Hart and Perfetti: "Learning Words in Zekkish" (2008)

Because of the interesting quotes and references from Gerard Steen, I decided to take a look at some of the papers at Charles Perfetti's homepage. He has generously put many of them online and even scanned some book chapters.

Perfetti is mainly a scholar of the cognitive and developmental psychology of reading, so not everything he writes can be directly translated into the debates about semantics that I'm interested in. However, this book chapter, written with Lesley Hart, discusses disambiguation along with resolution of other input ambiguities (including the resolution of phonetically ambiguous words like content).

The upshot of the discussion is that disambiguation is a horse race process: When a phonologically unambiguous but semantically ambiguous word is read, a number of candidate meanings are activated, and a winner is then found by mutual inhibition:

With ambiguous words there is no phonological competition; however, the context and the extent of bias in the context in which the word appears (Vu, Kellas, Petersen & Metcalf, 2003), word-specific qualities such as word structure (Almeida & Libben, 2005), and the relative frequency of use of each of the meanings (Collins, 2002) remains necessary for choosing among multiple activated lexical entries. (p. 112)

They also briefly mention the surprisingly heated debate around the question of when in the process contextually irrelevant meanings are killed off:

There is some debate as to the power of biasing contexts to speed the response time for subordinate meanings. For example, can reading "bank" in a sentence like "There were crocodiles sunning themselves on the bank" improve response time times to the river meaning of bank more than sentences like "We took a picture of the bank," for which either meaning of "bank" can be appropriate? Martin, Vu, Kellas, and Metcalf (1999) claim that strongly biasing context can override word meaning biases from frequency, whereas weakly biasing context cannot. Binder & Rayner disagree with the power of strongly biasing context; they find that strongly biasing context does not have enough strength to incase the activation rate of lower frequency word meanings. (p. 113)

As a side note, I'm not sure the first reference here is to the right paper: George Kellas and Hoang Vu wrote a similarly-titled paper which was a direct response to Katherine S. Binder and Keith Rayner's paper, so maybe that's what Hart and Perfetti in fact wanted to cite.

The Steen-Gibbs-McGlone debate in Discourse Processes (2011)

In 2011, the journal Discourse Processes had a special issue on cognitive metaphor theory. The issue consists of four papers, a target piece by Raymond Gibbs, a reply by Matthew McGlone, a reply by Gerard Steen, and a rebuttal by Gibbs. The whole thing spans about 50 pages.

What is Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

Gibbs is quite direct in his claims. He directly openly says that:

Under the CMT view, so-called clichéd expressions, such as "stay the course" and "We're spinning out wheels," are not dead metaphors, but reflect active schemes of metaphorical thought. (p. 532)

However, the picture later muddles a bit because he constrains his claims to primary metaphors (pp. 9–10) and disqualifies explicit similes such as My job is a jail (p. 547). He also entertains the thought, inconsistent with conventional versions of cognitive metaphor theory, that these mappings may be learned through verbal behavior (p. 540).

But in fact, the story gets even muddier than that. In the last section before the conclusion, he floats his dynamical systems proposal for cognitive metaphor theory (p. 551ff). But while it all sounds very good with emergence and self-organization, Gibbs never commits to any particular model. This puts him in the questionable company of a tradition that throws around fancy math terms without actually saying very much.

That's not a nice accusation, but I'm afraid it's unavoidable. Gibbs himself seems to misunderstand fundamental concepts about dynamical systems: For instance, he seems to confuse the system states and state spaces (p. 551), confuse out-of-equilibrium states with chaos (see p. 115 of his 2005 book), and to confuse attractors with their associated basins of attraction (p. 551). Also, talking about "nonlinear interactions" (p. 554) without specifying what the independent variables are is just plain nonsense.

Constrained Comprehension

At any rate, the bottom line is that cognitive mappings aren't after all the basis of metaphor understanding; rather, they are factor that influence understanding, but neither necessary nor sufficient:

… many conceptual metaphors, along with many other constraining forces, may have partial, probabilistic influence on one's understanding of verbal metaphor. (p. 553)

That seems about right — but of course, we would have to specify what those forces were for this to be a informative statement. Gibbs seems to put everything in the mix, just to be on the safe side:

For instance, some dynamic processes occur over short time spans (e.g., neural firings or momentary thoughts). Others processes unfold over the course of individuals’ lives, and so guide development and change in personality, and interpersonal interactions throughout the lifespan. Dynamic processes also operate on populations over a much longer, evolutionary timeframe. (p. 551)

So just about anything can potentially be a relevant factor in determining comprehension. In his reply to this claim, Steen comments:

This basically brings all possibly relevant parameters of discourse processing together, from neural cognition to cognitive evolution, with all other dimensions of language use and discourse processing in between; and, in principle, allows for each of them to exert some yet to be determined effect on the ongoing discourse process. … If such a dynamic systems theoretical model could generate more precise predictions … it would be a valuable upgrade of CMT. (p. 587)

So it's not like the claim is wrong, it's just that it's only a ragtag collection of vague analogies rather than a theory.

