Meaning and Experience

Take that again, Noam

2012-02-16T15:23:00.000-08:00

Goat kids can develop 'accents'

"Scientists suggest that the ability to modify a sound rather than making calls limited by genetics could be more widespread than previously thought."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17061101

Notes on Meaning and Experience (3)

2011-12-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

Knowing when to say something is much more difficult and fuzzy than learning to say it correctly –that’s what even animals can do. Reacting in an appropriate way is a constant hassle, an ongoing activity. Even in dreams we are rehearsing dialogues and conversations, reliving situations in which these interchanges took place.

The metaphysical realm in human history has been basically given birth by virtue of a technological device, language or speech. Culture, religion, and the philosophical trend that Plato created is a side effect of this phenomenon (physiological origin of speech faculty). Speech and symbols, first used or discovered to help planning hunting expeditions, achieved gradually an increasingly greater role in human society, until it became the software of every activity, the justification , the goal, the trascendental meaning of human existence. This event did not change the fundamental drive of life for social animals, that is being part of the group in order to survive and breed.

Abstraction means the most general or important features, but not the flesh and blood, disengaging the object of perception.

One of the problems is who makes the selection of features, on what premises, criteria, etc. It is a filter you get from tradition mainly. Everything that has been built around human life, especially social, moral, religious, is only some of maybe infinite possible choices or routes. Physical phenomena are not even the only logical way things are. Chance is what really counts.

Perspective was invented by someone at a certain point in history, but people may not have even seen it before its graphic pictorial representation. Maybe they did not really see the stars as bright points but as actual beings or gods. If the extent of our perception of the world that includes us is the limit of the possibilities of carrying information across the universe, the speed of light, perfecting out senses, especially vision, is a sort of record of the shape of our world. People from earlier times must have lived in an extremely bizarre world for us, seeing things we cannot possibly see now, because we have not been trained to do so.

Welcome to the machine

2011-12-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

Every time I read something I understand it more and more, even over the years, no matter how focused my reading might be (which certainly varies a lot).

Under the educational system, you have to be evaluated as often as possible - youngsters have to be dispatched quickly to make room for the next batch. Imagine the consequences for your learning development.

THE FOOTBALL GENE

2011-12-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

How can a football player make a play they have never done before or even practiced, like Borghi's Rabona?

CHILDREN: BLANK SLATES OR PRE-PROGRAMMED ROBOTS?

2011-12-20T04:39:00.000-08:00

I guess there is a misunderstanding of what blank slate means: here they assume that empty means inert; children might be primed to get information, but the content of that information is outside the brain. Wittgenstein: meaning is not inside the mind, it's outside in the world; Vygotsky: there's nothing in the individual that is not first in the social environment (social constructivism against cognitive psychology). When Skinner talked about hungry pigeons he was clear about the nature of an organism: of course they move, they need, they look for things; they have to survive. Blank slate does not mean "stone," it means that whatever content (which is already a metaphor) there is in language or anything that accounts for behavior or knowledge must be found in the environment. In other words, we don't come with written instructions - there's no one programming us, God or Syntax. Cognitive psychology is just a setback to a pre-modern, pre-materialistic, pre-scientific, neo-religious, mystical weltanschauung. People nowadays are so ignorant of philosophy that they don't know that by supporting cognitive psychology they are accepting the Cartesian myth that the mind is of a different nature than matter, with its own laws - no one would explicity state that in this age, but it's the true cognitive "underlying structure." (pun intended)

Homo Economicus: Bibliografía para entender las crisis financieras

2011-12-19T18:04:00.000-08:00

Homo Economicus: Bibliografía para entender las crisis financieras: Manias, Panics and Crashes , de los autores Charles Kindleberger y Robert Z Aliner explica, de manera sencilla, cómo se generan las depres...

The Chemistry of Social Behavior

2011-11-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

What is most interesting about this is that you have to be able to recognize social traits without listening to what other people say - language being the crucial source of deception in social ineraction (sex, religion, politics, social "sciences," and so on).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15693508

Language Evolution (Yes, it did!)

2011-11-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

More and more evidence against Cognitive sciences and Psycholinguistics' tenets.
Phonemically, language developed from simple to complex, despite Chomsky's ludicrous claim that is must have arisen as complex as it is now.
Even Pinker shied away from placing language as a kind of "Big-Bang" singularity that does not have to follow the laws of science.

http://languagemagazine.com/online/May11/

Philip K Howard On Education & Beaurocracy

2011-10-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedailyshow.com/extended-interviews/375313/playlist_tds_extended_philip_howard/366138/380182

birds learn too

2011-09-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-15053754

Learning Documentary 1-3

2011-09-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Language Development Documentary 1-3

2011-09-19T19:15:00.000-07:00

Animal Language Documentary

2011-09-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

A Child's Guide To Languages 1-6

2011-09-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

Thinking Documentary 1-6

2011-09-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Spark Controversy

2011-08-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/humanspark/

The most important aspect of Alda's documentary is that it brings down another linguistic myth, that language has no relation to intelligence, by showing how recursion requires a mental effort. I have always thought that the so-called infinite recursion is just part of linguists' ideal model of language, separated from actual speech -something that could only function (as linguists argue it does) in written language, and what about the primacy of speech?
Alda said the spark image was a hypothesis, and he actually ends up putting it in serious doubt.

CONSTRUCTIVISM LOST AND FOUND

2011-08-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

If the subject, the learner constructs their own knowledge from the environment, then the only thing that matters in Science and Education is the subject - not the environment. The subject learns something from every and any environment, they always do. What matters is finding the best learners, the ones that show insight (understanding of relations), not designing the right environment - that is what behaviorists do. The best learners lead the way for the rest, they have always done so.

