Gardner: "Metaphors and Modalities" (1974)

This paper (by the later very famous developmental psychologist Howard Gardner) reports on an experiment in which college students and children of different ages were asked to apply adjectives like hot/cold to stimuli like uncommon stimuli like faces, color samples, or small objects. The young children were quite good at this, with some caveats.

The experiment is notable for employing materials that are not entirely obvious clichés, like the connection between big/small size and high/low tones.

In one task, for instance, the subjects to felt sandpaper of various degrees of coarseness, then deciding which of the two types of sandpaper was the more light, and which was the more dark. Other stimuli included as ping-pong ball vs. a jack (presumably meaning the edgy die used in playing the jacks), or the sound of a triangle vs. the sound of a recorder.

Table of materials used in the experiment; p. 86.

In general, Gardner found that even preschool children agreed more or less with the judgments college students made on these tasks. A notable exception was the application of color terms to new stimuli, something that seems to indicate a heavily conventional component in color metaphors, such as a blue tap for cold water (p. 88).

The smaller children also gave a number of bizarre, funny, and "incorrect" explanations for their choices. For instance,

The 7-year-old[s] equated "getting lots of presents on your birthday" with dark and "getting no presents" with light, because, as several subjects explained, "lots of presents are heavy to carry." Here the contrast to light/dark was apparently assimilated to light/heavy. (p. 88)

Also, the children equated

… a tactile-perceived Ping-Pong call with loud and a tactile-perceived jack with quiet; in this case, subjects reported that the Ping-Pong ball would make more noise if it fell, Here an action in which the elements might be involved overwhelmed the more conventional association of pointed compactness with noise and smooth emptiness with silence. (p. 88)

In both of these cases, the older children and the college students tended to arrive at the opposite conclusions.

The 11-year-olds in the study, by the way, also tended to answer that

[an] angry face is cold "because it makes you feel cold" (p. 88)

a finding that sits somewhat uneasily with Zoltán Kövecses' insistence on the universality of ANGER IS HEAT metaphors.

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.

Marina Rakova's debate with Mark Johnson and George Lakoff

In the September 2002 issue of Cognitive Linguistics, Marina Rakova had a short and bloody exchange of ideas with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

She criticized their theory for being "philosophically inconsistent" and "contradicted by empirical evidence" (p. 215), and they accused her of "systematic misreadings" (p. 260).

Rakova's paper is not very well-structured, but it does contain some interesting points that I do find worth mentioning:

1. Consistency with developmental psychology

It seems that there may possibly be some measure of evidence that the developmental story implied by cognitive metaphor theory doesn't quite fit our knowledge of actual child development.

She mentions for instance (p. 220) that children are able quite early to use sentences such as There's a butterfly in the garden even though the theory (perhaps) predicts otherwise.

It is not entirely clear to me how much this argument depends on the claim that one needs abstract thought in order to apply a container schema (cf. pp. 232 and 235).

2. Conflicting motivations

Picking up very small things is exceedingly difficult. So why is there no DIFFICULT IS VERY SMALL metaphor, when such post-hoc analyses can motivate the metaphors IMPORTANT IS BIG and DIFFICULT IS HEAVY? 

3. What governs the governor?

If we can have independent knowledge of a target domain, and if we need not use a metaphor automatically, then exactly can we conclude about the role of metaphor?

If metaphors can be switched on and off depending on whether they are useful in the specific context, is there any real content to the claim that we "think metaphorically"?

This is, as far as I understand, the question Rakova raises on the bottom of p. 227.

See also p. 234 and p. 236, where she seems to hint that a bodily experience doesn't just become a crisp, logical concept without some sort of additional enforcement. Lakoff and Johnson mention this on p. 259.

4. Are primitive really universal or just sort-of, so-far universal?

If some conceptual mappings are universal and others are not, and those that are universal are only partly universal, is there any content to the claim that certain concepts are universal?

If there is no theoretical support for the claim, then it should just have the status of "All swans I have seen so far seem to be white," which is not particularly strong or interesting.

In Rakova's words, the theory badly needs to mark off some "boundaries between significant and nonsignificant cultural variations" (p. 229).

By the way, Johnson and Lakoff refer in their response to "mountains of evidence" and "evidence that fills the pages of our discipline to overflowing" (pp. 251 and 261).