Williams: "Synaesthetic Adjectives" (1976)

Based on an inspection of English and Japanese adjectives, this paper claims that the etymological development of meaning by metaphorical extension always follows a particular pattern, shown in the figure below.

Figure 1 from Williams' paper (p. 463).

For instance, sound can be conceptualized as touch (soft music), but the opposite is not the case (loud touch). Williams emphasizes, though, that the law is quantitative, not logical:

Even in English, the generalization is not exceptionless. But its regularity varies between 83% and 99%, depending on how we compute what counts as an observation of it. (p. 463)

These numbers refer to the number of dictionary entries inspected (not, for instance, token frequencies in running text).

Towards the end of the paper, he wonders whether "these sequences [of consecutive word meanings] might be reflected in any physical basis of sensation" (p. 472) like its evolutionary history, or the developmental history of the individual. In the conclusion, he writes:

Obviously it is presumptuous, to say the least, to seek a biological foundation for a phenomenon that may not universally exist, in an aspect of human cognition about which very little is known. But the parallels that do exist … indicate … a point of interaction between mind an brain. (p. 473)

However, it is important to keep in mind that he explicitly presents his hypothesis as one about "rule-governed semantic change" (p. 473), not about cognition.

Talmy: Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2000)

It appears that Leonard Talmy has put the whole manuscript for his book Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2000) online. That's nice of him.

I've just had a brief look at chapter 5, which is about figure/ground relations. It contains some pretty funny and telling linguistic examples. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to include any psychological evidence, though.

Even so, I'd still like to show a few of his examples because they bring out his point so neatly.

I Put My Mouth Around the Food

He argues that some things are inherently more likely to be used as grounds. This is illustrated with contrasts like

1. 1. The bike is near the house.
   2. *The house is near the bike. (p. 314)
2. 1. The TV antenna was above the house.
   2. ?The house was below the TV antenna. (p. 317)
3. 1. My sister resembles Madonna.
   2. ?Madonna resembles my sister. (p. 318)
4. 1. Clark Kent is Superman.
   2. ?Superman is Clark Kent. (p. 318)
5. 1. y = 3x² + 1
   2. 3x² + 1 = y (p. 320)
6. 1. He dreamt while he slept.
   2. *He slept while he dreamt. (p. 324)

Being an old-school linguist, Talmy of course sums up the lesson learned from these examples with a story about universal principles of cognition and the like. That's all fine and good, but you can probably already predict what that story is going to look like based on these examples.

Before the Bomb Exploded, I Pushed the Button

One thing I found really thought-provoking was Talmy's discussion of how before and after are expressed in the native American language Atsugewi. According to his gloss, these relations are expressed in a way that literally translates as the following (p. 323, my italics):

• Having-eaten, we left. (= We left after we ate.)
• Still not having-left, we ate. (= We ate before we left.)

Notice that all four sentences actually mean the same thing (in a strictly logical sense).

But I for one needed some time to even see that. Time is difficult.

Barbara Dancygier: "Mental space embeddings, counterfactuality, and the use of unless" (2002)

According to many native English speakers, the word unless has a tendency to work less well in hypothetical contexts:

• You're not clinically depressed unless you're tired.
• ?You wouldn't be clinically depressed unless you were tired.

In Barbara Dancygier's paper on the use of unless, she tries to explain this fact by means of some rather extravagant cognitive assumptions about people's use of hypothetical mental spaces. This explanation mainly amounts to describing the different distributions of unless and except if.

Unacceptability: Counterexamples

Although unless is indeed not appropriate in many hypothetical constructions, there are couterexamples. Dancygier gives a number of quite nice corpus examples, including

• 'Unless I was naked, you'd still worry I was wearing a gun or a wire.' (p. 365)
• 'I have pulled my tail off,' replied the younger Mouse, 'but as I should still be on the sorcerer's table unless I had, I do not regret it.' (p. 368)
• [I]f Miss Catherine had the misfortune to marry him, he would not be beyond her control, unless she were extremely and foolishly indulgent (p. 369)

So apparently, some hypothetical uses are OK, whatever the reason is.

Some Acceptability Judgments

Zooming a bit out from this observation, we have, according to Dancygier's intuitions, the following pattern (p. 369; I've abbreviated the sentences a bit):

• If she married him, he would be under control unless she were extremely indulgent.
• If she married him, he would be under control except if she were extremely indulgent.