Why can't constructivists see this? They have been blinded by their academic upbringing.
Even books and classes are by their very nature against constructivist principles -the impossibility of any interaction or negotiation of meaning would mean they are a hindrance to learning...

How To Sell Innate Beans

2011-08-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

How To Sell Magic Beans

"...poor understanding of science, lack of an innate sense of probability, all the various mechanisms of self-deception, and the strong desire to believe in certain things."
- Cheap Psychology , anyone?

Lessons from the Land of the Free (for now)

2011-07-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

Why are American universtities the best? They're 100% Private

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/the-university-debate-what-the-ivy-league-can-teach-britain-2215930.html

Notes on Meaning and Experience (2)

2011-07-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

There is a constant negotiation in social life which is the very opposite of fixed behavior-so to survive people must be good at political maneuvering. Perhaps people come from hominids that enjoyed politics.

As humans do not come to the world equipped with any kind of instinctive behavior, everything is nurture. They have to learn everything as quickly as they possibly can, so they grab at language (clutch at it) and dedicate all their efforts to master it, because it is obvious that it is the vehicle of all subsequent vital information.

Social life imposes a cognitive strategy. “people want to believe, not to know”. What people need is to position themselves in social interaction, because an individual on his own cannot survive.

People need to convince themselves of the absolute righteousness, reality, necessity of the input they are being fed. It is neither a conscious examination of possibilities nor a testing of different candidate hypotheses.

Implanting information at an early age is crucial; it is permanent and it is not organized logically or sensibly, but morally, so it cannot be erased, modified or even defied easily.

The emotional strength of an early implanted mind frame springs from lack of competition, lack of choice. Children are not asked to compare their source-religion with the opposite one, rather they are taught with the utmost emphasis that the others are morally or otherwise objectionable.

But information is not in the form of rules, but in a simple description of alternatives: if you do this, that will happen; if you do that, this will happen. You do what you see in others, because you want to be like them. There is always something that just does not work well, and individual differences arise, which in the end is good.

Notes on Meaning and Experience (1)

2011-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

"Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos." William James

What we call signs – the physical and psychological mix-up (a thing that is interpreted as another) and what we call rules – where they come from. The metaphysical myth: there are rules before there are things.

Understanding something does not mean looking at the structure but at the conditions that made it possible, and that might call for historical descriptions, an evolutionary perspective that would give it meaning and purpose, in the sense that you might find the reason why that something exists –or has existed, or even better, came to exist, was brought about by its circumstances. Inner structure can never be more than just the temporary solution to a temporary situation.

You have the inner and outer structures and the processes -the evolution together constitute reality. That’s why physicists talk about events. The processes shape the structure to make it succeed in whatever it is it wants to succeed. A flower evolves to become more attractive –the structure alone cannot give us this cause. If cause and effect are always consecutive, never simultaneous, a structural analysis is always meaningless.

"Language... (reduces) perception and response down to a few units (in relation to everything else) -the minimum necessary. We talk and ride bicycles automatically, but there is no instinct, only drilling of a few exercises, to make the tracks in you brain that are going to help slide over these activities without thinking about them."

Language works by creating shortcuts which humans use to make communication fluid. But they end up relying almost exclusively on these shortcuts; they become the only or a higher kind of reality.

Meaning in social life, which can make use of deception at all times, has nothing to do with truth in the logical sense, and it did not have much to do with it in non-social behavior anyway: animals deceive other animals instinctively as well.

How you can predict what somebody will say has to do with their own private experience. Why Bohr answered Einstein, “Don’t tell God what to do” can only be found in the particular way he learned his culture and language and develop his personality (of couse with some degree of heredity).

Just as the speed of light, information is absolute, but the perception of bystanders can be relative, so it is with the relation between the real world and the cultural one, which humans inhabit.

More and More Evidence against Innateness

2011-07-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Chimp recognises synthetic speech

THE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR - THE STUDY

2011-05-24T13:07:00.001-07:00

Introduction

Strictly speaking, a Conceptual Metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon and, as such, it is not made explicit in everyday language under the form "X stands for Y". Consequently, its realization is achieved through an unconscious process of instantiation, i.e., the projection of the Conceptual Metaphor onto linguistic expressions belonging to specific conceptual fields to refer to other unrelated conceptual domains.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1981, Lakoff 1992), together with Reddy (1979), Kronfeld (1980-81), Carbonell (1982), and Gibbs (1992), stress the fact that metaphors cover the entire conceptual world we live in and provide extensive inventories of instantiations of the most common conceptual metaphors in English. These examples, however copious, do not demonstrate the actual pervasiness and frequency of occurrence of CMs in ordinary language, a phenomenon which can only be perceived in a speaker's discourse not biased by any previous knowledge of the theory under analysis.

This is primarily what we attempt to achieve inductively in this study, namely, to demonstrate the actual relevance of CMs in the structuring of a speaker's discourse focused on a given topic. We take into account discursive concepts such as Halliday's theme,"...the set of options by means of which a speaker or writer is enabled to create texts -to use language in a way that is relevant to the context" (1970: 160), information unit, which "represents the speaker's organization of the discourse into message units" (1967: 8), and Chomsky's focus, which "determines the relation of the utterance to... other sentences in the discourse" (1971: 205). However, we do refer to formal or intonational components of discourse, but only to the deep semantic aspects of conveyed messages through clauses in a discourse, since, as Lakoff points out, "The semantic content of the focus is an assertion of coreferentiality. ...the lexical-semantic content of the surface structure constituent bearing main stress has nothing whatever to do with the semantic content of the focus" (1971: 261).