The Case for Cognitive Metaphor Theory

OK, so getting a precise theory out of Gibbs can occasionally be a bit like holding on to wet soap. But he does bring a set of arguments to the table in order to support the claim that cross-modal effects play some sort of role in word comprehension. Here is, schematically, the arguments he cites:

1. Metaphorical expressions are systematic (p. 532)
2. Novel metaphors can be explained by means of old mappings (p. 532)
3. The mappings explain certain facts about etymology (p. 532)
4. Mappings are shared across cultures (p. 538)
5. Scientific concepts can be analyzed as metaphors (p. 540)
6. Verbal framing can influence decision-making (p. 540)
7. There are mappings in non-verbal thought (pp. 540–41)
8. Gestures sometimes seem to reflect mappings (p. 541)
9. There are cross-modal spill-over effects from non-verbal to verbal tasks (p. 541–542)
10. People have consistent mental images (p. 544)
11. People have consistent judgment of underlying mappings (p. 544)
12. (Quite novel) euphemisms are understood faster when primed metaphorically (p. 545)
13. Transparent idioms are learned faster than no-so-transparent (p. 546)
14. Domains are similar in an asymmetric way (p. 548)

So that's a lot of stuff, and not all of these arguments are equally good.

The Bad

Some of them are bad just for conceptual reasons: For instance, interviewing people about their mental imagery is just not a very reliable way of producing cognitive evidence. Ironically, Gibbs seems to accept this point when the data goes the other way, as in his comments on McGlone's paraphrase task:

Yet, asking people to verbally paraphrase a novel metaphor may not be the best indicator of the possible underlying presence of conceptual metaphor in interpreting these novel expressions. Given the long-noted difficulties people have in paraphrasing metaphors (Gibbs, 1994), the fact that 41% could provide interpretations that seem to meet some criteria for conceptual metaphor may be a positive finding in favor of CMT. (p. 546–47)

In fact, the quote goes on to question McGlone's materials on the grounds that metaphors of the form A is B or the form A is the B of C are "Not typically motived by single conceptual metaphors" (p. 547), so that that do not count as negative evidence anyway (even though they do, apparently, count as positive).

Other arguments are weak for empirical reasons: For instance, the systematicity which originally motivated cognitive metaphor theory has in fact been hugely overstated, and much of the last 15 years of research has been dedicated to the problems that arise from the fact that there are unsystematic holes in metaphorical mappings. (This parallels the fact that there is no cognitive reason that you can't ask for the time with the question How late is it?) Similar problems hold for the gesture evidence.

The Good

But some pieces of evidence are good. Here's a list of some of the experimental studies that Gibbs cites, and which I think have a lot of merit:

• Meier and Robinson 2004: Positive words are recognized faster when they're presented at the top of a computer screen.
• Giessner and Schubert 2007: Subjects judge bosses to have more power when they are depicted higher up on a screen.
• Williams and Bargh 2008a: Subjects find other people more friendly when they're holding a cup of warm coffee.
• Williams and Bargh 2008b: Subjects find themselves more socially isolated when they have been asked to measure large distances.
• Zhong and Lilgenquist 2006: Subjects who think about immoral behavior are more likely to accept an antiseptic wipe afterwards.
• Meier, Robinson, and Clore 2004: Subjects are slower at categorizing words like faith or beggar as positive or negative when the positive are dark or the negative bright.
• Wilson and Gibbs 2007: Subjects are faster at reading a metaphorical grasp sentence if they have first made a grasping hand movement.

I am not saying all of these studies are methodologically unproblematic (in fact, I am quite skeptical about using the Giessner and Schubert study as evidence of how online processing works). I am just saying that Gibbs is right in saying that they bring some information to the table which should not be ignored.

Steen: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage (2007)

Gerard Steen's 2007 book on metaphor is very long, and it contains both chapters that are interesting for me and chapter that aren't. Steen has chosen to read the chapters so as to cover all the possible combinations of the following pairs of dichotomies (cf. ch. 1.4):

• grammar — usage
• language — thought
• symbols — behavior

So that's eight topics. Not surprisingly, this structuring a book this way produces a fair bit of repetition, but it also makes it easy to skip things that are less important to you.

From my perspective, the two important chapters the ones that touch on psycholinguistic aspects of the theory. That's chapters 9 and 12.

Curriculum

There's a list of books and papers that seem to have been more informative of Steen's position than others. I would say his core reading list consists of the following:

• Rachel Giora: On Our Mind (2003)
• Ray Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2005)
• Ellen Winner: The Point of Words (1988)
• Charles A. Perfetti: "Comprehending Written Language," in The Neurocognition of Language (1999)

He also refers a number of times to Lynne Cameron's Metaphor in Educational Discourse (2003), although that seems to be less central to his argument.

