CC BY
59
Lavrova N.A.
Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of English Lexicology,
Moscow State Pedagogical University
TOWARDS SOME MILESTONES AND TRENDS IN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
Summary
The aim of the present article is to overview the major trends and developments in cognitive linguistics. It is demonstrated that cognitive linguistics deals with our perception and interpretation of the world and studies how it is reflected in the language. The main terms of cognitive linguistics are: categorization, concept, frame, scenario, script. It is illustrated that the theory of prototypes was conceived of and worked out within the framework of cognitive linguistics. According to this theory there are more typical and marginal representatives of certain categories. It is highlighted that an object belonging to a particular category is characterized by the essence, which is stable, and the accidence - attendant features, which admit of certain variation within this category. The findings of cognitive linguistics also demonstrate that many colour terms are experienced as objects and organisms, or as properties of certain objects. Finally, credit is given to G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, who posit that metaphors and metonymies may be closely connected with our bodily experiences.
Keywords: cognitive linguistics, concept, prototype, frame, scenario, script.
Ключевые слова: когнитивная лингвистика, концепт, прототип, фрейм, сценарий, скрипт.
Cognitive linguistics, which emerged in the 1970s, is still developing and attracts a great deal of attention, partly because of its contentious status as a science. One of the majour aims of cognitive linguistics is to study the way we perceive and interpret the world around us and how it is reflected in the language. The aim of the present article is to give a short overview of the major trends and objects of study of cognitive linguistics. The article is mostly based on the work by F. Ungerer and H.-J. Schmid “An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics”. In the article the notions of prototype, frame, script and some other will be highlighted.
Attributes of objects and phenomena provided by native speakers reflect the way we perceive the world and interact with it. A description that takes account of our experience of the world (an experiential view of words and other linguistic structures) is one of the goals of the cognitive linguistic approach. As an example of such an approach the advertising text “unleash a Jaguar” could be given: “Exploiting the origin of the brand name, this ad brings together ideas from the two conceptual domains of cars and wild animals; it amalgamates them into a powerful message suggesting an image of a car that is impatiently waiting for the customer, to be set free and allowed to act out its power, speed and ferocity...Technically speaking, the expression “Unleash a Jaguar” instructs the readers to simultaneously construct two mental spaces: a “car” space containing associations like powerful engine, high maximum speed, attractive design, etc.; and a “wild animal” space including associations normally attributed to jaguars, such as their ferocity, speed of running, litheness and elegance. To understand the message of the slogan, readers have to go through a process of conceptually blending the two mental spaces, a process resulting in a blended notion of ‘car-as-a-wild-animal’” [3, 3].
One of the basic notions of cognitive linguistics is the notion of “frame”, introduced and worked out by Ch. Fillmore, D.A. Slobin and L. Talmy. A frame could be defined as “an assemblage of knowledge we have about a certain situation, e.g. buying and selling. Depending on
where we direct our attention, we can select and highlight different aspects of the frame, thus arriving at different linguistic expressions” [3, 5].
It is well known that the process of mental classification is commonly called “categorization”, and its products are called cognitive categories, another widely used term is “concept”.
One of the first achievements of cognitive linguistics is the establishment of the so-called focal colours by B. Berlin and P. Kay. Three dimensions were taken into account - hue, brightness and saturation. According to the findings, the focal colours are quite bright and rather saturated, the names for focal colours being retrieved from long term memory more rapidly than for non-focal ones. The focal colours could also be called prototypical.The discovery of focal colours spurred on the development of the theory of prototypes (E. Rosch being one of the seminal scientists in this field). According to this theory, there are prototypical shapes, forms and objects, which possess features subconsciously agreed upon by the majority of native speakers. In order to explicate these features informants are encouraged to verbalise them by naming the attributes they think a particular object or phenomena possesses.
According to the findings of E. Rosch, the most typical, in other words prototypical, representative of the category “bird” is robin, of the category fruit - orange, of the category vehicle - automobile, of the category furniture - chair, of the category weapon - gun. Interestingly, the least typical representative of the category weapon is shoes. Somewhat simplistically, the most typical representatives are considered to be “good” examples, the least typical - “bad” examples, there are also boundary categories characterized by “fuzzy category boundaries”. Boundary categories are represented by objects that could be simultaneously alloted to different categories. In 1973 and in 1978 W. Labov conducted a series of experiments with cups and cup-like containers. The consistency profile was set up which registered the consistency with which informants referred cups and cup-like containers to the category “cups”. It turned out that the highest consistency profile was for the medium-sized container with a handle, neither too wide, nor too narrow. This container was ascribed the status of the category prototype.