We consider discourse as the largest unit of language, semantically structured by a general topic and constituted by more specific pieces of discourse, which are structured by more specific topics. From this point of view, the cohesion of discourse lies in the experiential conceptualization that allows the users of a language to communicate; in other words, basic physical experience and conceptual metaphors.

Our second goal is to verify whether this cognitive organizing phenomenon is comparable in the case of native speakers of English and Spanish. To that extent, we carried out a fairly in-depth analysis of the way they metaphorically conceptualize their feelings and emotions as concerns LOVE and DEATH, and their reasonings in the case of POLITICS and ECONOMICS.

DESIGN AND MATERIALS: In order to carry out an in-depth analysis, we will concentrate on only 4 areas of human understanding in this study, two of them deeply rooted in culture (LOVE and DEATH) and the other two (ECONOMICS and POLITICS) of a technical and scientific nature. The areas selected for the study of CMs were researched both in oral and written discursive units in the two languages. In the first case, the corpus analysed was gathered through interviews held with native speakers of American English and of Chilean Spanish. In the second case, the data were collected through a sampling of selected texts from the political and the economy sections of newspapers in both languages. The interviews comprised a set of ten items in the case of LOVE and of nine in the case of DEATH, some of them direct questions and others, suggestions of topics to talk about, each related to subject matters that fall within the culturally determined domains inquired into. Written texts were used to analyse some of the CMs that provide underlying structure to the technical-scientific areas. We analysed 4 written texts, one for each topic and language. These materials provided sufficient data for researching the underlying metaphors that structure the conceptualization of the domains selected. At the same time, they provided a comprehensive view of the intentional and situational meanings that the CMs map onto the literal metaphors present in these texts as units of discourse.

CRITERIA OF ANALYSIS: To analyse the data we applied the metaphorical interpretation process proposed by Carbonell (1982), primarily intended as a metaphor understanding mechanism in computational analysis. To describe his method Carbonell uses technical language that belongs, in many cases, to this field of research. As students of linguistics, we have introduced some modifications in the original analysis so as to make it more concordant with a study of human understanding of the domains already stated. As to the linguistic unit adopted, instead of focusing on single utterances as Carbonell does, we have chosen discourse for our analysis, so as to examine utterances in their relations to one another. Carbonell's general process for applying metaphor-mapping knowledge is the following:

1. LITERALNESS TEST:

Attempt to analyze the input utterance in a literal, conventional fashion. If this fails, and the failure is caused by a semantic case-constraint violation, go to the next step. (p. 418)

First, all the utterances of a text in which non-literal language is used have to be isolated. By non-literal we mean any utterance in which a case of semantic violation is detected. More specifically, we will treat as semantic violation any utterance in which we detect a conflict between the semantic features of, at least, two constituents of the utterance under analysis. This implies to have every item analysed in terms of the relation of their semantic cases and types of predicates (actions, states and processes). For this purpose, we use case model theory, as originally proposed by Fillmore (1968), which distinguishes six propositional cases: Agent, Instrumental, Dative, Factitive, Locative, and Objective. Four of these cases were sufficient for our analysis:

Agent

Dative

Locative

Objective

Objective includes here the cases of Instrumental and Factitive, since the current analysis deals only with the three main semantic features attached to cases:

Concreteness

Animateness

Humanity

For the Objective and Locative cases, only the feature of Concreteness is required. For Agent and Dative, a distinction must be made between predicates which can be attached to any animate being and those which can only be assigned to human animate beings, thus requiring cases which fulfill the feature of Humanity (e.g., to read, to feel, to love, to think). To illustrate this, let us take the sentence the prices jumped. According to the predicate involved, its corresponding case should be an Agent. But the entity involved cannot satisfy the needed requirements of Concreteness and of Animateness; this is therefore an example of Concreteness and Animateness in Agent.

In examining further analyses of case theory (Cook 1979), we have found that new cases proposed to specify semantic relations can be analysed in terms of their literalness; therefore, they can also be subject to this test. Only the most general cases may avoid this semantic 'trap'.

Accordingly, we propose a set of three cases of Semantic Conflict [SC]:

Reference Conflict (RC): To account for a lack of physical action/state reference, i.e., what is described is not actually (in physical terms) referred to.

Semantic Feature Conflict (SFC): To deal with the already mentioned relation of cases to actions/states. It is crucial to emphasize that SFC always involves RC, but not vice versa. Prices cannot possibly jump: they are neither Animate nor Concrete entities. But in the Spanish sentence me tiré a la piscina, there is no semantic violation; what is involved here is only a Reference Conflict, since no actual physical action is referred to.

Identification Conflict (IC): To refer to any instance of explicit metaphor (e.g., my life is rubbish), intended as a literal expression or as the speaker's "creative" expression.

2. RECOGNITION NETWORK:

A recognition network contains the information necessary to decide whether or not a linguistic utterance is an instantiation of the general [conceptual] metaphor... (p. 416)

According to Carbonell, there appears to be a small number of CMs and metonymies (Mets), in the order of 50, that pervade commonly spoken English. Many of these have been identified and exemplified by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1981), Lakoff (1992), as well as by Carbonell himself. We will use these CMs/ Mets for the recognition of metaphorical instantiations.

3. BASIC MAPPING:

(It) establishes those features of the literal input that are directly mapped onto a different meaning by the metaphor. (Carbonell 1982: 417)

Once the CM underlying the instantiation(s) is identified, the next step is to provide a rule by means of which the apparent semantic conflict case is solved through a metaphorical process that involves the reinterpretation of the semantic feature which causes the conflict, matching the components of the CM (X and Y) with the pertinent roles of the analysed utterance. This reinterpretation process will be graphically displayed in the form of re-read rules of the type [A][B], which must be interpreted as meaning "re-read A as B", A being the source domain and B being the target domain.