With respect to the debates about the psychological reality of conceptual mappings, he cites the following works in particular a lot:

• Lera Borodistsky: "Metaphoric Structuring" (2000)
• The debate in Cognition between Gregory L. Murphy (1996, 1997), and Ray Gibbs (1996)
• The debate in Cognitive Linguistics between William Croft (1998), Dominiek Sandra (1998), David Tuggy (1999)

There are other references as well, but these are the ones that receive the most attention.

Conclusions

Much of the point of Steen extensive methodological discussion is to weed out some of the more crazy claims made by cognitive metaphor theorists. In the process of doing so, he occasionally his own opinions on these matters.

Somewhat surprisingly, he is quite pessimistic about the cognitive validity of cognitive metaphor theory. In his discussion of Perfetti and Giora, he poses the following three questions (pp. 351–52):

1. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve the activation of both the basic nonmetaphorical sense as well as the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of linguistic form)?
2. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve such a degree of activation of the basic nonmetaphorical sense that it is sufficiently rich to function as a conceptual source domain for mapping the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure domains)?
3. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always display some manifestation of an obligatory mapping from the basic nonmetaphorical sense to the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure of mapping)?

(Incidentally, this quote also illustrates Steen's almost meditatively repetitive style.) Anyway, his own answer to these questions is negative:

Salient word meanings [in the sense of Giora] are word meaning that are frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, and it is these senses which are quickest to retrieve. Since metaphorical word senses may also be highly frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, they may also be activated faster than their nonmetaphorical counterparts. It follows that questions 3, 2 and even 1 have to receive negative answers, as may be inferred from Giora's detailed review of her own and other researcher's work. (p. 352)

It follows that the symbolic analyses we know from cognitive metaphor theory don't really have much cognitive validity:

The fact that symbolic synchronic or historical analysis may helpfully privilege a particular class of senses as direct or nonmetaphorical does not directly map onto individuals' cognitive representation of such senses as prior or even necessary in the online comprehension of linguistic forms when these are to be processed in the metaphorical ways. (p. 352)

That's pretty radical, but it's perhaps less surprising if we see Steen as the strict methodology policeman of cognitive metaphor theory — in that case, we would expect him to have the most cautious conclusions in the field.

Gibbs and Steen (eds.): Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (1999)

In the introduction to this collection, Raymond Gibbs and Gerard Steen warn their readers that

there may not be a direct mapping between linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor, on one hand, and between linguistic metaphor and individual cognition, on the othter. (p. 4)

That is, conceptual metaphors may not explain the actual linguistic data; and even if it does, it may not be good model of what goes on in the head (see also p. 2).

Unfortunately, Gibbs and Steen's solution is to posit a "jigsaw" model in which every individual only has a piece of the puzzle:

A complete conceptual metaphor may only emerge from examination of the communication between, or across, participants in some community. This examination yields a "supra-individual," cultural class of metaphors. (p. 3)

And even when a particular individual has the piece of the puzzle stored in his or her brain, the "pre-stored conceptual metaphors may not always be activated" in the expected situations.

This way, cognitive metaphor theory gets to keep its cake and eat it too: It recognizes that there aren't actually any conceptual mappings in there (as shown by experiments), but they are still "out there" (as posited in our speculative analyses). The consequence is of course that the conceptual mappings only appear to those who believe.

Gibbs and Steen proceed to notice that many metaphors lack experiential basis (presumably they're thinking of something like ARGUMENT IS WAR).

Reading list

I definitely need to read the article "MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse" (2007) at some point. I read Steen et al.'s article from 2010, but the 2007 paper is cited more frequently.

Steen et al.: "Metaphor in Usage" (2010)

This is a report of a project done at the VU here in Amsterdam under the supervision of Gerard J. Steen. It's an effort to tag the tokens in the British National Corpus as metaphorical or not metaphorical.

Section 1.1 of the paper includes some very handy references to various work critical of cognitive metaphor theory from the perspective of psychology (p. 766), comparative linguistics (p. 767), and linguistics in general (p. 767).

The methodology behind the tagging procedure requires that the human annotators (six PhD students) compare the meaning of a disambiguated word to any "more basic contemporary meaning" of that word (p. 769).

They write that basic meanings "tend to be" characterized by being

– more concrete; what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel,
smell, and taste.
– related to bodily action.
– more precise (as opposed to vague).
– historically older.  (p. 769)

This seems to involve a certain amount confusion of criteria. They even state immediately after:

Basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meanings of the lexical unit. (p. 769)

This claim, however, comes without quantitative evidence (or footnote).