Cognitive Linguistics in Action: From Theory to Application and Back (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics)

Cognitive Linguistics in Action

Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 14

Editors Gitte Kristiansen Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez Honorary editor Rene´ Dirven

De Gruyter Mouton

Cognitive Linguistics in Action From Theory to Application and Back

Edited by

Elz˙bieta Tabakowska Michał Choin´ski Łukasz Wiraszka

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-020581-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-022609-6 ISSN 1861-4078 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cognitive linguistics in action : from theory to application and back / edited by Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski, Łukasz Wiraszka. p. cm. ⫺ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-020581-7 (alk. paper) 1. Cognitive grammar. 2. Language and languages ⫺ Study and teaching. I. Tabakowska, Elz˙bieta. II. Choin´ski, Michał, 1983⫺ III. Wiraszka, Łukasz, 1982⫺ P165.C644 2010 371.3315⫺dc22 2010032908

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Introduction Theory informing applications, applications informing theory . . . . . Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka

1

Part I. From loop to cycle Looking back at thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

11

Recontextualizing Grammar: Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dirk Geeraerts

71

How theory informs application and how application informs theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Janda

103

Part II. The context for prototypes Why not? Prototypes and blocking of su‰x shift in Russian verbs. . . Tore Nesset

123

Prototype-based taxonomy of idiomatic expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . Esa Penttila¨

145

Part III. Contexts for Cognitive Grammar Control and the mind/body duality: Knowing vs. e¤ecting . . . . . . . Ronald W. Langacker

163

A discourse perspective to nominal reference-point constructions. . . Peter Willemse

209

Lexicalizing indirect path: Focus on Finnish motion verbs . . . . . . . Jari Sivonen

241

A cognitive approach to parenthetical speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jaakko Leino

273

Part IV. The pragmatic context Using RST to analyze subjectivity in text and talk . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kirsten Vis, Wilbert Spooren and Jose´ Sanders

291

vi

Table of contents

Typology meets witness narratives and memory: Theory and practice entwined in Cognitive Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Luna Filipovic´ Part V. The social and cultural contexts for CMT and CI Cross-cultural variation in idiomatic expression: Insights from Cognitive Metaphor Theory and implication for Translation Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diane Ponterotto Mundane Transcendence? Conceptualizations of faith in prosperity theology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Małgorzata Pasicka

343

371

From god is a father to god is a friend: Conceptual integration in metaphors for God in Christian discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Aleksander Gomola Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

409

Introduction: Theory informing applications, applications informing theory Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka The present volume brings together a selection of papers delivered during the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, which was held in Krako´w (Poland), from July 15 to July 20, 2007. This was, indeed, a jubilee year for Cognitive Linguistics: thirty years after various strands of linguistics focusing upon the relation between language and mind began to develop their theoretical frameworks in a cognitive direction, building up – during the 1980s – uniform cognitive foundations for linguistic description, and twenty years after the appearance of the first two milestones: Lako¤ ’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Eighteen years after the first conference, organized by Rene´ Dirven in Duisburg in 1989, the event in Poland was attended by over five hundred scholars from 42 countries. The conference was organized by the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association in cooperation with the Jagiellonian University of Krako´w. Its leading theme, Cognitive Linguistics in Action: From Theory to Application and Back, gave the title to the present volume. During the five days of the Conference the participants presented results of their research devoted to a wide array of linguistic phenomena of interest to Cognitive Linguistics. Despite the great variety of scholarly interests and the problems addressed, all the researchers – whether the six plenary speakers (Laura Janda, Leonard Talmy, Ronald W. Langacker, Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Chris Sinha and Dirk Geeraerts), the hundreds of speakers in general and theme sessions, or the forty authors of poster presentations – shared at least one common objective: to illustrate, as Laura Janda puts it in her chapter below, ‘‘how theory informs application and how application informs theory.’’ Traditionally, jubilee was a year of celebration and forgiveness. The present volume was conceived as part of the celebration, bearing testimony to the event and its key theme. But at the same time the editors feel obliged to ask their readers’ forgiveness: because of space limitation, the book could not encompass all the quality papers, lectures and presen-

2

Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka

tations o¤ered as contributions to the 10th ICLC. A choice had to be made so as to present the readers with a more or less coherent volume, which would at the same time provide a varied and stimulating reading. As a result, it was decided to shift the focus towards such aspects of the relation between theory and application in Cognitive Linguistics that have not been comprehensively dealt with in other recent publications. Therefore the articles o¤ered here do not specifically address such topics as second/foreign language learning and pedagogy (Pu¨tz, Niemeier, and Dirven 2001; Boers and Linstromberg 2008), language acquisition (Tomasello 2003; Da˛browska 2004), sign language (Emmorey 2002; Janzen 2005), nonverbal communication (McNeill 1992, 2000, 2005) or computational and corpus-based linguistics (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2006; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006). Naturally, individual papers in the book address a wide array of topics, dealing with various fields of application, as defined in the introduction to the first volume in the ACL series (Kristiansen, Achard, Dirven and Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez 2006). Some – more general in scope – indicate new directions and open new perspectives, others – originally presented at the Conference as section papers dealing with finer-grained issues – demonstrate ways in which application of the theory to new data and using new methodologies lead to refinement, further development or modification of the theoretical framework. All provide illustration for the recent ‘‘empirical turn’’ in Cognitive Linguistics, which is marked by the consideration and description of large amounts of authentic data, facilitated due to increased use of electronic corpora, as well as by the increasingly interdisciplinary approach. The ill-famed ‘‘linguistic artifacts’’, which linguists of various persuasions often used to create to illustrate and support their hypotheses about what language is and how it works, are being replaced by large linguistic corpora, setting new standards for empirical research. The impact that the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics has been making on the neighbouring fields of study is evident; it is often reflected by the very titles of books written within new ‘‘interdisciplinary disciplines’’, where the adjective cognitive comes to implicate significant modifications that a given field has been undergoing, following the adaptation of CL theoretical models, methodologies and principles of practical application. Thus we have witnessed the emergence of Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Kristiansen and Dirven 2008), Cognitive Poetics (Stockwell 2002; Gavins and Steen 2003; Broˆne and Vandaele 2009), Cognitive Stylistics (Semino and Culpeper 2002) and Cognitive Translation Theory (Tabakowska 1993; Gutt 2000). Cognitive principles of categorization as reflected in linguistic

Introduction: Theory informing applications, applications informing theory

3

labels put on entities and categories, as well as the cognitive model of grammar of the natural language, are now used, and developed, in fields seemingly very remote from that of linguistics proper, such as archaeology, cultural anthropology or theology. Many further vistas lie open. By bringing up a collection of papers which point out these new directions the editors hope to provide scholars working in the field of linguistics, as well as in other fields within the humanities, with a survey of recent trends which constitute the ‘‘empirical turn’’ in the Cognitive Linguistics of today. The contributions in the first section of the volume, written by eminent scholars, whose position within the field of Cognitive Linguistics has been firmly established, touch upon issues of continuing relevance to the discipline and introduce thematic areas covered in the next four sections. There, the contributions come mainly from young scholars, whose research illustrates various ways leading to the implementation of the cycle through di¤erent forms of contextualization, either presenting descriptive analyses that lead to theoretical adjustments and amendments, or widening the field of possible applications, e.g. to include theological or metaphysical discourse. Part I of the volume (‘‘From loop to cycle’’) begins with a comprehensive survey by Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, who review relevant developments that took place over the thirty years of the history of Cognitive Linguistics, putting special emphasis on the relation of grammar to cognition and presenting the distinctive features of CL, in particular the non-modular conception of language and conceptual prominence in grammar. The authors discuss the notion of embodiment, showing the philosophical grounding of embodied realism in phenomenology, and demonstrate the role of categorization in the emergence of the lexicon-grammar continuum, focusing upon the crucial notions of construal, perspective, and compositionality. In the contrastive sections of the chapter, Dirven and Mendoza Iba´n˜ez elaborate on the areas of overlap and contrast between Cognitive Grammar and the various versions of construction grammars. In the second part of their survey, they critically review the issue of polysemy, arguing for a solution based on complementing qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques. Finally, they discuss blending as a pervasive cognitive phenomenon and a psychologically plausible explanation for non-compositional aspects of grammar, pragmatics and discourse. In Dirk Geeraerts’ chapter, historical trends in the history of Cognitive Linguistics are also a central issue. Arguing for ‘‘recontextualization’’ in

4

Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka

CL methodology, the author looks for patterns underlying the developments in CL descriptions over the last thirty years, claiming that their discovery and re-thinking will have significant implications for the directions and ways which CL should follow in the future. Posing the question about the common trend underlying the development of various strands within CL, the author argues that what keeps together the vast breadth of cognitive approaches in linguistic description is their tendency to recontextualize the study of grammar. Laura Janda’s contribution demonstrates the working of the full cycle: from theory through application to further refinement of theory. The author presents an example of this cycle of mutual interaction by showing how the findings of CL studies of case in Slavic languages may be applied to language pedagogy and how this application in turn influences the theory. Motivated by the need for teaching materials, Janda’s paper gives an illustration of a scholarly agenda in which practical needs lead to a comprehensive investigation of a linguistic phenomenon and, ultimately, to ‘‘uncovering new territory for theoretical exploration.’’ Part II (‘‘The context for prototypes’’) focuses on the fundamental notion of prototypicality. It presents two ‘‘contextualizing’’ applications of prototypes in linguistic analysis. Tore Nesset demonstrates how the notions of prototypical and peripheral members of radial categories may be applied to explain certain changes in Russian verb morphology. He investigates the process which results in Russian verbs with the su‰x /a/ shifting to the group with the su‰x /aj/ due to the interaction of the prototypes of source and target verb categories. Esa Penttila¨ demonstrates how a prototype-based approach can be used to investigate characteristics of idiomatic expressions and to create a taxonomy which takes into account the entire complexity of the problem. In his analysis, the author highlights various relationships between di¤erent subclasses of idioms, arguing for viewing the phenomenon of idiomaticity in terms of a continuum rather than in terms of categorial notions. Part III (‘‘Contexts for Cognitive Grammar’’) opens with a contribution by Ronald W. Langacker, who explores the problem of the mind/ body duality and its linguistic manifestations in the domain of English complementation, arguing that a more unified account of complementation in language can be achieved by further refining the concept. Langacker claims that the body/mind duality is a ‘‘natural product of embodied cognition’’ and thus has ‘‘a firm experiential basis.’’ As he demonstrates, it is this duality, which is systematically manifested in linguistic expressions, that underlies the distinction between what he defines

Introduction: Theory informing applications, applications informing theory

5

as e¤ective and epistemic relationships on the conceptual plane, with the former involving the occurrence of events, and the latter pertaining to the validity of knowledge. The progression from e¤ective to epistemic relationships is shown to be correlated with di¤erent degrees of structural complexity of linguistic expressions, from lexical predicates, to direct complementation, to infinitival and clausal complementation. Moreover, the author suggests that the opposition between e¤ective and epistemic relationships can also be manifested within each of these levels, in di¤erent ways, depending on the inherent properties of the particular level. In conclusion, Langacker contends that the recognition of the systematicity of the opposition between the two types of relationships allows for significant unification of the account of di¤erent types of complementation. Peter Willemse takes up the problem of the description of nominal reference-point constructions, paying specific attention to the way in which such constructions are embedded referentially in the discourse context, and the way in which the reference-point relation may interact with information in the surrounding discourse. Following a corpus study of English possessive noun phrases, which as the author claims should be studied in extensive discourse contexts, Willemse argues for distinguishing a continuum of discourse statuses of these phrases rather than adopting binary distinctions. The paper concludes with implications for both the description itself and the theory of English nominal reference-point constructions. The author of the next contribution, Jari Sivonen, focuses on an analysis of path as part of the semantics of Finnish motion verbs. An essay in Cognitive Semantics, Sivonen’s paper presents the results of his investigation of fifteen lexemes: the most frequently used motion verbs which profile indirect path. He distinguishes between five groups of verbs with respect to their implied path shapes (Paths of Irregular Shape, Paths of Regular Shape, Paths of a Single Turn, the Back and Forth Paths and the Crossing Shape Paths). Once again, Sivonen’s paper demonstrates that recognizing the systematicity of seemingly disparate linguistic phenomena enhances uniformity of linguistic descriptions, and at the same time provides refinement of existing theories (in the case of motion verbs, Talmy’s theory of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages). Jakko Leino demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a useful tool for a researcher aiming at bringing together issues of spoken language and syntactic theory. To this end, the article presents an analysis of two parenthetical expression types characteristic of spoken Finnish and elaborates on the role of expression types in shaping the notion of construction, the organization of speech, and the relation between the two. In conclusion,

6

Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka

the author claims that models of grammatical constructions are just as useful for analyzing the syntax of spoken language (which is less frequently addressed in the linguistic enterprise than the more ‘‘orderly’’ written language) as they are for the written variety. Moreover, the notion of construction may actually prove to be more useful than the traditional notions of clause or sentence. Part IV (‘‘The pragmatic context’’) o¤ers two illustrations of the significance of pragmatic context in linguistic research. Kirsten Vis, Wilbert Spooren and Jose´ Sanders investigate the issue of conversationalization of public discourse. Analyzing three Dutch newspaper corpora: two corpora including texts from national newspapers from 1950 and 2002 and a corpus consisting of spontaneous conversations recorded c. 2002, the authors use tools provided by Rhetorical Structure Theory to compare various levels of discourse coherence; the content as well as epistemic and speech act relations between clauses are investigated to establish the degree of subjectivity in the investigated texts. Recognizing the level of discourse as a ‘‘major challenge to Cognitive Linguistics’’, they demonstrate how RST allows to provide explicit links between the level of linguistic information and the level of conceptual representation. Vis, Spooren and Sanders’s chapter demonstrates the e¤ectiveness of the method itself rather than final results of the study. Luna Filipovic´ analyses the content of witnesses’ testimonies: transcripts of police interviews with native speakers of Spanish and their attested translations into English. Focusing upon descriptions of motion events, she investigates the di¤erences between lexicalizations of the experiential domains in the two languages. In her work, these di¤erences (e.g. reference to the manner of the motion verb), which result from Talmy’s (1985) linguistic typology, are used to help to explain the modifications of the content of the testimonies, which take place when they are translated from Spanish into English. The study demonstrates how systematic research of lexicalization patterns within particular cognitive domains might reveal significant typological contrasts between languages and thus contribute to our general knowledge of language typology. On the pragmatic plane, the implications of Filipovic´’s study are equally significant: the description – and the following awareness – of typological di¤erences can allow for a better understanding of language-specific bias in legal contexts and provide significant clues for training language professionals – e.g. interpreters or translators. Filipovic´’s chapter provides a mental link with the final part of the volume (‘‘The social and cultural contexts for CMT and CI’’), devoted to