4. TRANSFER MAPPING:

(It) is a filter that determines which additional parts of the literal input may be mapped onto the conceptual representation, and establishes exactly the transformation that this additional information must undergo. (p. 417)

This step involves the same metaphorical reinterpretation process as in 3, but in this case it includes all the additional semantic features and variables which enrich and specify the overall metaphorical meaning. This information will also be displayed in the form of re-read rules.

5. IMPLICIT-INTENTION COMPONENT:

The Implicit-Intention Component encodes the reasons why [a] metaphor is typically chosen by a writer or speaker... (p. 417)

Carbonell states that a writer chooses a metaphor as a function of the ideas he or she wants to convey to the reader; the understander ought to know why the particular metaphor was chosen and what the metaphor conveys that is absent from a literal expression of the same concept. In this final step, one is able to account for the speaker's choice of a metaphorical expression instead of a literal one, taking into account for this purpose the emotional, cultural, and social variables that might play a role in this choice.

Summary of Results

1. We have found that Conceptual Metaphors pervade the four cultural areas under research; therefore, they are basic constituents of cognitive processes, discourse organization and human understanding.

2. CMs and Mets are basic conceptualizations; they cannot be paraphrased. Through the Implicit-intention analysis, we have found that in many cases CMs and Mets overlap, that is to say, they explain themselves circularly, by means of other CMs and Mets. This fact rejects the dicotomy between literal and non-literal meaning: due to the high frequency of 'non-literal' instantiations we cannot continue clasifying meaning as we have been doing so far.

3. Differences between the two languages, though they exist, are only relevant in terms of the frequency of different Conceptual Metaphors or Metonymies; they reveal predictable specific inherent peculiarities of each culture.

4. Conceptual differences between sex groups, although detected, were not accounted for since they are not significant in the same terms as differences between languages, frequency related to specific relevance. In-depth analyses of differences related to sex and culturally specific conceptions and approaches to the analysed areas would require further and much more specific studies than the one attempted here.

5. Along with the verification of the pervasiness of metaphorical conceptualizations, we have come across another interesting aspect: the areas of love and death are equally important in terms of CMs:

LIFE IS A JOURNEY/ love is a journey, people are containers of states, and

events are objects/ containers. This can also be observed in the areas of economics and politics, whereas the following Metonymy prevails: the institution for the people responsible.

6. The latter finding led to the conclusion that the four conceptual areas analysed can be conflated under two macrometaphors, namely, the Event Structure Metaphor (which entails the CMs EVENTS ARE OBJECTS/ CONTAINERS and LIFE IS A JOURNEY/ LOVE IS A JOURNEY) and the Met THE INSTITUTION FOR THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE. In effect, it was found that they act as conceptual superstructures of the metaphorical processes seen at work in all the researched domains, and consequently, they appear to be the underlying semantic macroconstituents of the discourses involving the topics of love, death, economics, and politics.

General Discussion

We will examine the macrometaphors found in our analysis with some detail, and end up by discussing the relevance of metaphor and Lakoff and Johnson's theory to linguistics.

THE EVENT-STRUCTURE METAPHOR: The current analysis coincides with Lakoff's proposal (1992) concerning the Event Structure Metaphor: various aspects of event structure, including notions like states, changes, processes, actions, causes, purposes, and means, are cognitively characterized via metaphor in terms of space, motion, and force (p. 31). This general metaphor is organized in hierarchical structures, in which 'lower' mappings in the hierarchy (LOVE IS A JOURNEY) inherit the structures of 'higher' mappings (LIFE IS A JOURNEY), as Lakoff aptly puts it,

In our culture, life is assumed to be purposeful, that is, we are expected to have goals in life. In the Event Structure Metaphor, purposes are destinations and purposeful action is self-propelled motion toward a destination. A purposeful life is a longterm activity, and hence a journey. Goals in life are destinations on the journey. The actions one takes in life are self-propelled movements, and the totality of one's actions form a path to a destination... One's expected progress through life is charted in terms of a life schedule, which is conceptualized as a virtual traveler that one is expected to keep up with. ... the metaphor A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY makes use of all the structure of the Event Structure Metaphor, since events in a life conceptualized as purposeful are subcases of events in general. (p. 38)

...events in a love relationship are special cases of life events. Thus, the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor inherits the structure of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. What is special about the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, is that there are two lovers, who are travelers, and that the love relationship is a vehicle. The rest of the mapping is a consequence of inheriting the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. Because the lovers are in the same vehicle, they have common destinations, that is, common life goals. Relationship difficulties are impediments to travel. (p. 39)

A metaphor higher up in the hierarchy, such as the Event Structure metaphor, is more widely spread than those at lower levels. In fact, it should be a universal phenomenon since all human beings experience and refer to events. Lower CMs, like LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LOVE IS A JOURNEY, are more culturally restricted. However, we have seen that these lower CMs pervade the two western languages under analysis. The universality of the Event Structure Metaphor could only be tested in relation to utterly different cultures.

In addition, CMs like LIFE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS A RACE, etc., share the common conceptualization of defining TIME in physical-spatial terms: periods of time are stretches of land, sequence in time is movement, moments and events are places, past and future are directions, time is even conceived of as a surface or as a moving object. This conceptualization is essential since most aspects of our lives (life itself, actually) are partially or totally defined in terms of time (i.e., what we believe that time is). Now, why is this CM the one selected to define time? Probably because our physical experience in terms of place is our most basic experience, and our concepts of movement, orientation, distance, existence, and others spring from this experience. Another reason may be found in that TIME and PLACE are closely related concepts since it is on the bases of both that we attribute existence to people and objects.