Further, we have the following distribution in the mouse example, again according to Dancygier's intuitions (p. 372):

• As I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.
• *As I should be on the table *except if I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.

I suppose it's fair to assume the following acceptability judgments as well, even though Dancygier does not explicitly say so:

• *I wouldn't have finished unless you had helped me.
• *I wouldn't have finished except if you had helped me.

If these three cases are representative, then unless is more lax than except if: Whenever except if fits in a frame, unless does, too. Whatever story we tell about these distributions, it thus better be one in which except if requires some kind of higher standard of well-formedness.

Acceptability Patterns: A Possible Explanation

Dancygier's theory has something to do with contrast.

She proposes that except if needs to introduce a condition that stands in contrast with the whole hypothetical context (I think?) all the way up to the actual situation. Unless, on the other hand, only needs to introduce a condition that stands in a contrastive relationship with the immediate intensional context.

What this means is not quite clear, and it requires some further (and quite strong) assumptions about the introduction of new layers of intensional context. Such layers are introduced quite often in Dancygier's theory; not only modal verbs like would and should trigger them, but also future tenses and conditional items like if.

Beyond Control

So, and example: Let's look at the marriage example and show how this example allegedly builds up layers of context according to Dancygier's analysis. The relevant embeddings are:

This should be read as follows: In the base layer, Miss Christine and the male character are not married. However, in the first conditional scenario (if…), they are imagined to be, and from this hypothetical situation (would…), it is judged that "he would not be beyond her control."

This imaginary situation is then equipped with an exceptional condition (unless…), namely that "she were extremely and foolishly indulgent." This condition is taken to imply to lack of control in a future scenario (not lexically expressed). (Cf. pp. 369–70.)

Pancake Upon Pancake

Another way to visualize the same thing is by keeping track of when different assumptions are introduced, inherited, and negated in the embedded structure:

Not marriage (assumed)
(No assumption about control)
(No assumption about indulgence)
Hypothetical scenario:
        Marriage (overridden)
        (No assumption about control)
        (No assumption about indulgence)
        Future scenario:
                Marriage (inherited)
                Control (assumed)
                (No assumption about indulgence)
                Exceptional scenario:
                        Marriage (inherited)
                        Control (inherited)
                        Indulgence (assumed)
                        Future scenario:
                                Indulgent (inherited)
                                No control (overridden)
                                Marriage (inherited)

The important grammatical fact is here which of its ancestor layers the exceptional condition (indulgence) is inconsistent with. The ancestor layers are here the base layer, the hypothetical scenario, and the future scenario.

Since the indulgence is neither assumed nor denied in any of these layers, the exceptional assumption stands in a relationship of contrasts with all of them. Both unless and except if are thus grammatical in this context.

Note that this conclusion crucially depends on the fact that the base layer assumed to be undecided about control. If we suppose that Miss Christine has no control over the male character in the base layer, except if should be ungrammatical

Tailless Escapes Captivity

This analysis should be compared to the example I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off (cf. p. 371):

Pulled tail (assumed)
Not on table (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        (Assumptions about the tail deleted)
        On table (overridden)
        Exceptional scenario:
                Pulled tail (assumed)
                On table (inherited)
                Future consequence:
                        Pulled tail (inherited)
                        Not on table (overridden)

In this case, the exceptional condition (I pulled my tail off) is in contrast with the immediately preceding scenario, which has no assumptions about the tail. The exception is, however, not in contrast with the base layer. Consequently, except if is ungrammatical, and unless is grammatical.

But note again the assumptions going into this conclusion: Without the assumption of "forgetfulness" in the hypothetical scenario, the conclusion would not follow. It is thus crucial that the hypothetical If I were still on the table… "deletes" a particular one of our assumptions in a seemingly rather arbitrarily fashion.

And All the Other Cases…?

Let's look at the case I wouldn't have finished, which I assumed above was ungrammatical with both unless and except if. This sentence should presumably be analyzed as follows:

I have finished (assumed)
You helped me (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        I have not finished (overridden)
        You helped me (inherited)
        Exceptional scenario:
                I have not finished (inherited)
                You did not help me (overridden)
                Future consequence:
                        I have not finished (inherited)
                        You did not help me (inherited?)

In this case, the conditional exception (you did not help me) contrasts with both of the two layers above. So why not a grammatical use of unless and except if?