Introduction: Theory informing applications, applications informing theory

7

demonstrating social and cultural contexts for Cognitive Metaphor and Conceptual Integration Theories. Diane Ponterotto demonstrates how Cognitive Metaphor Theory can be applied to cross-linguistic analyses, ultimately contributing to the understanding of translation problems regarding idiomaticity. By o¤ering a contrastive analysis of a selection of English and Italian idiomatic expressions, her study explores similarities and di¤erences in cross-language renderings of such expressions, focusing on the issue of conceptual metaphor identification. Ponterotto ends her study with some practical implications for translation studies and translator training by pointing out the importance of the awareness of constraints imposed on translation practice by cross-cultural variation of metaphorical conceptualizations. Emphasis on cross-cultural di¤erences, as manifested in particular instantiations of universal conceptual metaphors, suggests a possibility of completing the theory-application-theory cycle: investigation of attested translations produced by practising translators might obviously contribute to our understanding of universal vs. language- and culturespecific metaphorization. The final two chapters o¤er CL analyses of two key notions in Christian religious discourse. In her chapter on metaphorical conceptualizations Małgorzata Pasicka o¤ers an analysis of expressions used by followers of Faith Movement, a branch of charismatic Christianity, which she defines as ‘‘prosperity theology.’’ She discusses conceptual blends and metaphorical conceptualizations of faith, which, as she claims, ‘‘lie at the very heart’’ of the Faith Movement. She demonstrates how the blending theory, seen as an enrichment of the conceptual metaphor theory, o¤ers a better possibility of interpreting complex and novel metaphors, which are characteristic of the ‘‘positive confession’’ parlance of the Faith Movement. Moreover, she indicates and explores certain innovative syntactic structures which appear in the Faith Movement discourse, and concludes by showing how such syntactic innovations co-operate with metaphors and conceptual blends to create an overall picture of faith as ‘‘something almost tangible, something mundane rather than metaphysical.’’ The direction for further investigation is clear-cut: although the hypothesis of linguistic relativism is not explicitly mentioned, with the pragmatic goals of FM in view, psychological and sociocultural implications of Pasicka’s analysis seem evident. Last but not least, Aleksander Gomola investigates the concept of God that underlies the metaphor ‘‘God is Friend’’, often used by process theology and feminist theology. An analysis of the metaphor, carried out in the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory, leads to the second part

8

Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Michał Choin´ski and Łukasz Wiraszka

of the chapter, which brings out the semantic contrast between the ‘‘God is Friend’’ metaphor and some other, well established metaphors that occur in Christian discourse, e.g. ‘‘God is Father’’. Gomola elaborates on the origin of the new concept as well as on social and religious consequences of its wider application. It is generally assumed that man cannot talk about God in plain, i.e. non-metaphorical language; Gomola’s analysis shows that a linguist can profitably use plain language to talk about the metaphors that men use to talk about God. Theory informs application, application informs theory. They feed each other, and at the same time provide food for thought for anyone keen on trying to understand the nature of complex bonds that tie human language and human mind together. References Boers, Frank and Seth Lindstromberg 2008 Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology. (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 6.) Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Broˆne, Geert and Jeroen Vandaele 2009 Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps. (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 10.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Da˛browska, Ewa 2004 Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Emmorey, Karen 2002 Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. Gavins, Joanna and Gerard Steen (eds.) 2003 Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London: Routledge. Gries, Stefan Thomas and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.) 2006 Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gutt, Ernst-August 1991/2000 Translation and Relevance, Cognition and Context. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Janzen, Terry 2005 Topics in Signed Language Interpreting. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kristiansen, Gitte, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez 2006 Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Introduction: Theory informing applications, applications informing theory

9

Kristiansen, Gitte and Rene´ Dirven (eds.) 2008 Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Language Variation, Cultural Models, Social Systems. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 39.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lako¤, George and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1993 Reference point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38. Langacker, Ronald W. 1995 Possession and possessive constructions. In: John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, 51–79. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. McNeill, David 1992 Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. McNeill, David (ed.) 2000 Language and Gesture. (Language Culture and Cognition.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNeill, David 2005 Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pu¨tz, Martin, Susanne Niemeier and Rene´ Dirven (eds.) 2001 Applied Cognitive Linguistics I: Theory and Language Acquisition. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 19.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) 2002 Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Thomas Gries (eds.) 2006 Corpus-based Approches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Stockwell, Peter 2002 Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Talmy, Leonard 1985 Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description (Vol. 3), 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tabakowska, Elz˙bieta 1993 Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Taylor, John R. 1996 Possessives in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomasello, Michael 2003 Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Part I.

From loop to cycle

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics1 Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez 1. Introduction: Looking back in pride After 30 years of inner development and steady growth, Cognitive Linguistics stands firm, both qualitatively and quantitatively. As a symbol of this self-assured presence in the linguistic landscape rises Geeraerts and Cuyckens’s (2007) monumental Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics,2 which even boasts on its blurb: ‘‘In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics.’’ What has made Cognitive Linguistics so dynamic and attractive? The dynamicity of Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is largely due to the fact that it is not a single person’s enterprise. Rather it arises from the combi1. This paper is a heavily revised and expanded version of previous work by Dirven (2002a, 2005). We want to thank Gu¨nter Radden, Ad Foolen and Verena Haser for their valuable comments on this earlier work. Financial support for part of this research has been provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grants HUM2004-05947-C02-01/FILO and HUM2007-65755/FILO, which are co-financed through FEDER funds. 2. Cognitive Linguistics now has a whole range of introductions, surveys and readers. There is the shorter type of introduction such as Taylor (1995a), Ungerer and Schmid ( 22006), Dirven and Verspoor ( 22004), or Lee (2001), and the longer type of an advanced introduction such as Evans and Green (2006). Then there is the more specialized type of introduction such as Taylor (2002) and Langacker (2008) for Cognitive Grammar, and Croft and Cruse (2004) for Radical Construction Grammar. In contrast, Geeraerts and Cuyckens (2007) is a highly specialized handbook, covering all strands, linguistic fields and even a number of neighbouring disciplines. Readers are: Evans, Bergen and Zinken (2006) and Geeraerts (2006b), and Kristiansen, Achard, Dirven and Ruiz de Mendoza (2006). An introduction to a two-model conception of CL, with a strict separation between the semantic and the conceptual world, is Schwarz (1996). Finally, for a comprehensive overview of the contrasts between the various versions of Construction Grammar and some functional models of language, see Gonza´lvez and Butler (2006).

14

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

nation of various pioneering ideas that, acting as separable strands of one whole, have drawn together to give rise to a unified paradigm. Central to the whole paradigm is the cognitive commitment, i.e. the conviction that there is fundamental unity and interaction among all cognitive faculties including perception, attention, categorization, conceptualization, a¤ect, memory, reasoning, and language (see Lako¤ 1990; Talmy 1997). The attractiveness of CL may be due to the fact that it has largely given up the traditional axioms that reduce language to a self-su‰cient system, especially dichotomies such as syntax vs. semantics, lexis vs. grammar, semantics vs. pragmatics, langue vs. parole, competence vs. performance, and synchrony vs. diachrony. The belief in the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign has given way to a search for the motivation of linguistic organization on the basis of cognitive principles. This change of direction stands in sharp contrast to the central claim of generative linguistics that language is an autonomous system, detached from any other type of knowledge, including encyclopedic or world knowledge. In contrast, CL holds that there is no clear-cut distinction between linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge (Haiman 1980; Langacker 1987). Additionally, in CL, the view of the interwovenness of language and other cognitive faculties has generally been synonymous with an extreme anti-modularity view, which is in line with a general anti-generative mind-set. However, a milder approach in all these matters is now growing. Whereas language itself is still seen as an internally non-modular system (e.g. by Glynn 2007), from an anatomic perspective, there are some who would not deny that the various cognitive faculties may be organized on the basis of functional modularity, i.e. the encapsulation of information in distributed areas of the brain, for which there is a growing body of evidence in neuroscience (e.g. Calabretta, Di Fernando, Wagner and Parisi 2003).3 In spite of this non-modular conception of language and the belief in the continuity of grammar and lexicon, all the main strands in CL have 3. Functional modularity rejects the naive notion of modularity as information encapsulation in specific parts of the brain. Similarly, in the case of language, the evidence strongly suggests that there is no domain specificity. For example, there are brain areas involved in language that are also related to motor control (Heiser et al. 2003). There is additional evidence that understanding the meaning of some linguistic expressions often requires that listeners become involved in an embodied ‘‘simulation’’ of the described situation (Gallese and Lako¤ 2005; Gallese 2005). Embodied simulations of actual object manipulation are thus used in reasoning processes such as understanding the metaphorical meaning of grasp an idea (Bergen 2005; Feldman and Narayanan 2004).

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

15

emphasized either the grammatical units of language or else its lexicalsemantic units. In line with this fact, the present retrospective overview will first concentrate on the more grammatical strands, and next on the lexical-semantic strands, not losing sight of further discourse orientations. We will also outline some developments within these strands, highlight internal problems, if any, and obstacles on the path to their integration. The following strands, or topics related to them, will be discussed: (i) the relation of grammar to cognition (Section 2); (ii) Cognitive Grammar (CG) (Section 3); (iii) di¤erences of opinion between CG and the various versions of construction grammar (Section 4); (iv) Construction Grammar (CxG) (Section 5); (v) Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) (Section 6); (vi) the philosophical basis of CL (Section 7); (vii) Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory (Section 8); (viii) Lexical Semantics (Section 9); (ix) Discourse: Mental Space and Blending Theory (Section 10).

2. The relation of grammar to cognition The most important inroads into the relation between grammar and cognition have been made by, amongst others, the following scholars: Haiman (1985a, 1985b) on iconicity; Fillmore (1977) on frames and scenes; Talmy (1975, 1978, 1988a, 1988b, 2000a, 2000b) on figure/ground alignment, and on attention and (per)ception phenomena; Langacker (1987, 1990, 1991, 1999) on construal, perspective, subjectivity and mental scanning; Fillmore (1990), Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor (1988), Fillmore et al. (2004), Goldberg (1995, 2002, 2005), Croft (2001), and Bergen and Chang (2005) on constructional patterns; Lako¤ and Johnson (1980, 1999), Lako¤ (1993) and Lako¤ and Turner (1989) on metaphor; Johnson (1987) on image schemas; Lako¤ (1987) on categorization, and Fauconnier and Turner (1996, 2002) on blending.4 From a historical point of view, CL belongs to the functionalist tradition in linguistics. Although Saussure ([1916] 1974) saw linguistics as part of semiology or semiotics, he mainly emphasized one of the three main modes of semiotic reference, i.e. symbolicity, as the organizing principle of linguistic structure. In the more balanced semiotic view of language taken by Haiman (1985b), the other two main semiotic principles, i.e. 4. Since Fillmore’s work, although generally compatible with the main assumptions of CL, does not subscribe to the cognitive commitment, we will only make occasional reference to it where it is relevant for our discussion.

16

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

iconicity and indexicality, are shown to be highly relevant, too. They are, moreover, more perceptually and experientially based, and as such fully in line with the cognitive view of language. As a direct manifestation of the interaction between perception and language, the principle of iconicity becomes visible in three sub-principles of linguistic organization, i.e. sequential order, proximity/distance, and quantity. The sequential order in the perceived or conceived world is reflected in syntactic word order as in the advertising slogan Eye it, try it, buy it. Syntactic proximity and distance reflect conceptual closeness or di¤erence, e.g. in the position within adjective sequences as in a large purple satin coverlet: here the conceptual closeness between the linen (coverlet) and the material that it is made of (satin) determines the primacy of the material adjective; color is next in the intrinsic nature of artifacts, and size is the least intrinsic feature and stands at the greatest distance from the noun. The principle of quantity relates to the pairing of form and meaning: a more complex form usually carries a greater amount of meaning, and form is motivated by functional factors such as politeness, demands of informativeness, and rhetoric, among others (e.g. compare the wording of No smoking in a public place with that of Customers are kindly requested to refrain from smoking, if they can in the dining room of a chic restaurant). Thus iconicity clearly reveals that extra-linguistic cognitive factors can have a direct bearing on linguistic form, or that linguistic form is not so arbitrary as many have claimed since Saussure.5 One of the greatest merits of Talmy is to have incorporated Gestalt Psychology into the cognitive exploration of language. Another major asset of Talmy’s work is its concern with both grammar and lexicon, and with their subtly di¤erent relation to cognition. As a highly abstract symbolic system of generalized or schematic conceptualizations, the grammar of a language is even more intimately linked with, and subject to, general cognitive principles and processes than the lexical system, which is an inventory of more specific and singular forms of conceptualization. Whereas iconicity is a receptive cognitive principle in that it reflects metonymic links between parts (single event or property) and wholes 5. This claim arises from an extreme interpretation of Saussure’s real views. As Radden and Panther (2004) have noted, Saussure was well aware of the dangers of applying the principle of arbitrariness without restriction and was consequently in favor of relative motivation, a view that is not incompatible with most CL claims on the relationship between form and meaning (cf. Langacker’s 1987 treatment of the relationship as ‘‘symbolic assemblies’’).