However, we know that TIME, at least in our occidental culture, is also defined in terms of another widely spread CM, namely, TIME IS MONEY. The difference between the two conceptualizations is the apparent basicness of TIME IS PLACE. As shown by Lakoff and Johnson, TIME IS MONEY is a culturally based CM: its existence is intimately related to the socio-economic system in which we act; if this cultural factor changes, so would this CM. TIME IS PLACE, on the other hand, defines our concept of time in more elementary terms since it is previous to any other conceptualization.

Another important finding is that the Event Structure Metaphor proved also to be relevant in the conceptualization of what discourse is in itself: since a discourse is perceived as having a continuity in time and time is mainly understood as movement, DISCOURSE IS A JOURNEY is the CM that structures our conception of discourse. This is useful to understand how we structure what we are saying in a discourse and throws light on the meaning of sequential discursive markers like "now", "then", "next", and "finally", among others.

We have pointed out that our spatial experience is a basic one, but a different thing is to claim, as we have done through this study, that places are clearly shaped and defined concrete entities. The question is: are places (concrete) entities? Our answer is twofold: for methodological purposes in this analysis, they are basically concrete entities; we assume that we experience no trouble in recognizing a stretch of territory, a country, a town, a house, etc.. Strictly speaking, nevertheless, we must recognize that in many instances places are not as concrete and well-defined as other entities ( like balls, boxes, tables, houses, planes, etc.). In fact, we generally attribute shapes and boundaries to tracts of land on completely arbitrary conventions, without any overt boundary indicating physical separation. For example, a pencil ends clearly where no more of it is perceived through our senses; on the contrary, the exact division between Chile and Argentina is in most cases a matter of "abstraction"; additionally, we must recognize that the only "shape" that we can attribute to a country is the one we find on a map.

This answer may seem contradictory: if we know that the very concept of place is a metaphorization of some type involving the entification of what is not an entity, why do we treat it as an object in our analysis? The issue at stake here is that of the difference between a physical and a basic experience. Perceiving a tree as a concrete entity is probably easier than perceiving Nepal as such a type of entity because the former is a concrete object proper and the latter is a conceptually "concretized" entity. However, in our daily lives we feel that going from one place to another is an action as natural as eating food, watching television, or throwing a ball. The point is that CMs are, by definition, related to basic experiences, like OBJECTS and PLACES, regardless of their physical nature.

It follows from the previous discussion that our most common mental categories -TIME, STATE, CHANGE, CAUSATION, ACTION, PURPOSE and MEANS- are conceptualized via metaphor. The fact that such categories constitute core notions of our conceptual systems, shows that metaphor is central to ordinary abstract thought (Lakoff 1992: 36).

THE INSTITUTION FOR THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE: Concerning the discourse of economics, this metonymic conceptualization serves to relate abstract institutions to other collective entities, such as 'the people' and 'public opinion'; otherwise, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to articulate discourse in this area. In the discourse of politics, on the contrary, we have already seen that metonymies are not inescapable phenomena like the CMs STATES/ EVENTS ARE OBJECTS; in fact, they convey 'economical' ways of referring to political matters, which can perfectly be paraphrased. Their existence, however, allows for a number of processes which can have political significance, as discussed in Section 4.

These two types of discourse are not as primary as those that are built on topics dealing with love and death. All the same, they are of great significance in contemporary western society and in everyday interaction. Despite this significance, the concepts they involve cannot be defined in simple terms. In fact, there is no agreement, even among specialists in these fields, as to what expressions such as "the people", "public opinion", "socially positive", and "common good" mean.

Let us examine two instantiations in each language:

.. The United States should move/ implement... measures

.. United States [does not want] to dominate/ [is not] able to dominate

.. Estados Unidos ha asumido el rol de gendarme

.. Occidente se arrepiente de haber armado al "monstruo".

In the first two cases, the writer's attitude towards the political action of the entity United States is that of support

and justification, whereas in the remaining ones the writer's attitude is that of criticism. However, both use the same cross-domain mapping:

UNITED STATES PERSON LEADER

[- concrete] [+ concrete] [+ human]

[+ abstract entity] [+ animate] [+ nation's representative]

[+ nation] [+ human] [+ performer of social actions/ decisions]

Both writers agree in the personification process this metonymy conveys. It is only within this conceptualization that the Chilean Spanish writer can criticize the leader's actions and decisions. The writer assumes that the metonymical conception corresponds only to a nation, but that it cannot be further generalized, i.e., the United States is not the world's leader (it has the feature [- world's representative]); consequently, it does not have the right to be its guard or decide which nation should have weapons and which should not.

Political analysis, as a rule, attempts to disentangle ideological and biased opinions that overlap with the discursive 'straight', objective structure, presupposing that any political idea is subjective and is intended to be for or against something or someone. Geis (1987) analyses political discourse in news magazines from the viewpoint of considering it biased discourse. This bias conditions the choice of lexical items to ascertain an emotional or expressive effect on the reader, together with "not essentially linguistic" features, such as "the overall impression of a sentence, paragraph, or story" (p. 122). For Seidell (1987) "the theory and practice of politics and political talk is primarily concerned with power" (p. 44), and political discourse analysis also focuses on the ideological meaning in text, which "serves to sustain relations of domination" (p. 44). However, Seidell states that 'discursive process' forms a 'matrix of meaning' in which metonymy -together with substitution, paraphrase, and synonymy- plays an important part (p. 47). As concerns this last assertion, our analysis was not focused on ideological, biased political discourse, but on underlying conceptualizations that demonstrate that political discourse can be examined without the researcher being politically involved, and that conceptual generalizations can be achieved.

