Meier, Robinson, and Clore: "Why Good Guys Wear White" (2004)

OK, now I'm officially confused.

In their 2007 study, Meier and Robinson found that affective cues prime spatial position, but not other way around:

TARGET (affect) →  SOURCE (position)

In this 2004 study — which contains the same references, the same statistical methods, the same ideas — Meier, Robinson, and Clore show that color primes affect, but not the other way around:

TARGET (affect)  ←  SOURCE (color)

In other words, they show two completely opposite things, and no one seems to have pointed this out.

Experimental Design

In the 2004 paper, the set-up is the following:

They show a number of words on a computer screen. Some are shown in a dark font, some in a bright; some words are positive, some negative. For instance, you could be shown the word candy in a dark gray font, or the word fickle in a bright gray font.

In the first batch of experiments, the subjects were told to determine the valence of the words as quickly as possible; this turns out to be easier when the color and the valence are congruent (e.g., the word sincere in a bright gray color).

In the second part, the subjects were told to determine the color of the font. This is easy, and word valence didn't make a difference.

Here's my own little mock-up of such a test material, so you can try it out yourself — say as quickly whether the following words are positive or negative:

gentle

bitter

cruel

trust

If you're like the average person in this study, then you're about 2% or 3% slower at making the judgment about the last two items (although you might be much faster at recognizing positive words in general).

As the authors say, this effect can be compared to that of the Stroop experiment, although the conflict here is indirect — there is no literal contradiction between trust and "black" (p. 86).

Order and Association

The authors interpret the asymmetry between color and word valence in terms of "a race model in which physical cues … are available before stimulus valence is" (p. 85).

If this is true, then the order is: First, you notice the white letters; then, the whiteness primes your valence judgment; and then, you finish reading the word. This would then mean that the appreciation of the color and its associated valence is "obligatory," and that people can't ignore it while making semantic judgments (p. 86).

This, however, does not show that we think about the abstract concept in terms of the concrete: If anything, it shows the opposite.

It thus seems that cognitive metaphor theorists can choose between two empirical results when they dig through the psychological literature — one that supports that idea of understanding-in-terms-of, and another that supports a "deep" metaphorical comprehension process. This would be wonderful if it weren't for the fact that the two papers both forcefully argue against the point made in the other.

Meier and Robinson: "Why the Sunny Side Is Up" (2004)

This Psychological Science paper by Brian P. Meier and Michael D. Robinson is a report on three experiments which collectively show that

1. reading positive and negative words facilitates the recognition of letters that are placed high or a low, respectively,
2. but looking up and down does facilitate the comprehension of positive and negative words.

In the terminology of Judea Pearl, we can thus say that activation of GOOD causes activation of UP, and BAD of DOWN:

Another result that came out of the experiments was that people recognize positive words faster than negative words, regardless of condition. Meier and Robinson do not discuss this effect explicitly, and I'm also not sure what to make of it.

From GOOD to UP, Not from UP to GOOD

The paper opens with a discussion of an experiment which shows that people are faster at judging whether a word is "positive" or "negative" if it's placed in a position on the computer screen which is congruent with the meaning. When the word polite is flashed at the top of the screen, for instance, you're faster at pressing the button corresponding to "positive" than when it flashes at the bottom.

This shows a correlation, but does not disentangle the question of causation. To do this, the two variables need to be manipulated independently of each other. This was achieved in two follow-up experiments which placed a spatial judgment task before or after a valence judgment task.

In the first of these follow-up experiments, the GOOD-to-UP direction was set up by a design looking roughly as follows:

That is, first the subject made a judgment about the valence of a word, and then about the identity of a letter which was presented in either a high or a low position. The last screen showed the word INCORRECT if the subject failed at the second task (as I've assumed in this example). This study found a significant facilitation effect.

The second follow-up experiment set up the UP-to-GOOD direction in a design that may be pictured thus:
 

Here, the subject first had to identify where a spatial cue was, and then to judge the valence of a word. In this task, they found no facilitation effect.

Is This Consistent With Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

In their brief conclusion, Meier and Robinson write:

These findings suggest that, when making evaluations, people automatically assume that objects that are high in visual space are good, whereas objects that are low in visual space are bad. (p. 247)

But there's an issue buried here which is usually evaded in cognitive metaphor theory: In which direction do the connections between source and target domain run? Meier and Robinson's results as well as the notion of "understanding in terms of" suggest that the connections run from target domain to source domain.

This analysis, however, leaves cognitive metaphor theory with little explanatory value with respect to word semantics. Consider for instance this paradigmatic instance of a "conceptual" metaphor:

• I'm feeling up.

According to the standard analysis, I understand that the word up here means "good" because the domain of spatial position translates into the domain of moods.

But this is exactly the opposite association of what we need. Meier and Robinson's show that we have a completely literal understanding of spatial position, and that looking upwards doesn't associate to feeling good:

People can use their senses to determine whether an object is up or down, white or black. There is no need to borrow metaphor to achieve an understanding of vertical position. Because of these considerations, we view it as unlikely that physical cues, in the absence of an evaluative context, activate evaluations. (p. 245)

There is thus no neurological reason why the word up should activate the meaning "good."

While Meier and Robinson thus offer excellent evidence in favor of a system of analogies in thought, it is not obvious that these should be responsible for the way we understand metaphorical language—only that they can be seen during our comprehension of literal language. To my mind, this creates a huge problem for cognitive metaphor theory, in particular in its more recent brain-talky incarnation.

Horn and Kato: Introduction to Negation and Polarity (2000)

My "negative polarity" reading list currently includes

• the anthology Negation and Polarity (2000), edited by Larry Horn and Yasuhiko Kato;
• William Ladusaw's PhD dissertation, Polarity As Inherent Scope Relations (1979);
• Zeno Vendler's Linguistics in Philosophy (1967);
• Johan Brandtler's The Evaluability Hypothesis (2012).

So far, I've read a chunk of Ladusaw's thesis and the introduction to Negation and Polarity.

The Dull Edge of Negation

Horn and Kato quote an interesting observation by Otto Jespersen (1917) about the historical trajectory of negation marking:

The history of of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word. (Jespersen 1917, p. 4, quoted by Horn and Kato on p. 3)

The pragmatic choice of word is thus always in a kind of arms race with itself because of its feedback to semantics.

We see the same phenomenon with curses, politeness markers, and slang words – all of which regularly have to be discarded because their original force wears off. A similar thing happens with taboo concepts like disease, stupidity, or madness, which regularly have to be renamed because the last generation of terms has lost its neutral and clinical value.

The Historical Emergence of Negative Polarity

With respect to negation, Horn and Kato dub this phenomenon "Jespersen's cycle" and claim that it "plays a central role in the development of negative polarity and negative concord" (p. 3).

I am not quite sure how they imagine the mechanics of this development looks, and neither of their contributions to the volume seem to focus specifically on this (etymological) question. However, somebody at the ACLC recently told me that it's only by recent convention that the Dutch word hoeven ("need") has become ungrammatical in positive contexts, and this seems to support their claim.

Another case that might support this case is the existence of very obviously conventional negative polarity items like lift a finger, hurt a fly, and so on. As with many insults and politeness markers, these were presumably scalar implicatures before they were turned into conventional lexical items.

Notice also the syntactic parallel between such cases and the traditional examples of negative polarity:

• Would you mind helping me?
• *You would mind helping me, wouldn't you?
• You wouldn't mind helping me, would you?

compared to

• Do you want anything?
• *You want anything, don't you?
• You don't want anything, do you?

I don't know how far this analogy could be stretched, but there does seem to be something buried here.

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.