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

17

(total of events or objects), the imposition of gestalts on the experiential world is a far more creative achievement. That the structure of grammar is directly related to principles of gestalt perception was first shown by Talmy (1975; see also 1978, 2000a, ch. 5). One of these is the principle of figure/ground alignment, according to which the perception of an overall shape comes about by dividing the perceptual field into a more prominent part, the figure, and a less salient part called the ground. It is against this ground that the figure moves, is moved or stands out. Talmy furthermore applies this perceptual principle to complex sentences thus showing that the main clause has the function of the figure and the subordinate clause that of the ground. Probing more generally into the relation of grammar to cognition, Talmy (1988a, 2000a, ch. 1) deals with the relations between lexicon, grammar and cognition in terms of a building metaphor. Whereas the lexicon can be compared to the single bricks of a building, the grammar is ‘‘the conceptual framework or, imagistically, a skeletal structure or sca¤olding for the conceptual material that is lexically specified’’ (Talmy 1988a: 165). The lexicon contains content words and reflects the tens of thousands of individual phenomena as single, conceptual categories, whereas the grammar develops more abstract, schematic categories, applying over wide ranges of phenomena. Such a schematic category of meaning, e.g. that of the plural morpheme, is one that applies to all possible relevant contexts. Thus the schematic meaning of the plural is the notion of ‘‘more than one’’, technically called multiplexity, which is found not only with count nouns (cups), but also with abstract nouns ( fears, misgivings), uncountable nouns (ashes, waters), or event nouns (the silences between the two lovers). Furthermore, the concept ‘‘multiplex’’ is not limited to nouns and plurals, but is also found with iterative verb forms as in He was hitting her. Thus, whereas the lexicon diversifies the conceptual world more and more, the grammar synthesizes, under one common denominator, quite di¤erent manifestations of multiplexity, be it concrete or abstract, countable or uncountable, things or events. It is also in this sense that grammar creates gestalts: ‘‘[grammatical] structuring is necessary for a disparate quantity of contentful material to be able to cohere in any sensible way and hence to be amenable to simultaneous cognizing as a Gestalt’’ (Talmy 1988a: 196). Still, lexical and grammatical specifications are to be seen along a continuum ranging from content categories to schematic categories. An example of closed-class notional category that impinges on grammar is force dynamics (Talmy 1988b, 2000a). Linguistic expressions can

18

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

have a force-dynamic grounding where either of two forces, an agonist and an antagonist, one stronger than the other, can be in focus. We can have basic steady-state force-dynamic patterns with a tendency to motion (e.g. The ball kept rolling) or to rest (e.g. The fence kept standing in spite of the strong wind ) or change-of-state patterns which also exhibit a tendency to motion (e.g. The water made the fire die down) or to rest (e.g. The ball made the lamp fall ). There can be internal psychodynamics as in He forced himself to keep working (motion) and He refrained from smoking in the lab (rest). As Deane (1996) has noted the elements of force dynamics are basic to human cognition since they are grounded in natural motor activities. A related area of Talmy’s research where the cognitive role of perception is crucial for grammar is the study of motion. Talmy (2000a) distinguishes three types of motion: factive, fictive, and metaphorical. Factive motion, concerns real motion as in The boy ran from the tree to the fence. Fictive motion consists in depicting a situation where there is no actual motion, but it is conceived as if it involved real motion, as in The road ran from the river to the valley; this is possible since our perceptual mechanisms give us the false impression that there is motion (we move our eyes from one point to another and interpret the static scene as if it were dynamic). Finally, with metaphorical motion we see a non-physical entity as if it were a moving object, as exemplified by The smell came into the room. In general, Talmy’s own grammatical description of a number of single constructions such as those for motion events in various languages around the world tends to be typological in orientation (Talmy 2000b). Thus, he notes that there are satellite-oriented languages like English that represent the path of the motion in a prepositional phrase or satellite (e.g. The child crawled into the room) and verb-oriented languages like Spanish and Japanese that represent the path in the verb root (e.g. El nin˜o entro´ en la habitacio´n gateando lit. ‘The child came into the room crawling’). In the latter, the co-event (i.e. gateando) is secondary to the motion event itself (entro´ ); it describes the manner of motion and is typically expressed by a gerund. Thus there is a double opposition: Spanish expresses path as a first event and manner as a secondary event; English expresses path as a satellite and manner as the sole event. Thus, the English path expression by means of a satellite is a major carrier of the notion of motion in the sentence. In contrast to other founding fathers of CL, Talmy has never developed a specific grammar model. But, stimulated by Talmy and also by Fillmore, CL has seen the development of various models of cognitive grammar (the

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

19

use of lower case throughout this paper suggests a generic use of a term and the upper case a specific model). In the following sections we discuss what we feel are the most relevant contributions of the various approaches, which include Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, several versions of construction grammar, and Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory.

3. Cognitive Grammar: Construal, perspective, and compositionality Historically speaking, Langacker’s accomplishment is to have realized the enormous potential of Talmy’s gestalt-based approach to language and to have developed it into a fully-fledged theory, which at first he labeled Space Grammar and later Cognitive Grammar. Langacker’s main inroads into cognition in grammar are the application of the notion of construal to explain various linguistic phenomena, his elaboration of Talmy’s notion of perspective, and the generalization of the gestalt principle of figure/ground alignment to all levels of linguistic structure. The notion of construal is needed to mark the cognitive operation transforming a conceptual scene into a linguistic description of it. Whereas a conceptual scene is in principle not limited in the number of participants and relations, its linguistic expression always imposes a ‘‘construal’’ on the scene in terms of scope and perspective. Scope, which relates to how much of the scene is to be included in the description and which elements are to be excluded, is roughly equivalent to Fillmore’s (1977) notion of frame. Thus the well-known scene of a commercial transaction comprises participants and relations.6 Among the participants we have a buyer, a seller, goods, a price, and the quality of the goods or the extent of the sales. Then, there are two main relations: the transfer of goods and of money. Of all this rich conceptual content, the construal operation never allows all elements within its scope. The absolute maximum is to express all of the participants, but only one direction in the transfer: I paid her 200 dollars for the ring or else She sold me the ring for 200 dollars. It is of 6. The example of the commercial transaction scene stems from Fillmore (1982). His notions of scene and frame (Fillmore 1977) are comparable to Langacker’s notions of conceived situation and scope. Semantic frames are schematic representations of situation types described in terms of participants and their roles, which matches the elements of a scene taken into the speaker’s scope. Associated with the frame there are a number of lexical units and inheritance relations with other frames.

20

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

course possible to express the double transfer by means of the verb exchange (We exchanged the ring for 200 dollars), but here the buyer/seller relation is kept out of sight so that the commercial character of the transaction itself is out of the scope. One can exchange anything for anything else, e.g. stamps for horse pictures. Other forms of construal of the commercial transaction focus on the goods and the price (The ring cost 200 dollars), on the seller and the price (She charged 200 dollars for the ring), on the buyer and the price (I bought the ring for 200 dollars, I paid 200 dollars for the ring). All in all, there is a limited number of ways of construing the same content. Construal is determined by the perspective that speakers impose on the scene to be described. In the commercial transaction only one of the four participants can serve as the point of departure: the buyer can only buy, pay a price and receive the goods; the seller can only sell, charge a price and transfer the goods; the goods cost a certain amount; and money can buy them. Langacker’s main contribution in this respect is that he has not just left the notion of perspective at a fairly vague level, as exemplified by the various ways of construing the commercial transaction scene, but that he has further elaborated it into more discrete components. Thus, the perspective adopted on a given scene or situation can involve three further components: a vantage point, an objective vs. subjective view, and a given direction in the mental scanning of the scene. First, construal can involve the choice of a vantage point from which one looks at the situation. This can be the sentential subject as the figure selected for the scene, as illustrated above for each of the four di¤erent participants in the commercial transaction, whereby the other participants then form the ground (see further down below). But the vantage point can also be either of the participants in the speech situation, i.e. the speaker’s or the hearer’s position as in the use of come: here the speaker can take either his own perspective or that of the hearer as in the contrast between Shall I come to your place? or Will you come to my place? In the former the coming is seen from the hearer’s perspective, in the latter from the speaker’s. Second, perspective can involve the choice between an objective and a subjective construal. These two terms are used in a very specific sense, based on their everyday meanings. An objective construal presents an explicit temporal or spatial setting of the scene relative to speech time or to the speaker’s position. Thus, by using the adverb before now the speaker defines the time reference point objectively as the time of the speech act (now); and by saying She was sitting across the table from me the speaker puts himself or herself objectively on the stage as the spatial reference point. Subjec-

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

21

tivity in such cases means that the speaker leaves out the speech time (She was sitting here) or the speaker’s position (She was sitting across the table) such that these vantage points are merely implied, explicitly or ‘‘objectively’’ put on the stage. That is, a subjective construal as She was sitting across the table is precisely subjective because it implies an o¤-stage, speaker-dependent reference point. As a third component, perspective can involve the choice of a direction of the motion in real motion events or in fictive motion events. Fictive motion is found in scenes such as The roof slopes, where the mind simulates motion in processing the sentence (Matlock 2004a, 2004b). Also in such mental scanning the speaker has to decide on the direction of the motion by choosing between The roof slopes steeply upward and The roof slopes steeply downward, where the former suggests motion away from, and the latter motion towards, the speaker. After selecting a perspective, the speaker assembles the various elements chosen from the scene into larger composite wholes, linguistically expressed as phrases, clauses, sentences, or text. Next to these refinements in viewing processes, Langacker has also considerably extended the notion of figure/ground alignment to all linguistic levels.7 The structuring of a scene into a figure and a ground does not only apply to the relation of main clause and subclause, as shown by Talmy (1975, 1978), but also to other levels such as a lexical unit, a compound, a phrase (verb phrase, prepositional phrase, adjective-noun phrase), a clause, and a speech act. Before going into some of these levels, it is necessary to point out that, according to Langacker (1987, 1995), all linguistic units and their meanings can be reduced to two kinds of conceptual entities: things and relations. Things are independent conceptual entities such as book or linguistics, whereas relations are conceptual entities constituting conceptual links between things such as the temporal relation know or the atemporal relation about. Conceptual entities are joined to one another by assembling them into increasingly larger and more complex units. Thus book is assembled with about linguistics into the relationship book about linguistics; this initial assembly is in its turn combined with good into good book about linguistics; these are all atemporal relations, which are further assembled with the temporal relation I know into I know a good book about linguistics. This principle of composing and integrating smaller units into larger higher-order ones is known as compositionality, to which we will come back in Section 4. But let us first see

7. For a survey of the uses of figure/ground, see Grundy and Jiang (2001: 115).

22

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

how the figure/ground relationship applies to various conceptual units and their expression. Each conceptual entity, e.g. book or strawberry, consists of a profile and a base: the figure is what is profiled and the base is what the figure is profiled against. For strawberry the base is the domain of plants, in this case a strawberry plant with roots, leaves and fruit, and the noun strawberry profiles the fruit. A relationship like the strawberry on the plate consists of the relational link (or relation) on and two things as participants, i.e. strawberry and plate. The relation on profiles contact or support with a surface in the domain of space. The figure/ground relationship holds between the first participant strawberry as the figure and the second participant, plate, as the ground. In order to have a more specific term for figure/ground relationships, Langacker (1987: 217–220) has introduced the spatial terms trajector – which does not necessarily identify a moving entity – and landmark. Langacker sees the trajector/landmark configuration, which further specifies the notion of figure/ground alignment, as applicable to those conceptual relationships that are linguistically expressed as phrases, clauses, and complex sentences. In the structure of a simple sentence or clause, the trajector is the subject, and the landmark is the (direct) object or the oblique complement. Furthermore, each trajector/ landmark relation in a finite clause – or rather the situation or scene described in it – is simultaneously ‘‘grounded’’ in time and reality by means of the tense system or in irreality (i.e. potential reality or nonreality) by the modality system. A clause uttered in discourse functions in the interaction between speaker and hearer as a speech act (see Searle 1979). Figure/ground relationships also hold in this case, which is – in our view – Langacker’s most innovative extension of the notion in question. That is, the speech act itself functions as the figure and the whole speech situation is the ground. The speech situation comprises the speech act participants (speaker and hearer), the speech act time and location, and the di¤erent elements of background knowledge. The speech situation is thus the whole context or the ground against which the linguistic expression communicated makes sense as the figure. Langacker has also developed outspoken views on three issues that have caused di¤erences of opinion within CL: the notion of compositionality, the number of conceptual-linguistic units, and the universal status of grammatical categories such as noun, verb, subject, and direct object. Though not apparent at first sight, these issues may well be linked to one another, which we will do in the context of construction grammar models. Thus, as will be evident in the ensuing discussion, Langacker’s

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

23

schemas – which may range from specific to abstract – are but ‘‘conventionalized patterns’’ that give rise to more creative constructions.

4. Di¤erences between Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars Although Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and the various construction grammar models share the basic tenets of cognitive linguistics, they also di¤er fundamentally on the principle of compositionality, the inventory of linguistic units, and the status of grammatical categories. Construction grammar claims that compositionality cannot account for all linguistic phenomena and that acceptance of a third conceptual-linguistic unit is unavoidable: in addition to things and relations, they also argue for the existence of constructions, i.e. fixed patterns in the combination of relations and things, not built up compositionally, but available as whole constructional units with their own constructional meanings (see e.g. Michaelis 2003). Thus, the linguistic expression I painted myself in a corner can have two di¤erent interpretations and hence also two constructional paths. The compositional build-up accounts for the literal meaning that the speaker made a picture of himself/herself and did so in a corner. In this interpretation the object (myself ) is assembled to the verb ( paint) into a verb phrase that is then assembled into a relationship with the subject (I ), thus yielding a new composite structure that is further assembled to the adverbial phrase (in a corner). The non-compositional, idiomatic and constructional meaning is quite di¤erent, i.e. ‘I expressed an opinion, which committed me to things which I subsequently regretted.’ This figurative meaning is based on the figurative interpretation of the global construction whereby the speaker does something that brings him/her into an unpleasant state. In order to distinguish this case from the caused-motion construction, as in The player kicked it into the goal, we will call it a caused-change construction. In such a construction there is no assembly of the verb ( paint) and a direct object (myself ), but only between the verb ( paint) and the subject (I ), on the one hand, and between the pronominal noun phrase (myself ) and the adverbial phrase (in a corner), on the other. But the link between those two relationships is not borne out by a linguistic form, which is the very reason why construction grammar claims that it is the construction as a whole that expresses the notion of caused change. This in turn entails that there are not just conceptual entities like things and relations, but also more abstract patterns or strings – the ambiguous and hence infelicitous term chosen for them

24

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

is ‘‘constructions’’ – which just like things and relations also function as conceptual units.8 In such constructional units – or non-compositional constructions – the interpretation process is claimed to follow a topdown direction, whereas in compositional constructions the interpretation results from a bottom-up assembly of the various lexical units (I, paint, myself, in, corner) into increasingly larger phrases and a clause. In the figurative interpretation of I painted myself in a corner it is especially the relationship myself in a corner that seems to lack any conceptual and syntactic status in the clause as a whole. It is important to realize that it is not the figurative use of the caused-change construction that makes the construction special. This non-compositional caused-change construction can also occur with many other verbs, also when used literally. Consider the verb drink. Here the caused-change construction can be used to express a resultant state, with adjectives (He drank himself poor/silly/senseless), with the goal prepositions to or into (He drank himself to death/into a coma), and with the source preposition out of (He drank himself out of his practice/out of his career). In Section 5 we will discuss the solution Construction Grammar o¤ers for this, then evaluate Langacker’s view of it, and suggest other solutions. But first we must refer to the other major point of disagreement between Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and construction grammar models, especially Radical Construction Grammar, which is the status of grammatical categories like noun, verb, subject, and direct object. For Langacker, there are only two basic conceptual entities, i.e. ‘‘things’’ as somehow independent entities, and ‘‘relations’’ as establishing links between ‘‘things.’’ Linguistic expressions that profile things are, prototypically, nouns, pronouns, determiners, and higher-order expressions such as full noun phrases. Linguistic expressions that profile relations are verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and adjectives, among others. There are two types of relations: finite verbs profile temporal relations (i.e. processes); non-finite verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and adjectives profile atemporal relations. For Langacker, the two main categories discussed here, nouns and verbs are not just meta-theoretical constructs, useful to talk about language, but they are an intrinsic part of grammar and thus have a universal status. The same claim is made for the functional categories of subject and object (Langacker 2005: 128–129). Radical Construction Grammar rejects this view on the grounds that most gram8. Langacker uses the term construction in a much looser sense than constructionists in CL do. For Langacker the notion of construction is even compatible with that of compositionality, as will be shown below.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

25

matical categories di¤er across languages and can only be defined from a language-specific perspective (see Section 6).