The role that metaphors play in political discourse has been only recently acknowledged. Postman (1985) refers to the incidence of implicit and complex metaphorical conceptualizations with respect to political discourse in the United States and mass communication. He takes the Mac-Luhan's (1964) formula "The medium is the message" (i.e., a culture must be examined through its discursive instruments, because "any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment" (p. vi), which is an active process of change of perception) and proposes instead a new formula, "The medium is the metaphor": the technological nature of the instruments we use to know and communicate actually determines our conceptualizations, our knowledge, and therefore our language. This is very close to CM theory. Postman states that nowadays, in the United States, "political discourse is show business", that is, the former domain is structured by the latter, with the corresponding conceptual, cultural and mainly social consequences (Postman 1985: 13-18). Following this argument, we may ask: What is our political discourse based on? Which is the metaphor we, in this nation, are using? By means of this approach, a connection of a specific area, such as politics, with wider areas of inquiry can be made.

THE RELEVANCE OF METAPHOR IN LINGUISTICS: The place metaphor has been assigned in linguistics is directly connected to the conceptual bases of this discipline as a science. The relation of a cognitive semantic approach, such as the theory of conceptual metaphor, to linguistic research, is a crucial aspect of the current discussion, since CMs allow generalizing over the linguistic constituents to be found in discourses related to specific domains.

According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), scientific Objectivism structures our understanding of the world we live in, ruling over the realms of science, law, government, journalism, morality, business, economics, and scholarship. The empirical position that made scientific and technological advances possible are underlined by the following conceptions: man is separated from the world and is its master; the world itself is there to be used by man, the land to be cultivated, animals to be eaten, trees to be made into timber, etc.

Following this scientific trend, structural linguistics -from Saussure, a scholar "regarded... as having for the first time placed Linguistics upon a scientific basis" (Ogden and Richards 1923: 37), to Chomsky- has led language studies to basically delimit their field of inquiry to phonology and grammatical structure (which allow exhaustive observable empirical recollections of data) and has assigned the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language a marginal status.

Structural linguistics considers its object of study as basically physical particles (sounds); this allows linguistics to place itself at the head of the social sciences in methodological and empirical results, because of its early discovery of an object (i.e., Saussure's langue, that can be treated as an objective, systematic phenomenon) and of its specific methodology, degrees of objectivity which the rest of the social sciences have been unable to achieve. According to Lévy-Strauss (1958), language is the social phenomenon which exhibits more clearly the two basic characteristics which allow for scientific research: first, it constitutes an object which is independent from the observer; second, language provides the scientist with considerable amounts of statistic data, extensive enough to make mathematical analysis possible (pp. 52-3). However, structural linguists are worried about the orientation their science has taken. Due to the limited scope of their investigations, they have lost contact with the other human sciences; they work with abstract notions their colleagues cannot comprehend any longer. The linguistic object seems not to be related to the field of culture, to social life, to History, and to linguists themselves, as men who speak. Lévy-Strauss (1958) thinks that structural linguistics, being driven by its method, is losing the concrete apprehension of phenomena that human sciences have. Furthermore, descriptive structuralism, as Chomsky himself points out, appeared to dwarf and scoff at the 'metaphysical' and 'airy pronouncements' of universal grammar and those who were attempting to deal with a much wider range of problems (in Allen and Van Buren 1971: 4).

... many linguists, though not all, would hold that universal grammar was misguided in principle in its attempt to provide explanations rather than mere description of usage, the latter being all that can be contemplated by the 'sober scientist'. (p. 2)

There is particular irony in the fact that this criticism should be advanced with the avowed intention of making linguistics 'scientific'. It is hardly open to question that the natural sciences are concerned precisely with the problem of explaining phenomena, and have little use for accurate description that is unrelated to problems of explanation. (p. 3)

Widdowson (1984) states that "when linguists proclaimed that language was really structure and language was really speech, we created a monstrous hybrid: the oral structural approach" (p. 17). The model of an abstract system and the descriptive methods the structural linguist devises must conform to scientific principles. Accordingly, Black (in Haussman 1989) says that there is a general assumption that "the world is necessarily a world under a certain description -or a world seen from a certain perspective" (p. 37)

Within this framework, the issue of meaning is similar to what we have seen about metaphor: it is a marginal area, already unsatisfactorily undertaken. Furthermore, it conveys problems that go far beyond simple conclusions. The current situation, as Lakoff (1992) puts it, is that generative semantics and Chomsky's Government and Binding theory assume that semantics is to be represented in terms of logical form; the philosophy of language assumes that conceptual systems are purely historically contingent, that there are no conceptual universals, observing that conceptual systems change through time; European philosophy makes a distinction between the study of the physical world, which can be scientific, and the study of human beings, which cannot be scientific; the fields of symbolic artificial intelligence and information processing psychology assume that thought is a matter of algorithmic symbol manipulation, of the sort done by a traditional computer program (p. 83). There is no linear development of linguistic research from structuralism to semantics. Instead, they seem to be, by their nature, at odds with one another.

From a scientific perspective, there can be "no tolerance for vague notions, imprecision, and ambiguity" (Widdowson 1984: 9). A descriptive model represents underlying knowledge that users of language are generally unaware of, and can only realize as communicative behaviour.