I think questions like these point to the fact that the cognitive assumptions behind Dancygier's theory are pretty vague and very, very speculative. It is by no means clear when assumptions are "forgotten," or exactly which or how many assumption that have to contrast with the intensional context.

In fact, it is not even quite clear to me whether except if requires contrast to all ancestor levels, and whether it requires contrast on a particular, high-focus parameter, or just any single parameter. Without an answer to these questions, it will be very difficult to assess the theory to any interesting degree.

Lakoff: "Cognitive models and prototype theory" (1987)

Lakoff argues that the prototype effects exist because concepts are defined by several partly overlapping "cognitive models." A possible example of a mother might then fit some of the models (the "genetic mother") and not others ("the wife of the father"). This may lead to graded membership judgments.

Structure of the Paper

The paper is a little bit difficult to navigate in, as it contains a large number of sections which are all on the same level of organization.

The sections differ in content and length. Their headings are:

1. Untitled introduction
2. Interactional properties
3. Cognitive models
4. Graded models
5. The idealized character of cognitive models
6. Cognitive models versus feature bundles
7. Mother
8. Metonymic models
9. Metonymic sources of prototype effects
10. The housewife stereotype
11. Working mothers
12. Radial structures
13. Some kinds of metonymic models
14. Social stereotypes
15. Typical examples
16. Ideals
17. Paragons
18. Generators
19. Submodels
20. Salient Examples
21. Radial categories
22. Japanese hon
23. Categories of mind, or mere words
24. What is prototype theory
25. The core + identification proposal
26. Osherson and Smith
27. Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman
28. Conclusion

Cognitive Clusters

His own theory on cognitive models is most clearly explained in section 6 and 7 (pp. 66-70). His idea is that concepts are defined in terms of a cluster of competing models -- for instance, a salient example, an idealized picture, and a positive paradigm.

The effect seems oddly close to the weighted lists of attributes used by, e.g., Linda Koleman and Paul Kay (1981). But he insists that bundles of cognitive models are empirically distinguishable from bundles of features. He refers to Eve Sweetser (1987) for support of this claim, but does not discuss the evidence.

Sections 14 through 20 (and perhaps section 21?) are intended to give examples of how "cognitive models" can look. They can look like a lot of different things, it appears.

An Alternative Theory

Sections 25, 26, and 27 criticize a "reactionary" counterproposal.

According to this theory, category judgments can be made in two ways, by deliberation or by quick-and-dirty heuristics. Prototype effects are then, as far as I understand, only present when the heuristic method is used.

Lakoff identifies a comment from his own 1972 paper on hedges (journal version, 1973) as the inspiration for this new theory. He finds this "ironic."

The arguments he proposes against this two-method theory oddly resembles arguments in favor of it (e.g., p. 92). His main concern, if I understand it correctly, is the metaphysical assumptions of the theory rather than any specific empirical problem.

Rosch: "Principles of Categorization" (1978)

Elanor Rosch's contribution to Cognition and Categorization really consists of two independent parts: An overview over her experiments investigating basic-level categories (pp. 30-35), and an overview of her experiments with prototype effects (pp. 35-41). In will only deal with the first part now.

Cue Validity

The most central concept in Rosch's discussion of basic-level categories is the notion of the cue validity. This is defined for a category such as "bird," which is more or less reliably identified by cues such as "wings." She explains:

The cue validity of an entire category may be defined as the summation of the cue validities for that category of each of the attributes of the category. (pp. 30-31)

This immediately raises two questions:

1. Do all cues count in the summation with equal weight? There are infinitely many possible cues and only a few highly valid ones. This suggests that more explicit assumptions about "salience" are needed.
2. With what weight do the various members of a category contribute to the average? Equally? Weighted by the frequency of the linguistic label? Weighted by the frequency of the thing?

While these questions may seem like technical remarks, they do in fact relate to some deeper issues that I will mention below.

The Ambiguity of "Basic"

There are two competing characterizations of "basic" in Rosch's work, an ostensive and a perceptual. It's not always clear which one she is taking as definitive, and this sometimes introduces problems.

Both definitions apply to concept trees and are meant to pick out a particular depth in such a tree. They do so by locating the level of abstraction at which either

1. the categories "car," "chair," "tomato," and "hammer" are found; or
2. average cue validity is maximized.

