (LM) , , , language acquisition , , , , –, , , , learning , , , –, –, –,
lexical co-occurrence –, , lexicalization, lexicalisation , –, , , –, , , , lexically driven , , , –, , , , M Mandarin (Chinese) , , , mapping , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , markers , , , , , , , , , , , , , case , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , cohesion evidential , , , , , nominative , , , –, –, tense , , , , , , , , , , , , topic , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – medium , , , , memory , , , , –, , , , , , , – mental spaces , , , , , , , , – metalanguage , , , , , , , metaphor , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , ,
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F: HCP15SI.tex / p.4 (446-579)
Subject index metaphorical scope , , model , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , computational , , , , , , –, , , , , , , module , mood (participial) , , – motion , , –, , , , mutual ground , , , , , , , , , , , information , , , –, , , , , , –, , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , ,
N narrative –, , , –, , , –, , , , , , network , , , , , , , –, , , , neural , , , , semantic –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , neutralization , , , complete , , , , , , , , , , partial , , , , , , , ,
new (information) , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , New Zealand English , , , , O om , –, , , , , , , output , , –, layer , pattern , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, P Pakeha , pantomime paradigm , , , , – parallel (processing) , , , , , , , , , path , , , , , , , patient , , , , , pattern completion pause patterns , , , , , , perception , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , performance perspective , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , polysemy , , , , , , , , –, problem solving processing –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , , bottom-up language –, , , , –, , , , , , –, ,
, , , , , –, –, , , , , , , –, , –, , , –, –, , , , , –, , , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , , , , , phonetic , , –, , , –, , , top-down production , , , , , , , , –, –, , –, –, , , , , –, , , , projection partial , , , , , , , , prominence , proposition , , , , , , , , prototype , , –, , , , , , , , , , , prototype effects , , R range (pseudo-goal) , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , recall , , –, – recognition , –, , , –, , recovery , , , , reference , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – register relativism role , –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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F: HCP15SI.tex / p.5 (579-695)
Subject index –, , –, , , , semantic –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , syntactic , , , , , –, , , –, , , rule , , , , , , , , , S salience , , , , , , , , scenario , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , – schema , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , schematicity schematization , , scope , , , , , , , , , , , , , self organization network – map – semantic extension , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , field , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , structure , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, –, , semanic space , semantics –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , cognitive –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , –, , formal , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Shona , , , , –, , sign language social , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , space , , , , , , –, , , , , , , –, , , –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , blended , , , , , , mental –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , physical , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , , , , , –, – Spanish , , , , , , –, , , , ,
speaker –, , , , , , , , –, –, , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , speech act , statistical learning , , , , structure building , , subjectivity , –, , , – subjectivity scale subordinate mood type , surrogate symbolic , , , , , , , , , , , , , , T Tagalog , , , , –, , , , temporal grounding tense , , , , , , , , , , , , conceptualization , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , continuous , , , , , , , , thematic coherence theme , , theory , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , thinking for speaking ‘top-down’ (processing) topic , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – topic continuity , , , training , , trajector , , , , , –, , , , –, trajectory (TR) , , , , transitive , , , , , , –, –, ,
JB[v.20020404] Prn:12/04/2006; 9:47
F: HCP15SI.tex / p.6 (695-750)
Subject index Turkish , , , , , , , , – turn-taking U unit , , , , , , , , , , , , processing –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , , universal –, , , , , usage-based V variation , , , , , , , , ,
verb , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , –, –, , , , , , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , –, , , , , ‘killing’ , , , , , –, , emotion , , –, , , , , , motion , , –, , , , processing –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , ,
viewpoint , , visual , , , , , –, , , , , , , voice , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
W weights , , –, , Whorf –, , , , , working memory , –,
X Xhosa , , , , , , ,
In the series Human Cognitive Processing the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 17 LANGLOTZ, Andreas: Idiomatic Creativity. A cognitive-linguistic model of idiom-representation and idiomvariation in English. 2006. xii, 326 pp. 16 TSUR, Reuven: ‘Kubla Khan’ – Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality and Cognitive Style. A study in mental, vocal and critical performance. 2006. xii, 252 pp. 15 LUCHJENBROERS, June (ed.): Cognitive Linguistics Investigations. Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries. 2006. xiii, 334 pp. 14 ITKONEN, Esa: Analogy as Structure and Process. Approaches in linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy of science. 2005. xiv, 249 pp. 13 PRANDI, Michele: The Building Blocks of Meaning. Ideas for a philosophical grammar. 2004. xviii, 521 pp. 12 EVANS, Vyvyan: The Structure of Time. Language, meaning and temporal cognition. 2004. x, 286 pp. 11 SHELLEY, Cameron: Multiple Analogies in Science and Philosophy. 2003. xvi, 168 pp. 10 SKOUSEN, Royal, Deryle LONSDALE and Dilworth B. PARKINSON (eds.): Analogical Modeling. An exemplar-based approach to language. 2002. x, 417 pp. 9 GRAUMANN, Carl Friedrich and Werner KALLMEYER (eds.): Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. 2002. vi, 401 pp. 8 SANDERS, Ted J.M., Joost SCHILPEROORD and Wilbert SPOOREN (eds.): Text Representation. Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects. 2001. viii, 364 pp. 7 SCHLESINGER, Izchak M., Tamar KEREN-PORTNOY and Tamar PARUSH: The Structure of Arguments. 2001. xx, 264 pp. 6 FORTESCUE, Michael: Pattern and Process. A Whiteheadian perspective on linguistics. 2001. viii, 312 pp. 5 NUYTS, Jan: Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization. A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. 2001. xx, 429 pp. 4 PANTHER, Klaus-Uwe and Günter RADDEN (eds.): Metonymy in Language and Thought. 1999. vii, 410 pp. 3 FUCHS, Catherine and Stéphane ROBERT (eds.): Language Diversity and Cognitive Representations. 1999. x, 229 pp. 2 COOPER, David L.: Linguistic Attractors. The cognitive dynamics of language acquisition and change. 1999. xv, 375 pp. 1 YU, Ning: The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. A perspective from Chinese. 1998. x, 278 pp.