And communicative behaviour is vague, imprecise, and ambiguous. This is because it draws on resources for meaning in the language which cannot always be reduced to linguistic rules since they just have not been encoded as such in the language system, and because language behaviour has to be imprecise if it is to function effectively as communicative interaction. (p. 9)

It is at this point that Ogden and Richards' principles of function and language should be, in our opinion, reexamined: they state that the attempt to generalize from the exceptional cases in which symbols and referents correspond (i.e., logical, scientific language), to a necessity for such correspondences in all communication is invalid, because such a correspondence may give to scientific symbol systems a great deal of scope and accuracy, and render them manageable to deductive processes; but it can only be imposed when limited to the simplest and most schematic features.

Ordinary language, as a rule, dispenses with [correspondence], losing in accuracy but gaining in plasticity, facility, and convenience. Nor is the loss so great as is sometimes supposed, for by straining language we are able to make and communicate references succesfully, in spite of the misleading character of our symbols if taken literally. (1923: 255)

However, language function cannot be taken into account separately from synchronic semantics. All linguists agree with this assertion, but no one turns it into practice, because we are trapped by the analytic nature of science.

Our whole outlook on life, our behaviour, our character, are profoundly influenced by the use we are able to make of [language], our chief means of contact with reality. ... How many grammarians still regard their science as holding the keys of knowledge? It has become for them too often merely a technical exercise of strictly limited scope, instead of the inspiring study of the means by which truth is acquired and preserved. (pp. 261-2)

A linguistic symbol is a web of active, changing, and imprecise meanings that the users of a language can handle with no difficulty. This is the actual linguistic competence. But a descriptive, analytical approach cannot cope with concurrent meanings: it has to work disjunctively, and this is part of our linear metaphorical conceptualization of scientific analysis. Analysis, in its very nature, means separation: the man's necessity to separate things, first from himself, and then in their structure, in order to apprehend them; to possess things by his knowledge. Functionalists have been no exception to this rule, by considering the social domain the source and the goal of meaning, which can be interpreted as function indistinctively. Halliday (1985) explains language simply (and erratically) as the natural link of the "whole" system of meaning (social and cultural) to "syntagms", formal grammatical items and sequences.

He states that a discourse analysis must be based on grammar, in order to make explicit the speaker's interpretation of the meaning of a text. Halliday's final assertion is that what makes it possible for language to be what it is in the process of cognition is the textual function, which allows language to have "texture", i.e., to be a text (1967). It becomes evident that the simple explanation of the ideational function of language in logical and grammatical terms has led Halliday to interpret the remaining functions, which he consider more important, in the same fashion, thus postulating again structuralist principles, the same old "false assumptions" (Lakoff 1992: 67). The root of the problem is to understand language by means of its functions, which can be social, postponing a deeper research of its essence, which is necessarily conceptual.

From a cognitive point of view, we must look for the conceptual principles on which language is based, through investigating discourse, the mayor linguistic unit, in its semantic structure. Thus, metaphor comes into view when examining all these issues: conceptualization; objective, true, literal meaning, and the functions of language.

An expression or statement may be interpreted metaphorically not when it shows falsity or incoherence but, instead, when it shows "the banality of that [literal] reading's truth, its pointlessness, or its lack of congruence with the surrounding text and non-verbal setting " (Black, in Haussman 1989: 35). Furthermore, to "take a metaphor... 'literally' is to overlook the fact that a symbol... is not occurring in its original use" (Ogden and Richards 1923: 255).

Metaphor and ambiguity are central features of language use. Natural language, through its necessity to adapt to changing communicative processes, not only "allows" for metaphor; it is metaphor and ambiguity which allow language to function effectively. But metaphors cannot be reduced to rule because once they are, they cease to be metaphors and become incorporated into the semantic system.

The point about metaphors is that they depend on a disparity between the established rules of the code and the extempore exploitation on... potential resources for meaning which are not reduced to rule. ... The essence of metaphor is that it represents ambiguity which can be reconciled with effective communication but which cannot be resolved by analysis. (Widdowson 1984: 13)

Communication is much more than the sum of its parts. Users of language do not find any problem in understanding expressions such as he was a real bastard, or él vive colgado de las faldas de su mamá, since they live by a whole semantic system, in which all the levels of meaning function at the same time. However, these three levels of meaning are hierarchically constituted, according to their experiential level, from basic concrete, physical, and spatial to interpersonal or situational. This hierarchy depends on the faculty of a semantic feature to be entirely downplayed. Is the basic meaning of journey completely removed when used to refer to events? The answer seems to be no; in any transaction both participants keep their inherent qualities.

As we have seen, our conceptual system is metaphorically grounded. Every experience involves cultural presupositions, and there is no direct physical experience of the world. When we live by conceptual metaphors as we do in our culture, we tend not to see them as metaphors at all. It is the grounding in experience that shows how basic metaphors are in our societies. They form constitute an environment as essential as conceptualization itself.

Part of what makes the theory of Conceptual Metaphor so interesting is that the evidence for it contradicts and challenges most basic academic principles: "...if the results of the [CM theory] are accepted, then the defining assumptions of whole disciplines are brought into question" (Lakoff 1992: 84).

Chapters 1-3 pdf:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B79ipi2EmMjdMWQyNDVkNjAtMjFmYy00ZWUwLTg1N2YtN2VkYTI5OWQwNTJk&hl=en_US

THE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR

2011-05-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND
CULTURE WITHIN A COGNITIVE APPROACH

The present work arose from our interest in human understanding, conceptualization and the metaphorical structuring of reality. More specifically, our concern is with the structure of, and with the processes involve in structuring, discourse through conceptual metaphors in two languages.