My worry is that her cross-cultural, developmental, and evolutionary claims may turn out to be tautologies when we look closer at the ups and downs of her theory.

For instance, if the "basic" means "maximal cue validity," then of course children learn names from this level first. On the other hand, if Rosch gets to pick what counts as "basic" in each branch of the English category system ("chair," "car," "tomato," ...), then she can obviously just pick the level that fulfills the second definition.

Learned Perception

The fact that she might unknowingly be making the tautological point that "normal things are normal" is hinted at when she comments that English-speakers tend to be less able to distinguish between plants than the ostensive definition suggests.

This is observation was echoed more recently my Jerome Feldman:

For many city dwellers, tree is a basic category—we interact the same way with all trees. But for the professional gardener, tree is definitely a superordinate category (Feldman 2006: 186)

With those kinds of qualifications, basic level categories will certainly guaranteed to have all of the properties that Rosch claims. But any claim about their universal centrality will also become an empty verbalism.

Note how this also ties in with the sticky issue of trained perception:

One influence on how attributes will be defined by humans is clearly the category system already existent in the culture at a given time. This our segmentation of a bird's body such that there is an attribute called "wings" may be influenced not by perceptual factors [...] but also by the fact that at present we already have a cultural and linguistics category called "birds." (p. 29)

She is apparently aware of this problem, but not willing to face the implication that complex cues like plumage are themselves categories that are open-ended and ambiguous.

Mutual Dependence and Iterated Learning

She does note, however, that attributes might be extracted from categories just as well as categories might be based on attributes. However:

Unfortunately, to state the matter in such a way is to provide no clear place at which we can enter the system as analytical scientists. What is the unit with which to start our analysis? (p. 42)

To me, this suggests a game-theoretical analysis. A category system is invented by people, but also has to be transmitted; fixed points in such an iterated learning process will be the systems that trade off difficulty of acquisition for pragmatic necessity, I guess.

This process could probably be modeled relatively easily in a multi-agent system with a set of Bayesian learners. However, such a model will probably be highly sensitive to the assumptions made about the environment of learning (e.g., the frequency of birds and the frequency of winged-ness).

Rosch and Lloyd: Cognition and Categorization (1978)

Read this book, and you will understand everything about where cognitive semantics comes from, and how it sees itself. I feel like quoting the whole thing word for word.

All the seeds of future greatness and future crises are visible here – as well a firm rooting in the AI and cognitive psychology of the golden age of frog neurons and cat retinas in the 1950s.

Take a look, for instance, at the names of some of the contributors: Brent Berlin, Elanor Rosch, Amos Tversky, George Miller – quite a cast. Naomi Quinn and Dan Slobin, too, are involved in the background, as members of Social Science Research Council's Committee on Cognitive Research – the Council being an institution that "the book reflects the aims of" (p. vii).

Revolution!

The trumpets are already out in the blurb on the flap, with the promise of "a conceptual revolution overtaking the study of language and cognition." A more detailed narrative is unfolded in the preface:

In the spring of 1976, a small group of psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists met at Lake Arrowhead, California, in a conference sponsored by the Social Science Research Council to discuss the nature and principles or category formation. Participants coming from the East Coast talked about Roger Brown's memorial lecture for Eric Lenneberg given a few days earlier. (p. vii)

Note the literary voice – "Four score and seven years ago ..." And then an indirect reference to Eric Lenneberg, just to to put some distance to the "recalcitrant cultural relativists" that Berlin grumbles about (p. 12).

The preface continues:

Roger Brown had chosen had chosen to speak about the new paradigm of reference using research in the domain of color. But research in fields such as ethnoscience, perception, and developmental psychology was beginning to appear and might also have been cited to support the claim that categorization, rather than being arbitrary, may be predicted and explained. (p. vii)

The steady stride of scientific progress, in other words. No corner of the life of "man" will evade the searchlight of scientific attention.