5. Constructions and Construction Grammar (CxG) Construction grammars di¤er from Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar in that they reject compositionality as the main principle governing the grammar of a language, and claim that languages have numerous fixed or idiomatic expressions or ‘‘constructions’’, i.e. grammatical units in themselves. There are four main constructionist approaches. The first of all has been Fillmore’s construction grammar, also called Berkeley Construction Grammar (BCG), which was developed partly within a generative frame of thought by Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor (1988), Fillmore (1990), Fillmore and Atkins (2000), Kay and Fillmore (1999) and Fillmore, Kay, Michaelis and Sag (2004). Still, Fillmore incorporates quite a number of assumptions from CL in his approaches to the lexicon and grammar, known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar respectively. But typical for the more generative outlook, in this respect, is the separation between lexicon and grammar. According to Lako¤ (cf. Pires de Olivera 2001: 26), Fillmore does not consider himself a part of the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm, mainly because of his non-commitment to the interconnection between linguistic capacity and other cognitive faculties. Besides Fillmore’s approach, there are three fully cognitive versions of construction grammar: Goldberg’s (1995) Construction Grammar (CxG), Croft’s (2001) Radical Construction Grammar (RCG), and Bergen and Chang’s (2005) Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG).9 According to Langacker (1991: 8), the di¤erence between CG and CxG can be characterized as follows: whereas CG considers constructions to be reducible ‘‘to symbolic relationships’’, CxG assumes that ‘‘grammatical classes and other constructs are still thought of as a separate level of organization.’’ But more is at stake than a ‘‘separate level of organi9. ECG is mainly concerned with the embodied aspects of online language processing, which involves accessing and simulating conceptual representations or embodied schemas. ECG stands out for its emphasis on the simulation stage of processing, the inferences this process brings about, and its overall goal to achieve computational adequacy. However, ECG has not explicitly addressed issues of compositionality, the inventory of linguistic units, and the status of grammatical categories, which are the focus of this section.

26

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

zation’’; it is equally a question of ‘‘constructional meaning,’’ as has been pointed out by diverse ‘‘constructivists’’ such as Lako¤ (1987: 467, 538), Fillmore (1990), Goldberg (1995, 2006), Kay and Fillmore (1999), Michaelis (2003) and many others. That is, construction grammar starts from the existence of gestalt-like patterns or ‘‘established configurations’’ that are both simpler to produce and have meaning relations between the composing parts above their ad hoc compositional meanings. According to Goldberg (1995: 4) such patterns or constructions ‘‘carry meanings independently of the words in the sentence,’’ as in the parade example of an extended caused-motion construction Fred sneezed the napkin right o¤ the table (onto the floor). The verb sneeze, which has no causative meaning, is intransitive and cannot have a direct object. Since the ‘‘causative’’ meaning of the sentence as a whole is, according to Goldberg (1995: 4), ‘‘not strictly predictable from the construction’s component parts or from other previously established constructions,’’ she proposes to derive it from a constructional pattern such as cause-move . Of these thematic or semantic roles, Fred is the cause, the napkin the theme, o¤ the table the source, and onto the floor the goal. Thanks to this higher semantic schema the verb form sneeze inherits a causative meaning from the abstract predicate cause-move and functions as an ordinary caused-motion verb such as to put in He put the napkin on the table. However, there is a major di¤erence between the verbs to put and to sneeze: whereas to put does command a direct object and an obligatory resulting location or state, to sneeze does not command either of these. This appears from the passive test, which works with verbs such as to put (The napkin was put on the table), but not with to sneeze (*The napkin was sneezed o¤ the table). The solution that Construction Grammar has chosen is, in fact, to accept an abstract verb cause-move, which in our opinion is not necessarily the only possible, and perhaps not even the best solution. The first problem is the choice of an abstract predicate, which is a solution comparable to accepting a zero-morpheme in order to account for a causative meaning for expressions without a causative marker. Now already 20 years ago and in a di¤erent context, Langacker (1987: 452) discussed causative expressions that have no overt causative marker and said that he is not in favor of ‘‘positing causative zeromorphemes.’’ Langacker (2005: 153) tends to a solution whereby verbs such as to sneeze in the parade example might gradually, through its frequent use, assume a causative meaning in the long run. However, this solution does not solve all problems. Although the various caused-change

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

27

expressions with drink such as drink oneself to death are relatively frequent, it is unclear whether it is possible to think of this use of the verb to drink as involving causation. On top of all this uncertainty about the causative status of to sneeze or to drink, there is the non-object status of the napkin and oneself in such intransitive causative sentences. The incompatibility of the verb and the noun phrase is even clearer in drink oneself to death. Here to drink is a verb that has already incorporated its direct object (excessive amounts of alcohol ) and, moreover, if there was a direct object, it could not be human, but only non-human. This fact makes the explanation in terms of three arguments proposed by Goldberg’s Construction Grammar for the extended caused-motion and caused-change constructions highly suspect. The same holds for Langacker’s acceptance of a potential gradual meaning shift in to sneeze or, for that matter, in to drink. The essential problem is that at the conceptual level there cannot be a predicate-argument relation between drink and himself in He drank himself to death, but there can only be one within each of the two substructures He drank and himself to death. The second problem with Goldberg’s abstract predicate cause-move is that this does not account for the absolute necessity of a source/goal in the extended caused-motion construction with intransitive verbs such as sneeze, drink or others (e.g. laugh in The audience laughed the actor o¤ the stage). In these extended uses of the caused-motion construction the notion of motion is by and large expressed or carried by the dynamic prepositional phrase with o¤, out of, to, into, etc. This fact cannot but be related to Talmy’s insight (discussed in Section 2) that English is a satellite-oriented type of language, using the motion verb for secondary aspects such as the manner of motion, but expressing the very motion path by satellites as in The thief must have escaped by the backdoor through the garden and over the garden wall. In the extended caused-motion construction, the path component (o¤ the table, o¤ the stage, out of his job) is the sole component to conceptualize and express the motion, which also explains why it is a conceptually necessary component. The intransitive verb itself (sneeze, laugh, drink) reflects the action that serves as the direct or indirect cause triggering o¤ the motion, but this does not have to imply that the verb itself assumes a causative potential. It thus turns out that the extended causedmotion construction is far more complex in conceptual content than a single predicate-argument schema like 3cause-move cause theme source/ goal4 can suggest. The further question is then: is there any other way to account for

28

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

the causative relation between the two substructures in [(X sneeze) (the napkin o¤ the table)]? For a possible answer to this question, we turn to Langacker’s (1987) discussion of compositionality again. Langacker does not invoke compositionality for all usage events in language. Rather, he makes a distinction between fully compositional, partially compositional, and non-compositional constructions. As an example of the latter, Langacker (1987: 454–457) discusses the adjective-noun combination a patriotic pole-climber. Here he analyzes a putative event of boosting the feelings of patriotism amongst the crowds of spectators before American football matches by having a cowgirl climbing a flagpole in the stadium and kissing the American flag. The expression for such a putative event might be patriotic ( flag)pole-climber, which, if repeated regularly, might become an entrenched expression. Still, it would not have the compositional meaning of ‘a patriotic person who climbs the flagpole,’ but the non-compositional meaning associating it with the football context above. Langacker (1987: 453) sees such composite structures as ‘‘evoking a knowledge system to which neither of its components [i.e. patriotic and pole-climber] provides direct access, [but] the component structures motivate and highlight selected facets of the composite meaning.’’ In terms of figure/ground alignment, we can see the selected expressions and their meanings as the figures which here evoke two (back)ground domains, i.e. patriotism as associated with the American flag, and sports as associated with pole-climbing, combining both in an act of patriotic love amidst crowds of sports spectators. This means that metonymically referring expressions can evoke much wider scenes, and even implicitly highlight the conceptual relations potentially holding between elements in those scenes. That is, the relation between patriotic and pole-climber is largely contextually determined. Once the expression is repeated often enough, it acquires an increasingly de-contextualized meaning, which in turn becomes entrenched. As an alternative to Goldberg’s schema cause-move , it is possible to propose an approach like that of Langacker’s above for the caused-motion or caused-change construction as found in paint oneself in a corner and drink oneself to death. A good reason to do so is that CG does not regard lexicon and grammar as di¤erent systems. According to Langacker (1987: 456), both lexicon and grammar may, though in di¤erent proportions, show all the various degrees of compositionality, i.e. full compositionality, partial compositionality, and non-compositionality. Therefore we will apply this approach to non-

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

29

Figure 1. Perception of Causality

compositional constructions such as the extended caused-motion construction with to sneeze and the caused-change construction with to drink. It is part of the speakers’ knowledge system that the force-dynamic event (see Talmy 1988b) involved in sneezing may cause lighter objects to fly away and that excessive alcohol drinking may lead to a person’s corporeal or professional ruin. In each case two conceptual relationships are juxtaposed as follows: [(Fred sneeze) ! (the napkin is o¤ the table)] and [(Fred drink) ! (Fred comes to death)]. The causal link between the two relationships in each construction is based on our general perception and knowledge system. As has been empirically shown in experimental psychology (see Selg 1966, quoted by Radden 1985: 186), naive observers spontaneously establish causal links between two successive events, scenes or situations, even when no such links hold. Radden (1985) describes an experiment where subjects were shown a film of drawn triangles. One of the triangles approached the other and reached it; then, this second triangle started to move away in the same direction while the first one remained in the same place. The naive observer sees triangle A moving towards triangle B (phase I), and then hitting triangle B (phase II) thus causing B to move away (phase III). However, in the film the picture sequence was not one of causality. Given this strong propensity for imposing a chain of causal links onto observed or conceived successive events, it is quite legitimate to accept that speakers-conceptualizers do the same in language use. The causal link in to sneeze a napkin o¤ the table and to drink oneself to death would then not have to follow from an abstract predicate cause-move or cause-change, but could simply follow from a perceptual-conceptual propensity of naive human observers to construe causal links between two successive events or states. Just as Langacker invokes contextual factors to motivate the symbolic links between the components in patriotic poleclimber, we could propose an empirically-based and contextually-imposed

30

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

causal link for the two constructions under discussion. For a more linguistic representation of this construction, see the end of Section 10.10 Solutions like this one are not needed for very frequent constructions such as the transitive, intransitive, passive, and ditransitive constructions (Goldberg 1992). Therefore we can limit the discussion to another test case and pick out one construction from the various less frequent cases discussed in the literature such as the incredulity response construction (What? Him write a novel?! ), the let-alone construction (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1988), or the middle construction (Yoshimura 1998; Heyvaert 2003; Ruiz de Mendoza 2008). We will concentrate on this last one. The middle construction as in The door opened is a special case of the intransitive construction as in The book fell down. The middle construction with sell (e.g. This book sells well ) is even more special because it has a transitive counterpart, which, as shown in Section 3, operates in a fully compositional construction. Used in a non-compositional middle construction, sell can no longer focus on all the four participants of the commercial transaction scene (that is, neither on the seller, the buyer, nor the money), but the scope is mainly constrained to the goods. Still, the use of sell in a middle construction allows the speaker to construe a 10. Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2007, 2008) have explored the metaphorical grounding of some uses of the caused-motion construction, as in The audience laughed the actor o¤ the stage. Typically, the predicate laugh is either intransitive (They laughed and laughed ) or it may take a prepositional object (They laughed at the poor actor). However, in ‘‘laugh someone o¤ somewhere’’, laugh seems to take a direct object, very much like any prototypical transitive predicate (cf. They kicked the actor o¤ the stage). Both types of sentence can be passivized: He was laughed at and He was laughed o¤ the stage. We suggest that this kind of motion is comparable to Talmy’s notion of fictive motion. That is, we do not actually use direct force as in the case of kick, but we see the laughing as a psychological force fictively causing motion. In a case like He drank himself out of his job we then have to deal with metaphorical motion, which in fact does not involve motion, but only a change of state. This use is the result of high-level metaphor whereby the action of excessive drinking is seen as an indirect force moving the man out of his job. High-level metaphor acts as a ‘‘licensing factor’’ for the participation of the predicate drink in the caused-motion construction. This account is compatible with one where the hearer is expected to impose a contextually-grounded causal link between the event of people laughing at someone and the emotional reaction of leaving the place, which would act as a further pragmatic constraint on the possibility of a caused-motion use of laugh.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

31

configuration that goes far beyond a classical predicate-argument structure. Although there is no agent-seller, there is an agent-like property of the goods that has an ‘‘enabling’’ force11 allowing the goods to make good sales. The utterance This book sells well is not just a neutral statement, but highlights a less prominent component of the commercial transaction scene, i.e. the quality of the goods and its relation to the manner or extent of the process of selling. Whereas in compositional constructions with sell this manner or extent component is optional, in the non-compositional middle construction it is obligatory, or at least implicitly present.12 Another important component in the sell middle construction is the fact that, unlike the intransitive construction, which may take all possible tenses, this use of the middle construction prototypically occurs in the simple present, suggesting a general situation. Again, this component of the middle construction does not stand on its own, but is intimately linked with the properties of goods and the manner or extent component. Each of these three components more or less conditions the other two components. Conceptually there is a focus on the quality of the selling process enabled by the goods’ properties, allowing a high sales output, and presupposing a whole series of selling events. It is this specific contextual background that is caught by the sell middle construction, which totally focuses on one participant in the commercial transaction event, i.e. the quality of the goods and sales. The special characteristic of a non-compositional construction is then that it can overrule the normal compositional paths of languages and create subjects or direct objects that at the conceptual level have no equivalent roles as agents or patients. This view of what non-compositional constructions do seems to go into a somewhat di¤erent direction from that of Taylor (1998), who still seems 11. Radden and Dirven (2007) have observed that the subject of middle constructions in English has an enabling function such that the subject takes on a causal, agent-like value, as in Our new stadium seats 80,000. The presence of causality has also been noted by Heyvaert (2003: 132), who argues that the middle construction ‘‘foregrounds the fact that the Subject-entity has properties which influence the occurrence of a particular process.’’ 12. This formulation di¤ers from that by Yoshimura (1998: 279), who says that ‘‘the subject book goes beyond the semantic value of a non-agentive intransitive in that it has some special properties that ‘‘enable’’ what is denoted by the predicate, sell well.’’ What is still lacking here is the link between the goods’ properties and the manner or extent component in the selling process. This lack in the overall configuration of the sell middle construction is somehow felt in speaking of a predicate sell well, where in fact only sell is the predicate.