It is worthy of note that the fuzziness of category boundaries is mostly down to context dependence. In W. Labov’s experiments in a dinner table situation with containers filled with mashed potatoes the majority of the informants that had previously, in a neutral context, referred to one particular container as a “cup”, now called it a “bowl”. This served to demonstrate that our perception of objects to a great degree depends on their functional aspect, which is most clear in a context in which they are used or applied. Another example of this dependence can be demonstrated by different sentences that revolve around the word “dog”. In a hunting context the prototypical dog that an individual is likely to recall is a retriever. In a police context it is likely to be an Alsatian, in a salon-for-dogs context it is likely to be a poodle. Once again it demonstrates that what turns out the most likely member of a group depends on the context. It stands to reason that the notion of context is multiple. It can be a situation context, a linguistic context and a cultural context. Cognitive contexts for a particular domain depend on culturel models: “Essentially, cognitive models and cultural models are thus just two sides of the same coin. While the term "cognitive model” stresses the psychological nature of these cognitive entities and allows for interindividual differences, the term “cultural model” emphasizes the uniting aspect of its being collectively shared by many people” [3, 52]. Models, both cultural and otherwise, can be naive and expert. Naive models are based on informal observations, traditional beliefs and superstitions, and are sometimes called “folk models”, it would be wrong to suppose, though, that naive models are absolutely superfluous, for they reflect the properties of the world more or less correctly, if roughly and simplistically. To prove it, two sentences could be furnished: “The sun rises in the east” and “The apple fell to the ground”.
According to the natural law, it is the earth that revolves around the sun, and the apple is attracted by the gravitational force. The fact that it is verbalized in a different, metaphorical way does not change the state of affairs, and is quite enough for orientational purposes.
For an object or a phenomenon to be regarded as belonging to a particular category, they must be characterized by the essence, which is stable, and the accidence - attendant features, which admit of certain variation within this category. It is worthy of note that “prototypical members of cognitive categories have the largest number of attributes in common with other members of the category and the smallest number of attributes which also occur with members of neighboring categories. This means that in terms of attributes, prototypical members are maximally distinct from the prototypical members of other categories” [3, 32].
As is known, cognitive linguistics is closely connected with psychology, in particular, it borrows from it the idea that objects are perceived as a whole, that is, holistically. According to this, if the speaker has a clear image of some object, this image will spring into mind even if only some parts of this object are available. Other important principles of gestalt perception are as follows (the principles are taken from F. Ungerer and H.-J.Schmid, 2006): principle of proximity, according to which individual elements with a small distance between them will be perceived as being somehow related to each other; principle of similarity, according to which individual elements that are similar tend to be perceived as one common segment; principle of closure, according to which perceptual organization tends to be anchored in closed figures; principle of continuation, according to which elements are perceived as wholes if they only have few interruptions.
Cognitive linguistics also studies the relationship of inclusion. The number of attributes some hyponyms tend to have is higher than the number of attributes for superordinate categories (for example, “vehicle”, “fruit”). However, if biological categories are considered (“tree”, “fish”, “bird”), the number of attributes for these categories are as high as the number of attributes for their hyponyms. For superordinates a phenomenon of parasitic categorization has been observed, when a superordinate is characterized by some features of its hyponyms. Thus, in E. Rosch’s experiments the informants did not supply a single common attribute for the superordinate “furniture”. One of the possible explanations for this phenomenon could be that the available attributes for this superordinate are so general that informants do not find them worth mentioning. Another explanation is rooted in the family resemblance, which is observed between category members. It seems that parasitic categorisation is more typical of children’s attribution, because in ontogenesis it is basic level terms, but not, as a rule, superordinates that are acquired earlier.