"Scientists now realize…"

The boogieman is also largely the same as in 1960 – behaviorism, empiricism, relativism. The Introduction thus states:

In the stimulus–response learning paradigm that dominated American psychology in the first half of the twentieth century, both the stimulus and the response were dealth [sic] with as arbitrary systems; the focus was on primarily on the connection between them. In developmental psychology, children were considered beings born into a culture in which categories and stimuli were already determined by the adult world. Anthropology, which might have sought universal principles of human experience, under the influence of Boazian [sic] cultural relativism, concentrated on cultural diversity and the arbitrary nature of the definition of categories. (p. 2)

However, somewhat confusingly, the over-rationalizing "Aristotelian" picture of knowledge is also wrong:

If other thought processes such as imagery, ostensive definition, reasoning by analogy to particular instances, or the use of metaphors were considered at all, they were usually relegated to lesser beings such as women, children, primitive people, or even to nonhumans. (p. 2)

While all of these are true observations, to me they look like a motivation for something other than a research program hailing "universal principles" and biological reductionism.

Rosch's Afterthought

But maybe this should just one of the germs of contradiction in "second-generation" cognitive science. Rosch's abrupt change of attention in the very last part of her paper certainly seems to say so.

There, in the section "The Role of Objects in Events," she falls into an almost Heideggerian mode of thought, contemplating the "events of daily human life" and the "flow of experience" (p. 43).

Not for long, though. Soon, she gets the idea of treating everyday life events according to the same principles as she had applied to chairs and cars and vegetables (p. 44). So there we are, back in familiar territory.

Sweetser: From etymology to pragmatics (1990), ch. 3

Chapter 3 of Eve Sweetser's insightful 1990 book contains an analysis of the English modal verbs may, must, shall, will, can, etc. She claims that their epistemic meanings are derived from a set of more basic meanings, which includes the deontic ones.

The Order of Domains

It is not yet entirely clear to me whether she thinks that the deontic meanings (e.g., You may kiss the bride) can be learned without any metaphorical scaffolding. She draws a lot of inspiration from Lenord Talmy (1988), who thinks that both deontic and epistemic thought are fueled by analogies to physical barriers, blocks, and forces. This seems to suggest the following ordering:

Physical obstacles  >  Social obstacles  >  Logical obstacles

This works pretty well for a word like may, which is historically derived from a Middle English term referring to physical strength and capability. Sweetser further cites some evidence that children learn the deontic senses before the epistemic ones (p. 50).

Messy Domain Orderings: let

But it is the first link, physical > social, which is causing me some problems. Sweetser herself gives some examples (p. 52) that potentially subvert her theory:

• The crack in the stone let the water flow through.
• I begged Mary to let me have another cookie.

My intuition about these examples is that there is a kind of personification going on in the first sentence: We picture the stone as an agent which may or may not give the water permission to flow. If that intuition holds, the physical meaning of let is an extension of the deontic.

As far as I know, no ancestor of the English language (that we have any written records of) contain only one of these senses. To be fair, let is, speculatively, hypothesized to be derived from a word meaning roughly "loosen." But a historical case for the derivation from physical to deontic would probably be relatively weak.

Messy Domain Orderings: have to

Another set of examples with similar problems concerns the verb have (p. 53):

• I have to stay home, or Mom will get mad at me.
• I have to stay home tonight to study for the test.

In at least Ronald Langacker's equally "cognitive" analysis, the verb have primarily refers to possession. Again, this sense seems to follow the Indoeuropean languages as far back as we have written sources (despite a speculative derivation from a word meaning "grasp").

How do children learn the concept of possession – always through relating it to holding something in the hand? And do they make this connection when they learn the word have? Certainly, I can have my keys in my hand, but is this more basic than I have some cash?

And more specifically, is the deontic sense of have to more basic than the sense of have as "possess"? Historically, have to seems to have been a quite late derivation which initially drew its meaning out of the idea that one can have (= possess) a duty.

If this historical trajectory has any parallel in present-day adult cognition, it would suggest that we understand I have to go by translating it into a duty, then into a possession, and then into holding something in the hand. The question is whether that operation yields anything more intelligible than the concept of necessity that we began with.

Beate Hampe: "When down is not bad, and up is not good enough" (2005)

This thoughtful paper by Beate Hampe (see also From Perception to Meaning, 2005) is a nice empirical counterweight to some of the wildly speculative claims that are thrown around in cognitive linguistics. In this particular case, the issue is whether there is an inherent and global good/bad valence to the dichotomies up/down, in/out, on/off, front/back, etc.

The Theory
This claim has apparently been made most clearly by the Polish linguistic Tomasz P. Krzeszowski. Krzeszowski himself sees the claim as a specific version of the "Invariance Principle," since it claims that up/down metaphors inherit the good/bad valencies that standing and lying down have in our preconceptual lives.