32

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

to see a bottom-up compositional build-up in constructions. According to this author, constructions such as the middle construction are schemata which have to be characterized by criteria such as the configuration of the parts, the contribution of the parts to the overall meaning of the construction, and the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse value of the construction (the middle construction is especially favored in advertising). In our view, the semantic component of ‘‘enabling property’’ does not come from the assembly of book with sell, but it originates in specific facets such as certain factors in commercial transactions favoring good sales. In this sense, constructions are gestalts in which the construction is, as said before, the figure, and the commercial context the ground of the construction as a whole. This wider view also allows other factors than what would be a direct object in a transitive construction (sell a book) to become the more salient factor in the success of the sales process. Thus also the location of the goods can, though marginally, function as the point of departure in the middle construction. Yoshimura (1998) gives the following example of a bookseller’s exchange: ‘Where shall we put the new travel book?’ – ‘Well, the corner shop window sells very well’. Obviously, we can observe prototypicality e¤ects in this construction too, demonstrating that we witness the impact of the same very general cognitive principles at all levels of description.

6. Radical Construction Grammar Compared with Goldberg’s CxG, Croft’s (2001) Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) is based on both Fillmore’s construction grammar and Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (CG) and is, in fact, closer to Langacker’s CG than to Goldberg’s CxG. RCG is sometimes even called a notational variant of CG, which is certainly not the case. But both RCG and CG are alike in that they do not start from Goldberg’s putative abstract predicates such as cause-move as the predicate in argument structures. RCG is ‘‘radical’’ in comparison with both Goldberg’s CxG and Langacker’s CG for various reasons. First, there is a di¤erence over the basic linguistic units. Whereas CxG originally used the term ‘‘constructions’’ only for non-compositional or unpredictable expressions, but not for compositional or predictable ones,13 RCG sees constructions as the only basic 13. Goldberg now subsumes, just like Langacker, all complex linguistic expressions under ‘‘constructions’’.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

33

linguistic unit, or ‘‘primitive’’ as Croft calls them. This applies to both lexicon and grammar (or syntax, as Croft prefers to say). The lexicon contains ‘‘atomic substantive constructions,’’ whereas the syntax or syntactic rules are ‘‘complex schematic constructions.’’ Unlike Langacker, Croft thus avoids having to make conceptual distinctions between things and relations, and their lexical expression as nouns and verbs, respectively. Similarly, Croft avoids having to distinguish between temporal relations (verbs) and non-temporal relations (adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions), to which we will come back below. A second major di¤erence between the three CL grammar models concerns the number of levels in the formmeaning pairings of language. Langacker (2005: 105) observes that CG only posits two levels or poles, i.e. semantic structure and phonological structure, which are linked as symbolic structure, but that CxG and RCG posit three levels: semantic structure, grammatical form, and phonological structure. That is, for CxG the verb give has the semantic structure of cause-receive , where agt stands for agent, rec for receiver, and pat for patient, plus the syntactic form V SUBJ OBJ OBJ 2 and its phonological structure. For RCG the semantic structure of give is give (donor, gift, recipient) and the syntactic structure is NP1 < Verb < NP2 < NP3 . Although Langacker uses such labels for descriptive analysis, too, he claims that they are semantic notions, not syntactic ones, as Goldberg and Croft are purported to claim. But maybe Langacker misinterprets Croft here. For this purpose, let us see how Langacker (2005: 106) presents Goldberg’s and Croft’s analyses of the ditransitive construction with give. Whereas Goldberg’s CxG (Fig. 2a) explicitly claims a syntactic level with a subject, an indirect object and a direct object between the semantic and phonological levels, Croft’s RCG (Fig. 2b) only uses categories at phrase level (NP, V), which are directly linked by the dotted lines to the corresponding component units in the semantic structure. Croft (2001: 2)

Figure 2. Contrast between Construction Grammar and Radical Construction Grammar

34

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

claims that ‘‘there are no syntactic relations between elements in a construction,’’ which may be the reason why he avoids terms such as subject and object and only uses phrasal units whose mutual relations derive from the relations between their corresponding semantic relations, as suggested by the dotted lines. Thus, he argues that syntactic relations are not determined by semantic roles such as agent or instrument, but by the causal relations among participants in the action. This view is supported by the di¤erent construal operations that are possible with the verb sell: the subject can be the agent (He sells the book), the patient (The book sells well ), or the location, (This shop window sells well ). In each case, it is not the semantic role as such that determines the subject, but the whole causal configuration of the construction. Additionally, Croft (2001: 35–45) thinks that grammatical categories such as subject, object, and oblique NP can only be defined languagespecifically, because constructions are language-specific themselves. Croft concludes that such grammatical categories can have no universal definition and no meaningful relations to one another. Here, Langacker (2005: 111) defends the opposite view, defining subject and object in terms of ‘‘focal prominence.’’ The participant that receives primary focus becomes the subject and the participant that receives secondary focus is the object or the oblique NP. However, there need not be a contradiction between Langacker’s and Croft’s views. In the case of sell, each of the three subjects (seller, book, shop window) exerts a certain causal force thus attracting the primary focus. Since in Langacker’s view the subject/ object configuration is an instantiation of the trajector/landmark configuration, which is itself a specification of figure/ground alignment, here the circle has become full: figure/ground alignment is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Our brief overview of some of the central assumptions of CG, CxG, and RCG has evidenced the complementariness of the three approaches, despite some apparently marked di¤erences, which are more a natural side e¤ect of di¤erences of focus. Thus, CG focuses on compositional constructions, CxG on non-compositional constructions and on construction networks and alternations, and RCG on the semantization of syntax. We now turn to the more lexical explorations, including the creative processes of metaphor and metonymy. Whereas the grammatical innovations of CL are rather based on psychological foundations, lexical-conceptual explorations are rather faced with philosophical problems. Therefore the next section will discuss the philosophical roots of the CL enterprise.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

35

7. The philosophical basis of CL: embodied realism or phenomenology? From its inception, CL defined itself in strong opposition to its dominant structuralist and generative predecessors, which are both still alive and vital. Unlike the rival theories, CL saw language not as a self-su‰cient system as had been generally accepted since Saussure, but as a cognitive faculty interacting with other cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, emotion, and reasoning. The main focus of CL is not – like in many structuralist or generative approaches – on form only, nor – like in traditional semantics – on meaning only, but on the pairing of form and meaning. From Saussure to Chomsky and beyond, linguistic meaning had silently been taken for granted as a semiotic system of its own or explicitly conceived of as an autonomous system in the mind, i.e. as a module separated from the human conceptual world, or at best as linked to it by a conceptual-semantic interface (Bierwisch and Schreuder 1992; Pustejovski 1995; Jackendo¤ 1996, 2002; Schwarz 1996). But in CL meanings are part and parcel of our conceptual world. Meanings are concepts or combinations of concepts that have been laid down in language. By embracing Eleanor Rosch’s Prototype Theory CL has broken away from the traditional Aristotelian treatment of categories and accepts Rosch’s view of the internal layering of categories with central or prototypical members, less central members, and peripheral members, which also entails the partial overlapping of categories. That is, categories or concepts are man-made distinctions in the experience and perception of the human internal or external world and do not just reflect the ‘‘basic facts’’14 of reality in themselves. CL thus ventures into philosophical territory, but unfortunately it has not been su‰ciently cautious in its search for a philosophical basis. Instead of formulating its own ‘‘experiential (or embodied) realism’’ as developed by Lako¤ (1987) and Lako¤ and Johnson (1980, 1999), CL might also have opted straight away for the philosophical roots of experiential realism, known as phenomenology, as has repeatedly been advocated by Geeraerts (1985, 1993). The phenomenologist revolution in philosophy was launched by philosophers such as Husserl (1960, 1970a, 1970b), Heidegger (1962, 1982), and Merleau14. This term is used by Searle (2005) to denote the physical facts in the world, which he sees as independent from consciousness. This is the opposite of what Rosch proposes. In addition to physical facts, Searle also accepts social (or institutional) facts and cultural facts.

36

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Ponty (1945, 1962, 1979), and it has been actualized by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1999), and Dreyfus (2002). Lako¤ and Johnson (1999: 97) do not make much emphasis on the roots of CL notions in phenomenology and the connection is virtually absent in the authors’ previous discussions of experientialism versus objectivism (e.g. Lako¤ and Johnson 1980; Lako¤ 1987). Phenomenologists, in contrast, have devoted quite some attention to the points they share with cognitive science, such as the embodied mind and the important role of pre-conceptual experience in language and logic (cf. Wiggins 1994). In any event, Lako¤ and Johnson (1999: 97) point out that what distinguishes CL from other approaches to embodied realism is the use of empirical evidence coming from neuroscience and cognitive science. According to Lako¤ and Johnson’s ‘‘experiential realism,’’ all individuals have access to the world by their embodied experience and perception of that world (experientialism), and they can all have the same experiences and perceptions, because they all share the same bodily constitution in contact with that world (realism). From a phenomenological point of view there is nothing wrong with this view, although it does need refining. The problem is that Lako¤ and Johnson go far beyond this (implicitly) phenomenological claim in that they see experiential realism as a challenge to traditional Western thought, ranging from Aristotle to Descartes and to many present-day thinkers, whom they lump together under the label of ‘‘objectivism’’ or ‘‘objectivist realism.’’ For Lako¤ (1987: 183), in objectivist realism ‘‘true knowledge of the external world can only be achieved if the system of symbols we use in thinking can accurately represent the external world.’’ The alternative view, i.e. experiential realism, holds that ‘‘human language and thought are structured by, and bound to, an embodied experience’’ (Lako¤ and Johnson 1999: 233). Perceptual, especially spatial, experience is said to pave the way for categorization of the world phenomena, and these categories in concrete domains are mapped metaphorically onto more abstract domains such as time, emotion, and event structure. One objection to Lako¤ and Johnson’s notion of embodiment and embodied realism is found in the notion of a ‘‘situated body’’ as explored in the collective volumes Body, Language, and Mind. In the first volume, edited by Ziemke, Zlatev and Frank (2007), the main reservation is that the conception of the same ‘‘bodily constitution’’ cannot merely be a mass of single human beings floating around in the air, but that they are ‘‘situated bodies’’ linked to their natural environment and to one another. Its twin volume, edited by Frank et al. (2008), concentrates

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

37

on the social dimension of the body/mind’s situatedness, which is given shape in language and communication in human communities with their own cultural beliefs and institutions.15 The sharpest objection to Lako¤ and Johnson’s notions of experiential realism and objectivism is formulated in Haser (2005), who criticizes Lako¤ and Johnson’s presentation of and quotations from the so-called objectivist literature as being very scarce and ambiguous. Up until now there has not been any serious refutation of Haser’s criticism. But can and must this criticism be refuted? Would it not be better to search for the very roots of experiential realism? In fact, this route was already proposed by Geeraerts (1985, 1993), who places the deeper roots of CL in the phenomenologist revolution in philosophy, especially as presented by Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1962). This phenomenologist stresses consciousness and intentionality in the joint interaction of the body and the mind with the environment. Embodiment is not a matter of the body alone, but of the mind through the body. Merleau-Ponty’s thesis is that ‘‘consciousness is present in the corporeal experience of the world’’ (Geeraerts 1985: 355). Here we find all the basic epistemological tenets of CL: its realism, its experientialism, and its assumption of embodiment in the sense of an embodied mind, or as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘‘an em-mind-ed body.’’ These insights of Merleau-Ponty’s are taken up again by Violi (2008), who combines Merleau-Ponty with Peircean semiotics: Through perception the subject meets the world in the first place and begins to give meaning to it. Phenomenological and perceptive meaning is transformed into linguistic meaning through the corp propre16 which founds, at one and the same time, the subjectivity of consciousness and the exteriority of the world. Here we can see another possible compatibility with Peirce’s philosophy: in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, too, external and internal world are not separate and in opposition with one another, but related to each other via the mediation of the corp propre that operates, in a way, as translator of perceptually constructed meaning into linguistic and conceptual meaning.

15. Yu (2009) is an impressive illustration of the role of a community’s cultural conceptualization of the world. He shows how the Chinese understanding of the body/mind as a microcosm in the macrocosm of the universe has always been the core of traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine and is still part and parcel of present-day literary and non-literary Chinese discourse. 16. The English translation for this somewhat opaque term is ‘lived body.’

38

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez But the body is also the place where a¤ect and emotion are rooted, as Freud and psychoanalysis have taught us, reminding us that the Ego is first and foremost a corporeal Ego. Recent developments in semiotic theory are insistent on the fundamental role emotions play on the very deep level of sense structuring.

Violi has also re-introduced the concept of a¤ordances, which are possibilities for action o¤ered by the local environment to a particular type of embodied agent, equipped with specific bodily features. In this way perception is always contextualized and constructed: the world is essentially perceived by some given organism endowed with its own intentions in some given context, and is seen as a¤ording opportunities for goaldirected actions. Perception is therefore always connected to action, and both perception and action are always connected to cognition (Violi 2004: 216).17 These observations call for a serious revision of the philosophical underpinnings of CL. If the paradigm is not adequately contextualized, it is likely to keep ignoring the connections between the notion of embodiment and the social and cultural dimensions of language, and to pursue in the oversimplification of regarding most of Western thought as imbued with an ‘‘objectivistic’’ vision of science and knowledge. If, on the contrary, CL takes on the challenge of exploring more deeply the roots of experientialism, the theory will gain broader philosophical support in the domains of body/mind unity and interaction, the connection between inner and exterior perceptions, and the nature of consciousness and intentionality, among other issues. Undoubtedly, CL has a privileged position for this kind of epistemological venture in comparison with other approaches to language: CL is a flexible framework that is already backed up by serious empirical work in psychology and neuroscience. The mutual feedback between CL and research paradigms such as phenomenology is more than promising if the philosophical reflection is sensitive to the cognitive commitment. 8. Conceptual metaphor and metonymy: How conceptual and how linguistic? To a large extent, CL owes its breakthrough to the innovative work by Lako¤ and Johnson (1980), which launched Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). This breakthrough is remarkable if one takes into account that, from early on, CMT met with severe criticism from psycholinguists (e.g. 17. Violi (2004) is an earlier version of Violi (2008).