Cognitive linguistics also studies the categorization of compound words. Of note is the fact that the meaning of some compounds has much more in common with their first, subordinate component than with their main component. By “much more in common” we actually mean the associations native speakers tend to produce for compounds and for their constituent elements. Thus, “raincoat” and “rain” have much more in common than "raincoat" and “coat”. This could be explained by the fact that raincoats and rain are linked with wetness, bad weather and water, this is what raincoat is about. For the word “wheelchair” the informants list a large number of attributes that are not borrowed from either of the two source categories. Part of the explanation is that we rely on our knowledge of the world, whatever it is. Basically, it means that the concept of wheelchair is not reducible to the sum of the meanings of the constituent words “wheel” and “chair”, nor is it reducible to the sum of the concepts thereof.
It must be remembered that some subordinate categories (hyponyms) may gradually change their status to superordinates, the process being reflected in the type of shortening known as “apheresis”. This seems to be the case with the words “newspaper” and “airplane”, which are regularly contracted as “paper” and “plane” (this concerns the word "blackboard" as well, which is
regularly contracted as “board”). It must be noted that in word combinations, unlike in compounds, it is the second part that is usually shortened, which is most clear in the restaurant context, where “two apples” and “two lights” stand for two portions of apple juice and two portions of light beer, respectively. Compounds are more numerous than blends, because they are better indicators of the source categories.
The findings of cognitive linguistics also demonstrate that many colour terms are experienced as objects and organisms, or as properties of certain objects: amber, lilac, aquamarine, turquoise.
One of the major achievements of cognitive linguistics, in particular of G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, is the treatment of metaphors and metonymies as perceptional tools, which means that they are not just stylistic figures, but our interpretation of the world [1]. As a textbook example the cognitive metaphor "time is money" could be mentioned. The fact that we interpret the concept of “time” through the concept of “money” is reflected in our language: “You are wasting my time”; “Could you give me a few minutes?”; “How do you spend your time?”; “We are running out of time”; “Is that worth your while?”. In all these examples the target concept is “time” and the source concept is “money”, which means that time is described in terms of money, that is, some properties of money are borrowed and ascribed to time. The human life cycle can be described as journey or traveling. We arrive in the world, go through life and leave or depart. All this is reflected in metaphorical expressions, such as “the baby is on the way”, “the baby has arrived”, “ to bring the babe into the world”, “he is still with us”, “he is gone”, “they brought him back”, “he has departed”, “he has passed away”.
Metaphorical overlapping that takes place between two concepts can be of two basic types: lean mapping and rich mapping. The former takes place between specific source concepts and concrete target concepts, and primarily highlights individual aspects of the target concept (e.g. John is a pig); rich mapping takes place between specific concrete source concepts and abstract target concepts and is primarily used to supply a tangible conceptual structure for abstract concepts (argument, idea, emotion concepts). Unlike metaphors, metonymies are prototypically restricted to a single cognitive model (metaphors are usually mappings from one model to another). Metonymies are more straightforward than metaphors, their goal is ro refer to an entity, prototypically a person, denoted by the target concept by means of the source concept. The referential function of metonymies is represented by the “stand-for” notion. There are also metonymies with a highlighting function based on a predicative use, as in the sentence “I am all ears”. This type of metonymy is close to the lean type of metaphors (a person is an animal).
The emergence of some metaphors and metonymies may be closely connected with our bodily experiences, such as anger, sadness, happiness, which are often accompanied by physiological states, like increase of body temperature, change of pulse rate, palpitations of the heart, the production of sweat and tears. In other words, metaphors and metonymies establish a link between emotions and their physiological symptoms, which are regarded as the cause or, more often, as the effect of the emotions in question. Some of the relevant conceptual metaphors are “anger is fire”, “anger is heat”, “fright is cold”, “anger is explosion”. This is well reflected in cartoons and caricatures, where joy is accompanied by jumping up and down, anger by explosion, sadness by a drooping posture. It is also worth pointing out that that there is a specific correspondence between basic emotion terms and their linguistic realization, the linguistic form being short, simple (anger, hate, fear, joy, love, sad, happy). Non-basic longuistic terms often have longer words for them: frightened, terrified, petrified, alarmed, apprehension, embarrassment.
Emotion states are often described in cognitive linguistics as scenarios - that is, states that have the causal beginning, development and a logical end. Some interim conclusion is that emotion
concepts are structured by metonymic links with physiological effects. It must be mentioned, however, that it is mostly negative emotions, such as anger and fear, that can be understood as scenarios involving the stages of cause, actual emotion, control, loss of control and resulting action. For positive emotions like joy and love this type of cognitive metaphor does not always seems to be applicable.