This is a neat little fairytale about the genesis of meaning, but as usual, the empirical data spoils everything. The first, obvious sign comes from looking at bad things going up:

• Unemployment is up. (bad)
• Employment is up. (good)

Faced with such examples, one would have to say something like this: up and down have an inherent emotional value, but this emotional value is not very strong itself; a strongly laden context can thus pull the words in an "unnatural" direction. However, on average or in neutral contexts, up will have a weak tendency to lean towards positive emotional valence, and down a tendency towards negative.

The Counterevidence
However, this doesn't seem to be the case. Hampe has done a medium-sized corpus study of the constructions finish off, finish up, slow down and (the rare) slow up. For each occurrence, she looked for valence clues in the immediate context and categorized the example according to how positive it was. The result was, surprisingly, that up was much more likely to be used for negative purposes than down or off.

Now, it is of course a little unfortunate that she only looked at two verbs, and that one of her particle pairs (down/off) were not antonyms. A safer strategy would be to pick two antonym verbs and two antonym particles and then combine them in a table like the following:

	in	out
give	28.0 kk	27.3 kk
take	53.5 kk	118.0 kk

The numbers in this table are the number of occurrences (in millions), estimated by Google searches for the exact phrases. This excludes, for instance, split uses like take me out (or in general verb + NP + particle). However, Hampe's study seems to have the same weakness.

Similar tables could be made for the following:

• come/go in/out
• come/leave in/out
• push/pull on/off
• break/make up/down
• break/fix up/down
• etc.

Other Sources of Evidence
Several empirical hypotheses could be tested for such data.

For instance, one test whether there is a statistical tendency for some positive particle (e.g., in) to attach to the positive set of verbs (come, make, stand, keep) compared to its negative counterpart (out). This could be done with respect to grammaticality or with respect to empirical counts. It would essentially amount to collapsing all of the tables into a single 2 × 2 table.

Another question would be whether the positive and negative contexts where distributed evenly across the two columns of any such table. In order to do so, one would have to develop a valence assessment method like Hampe's, preferably an automatic one. After having trained such a model, one could use Fisher's exact test on the contingency table consisting of positive/negative valence × positive/negative column.

The automatic valence assessment might perhaps be achieved through semi-supervised learning. We can imagine starting from a valence function v₀ defined on a small set of good and bad words:

• v₀(w) = 1 for w in some finite set G = {good, pleasant, improve, victory, truth, ...};
• v₀(w) = –1 for any w that is an antonym to a word in G;
•  v₀(w) = 0 for all other words w.

Assuming that good words co-occur with good words, this could be used to train a more fine-grained function, say, v₁₀₀₀.There are a number of problems with this assumption (it ignores rhetorical contrast effects as well as negation), but experiments would show whether it worked or not.

"Cognitive Semantics: In the Heart of Language" (1998)

This is an interview with George Lakoff from the first-ever issue of Brazilian journal Fórum Lingüistico, published by the institute for linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. It was conducted by Roberta Pires de Oliveira.

The interview is notable for containing both some quite frank and some quite revealing assertions by Lakoff.

It is unfortunately quite badly transcribed. For instance, Pamela Morgan is identified as "Helena Morgan," (p. 106), and Lakoff's paper in Andrew Ortony's book Metaphor and Thought becomes "my paper on Ortony's book" (p. 108, my emphasis).

Below is a collection of some of the more striking quotes from the interview, sorted according to theme.

The Ricoeur connection:

Mark Johnson had studied with Paul Ricoeur. So he knew the Ricoeur tradition and the continental tradition and had come to the conclusion, through working with Ricoeur that metaphor was central to thought. But I wasn't at all influenced by that tradition. What influenced me was the discovery that ordinary, everyday thought and language, and specially ordinary everyday thought, is structured metaphorically. That was the major discovery. (p. 89)

The partial order:

It [= cognitive metaphor theory] says that we have basic concepts that arise from our direct interaction with the world and they are not metaphorical, and then we have metaphorical projections of those to more abstract concepts. (p. 91)

With respect to "big babies" and scaffolding:

Piaget saw that the understanding of, for example, causation came out of a child's dropping things. I think that's correct. But Piaget also thought that if you advance from one stage, then you left behind the other stage. This seems to be false. He thought that there was a higher stage of abstract thinking, and that seems to be false. The details are very unpiagetian when you think of the rest of Piaget's work. (p. 96-97)