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

39

Camac and Glucksberg 1984; Glucksberg, Brown and McGlone 1993; Cacciari and Glucksberg 1994; Glucksberg 1998, 2001; Vervaeke and Kennedy 1996; Vervaeke and Green 1997). But the success of CMT has been overwhelming, both in CL (e.g. for ideology research) and outside it, even in many other sciences such as therapy and social studies.18 A positive evolution is found in the development of Conceptual Metonymy Theory (CMyT), which is now an equivalent partner of CMT. In CMT metaphor and metonymy are regarded as processes of thought, and not just a question of language. In other words, metaphors and metonymies are seen as basically conceptual processes, which subsequently find expression in a number of concrete forms, both verbal and non-verbal. From a linguistic viewpoint, however, the problem is that a given linguistic form is usually linked to various conceptual categories such that the form seems to trigger o¤ or create the conceptual links between these categories, which might not be there without the linguistic form. In theory, one cannot fully ignore the impact of the linguistic form on the coherence between diverse metaphorical conceptualizations. At least, this holds for verbal metaphor, but perhaps far less so, or even not at all, for non-verbal metaphors. Before going into a more detailed analysis of CMT, it may be appropriate to deal first with some of the criticism on the basic CMT claims. The priority attributed by CMT to the conceptual level has been criticized on the grounds that one first needs a literal linguistic expression and its semantic-conceptual domain, e.g. the fruit of a plant, before it can be mapped onto a di¤erent domain, e.g. the fruit of one’s hard work (Bartsch 2002; Warren 2002; Haser 2005). However, this criticism is rather vacuous, since metaphor can be expressed, not only in language, but also in visual, audio or sensory-motor media such as drawing, painting, architecture, music, dance and gesture. The mere existence of non-verbal or multimodal metaphors (c.f. Forceville 2006) is a clear counterargument, since there is no reason why verbal or linguistic metaphors should be submitted to di¤erent conditions than non-verbal ones.19 18. To quote just a few examples of ideology research: see Dirven, Hawkins and Sandikcioglu (2000), Dirven, Frank and Ilie (2001), Dirven, Frank and Pu¨tz (2003), Grundy and Jiang (2001), Morgan (2001), and Verboven (2003); for therapy and social studies, see Lawley and Tompkins (2000, 2006) and Schmitt (2005). 19. We should bear in mind that linguistic expressions are not the carriers of meaning but simply ‘‘pointers to’’ meaning. This idea, which is widespread in CL, lies at the basis of other approaches to communication, especially Relevance Theory in the domain of inferential pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 21995; Ruiz de Mendoza and Pe ´ rez 2003).

40

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

The question is then rather: what exactly is the conceptual element in verbal or non-verbal metaphors according to CMT? Lako¤ and Johnson (1980) start from the assumption, fully spelled out in Johnson (1987), that metaphor is ultimately grounded in the human perceptual system and experiential world. The perceptual system is based on a number of pre-conceptual, most of all spatial, configurations which allow humans to react to, and manipulate, the world around them. This assumption is basically in agreement with the phenomenologist views propounded by Merleau-Ponty and Violi, as discussed in Section 7 above. The perceiver imposes structure on the things perceived, as is clearly expressed in the following quotation taken from Violi (2008: 57): According to Merleau-Ponty, meaning is in the first place articulated in our body, through perception. Also for the French philosopher perception is not merely the simple and passive record of an external world, already structured and pre-given in its configuration; perception is rather the active construction of a world already endowed with meaning and intentionality.20

The label Lako¤ and Johnson coined for such perceptual configurations is image schemas (see Hampe 2005: 1), i.e. topological, pre-conceptual structures that encompass sensory-motor and visual schemas such as motion (animate, inanimate, caused or self motion), containment/container, path (source-path-goal), link, part-whole, center-periphery, balance, contact, support, blockage, verticality (up-down), horizontality (front-back), and proximity-distance.21 As the human mind and language develop, image schemas serve as the basis for categorizing phenomena in the physical domain and, by means of metaphor, phenomena in concrete domains are used to come to terms with experiences in the more abstract mental domains. Thus we tend to conceptualize the emotion of anger as a heated substance via the conceptual metaphor (hence in upper case), love is a hot fluid in a container, which may be expressed in various linguistic metaphors such as My blood was boiling, He was seething with anger, and

20. For some more detailed, though brief information on Merleau-Ponty’s views, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/merleau-ponty/ 21. For a full list, see Hampe (2005: 2); for a detailed corpus-based description of each schema in Johnson’s list and its network relationships with other schemas, see Pen˜a (2003).

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

41

He blew his top. Time is envisaged as motion in space, either as inanimate motion via time is a moving object (The years flow by) or as self motion of an observer via time is an end point for a moving observer (We are coming up to Christmas). Events and states are captured in a complex event structure metaphor consisting of various subtypes such as states, changes of state, causes, actions, purposes, means, and di‰culties. All of these are conceptualized in terms of spatial image schemata: states are locations (be in doubt), change of state is change of location (get into trouble), action is self-propelled motion, purposes (of action) are destinations, means are paths (to destinations), and difficulties are impediments to motion or blockage. Lako¤ and Johnson claim that such basic conceptual metaphors may well be universal since human bodily experience is basically the same all over the world. Research on the universality of conceptual metaphor has been burgeoning within CL. Although first research results, for instance, on the spatialization of time seemed to confirm this universal tendency, it was soon found out that far more contrastive research was required: Marı´n (1996) for English and Spanish; Alverson (1994) for English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Sesotho (criticized in Tyler 1995). Even if the spatialization of time occurs in many cultures, there may be huge di¤erences. Thus Boroditsky (2001) shows in empirical research that the Western concept of time as a ‘‘horizontal’’ time line and the Chinese as a ‘‘vertical’’ one influences the location of months before or after one another. Another remarkable di¤erence in metaphorical conceptualization was found by Ning Yu (1998) for the domain of emotion: whereas, according to Lako¤ and Ko¨vecses, English sees anger as a hot fluid in a ‘‘whole body’’ container (cf. Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995 for an alternative analysis), Chinese sees it as hot gases in smaller body-part containers called ‘‘belly fire,’’ ‘‘kidney fire,’’ ‘‘liver fire,’’ etc. Here traditional Chinese philosophy and medical practice leads to a far more concrete, bodily self-experience. The research by Boroditsky and Yu thus o¤ers evidence both for the adequacy of Lako¤ and Johnson’s universal claims at a fairly abstract level and for the great, colorful variation of culture-specific realizations of these putative universal conceptual metaphors. Although Lako¤ and Johnson (1980) did not neglect metonymy altogether, they defined it in terms of metaphor: metaphor was seen as a mapping, i.e. a set of correspondences across di¤erent conceptual domains, and metonymy as a mapping within one domain. However, their metaphor revolution received virtually all of the attention and it took almost another twenty years to fully redress the balance between meta-

42

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

phor and metonymy, a position that had already been defended some time before by Jakobson (1971). The new metonymy upsurge of the late nineties culminated in programmatic papers by Ko¨vecses and Radden (1998), Radden and Ko¨vecses (1999), Radden (2000), a book by Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal (2002), and in collective volumes by Panther and Radden (1999), Barcelona (2000), and Dirven and Po¨rings (2002). For the sake of economy, we will concentrate here on Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal (2002: 27–42, 50–56), because, as already noted in Dirven (2005), they were the first to define metonymy fully independently from metaphor. Lako¤, Johnson, Turner, Radden, and others, see metonymy either as having a referential function, whereby one entity ‘‘stands for’’ another entity within the same cognitive domain, or else as serving as a reference point that o¤ers access to the other entity. These approaches cannot, however, account for constraints on these referential functions. While it is not denied that these referential functions are often served by metonymies, it is not their essence. Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal (2002) conclude this from the existence of predicate metonymies such as Mary is a pretty face, in which a pretty face does not ‘‘stand for’’ the person of Mary, but is rather a very salient feature that even serves to sum up the whole person. The authors do agree with Lako¤ and Johnson’s domain criterion: in the case of a metaphor like John is a pig there are always at least two di¤erent domains involved (people are animals), whereas in metonymy only one domain is involved, usually a domain and a subdomain (people and their faces). Just like in metaphor source features are mapped onto target structures, also in metonymy we are dealing with mappings, i.e. conceived and imposed connections or correspondences between features in the source and the target. In metonymy, the salient features of the whole domain are mapped onto the subdomain or salient features of the subdomain are mapped onto the whole domain as in the above example: Mary not only has a pretty face but she is a pretty face. By saying this, the speaker identifies Mary as a pretty face: the beautiful and attractive features of the face dominate the person’s whole being. Unlike in CMT with its claim to one-directionality, i.e. from source to target, CMyT has, because of the domain/subdomain relationship, one more possibility. Thus, the pretty face example is a source-in-target metonymy: the source, pretty face, is part of and maps onto the target, Mary. The target is the most encompassing conceptual structure, or matrix domain, and, as such, it is the only domain available for further reference, as in The pretty face is paying her bill. This remarkable potential is called ‘‘domain avail-

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

43

ability.’’22 The opposite case is a target-in-source metonymy like Bush attacked Iraq, where ‘‘Bush’’ stands for ‘‘army.’’ Although traditionally examples like this have been seen as cases of part-for-part metonymy, Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal (2002: 55) claim that this example is a wholepart metonymy. Our encyclopedic knowledge about Bush is such that it includes his being the president of his country, the commander-in-chief of the army, the leader of the Republican Party, etc. But the target, i.e. the referent that is meant in the sentence about attacking Iraq, is only the U.S. army. So the target (army) is a subdomain of the source (Bush), which now serves as the matrix domain. Bush as the source is mapped onto the army as target. In this target-in-source metonymy, the target is no longer available for reference, because it is encapsulated in the source and, hence, no anaphoric reference to the intended referent is possible: Soon after Bush attacked Iraq, *it (¼ the U.S. army) took Bagdad. In other words, the target in a metonymy is only referentially accessible if it is not encapsulated in some other subdomain. The newer CL approach to metonymy not only re-analyzes metonymy itself, but has also rethought some central aspects of pragmatics in a cognitive sense. A pioneering e¤ort in this respect is Thornburg and Panther’s (1997) metonymic analysis of indirect speech acts. In their view, indirect speech acts of the types that Searle (1979) calls directive, commissive, and expressive such as promises, o¤ers, requests, suggestions, etc., can be described in terms of metonymic models. In other words, just as a speaker can refer to a person by mentioning a salient feature of that person, a speaker can perform a speech act by calling up an attribute of that speech act, e.g. the speech act participants’ ability (Can you pass the salt?), their volition (Would you please sign here?), or the reason to perform the action (Why don’t we stop here?). This approach works not only for overt speech acts, but also for other constructions such as hedged performatives (May I ask if you’re married?) and sentences expressing sense perceptions (You can hear the motorway from here) and mental activities (I am thinking aloud now), all of which corroborate the hypothesis that speech act metonymies are just special applications of more general 22. The Domain Availability Principle, first formulated in Ruiz de Mendoza (2000), states that only the matrix domain of a metonymic mapping is available for anaphoric reference. It does not work alone but in combination with other factors of domain prominence and conceptual chaining that have been explored in detail in Ruiz de Mendoza and Dı´ez (2004).

44

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

metonymic principles. In Panther and Thornburg (2003) this insight is variously applied to pragmatic inferencing. The contributions to that volume aim to bridge the gap between CL and inferential pragmatics. Topics not only include the role of metonymically-based inferences in speech act and discourse interpretation, but also grammar itself. Further questions dealt with are: what is the pragmatic meaning of grammatical constructions, what is the impact of metonymic mappings on grammatical structure, and what is the role of inferencing in linguistic change? It may thus be useful to refer to all these connections with the label cognitive pragmatics, which is intended to capture all attempts to explain most, if not all, major pragmatic phenomena in terms of the standard conceptual tools provided by CL. The relevance-theoretic distinction between explicatures and implicatures is a clear case in point. Ruiz de Mendoza and Pe´rez (2003) have made this inferential pragmatics distinction compatible with Lako¤’s notion of idealized cognitive model. The explicatures of an utterance are the result of a number of cognitive operations like expansion or reduction, whereby, due to metonymy, the utterance meaning can be associated with ‘‘more’’ meaning (expansion) or with ‘‘less’’ meaning (reduction). Implicatures are enabled by the processes of correlation or resemblance, which are forms of metaphor. Another example of the power of the explanatory tools of CL is provided by Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi’s (2007) study of illocutionary constructions in terms of formmeaning pairings where the meaning part consists of high-level situational scenarios like the Cost-Benefit cognitive model and a specification of the conditions that allow metonymic access to such scenarios. Exploring this avenue further, cognitive pragmatics is likely to become a more central issue for the core of the CL paradigm.

9. Lexical semantics: Meaning selection or meaning construction? Over the last 30 years, views of categorization have changed dramatically. This has a¤ected lexical semantics in three ways: (i) prototype theory has largely replaced feature theory and the classical definition of categories; (ii) the structure of word meaning is understood as a semantic network resulting from semantic extensions via the figurative processes of metaphor and metonymy, and the non-figurative processes of specification, and generalization (the latter two will not be gone into in much detail); and (iii) lexical and phrasal meaning, which is often highly idiomatic, is seen as contextually determined.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

45

First, we will look back at prototype theory vs. classical definitions. Early CL had already given up the belief in the Aristotelian or classical definition of categories, which makes the following rigid assumptions: all members of a category, e.g. fruit, share some essential feature(s); these features are ‘‘necessary and su‰cient’’; all category members have equivalent status as members, and category boundaries are clear-cut. However, no linguist has ever managed to set up a list of such ‘‘basic’’ features.23 Even if one selects some putative features, they never apply to all members of the category. Suppose that for the category fruit characteristics such as sweet, soft and having seeds are necessary and su‰cient features. In this case several types of fruit would be outside the category: lemons, because they are not sweet, avocados, because they are not necessarily soft, and bananas, because they have no seeds. Strawberries are more like rhubarb because both grow on the ground, not on bushes or trees. Are they fruits? Why is a strawberry a fruit, while rhubarb is a vegetable? It is this fuzziness within or between categories that has suggested the necessity of a di¤erent approach to categorization, such as the prototype view (Rosch 1977, 1978; Berlin and Kay 1969; Lako¤ 1987; Geeraerts 1989). On this view, categories do not just reflect feature assemblies, but are rather manmade constructs consisting of prototypical members such as apples, pears and oranges for the category fruit, and more marginal members such as avocados, lemons and strawberries. Members of a category do not have equivalent status, and category boundaries are not clear-cut (nuts grow on trees, but do not share any of the three basic features). Categories are 23. There are, however, two possible exceptions that come from neighboring research enterprises. One is Wierzbicka’s (1996) Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which consists of around 70 primitive concepts, which are claimed to be universal. However, such primitives do not lead to classical definitions, but to exhaustive explications of the conceptual components of lexical and grammatical units. Mairal and Faber (2007) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008), within a cognitive-functional orientation, have incorporated similar primitives to the metalanguage used to define lexical constructions, which they call lexical templates. These authors have obtained their semantic primitives through extensive and systematic factorization of usage-based meaning definitions, which they have grouped hierarchically on the basis of standard lexematic procedures (cf. Faber and Mairal, 1999). Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008) provide a survey of the conditions for the incorporation of lexical templates into constructional templates (i.e. argument constructions) within the context of their Lexical Constructional Model. For reasons of space, we cannot go into these strands, which are compatible with the essentials of CL.