Conceptual metaphors are wide spread in politics, where a country is likened to a person, economy to a living organism. Some examples are: “Ailments in a country stain the whole
country”; “If limbs are severely damaged, the whole body is disabled”; “If regions are left to rot, the whole country is weakened”; “There is no vaccine to inoculate the country against the spread of shut down”. Political metaphors are closely linked to the notion of politically correct euphemistic jargon, and their evaluation may be divergent: “Relying on these convenient metaphors, politicians and military comanders do not see, or do not want to see, what these metaphors hide: the reality of pain and death, the long term health effects for the injured, the psychological effects on veterans, the environmental effects, not to mention the moral aspects of war” [3, 152]. In politics the explanatory function of metaphors is often subjected to the goal of manipulation, which means that metaphors are often primarily selected for their emotional effects.
Cognitipve analysis is also applied to the study of prepositions. When they are used not in their locatory or temporal meaning, it is customary to speak of their metaphorical extensions: e.g. “She has strange power over me”; “The government was overthrown”. Prepositions that are mostly used to describe movement and refer to the path of an object can also be used to specify the location of an object: something [can be] across the street, over there, against the lamppost. Prepositions in this function are called “fictive”.
Cognitive linguistics also operates with such terms as “frames” and “scripts”. A frame can be defined as a “pattern of knowledge extracted from the experience of the recurring situations and events”, as a “type of cognitive model which represents the knowledge and beliefs pertaining to specific and frequently recurring situations” [3, 212]. Unlike scripts, which are more complex, frames are associated with simpler categories, such as verbs and actions described with their help. Thus, we can speak of the frames for “buy”, “sell”, “cost”, “pay”, etc. Scripts can be defined as “knowledge structures that are particularly designed for frequently recurring event sequences” [3, 214]. Thus, we can speak of “flying on a plane” script, “the restaurant” script.
Cognitive linguistics also studies the theory of causation. According to L. Talmy, there are different degrees of causation: the first degree causation is embraced by the events that are caused by other events without involvement of animate beings (“the vase broke”), the second degree of causation is constituted by events whose outcome is caused, though not intended, by a person (“he broke the vase by mistake”), the third degree of causation is embraced by events whose outcome coincides with the agent's intention (“he broke the vase to irritate his wife”).
The conceptual representation of motion events involves six major components: figure, ground, motion and path, two components being optional - manner and cause.
Cognitive linguistics also strives to give a typological analysis of motion verbs in some Romance and Germanic languages. The general tendency of Germanic languages is to express a path by means of a particle, and for French and Spanish to incorporate the path in the meaning of a verb. Simultaneously, in English and German the manner of the movement is incorporated in the verb, whereas in French and Spanish the manner is added as a separate adverbial. Languages in which the path is incorporated in the meaning of the verb are called verb-framed languages; languages in which the path is rendered by a particle are called satellite-framed languages. This specificity is often reflected in translation: “Spanish translators of novels omit manner information half of the time, whereas English translators actually add manner to the Spanish original in almost a
quarter of their translations” [2, 212]. The basic stages of motion can be described in terms of perspectives, or windows: initial, medial and final. It is worthy of note that form typological point of view languages differ in terms of the presence of these basic windows in the description of motion events. In English prototypically all the windows seem to be present. In contradistinction, Spanish speakers tend to be much more reluctant in filling all the three window positions.
This distinction is already manifest in children’s language: “The English child seems to devote much more attention to the changing relation between the figure and the ground or setting. The Spanish child, on the other hand, leaves some parts of the movement to be inferred from the static description of the setting” [3, 241]. There seems to be a close correspondence between certain conceptual structures derived from everyday experience and syntactic structures allegedly generated on the spur of the moment. Cognitive linguistics suggests that syntactic constructions may in fact not be generated spontaneously but stored in long-term memory like frames and individual concepts.
Cognitive linguistics has put forward the theory of conceptual integration, which is best illustrated by the construction of blend words, or portmanteau words, where two input spaces map onto each other, creating a third, blended space. Conceptual blending, however, also takes place in specific types of word combinations, in which the adjective does not express the quality of the adjacent noun, but the subjective evaluation, which is the result of individual experience with the object or notion denoted by the head. To illustrate this cumbersome description, the word combination “a warm coat” can be furnished. Here the modifier does not express the inherent property of a coat, but that the coat is something that causes people to feel warm when they wear it. “Warmth” is therefore the result of the compression of a cause-effect relation between “coat” and “warmth” into a blended property. It must be noted that the property “thick” in “thick coat” does not form a blend, because it describes an objective property of a coat.