The Universal Body:

Yes, there are universal concepts. There are universal metaphors, universal aspects of language, because we all have very similar bodies and our physical experiences in the world are very similar. Those are where universals come from. (p. 98)

Inherent structure:

There's a structure that is independent of any particular metaphor of love. It may not be a very rich one. It may not be a highly structured concept... When you have a lover, a beloved, an emotional relationship, a positive emotional relationship, and lots and lots of types of complex feelings, but it may not be structured enough to reason with then you have lots of metaphors that allow you to conceptualize love in terms of other kinds of experiences. (p. 103)

You have to take into account target domain overrides. [...] The target domain override is a case where the mapping is carried through with contradicting internal structures of the target domain. (p. 107-08)

There's also an extremely embarrassing moment on pp. 106-07, when Lakoff shrugs of a counterexample to one of his claims by saying that a particular set of metaphors is just "linguistic expressions, not mappings," apparently without noticing his own blatant methodological inconsistency. He further goes on to imply that if a metaphor isn't universal, it doesn't really count.

Vyvyan Evans: "Semantic representation in LCCM Theory" (2009)

This is a relatively sketchy paper, published in New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Its main point is that we should see linguistic representation (discrete grammatical categories) as a crude, schematic system put on top of an ancient system for conceptual representation (qualitative sensibilities).

Various aspects of sentence and word meaning are put in one box or the other depending on whether the aspect is discrete or not. It is thus near-tautological that the "linguistic system" deals with crude, discrete categories, while everything else is relinquished to the dust bin category of fuzzy "conceptual content."

The psychological or "conceptual" part of the story is inspired by Lawrence Barsalou's ideas about mental representations.

Peter Harder: "Meaning as input" (2009)

This paper by Peter Harder argues---building on William Croft and D. Alan Cruse's Cognitive Linguistics (2004)---that sentences should be thought of as little programs that are run in the head of a hearer.

The main example supporting this view of semantics is the case of the definite article. In sentences like

• The UN condemned the test,

the noun phrase the test can be read as an instruction to find a suitable referent (p. 18).

This invites a view of grammar in which the syntactical structure of a sentence is seen as a chronological structure of a program. The sentence The test happened thus receives the following interpretation (p. 23):

• declarative (past tense (HAPPEN (definite (TEST))))

This should be read as a LISP-style program. Harder illustrates the syntax of this instructional language with the following "recipe" (p. 24):

• serve (sprinkle with lemon (grill (add salt (slice (salmon)))))

It should be quite obvious how this is intended to work. Note the parallel to Montague grammar.

The consequence of adopting such a view seems to be that language becomes a narrow communication channel that only allows for the transmission of code, not of meaning. If this is correct, understanding can be compared to a client-side execution of a server-provided script.

Meaning is thus constrained by the resources of the hearer, but the instruction is designed by the speaker. This may be what Harder means by the following quote, although I'm not entirely sure:

Knowing a language, I suggest, essentially consists of knowing the input properties of the forms you choose [the meaning of the keywords in the scripting language?] -- whereas actual outputs [interpretations, meanings?] can never be known for certain in advance [because you cannot control the settings and properties of the client-side computer?]. (p. 16)

The paper was published in New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics (2009), edited by Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel.

Casasanto and Henetz: "Handedness Shapes Children's Abstract Concepts" (2011)

This article by Daniel Casasanto and Tania Henetz shows a difference in the bodily experience which is not mirrored in speech. From the abstract:

In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good.

The article also quotes some other very interesting studies Casasanto has done with other coworkers.

These studies show that adult subjects have the same tendency to biased towards their dominant side, as shown for instance in an analysis of the gestures that four presidential candidates made during two debates (p. 2).

Further, this tendency can be temporarily reversed by handicapping the subjects' dominant hand with an annoying ski glove (pp. 9-10).

From Molecule to Metaphor (2006), chapter 10

Here's a strange quote from Feldman's book:

Even as adults, the experience we associate with a word and thus its meaning differs depending on our age, gender, profession, and so on. People who only watch a sport event or artistic performance cannot fully understand participants' conversation about the activity. (p. 130)

It's difficult to disagree with the first sentence here, and we should probably applaud that a cognitive linguist acknowledges this fact.