46

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

to some extent also based on family resemblances as shown by Wittgenstein (1953) for the German category Spiele ‘games’, which contains such diverse members as a football match, a theatre play, or gambling. Rosch (1978) also provided psychological evidence for prototype e¤ects in categorization; statements about central members of a category are processed far more quickly than statements about marginal members, and reasoning about any category is based on what is known about good examples of the category. Thus, for Spiel ‘game’, the feature of entertainment or amusement is most central. The second insight in lexical semantics is not really new, but is new in view of generative linguistics, which postulates the analytical preponderance of monosemy, while CL has generally considered polysemy to be the rule. However, recently a number of cognitive linguists have moved towards the monosemy view. In the monosemist views of meaning, as stated by Bierwisch and Schreuder (1992), words have only one basic meaning, which may however get di¤erent applications to entities in the world. This is managed via an interface between language and thought (cf. Taylor 1995b). The objection to this solution is that it may work nicely for words denoting man-made entities such as artifacts or institutions, like the word university, but not for words designating natural categories and their metaphorical and metonymic extensions, such as fruit in fruit and vegetables, the fruit of the womb, the fruits of the earth, and the fruits of his work. But even in the case of words like university, the appeal to an interface is unnecessary. Thus, this word can refer to a building, an institution for learning and research, a period of time in a person’s life, an academic qualification for a certain profession, etc. These senses need not be accounted for separately, since they are all linked to each other by what Dirven (2002b: 94) calls conjunctive metonymy, which relates to complex entities consisting of many components and in which a part of the complex entity may metonymically stand for the whole and vice versa. Given this basic metonymic link, an interface would not be needed at all. In the same way, words denoting relations such as the preposition or particle over or the verb to run are extremely diversified and hence less manageable by a putative interface. Admittedly, the reaction of early CL to monosemism may have been too extreme and researchers may have overreacted by trying to find too many di¤erent senses and explaining the motivation for the links among them. In a more critical approach, the main problem for CL is to find a good balance between the number of di¤erent uses or senses (indicated by subscripts) and the motivation for them. The item fruit is a good case in point. In its prototypical use in a given cultural context, fruit1 refers

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

47

to ‘something such as an apple, banana, or strawberry that grows on a tree or other plant and tastes sweet’ (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English; LDCE ). In this sense we can oppose fruit1 to vegetables, e.g. fresh fruit and vegetables. But in a technical sense, fruit2 is ‘the part of a plant, bush, or tree that contains the seeds’ (LDCE ).24 In this narrower sense, potatoes and all other root crop are fruits. Obviously, these two senses of one word form are mutually exclusive. Fruit2 is the result of specialization, which is, just like metonymy, one of the four di¤erent cognitive processes of meaning extension, the two others being generalization and metaphor. An instance of generalization is the meaning of fruit3 , i.e. ‘all the natural things that the earth produces such as fruit, vegetables or minerals’ (LDCE ). Metaphorical extension has applied to fruit4 as in the fruits of one’s work, meaning ‘the good results from working very hard’ (LDCE ). Although the four conceptual categories designated by the same word form are independent of one another, the human conceptualizer may see similarities and extend the use of this form from one category to others. Such extensions are neatly recorded in dictionaries as conventionalized senses, but this should not trap us into thinking that words do indeed ‘‘have’’ clearly defined di¤erent meanings. What is at stake is rather that a given word form is applied in a number of di¤erent contexts of use and thereby exploits one or several of the four processes of semantic extension. Although the various senses of a word may be clearly interrelated, the question is whether they are conceptually so strongly linked as was thought in traditional semantics and also in early Cognitive Semantics, which posited a di¤erent sense for each use in a di¤erent context, trying to motivate the links between them. Thus, Lako¤ (1987: 416–461) saw no less than 24 di¤erent senses in the English preposition over (see also Brugman and Lako¤ 1988). In a critical evaluation of Lako¤ ’s analysis, Tyler and Evans (2001) managed to show that the senses of over can be reduced to half that number. The various senses of over presuppose the image of a full-arc trajectory (ABC), suggesting the motion from ground level A to a higher level B and back to ground level C at the other end. Though the arc trajectory is presupposed, it is not part of the meaning of over. This proto-image is exemplified in example (0) below, but the basic meaning of over, also applicable to static contexts, is only that of position B in the trajectory, i.e. ‘higher than and approximate to.’ Apart from this proto-sense, the senses of over and several metaphorical extensions can be grouped into five clusters, illustrated in (1)–(5) below: (1) the other side 24. It is this sense that is exploited by the Latin-based metaphor fruit of the womb.

48

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Figure 3. The semantic network for over

or end of the ABC trajectory cluster; (2) the Coverage schema; (3) the Verticality cluster; (4) the Up cluster; and (5) the Reflexive cluster. Tyler and Evans’s semantic network representing the links between the protosense, the 5 clusters and the 12 senses is presented below in Figure 3, where the senses marked as (aa) have a closer meaning relationship to those marked (a) than to the rest of the senses. (0) He jumped over the wall. (1) a. Arlington is over the Potomac River from Georgetown. b. The film is over. c. Sally turned the keys of the o‰ce over to the janitor. (2) The tablecloth is over the table. (3) a. Mary looked over the manuscript quite carefully. b. The little boy cried over his broken toy. (4) a. Jerome found over forty kinds of shells on the beach. aa. The heavy rain caused the river to flow over its banks. b. She has a strange power over me. c. I would prefer tea over co¤ee. (5) a. The fence fell over. aa. After the false start they started the race over.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

49

The temporal or causal extensions within each cluster of senses are fully motivated by the particular spatial sense given first. Further, the coherence of the clusters of senses within the whole semantic network of over is accounted for. Also the criteria for distinct senses are justified. Thus there is no distinct sense if the use of the meaning purely results from the context or from encyclopedic knowledge, which is contradicted by Gries (2006), as we will see later on in this section. Still, in doing all this, Tyler and Evans have convincingly shown the usefulness of the very notion of semantic network. However, criticism of the validity and value of semantic networks had already been expressed in the mid nineties. Taylor (1995b) has shed doubts on semantic networks as a descriptive tool, since di¤erent authors had come to di¤erent results for the same lexical item. Sandra and Rice (1995) have questioned the psychological reality of semantic networks. On the basis of empirical work, Rice (2003) has claimed that the various uses of polysemous items are acquired and stored in a relatively piecemeal, idiomatic and construction-based fashion. This suggests that semantic networks are linguists’ representations of motivated extensions of form-meaning pairings, but not mental representations of a word’s polysemy by language users. The semantic network may thus remain useful as a summary of the motivated links between the various senses of a polysemous lexical item, and for the same reason, of a grammatical construction too. The third new insight into lexical semantics concerns the contextuallybased determination of lexical meaning. Here we can distinguish between a purely theoretical approach with a strong monosemist orientation and a fully empirical approach with a polysemist outlook, based on corpus studies. The monosemist approach is exemplified by the papers by Allwood, Zlatev and Janssen in Cuyckens, Dirven and Taylor (2003), which are neither extremely monosemist nor extremely polysemist, but rather regard the lexicon as strongly context-adaptive or, seen from the hearer’s viewpoint, as strongly context-dependent. Assuming that a theory of meaning is more operational than representational, these authors suggest that some very few basic senses of an expression (in the limiting case, just one) serve as ‘‘prompts’’ for meaning construction in on-line discourse, combining with contextual interpretation to yield the necessary inferences about distinct semantic functions of an expression in distinct environments. Instead of trying to specify a fixed set of senses for a word, Allwood (2003: 43) introduces the notion of meaning potential, which is ‘‘the union of its individually or collectively remembered uses.’’ Wright (2007: 571–572) has criticized the wide gap between this definition of meaning potential and the absence of any procedure to specify it:

50

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez [. . .] if lexical senses are mapped one-to-one into monosemous meaning potentials. . . , then specifying the meaning of any given word is just to specify the union of all information which has ever been conveyed in using it; and since no language user or linguist has access to all such information, the meaning potential of an expression can at most be approximated but never be specified.

Zlatev (2003, 2007) also speaks in terms of use potential, which he deals with on the basis of connectionist networks. Wright (2007: 573) criticizes Zlatev’s understanding of use potentials as ‘‘minimally di¤erentiated language games’’, and as ‘‘an amalgam of ideas from Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Searle, Dreyfus, Langacker, Talmy, and many others.’’ In the same monosemist vein, Janssen (2003) considers words as having ‘‘undivided highly abstract meanings,’’ which he illustrates by means of the behavior of Dutch possessives. Queller (2003) rejects sense-tosense mapping operations (e.g. Lako¤’s image-schema transformations or metaphorical and metonymic extensions) in favor of the emergence of new, freestanding senses via an abductive reanalysis of usage events. All in all, however challenging these new orientations may be, the fact is that little or no empirical work has been brought forward to support the hypothesis of non-polysemy. Consequently, these theoretical discussions can only remain hypotheses. A totally di¤erent perspective has been opened up in the last ten years by the marriage between lexical semantics and corpus linguistics, which by definition looks at language in context, with the sentential context as the lower limit. Two successful CL approaches in this direction are the Leuven group around Dirk Geeraerts and the German group around Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Gries. As a good representative illustration we will concentrate on Gries’s (2006) analysis of to run, for which he has selected 815 sentences from the International Corpus of English (ICE) for British English and the Brown Corpus for American English. The 815 sentences exhibit about fifty di¤erent uses (or senses), including uses with prepositions or particles such as run into somebody, i.e. ‘meet.’ In order to be able to handle the corpus material quantitatively and statistically, all sentences are first coded for a variety of linguistic parameters (so-called ID tags) such as word class, syntactic analysis in terms of subject and object, verb form, etc., which is done partly automatically, but to a large extent manually, because there are no fewer than 252 di¤erent attributes or tags to choose from. This analysis of all examples yields a complete syntactic-semantic picture or behavioral profile of this verb (see Table 1 below). The quantitative method provides objective empirical evidence for questions of the prototypical meaning of to run, the (degree of ) sense

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

51

distinctness, the clustering of senses, the structure of a possible semantic network and the possibility of automatic sense identification. The most frequent use of to run is that of ‘fast pedestrian motion,’ which applies in 25 per cent of the corpus, or about 200 out of the 815 sentences. Other quantitative indicators of prototypicality are the sense with the greatest variety of prepositions or particles, the sense used most frequently in the nominal derivation of the verb, the sense used first in child language acquisition and the sense first encountered in diachronic perspective. For all these criteria the sense of ‘fast pedestrian motion’ comes on top. The distinctiveness of di¤erent senses is much more di‰cult to decide. Thus, in its sense of ‘to flow’ the verb to run always has a liquid as its subject, but according to two criteria by Tyler and Evans (2001) this use of to run with the meaning ‘to flow’ would not be a distinctive sense. Indeed, it is a sense that follows from the context (the subject is a liquid) and, on top of that, it follows from our encyclopedic knowledge (only liquids can flow). So on the ground of those two criteria, the sense of ‘to flow’ would not be a distinctive sense of to run, which is certainly counterintuitive. Gries attaches far more importance to the intra-clustering of senses in a cluster than to sense distinctiveness and to their inter-clustering and their eventual configuration in a semantic network. Thus the sense of ‘(non-pedestrian) motion’ in There are three boats that run from the mainland to the Island is clearly more distinct than the di¤erences between ‘fast’ and ‘non-fast pedestrian motion.’ Or again, all ‘motion’ senses are more distinct from the sense of ‘functioning’ in The machine is running than they are to one another. A more general conclusion is the astonishing correlation between syntactic and lexical-semantic distinctions. Thus in all the senses discussed so far to run functions as an intransitive verb, but in its transitive use its most prototypical sense is that of ‘to manage.’ The contrast between these intransitive and transitive uses, and in fact a summarizing illustration, of the corpus approach may appear from the following table (Gries 2006: 86). A relatively di¤erent approach is provided by Geeraerts and his Leuven team is basically the same, but it also di¤ers in several respects. Thus in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema (1994), which is an investigation of Dutch clothing terms, the authors more strongly put the emphasis on lexical variation, not only finding out the various senses of words (the semasiological dimension), but also the various terms used for a given object such as the various terms referring to a jacket (the onomasiological dimension). This wider scope guarantees the embedding of cognitive linguistics in the wider tradition of 19th and 20th century semantics, as practiced in linguistics and philology. The quantitative statistical methods

52

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Table 1. Complementary distribution of selected ID tags for the two most frequent senses of run

verb form

transitivity

‘fast pedestrian motion’

‘to manage’

þ

ran

run (past part.)



runs

ran

þ

intransitive

transitive



transitive

intransitive

þ

main clause, imperative clause

zero relative clause, zero subordinate clause



(zero) relative clause, interrogative clause

main clause

þ

human, animate

organization/institution



concrete objects, organization/institution



þ

towards, for, down, after, up

0







clause type

subject preposition of following PP

as practiced in sociolinguistic research have always been part and parcel of Geeraerts’ work, but a major di¤erence with the recent turn in CL towards corpus linguistics is that they have also been applied both diachronically and sociolinguistically. Thus, for example, Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999) continue and extend the research on clothing terms by Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema (1994), but they now investigate both clothing and soccer terms and cover three periods in the development of their use, both in Belgian Dutch and in Netherlandic Dutch. All these diachronic and sociolinguistic variation studies are also theoretically and programmatically explored in Geeraerts (2005, 2006a), which all stress the inevitability of a cognitive sociolinguistics. It is only to be hoped that these diverse CL approaches to lexical semantics will somehow integrate their research on prototype e¤ects, semantic flexibility and variation into a usage/corpus-based and quantitativequalitative synthesis. 10. Discourse: Mental Space Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory Cognitive Linguistics is not only a lexico-grammatical theory of language; it also embraces the whole of language functions and structure, including

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

53

both pragmatic aspects, as shown in Section 8, and the discourse dimension, which is to be discussed now. In discourse, various knowledge systems, linguistic and non-linguistic ones, are invoked, which Fauconnier (1985/21994) calls mental spaces. Each utterance, even each content word, in discourse reflects and evokes a mental representation of some situation and/or some entities taking part in it. For the encoding and interpretation of mental representations speakers and hearers draw, not only on the linguistic expression as the figure, which mainly gives hints for interpretation, but also on the speech situation, and on their encyclopedic or world knowledge, which, in Langacker’s view (see Section 3), all together form the ground. Each utterance is grounded in a basic mental space which is primarily the speaker’s perspective, but which comes to be shared by other participants in the speech event. This speech situation is the base space (space 0). In the base space we can open new spaces as illustrated in an often quoted and much discussed example: I dreamt I was Marilyn Monroe and kissed me. How can the obligatory use of the phrase I kissed me instead of I kissed myself be explained here? In the example, the phrase I dreamt is part of the base space, and the verb dream is a space-builder opening a new space (space 1) of an imagined world in which the second I (was Marilyn Monroe) is no longer identical with the first I (dreamt) in the base space, but is part of a new knowledge frame in which Marilyn Monroe is not kissing herself, but the speaker, i.e. the I in the base space. Mental Space Theory (MST) initially started out as a cognitive alternative to traditional theories of reference and managed to solve many of the referential problems left unsolved by logic-oriented trends in generative linguistics. Gradually MST has, in the work of Fauconnier and Sweetser (1996) and Fauconnier (1997), developed into an encompassing cognitive theory of discourse and discourse management (see also Oakley and Hougaard 2008). In the development of the ongoing discourse, speaker(s) and hearer(s) have to keep track of all the mental spaces opened up for referents and they can at any time go back to any of them to elaborate them further. Still, MST is not limited to reference or discourse management, but also explores grammatical problems such as the tense-aspectmodality system serving the grammatical functions of perspective, viewpoint, epistemic distance, and grounding. This concept of ‘grounding,’ which is Langacker’s term for anchoring the speech act and the whole discourse in the actual reality of the speech act situation at speech time (see Section 3), can directly be linked to Fauconnier’s notion of base space. Furthermore, MST is also at the basis of Turner and Fauconnier’s (1995) metaphor theory, which is one of the applications of Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT). In their view, the source domain of