The study contains the results of demarcating and viewing the semantics of metaphorization in four areas of human conceptualization, namely, love, death, economics, and politics. Although English and Spanish are the languages researched for instantiations of these metaphors, the semantic elements and situations are taken to be fundamental, that is, they are considered to be a part of an almost universal semantic organization, deeper than those respects in which individual languages differ from each other.

The decision of investigating these conceptual metaphors crossculturally was dictated by the fact that the production and interpretation of a metaphor calls on not only the semantic properties of words but also beliefs about the objects or situations depicted.

In Chapter 1 we provide a brief account of the treatment that (explicit) metaphor has received from traditional studies on literature and linguistics.
Chapter 2 is devoted to summarize the Conceptual Metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, its antecedents and later contributions, within a cognitive perspective.
Finally, in Chapter 3 the study is presented. Carbonell's methodology was partially adopted for the analysis of oral and written discourses. The selected data gathered is presented in tables and is thouroughly discussed in each specific area. A general discussion closes this chapter.

The corpus used in this investigation and the complete data gathered are presented in appendixes A and B, respectively.

The Complete Work on PDF:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B79ipi2EmMjdMmQ2YjAyZmItZTNiZi00ODc4LWEwY2EtOGM0OGFhNTc5Njlh&hl=en_US

2011-04-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

"... in a way that was thought to be unique to humans." Theres is not a lot left for the "Human Uniqueness" paradigm that science has not already demolished
BBC Chimpanzees give birth 'like humans'

NO LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS

2011-04-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13049700

"We show that each of these language families evolves according to its own set of rules, not according to a universal set of rules," Dr Dunn explained.
"That is inconsistent with the dominant 'universality theories' of grammar; it suggests rather that language is part of not a specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of broad human cognitive skills."

PROPOSITIONS VS SENTENCES: THE CONTENT METAPHOR

2011-03-09T12:58:00.000-08:00

"What are propositions? Many writers in the early twentieth century and before use the term synonymously with “declarative sentence”: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein all employ this usage at least part of the time. But occasionally for some of those same writers—and increasingly this has become the practice— propositions are not the sentences themselves but nonlinguistic abstract things that sentences express, or that we express by uttering sentences. And it has become common to speak of propositions as the contents of our sentences.

"The metaphor of containment—content is what is contained—is worth keeping one’s eye on. The metaphor has often hardened, or deadened, to the point that philosophers are not conscious of anything metaphorical here. (Or, if it’s really hardened, there is nothing metaphorical left.) It’s a fact, they assume, that sentences have contents, the crucial question being what sort of theory of content one adopts. It seems important to me, on the contrary, to keep before our minds that content-talk is metaphorical; or at least that it begins in metaphor."

Howard Wettstein, The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Gilles Fauconnier

2011-03-08T10:29:00.001-08:00

Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By Review

2011-03-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

Lakoff's Errors

2011-03-08T10:08:00.000-08:00

Lakoff seems to attack pure abstaction but always uses abstract concepts ans categories as if they were real (one of his ways to "embrace" metaphor). Literally there is no "capacity for empathy" in our brains, only the fact that mirror neurons helps us be aware of what can happen to us when we see something happen to somebody else - it is self-interest. There are no Conceptual Metaphors for that matter.

"Cognitive Linguistics actually allows you, through the study of Language to get at the structure of Thought." The problem here is again the concept of "structure." It seems to be axiomatic for some people that there is a structure underlying reality (The Marxist Myth).

George Lakoff on how he started his work on conceptual metaphor

2011-03-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

Constructivist Myth: Words are Containers

2011-03-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

The meaning of a word is not "in" it, or below ("underlying") it, but the way people use it.

Elephants: More Evidence of Animal Intelligence & Language

2011-03-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

Elephants know how to co-operate

"If a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand what he says." (Wittgenstein)
All social animals have language - they don't resemble ours because that's not the point, but their use by the animals that speak them.

The "Inductive Learning" Genius of Babies

2011-03-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Babies' openness to learning a language has to do with their lack of cultural constraints to learn anything - there's no "linguistic" separate skill really. Adults are (on average) culture-bound, which means their upbringing (social, cultural, religious, etc.) limits their abilities to acquire any new information, or to take it as seriously as the ones they learned when they were babies. This period they talk about is not a time issue - it's more about a limit on the information babies need to get and practice on before they have to interact on their own (6 t0 7 years of age is the beginning of their school life). When they say it's a statistical skill they mean an inductive one - the capacity to draw conclusions from data/observation.

Chimp Talk Documentary 1-8

2011-02-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

Thinking, Language & Neuroscience: Beware of the Buzz

2011-02-25T10:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/feb/16/thinking-caps-pseudoscience-neuroscience

"... we are also in danger of entering the era of the "neuro-myth", where neuroscientists sensationalise and distort their own findings in the name of publicity."

More evidence against human uniqueness

2011-02-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

Monkeys demonstrate self-awareness in computer game

(PhysOrg.com) -- It has been widely assumed that only humans are aware of their own thinking, but a new study in macaques by US scientists shows some monkeys are also self-aware.

Conceptual Metaphor: The Complete Study

2011-02-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B79ipi2EmMjdMWQyNDVkNjAtMjFmYy00ZWUwLTg1N2YtN2VkYTI5OWQwNTJk&hl=en_US

Appendixes to Conceptual Metaphor

2011-02-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hWEgGkjvkRJvX-HqgpUZd0LHZesexoQp0NfE2oP5YJY/edit?hl=en#

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE WITHIN A COGNITIVE APPROACH: THE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR

2011-02-06T19:27:00.000-08:00

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B79ipi2EmMjdMmQ2YjAyZmItZTNiZi00ODc4LWEwY2EtOGM0OGFhNTc5Njlh&hl=en_US