But it's almost equally difficult to agree with the second sentence or see any logical relation between them. Where does this extreme solipsism come from?

Perhaps this kind of thinking is the very core of the problem in cognitive metaphor theory. If everything become a matter of private experience, then our evident ability to understand each other seems like a miracle. Feldman needs a shot of Wittgenstein.

Basic Level Nonsense
Speaking of Wittgenstein, I'm still shocked at the sheer amount of nonsense associated with the term "basic level category." Elanor Rosch (in all due respect) seems to have assumed without the slightest shed of argument that all concepts come in triples like vehicle > car > truck.

That's a bizarrely unfounded claim, conceptually and empirically. What would, for instance, be the "basic level" in the following strings of inclusions?

entity  >  ( . . . )  >  artifact  >  toy  >  doll  >  puppet  >  hand puppet

As far as I can see, the only way to pin these levels onto an absolute scale with a "ground floor" would be to randomly pick one by intuition. This would essentially fold the data into the definition and empty the theory completely of any meaning.

Gibbs: "Introspection and Cognitive Linguistics" (2006)

A short and nice article about the pitfalls of linguistics without experiments. Concludes with a handy list of recommendations for empirical practices that may help root out far-fetched and thin evidence.

It also contains a short discussion of dead metaphors (p. 144-45). Gibbs acknowledges that speakers and hearers may in fact not process a metaphor like flip your lide from scratch every time they hear it. He cites his own book The Poetics of Mind (1994) for this claim, as well as Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987).

He also refers to an experiment with idioms that were deliberately picked to be obscure ("the goose hangs high" and the like). This experiment seems to confirm the intuition that anything can be rationalized in retrospect, and that we don't need to compute meanings in a compositional way to understand phrases. The study is reported in the article "Intuitions about the transparency of idioms: Can one keep a secret by spilling the beans?" (1995).

According to Gibbs, his qualms about introspection are shared by people like Lera Boroditsky, Sam Glucksberg, Gregory Murphy, and John Vervaeke (misspelled as "Veraeke") and John Kenndy (sic!).

Critiques of cognitive metaphor theory -- literature

I've been doing a superficial search for literature that criticizes cognitive metaphor theory. This is what I'll begin with:

• Vervaeke and Green: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Theories: A Critique of Lakoff's Theory of Categorization" (1997)
• Markus Tendahl and Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.: "Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory" (2008).
• Gibbs: "Introspection and Cognitive Linguistics" (2006)
• Keysar and Glucksberg: "Conventional Language: How Metaphorical Is It?" (2000)
• Zlatev: "Embodiment, Language, and Mimesis," in Ziemke, Zlatev, and Frank (eds.): Body, language, and mind, Volume 1: Embodiment (2007)

Besides these, there are some further texts that I may look at later:

• González-Márquez (ed.): Methods in Cognitive Linguistics (2006), especially Gibbs' chapter.
• Kristiansen (ed.): Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives (2006), again, especially Gibbs and Perlman's chapter.
• Overton and Palermo (eds.): The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning (1994), maybe in particular chapter 5.
• The debate between Mark Johnson and Eugene Gendlin. This may include Gendlin's paper "Crossing and Dipping" (1995) but definitely Mark Johnson's chapter in Language Beyond Postmodernism (1997) and Gendlin's reply to that in the same volume.
• Sharifian, Dirven, Yu, and Niemeier "Culture and language: Looking for the 'mind' inside the body" in Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and Languages (edited by the article authors) might have some good examples of the non-universality of the body.
• There are two papers in the discussion section of Pragmatics & Cognition 7(2) that might be relevant: Reuven Tsur: "Lakoff's roads not taken" and Teresa Bejarano: "Prelinguistic metaphors?".
• Regarding the asymmetry of metaphors, Mark Tendahl and Ray Gibbs make a generic reference to Fauconnier and Turner: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, New York, 2002). I'll have to look into that and see if it's relevant to bidirectional metaphor.
• According to himself, Markus Tendahl has a discussion of the somewhat problematic claim that metaphors preserve inference structure (all inference structure!) in his PhD thesis. This might be relevant to my story about systematic gaps in metaphor systems.

There seems to have been some attempts at quantifying "metaphoricity" and related notions in the late '70s and early '80s, but presumably it died out because of the success of cognitive metaphor theory. If I get time, I might look into this literature (since it's relevant to my evolutionary metaphor of semantic change).