The emergent structure of a morphological blend is open-ended if they are not registered by dictionaries. Part of the explanation why the majority of blends do not find their way into a dictionary is that, first, in some cases one of the components is not easily spotted, and, second, which is more important, the cross-space mappings that connect the first and the second spaces are not vital, they are not easily grasped as identity, space, time, cause-effect or part-whole relationship. Therefore, we can conclude that the processes of composition and completion are not finished or even applicable: “As a result, compression does not lead to an emergent structure that goes beyond the unsatisfactory impression that the blend must have something to do with the content of the first input space...” [3, 269]. Blends are created as a quest for immediate and short-lived effects, they are also highly context-dependent, therefore they are poor candidates for conceptual entrenchment or lexicalization.
Conceptual blending also takes place in some speech errors and slips of the tongue. The grammatically incorrect sentence “Susan remembered Tom of Grandma's birthday” is a syntactic blend of two sentences “Susan reminded Tom of Grandma's birthday” and “Tom remembered Grandmother's birthday”. The not verbalized mental structure “Susan caused Tom to remember Grandma’s birthday” forks prior to the process of verbalization, then converges and is uttered as a blend of two syntactic structures.
Conceptual blending in advertising texts is often seen as a forced blend in that it is not usually based on any solid resemblance between two input spaces. It means that no explicit cross space mapping usually takes place, advertisements suggest a loose link, something resembling an identity of a cause-effect link. Coupled with the violation of the relevance principle, forced blends may produce a powerful effect, but ultimately they are regarded as having no solid basis for mapping.
Cognitive linguistics partially overlaps with pragmatics. Drawing on the findings of the latter, it introduced the term “ostensive-inferential” behavior, which is accompanied by syntactic structures whose meaning becomes clear only in the context, depending on which it could be diametrically opposed. Thus the sentence “Coffee would keep me awake” can connote either an acceptance or a rejection of the offer to drink a cup of coffee: pronounced with a falling intonation, it indicates the rejection thereof, while a rise would indicate its acceptance.
The cognitive perspective of onomatopoeia received the name of “sound symbolism”. According to it, certain letters and letter combinations are associated with certain meanings, which is actively exploited by some authors. Thus, front vowels are associated with positive characters, back vowels with negative ones. The names of the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and in J.K. Rowling’s series of books about Harry Porter serve a good proof of it. Interestingly, the majority of the informants who read neither J. R. R. Tolkien nor J. K. Rowling, correctly identified the negative and the positive characters of the mentioned books. Cognitive linguistics does not claim, however, that letters correspond to some specific meaning, which would surely be carrying things too far, because only words possess an independent meaning of their own. Given this, we cannot deny the fact that native speakers do have certain associations with certain letters, although there is no consistency across all the native speakers and across different writers who choose their characters’ names.
Cognitive linguistics is still a contentious trend in linguistics, it is accepted and acclaimed not by all linguists worldwide. Part of the explanation is that the notions of “script”, “frame”, “scenario”, “domain”, etc., first, have much in common and are not very well differentiated, and second, what they claim to describe and refer to is actually very close to the traditional linguistic terms “notion” and “concept”. As far as we are concerned, one of the strongest and credible aspects of cognitive linguistics is the theory of prototypes, although it could be regarded as part of the theory of perception, which is the subject of close scrutiny in psychology. The typological study of motion events and their linguistic realization is also of significance, inasmuch as it helps to draw some conclusions about the typology of some Romance and German languages and is of practical value in translating from one language into another, taking into account the specificity of windowing in the mentioned groups of languages.
References
1. Lakoff G., Johnson M. Metaphors We Live By. - Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. - 256 p.
2. Slobin D.I. Typology and rhetoric: verbs of motion in English and Spanish / in Shibitani M., Thompson S., (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. - P. 195-219
3. Ungerer F., Schmid H.-J. An introduction to cognitive linguistics. - London: Pearson Longman, 2006. - 384 p.