54

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

a metaphorical expression is not just mapped onto the target domain as proposed in Lako¤ and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but both the source and target domains are input spaces, which, via the generic space containing their common elements, are blended or integrated into the blend, which may also contain new emergent meaning, not present in the input spaces. Comparing the divergences between the two cognitive metaphor theories and those between the various grammar theories, it is not di‰cult to see that there is far less opposition between the former than between the latter. CBT is not a rival of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and certainly does not intend to replace it. The two models of metaphorical mapping are to be seen as complementary to each other rather than as rivals, as claimed by Grady, Oakley and Coulson (1999: 101): blending theorists are said to look at the particulars of single metaphorical expressions, whereas conceptual metaphor theorists are more interested in generalizations over conventional patterns across metaphors. Also here the desirability of a stronger integration of the various CL strands into a more synthetic view is strongly felt. This line of thought is also followed by Langacker (2003a, 2003b), who is making various attempts to come closer to and integrate views from both Fauconnier’s MST and Goldberg’s CxG into his Cognitive Grammar model. That a harmonic integration of the various CL strands is feasible at the descriptive level has now been proven in Radden and Dirven’s (2007) Cognitive English Grammar, from which an analysis in terms of conceptual blending for the extended caused-motion construction in Fred sneezed the napkin right o¤ the table is presented here (Figure 4). This blending analysis allows one to unite CBT with either Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar or Goldberg’s CxG. In fact, one input space is still lacking here, i.e. the as-path-specified motion that the napkin gets o¤ the table. Let’s call it input 3.25 We can interpret the causal link represented by input space 2 either as an element of encyclopedic knowledge, uniting two successive events in perception as one causing the other. This would be a possible representation of our own extension of Langacker’s line of 25. Blending Theory postulates inconsistencies and asymmetries between input spaces that are resolved in the blend. This thesis has been disputed in Ruiz de Mendoza (1998) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Pen˜a (2005), who basically claim that inconsistencies and non-correspondences only arise when not enough input spaces have been activated. The blend in this alternative view becomes a mere repository of structure projected – in a principled, non-arbitrary way – from multiple input spaces, but not the creator of new, emergent structure.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

55

Figure 4. Blending in Fred sneezed the napkin o¤ the table

reasoning for the phrase patriotic pole-climber. But input 2 can also be invoked as the spelled-out representation of Goldberg’s predicate-argument structure with the abstract predicate cause-move and the arguments . The great advantage of the Conceptual Blending approach is that one does not have to pin down oneself on either a purely-conceptual-perceptual interpretation of the causal link or else a conceptual-linguistic one. Would it be conceivable that CL is going to look for viable solutions to its richly di¤erent approaches along these or similar lines? 11. Conclusion This necessarily brief survey has attempted to highlight the main areas of interest of the CL enterprise from the point of view of its unity despite apparent diversity and of its ability to interact in a fruitful way with di¤erent disciplines related to language, mind, and the social context. It has also put into focus the strong descriptive and explanatory potential of the di¤erent strands of CL, which, far from being mutually contradictory accounts of language, can be regarded as highly complementary. The di¤erences are thus a matter of shifts of emphasis and can be reconciled, as we have tried to show, and integrated into a broad, ambitious picture

56

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

of language use in relation to the embodied mind and specific cultural exploitations of its universal features. The necessarily unfinished picture that 30 years of theoretical growth of CL presents is suggestive, colorful, and dynamic, with each and every element of the overall approach gradually taking shape in its appropriate place. References Allwood, Jens 2003

Meaning potentials and context: Some consequences for the analysis of variation in meaning. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 29–65. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Alverson, Hoyt 1994 Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English. Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press. Barcelona, Antonio (ed.) 2000 Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Topics in English Linguistics 30. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bartsch, Renate 2002 Generating polysemy: Metaphor and metonymy. In: Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, 49–74. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bergen, Benjamin 2005 Mental simulation in literal and figurative language understanding. In: Seana Coulson and Barabara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.), The Literal and Nonliteral in Language and Thought, 255– 280. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Bergen, Benjamin K. and Nancy Chang 2005 Embodied construction grammar in simulation-based language ¨ stman and Mirjam Fried (eds.), understanding. In: Jan-Ola O Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions, 147–190. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay 1969 Basic Color Terms. Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bierwisch, Manfred and Robert Schreuder 1992 From concepts to lexical items. Cognition 42: 23–60. Boroditsky, Lera 2000 Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75: 1–28. Boroditsky, Lera 2001 Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology 43: 1–22.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

57

Boroditsky, Lera and Michael Ramscar 2002 The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science 13: 185–189. Brugman, Claudia and George Lako¤ 1988 Cognitive topology and lexical networks. In Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. Perspectives from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence, Steven L. Small. Garrison W. Cottrell, and Michael K. Tannenhaus (eds.), 477–507. San Mateo, Cal.: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Cacciari, Cristina and Sam Glucksberg 1994 Understanding figurative language. In: Morton Ann Gernsbacher (ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 447–477. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press. Calabretta, Ra¤aele, Andrea Di Ferdinando, Gu´nter P. Wagner and Domenico Parisi 2003 What does it take to evolve behaviorally complex organisms? BioSystems 69: 245–262. Camac, Mary K. and Sam Glucksberg 1984 Metaphors do not use associations between concepts, they are used to create them. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 13: 443–455. Croft, William 2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse 2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csabı´, Szilvia 2004 A cognitive linguistic view of polysemy in English and its implications for teaching. In: Michel Achard and Susanne Niemeier (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching, 233–256. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cuyckens, Hubert, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.) 2003 Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Deane, Paul D. 1996 On Jackendo¤ ’s conceptual semantics. Cognitive Linguistics 7 (1): 35–91. Dirven, Rene´ 2002a Cognitive linguistics. In: Kirsten Malmkjaer (ed.), The Linguistics Encyclopedia. Second Edition, 76–82. London/New York: Routledge. Dirven, Rene´ 2002b Metonymy and metaphor: Di¤erent mental strategies of conceptualisation. In: Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings (eds.), Metaphor

58

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, 75–111. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Dirven, Rene´ 2005

Major strands in cognitive linguistics. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, 69– 100. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dirven, Rene´, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.) 2000 Language and Ideology. Vol. I: Theoretical Cognitive Approaches. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 204. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dirven, Rene´, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie (eds.) 2001 Language and Ideology. Vol. II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 205. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dirven, Rene´ and Ralf Po¨rings (eds.) 2002 Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dirven, Rene´, Roslyn M. Frank and Martin Pu¨tz (eds.) 2003 Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideologies, Metaphors, and Meanings, 123–157. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dirven, Rene´, and Marjolin Verspoor 22004 Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2002 Intelligence without representation: Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 367–383. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus 1999 The challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment for cognitive science. In: Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (eds.), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, 103–120. New York: Routledge. Evans, Vyvyan and Melanie Green 2006 Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Evans, Vyvyan, Benjamin K. Bergen and Jo¨rg Zinken (eds.) 2006 The Cognitive Linguistics Reader. Hereford, U.K.: Equinox Publishing. Faber, Pamela and Ricardo Mairal 1999 Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fauconnier, Gilles 1985 Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

59

Fauconnier, Gilles 21994 Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles 1997 Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles and Eve Sweetser 1996 Spaces, Worlds and Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner 1996 Blending as a central process of grammar. In: Adele Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, 113–130. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner 2002 The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Feldman, Jerome and Srini Narayanan 2004 Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language. Brain and Language 89: 385–392. Fillmore, Charles J. 1977 Scenes-and-frames semantics. In: Antonio Zampolli (ed.), Linguistic Structures Processing, 55–81. Amsterdam/New York: NorthHolland. Fillmore, Charles J. 1982 Frame semantics. In: The Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Pub. Co. Fillmore, Charles J. 1990 Construction grammar. Course reader for linguistics 120A. Ms. University of California. Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Catherine O’Connor 1988 Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical construction: The case of ‘let alone’. Language 64: 501–538. Fillmore, Charles J. and Beryl T. S. Atkins 2000 Describing polysemy: The case of ‘crawl’. In: Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock (eds.), Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches, 91–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay, Laura A. Michaelis and Ivan Sag 2004 Construction Grammar. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications. Forceville, Charles 2006 Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, 379– 402. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

60

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Frank, Roslyn M., Rene´ Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Berna´rdez (eds.) 2008 Body, Language and Mind, Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness. Cognitive Linguistics Research 35.2. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gallese, Vitorio 2005 Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 4: 23–48. Gallese, Vitorio and Gorge Lako¤ 2005 The brain’s concepts: The role of sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22: 455–479. Geeraerts, Dirk 1985 Paradigm and Paradox. Explorations into a Paradigmatic Theory of Meaning and its Epistemological Background. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Geeraerts, Dirk 1989 Introduction: Prospects and problems of prototype theory. Linguistics 27: 587–612. Geeraerts, Dirk 1993 Cognitive semantics and the history of philosophical epistemology. In: Richard A. Geiger and Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (eds.), Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language. A Selection of Papers from the First International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Duisburg, 1989, 53–79. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk 2005 Lectal variation and empirical data in Cognitive Linguistics. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, 163–189. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk 2006a Methodology in Cognitive Linguistics. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, 51–80. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk 2006b Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 34.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.) 2007 The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stef Grondelaers 1995 Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In Trends in Linguistics, John Taylor, and Robert MacLaury (eds.), 153–179. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

61

Geeraerts, Dirk, Stef Grondelaers and Peter Bakema 1994 The Structure of Lexical Variation: Meaning, Naming, and Context. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers and Dirk Speelman 1999 Convergentie en Divergentie in de Nederlandse Woordenschat. Een Onderzoek naar Kleding- en Voetbaltermen. (¼ Convergence and Divergence in Dutch vocabulary. An investigation into clothing and soccer terms). Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Glucksberg, Sam 1998 Understanding metaphors. Current Directions in Psychological Science 7: 39–43. Glucksberg, Sam 2001 Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. (With a contribution by Matthew S. McGlone). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glucksberg, Sam, Mary Brown and Matthew S. McGlone 1993 Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory and Cognition 21: 711–719. Glynn, Dylan 2007 Iconicity and the grammar-lexis interface. In: Elz˙bieta Tabakowska, Christina Ljungberg and Olga Fischer (eds.), Insistent Images, 269–288. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goldberg, Adele E. 1992 The Inherent Semantics of Argument Structure: The Case of the English Ditransitive Construction. Cognitive Linguistics 3: 37– 74. Goldberg, Adele E. 1995 Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele E. 2002 Surface generalizations: An alternative to alternations. Cognitive Linguistics 13: 327–356. Goldberg, Adele E. 2006 Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gonza´lvez, Francisco and Christopher S. Butler 2006 Mapping functional-cognitive space. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6: 39–96. Grady, Joseph 1997 theories are buildings revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 8(4): 267–290. Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson 1999 Conceptual blending and metaphor. In: Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 101–124. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

62

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Gries, Stephan 2006

Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of ‘to run’. In: Stefan Gries, and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics. Corpus-Based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis, 57–99. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Grundy, Peter and Yan Jiang 2001 The bare past as an ideological construction in Hong Kong discourse. In: Rene´ Dirven, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie (eds.), Language and Ideology. Volume II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches, 117–134. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haiman, John 1980 Dictionaries and encyclopedias. Lingua 50: 329–357. Haiman, John (ed.) 1985a Iconicity in Syntax. Typological Studies in Language 6. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haiman, John 1985b Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion: Cambridge University Press. Hampe, Beate (In cooperation with Joseph E. Grady) (eds.) 2005 From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Haser, Verena 2005 Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Heidegger, Martin 1962 Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin 1982 The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Heiser, Marc, Marco Iacoboni, Fumiko Maeda, Jake Marcus and John C. Mazziotta 2003 The essential role of Broca’s area in imitation. European Journal of Neuroscience 17: 1123–1128. Heyvaert, Liesbet 2003 A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Husserl, Edmund 1960 Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinns Nijho¤. Husserl, Edmund 1970a Logical Investigations, 2 vols. New York: Humanities Press. Husserl, Edmund 1970b The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

63

Jackendo¤, Ray 1996 Conceptual semantics and cognitive linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 93–130. Jackendo¤, Ray 2002 Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, Roman 1971 The metaphoric and metonymic poles. In: Roman Jakobson and Maurice Halle (eds.), Fundamentals of Language, 54–82. The Hague: Mouton. Again in: Dirven and Po¨rings (eds.), 2002, Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, 41–47. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Janssen, Theo A. J. M 2003 Monosemy versus polysemy. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 93–122. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Johnson, Mark 1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Reason and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kay, Paul and Charles J. Fillmore 1999 Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The ‘What’s X doing Y?’ construction. Language 75: 1–33. Ko¨vecses, Zolta´n and Gu¨nter Radden 1998 Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77. Kristiansen, Gitte, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (eds.) 2006 Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lako¤, George 1987 Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lako¤, George 1990 The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on ImageSchemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1(1): 39–74. Lako¤, George 1993 A contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lako¤, George and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lako¤, George and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

64

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Lako¤, George and Mark Turner 1989 More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1990 Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1995 The symbolic alternative. In: Georges Lu¨di and Claude-Anne Zuber (eds.), Linguistique et Mode`les Cognitifs, 51–76. Basel: Romanisches Seminar der Universita¨t Basel. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999 Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2003a One any. Korean Linguistics 18: 65–105. Langacker, Ronald W. 2003b Constructions in Cognitive Grammar. English Linguistics 20: 41–83. Langacker, Ronald W. 2005 Construction Grammars: cognitive, radical, and less so. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, 101–159. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008 Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawley, James and Penny Tompkins 2000 Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling. London: Developing Company Press. Lawley, James and Penny Tompkins 2006 What is therapeutic modelling? ReSource Magazine, Issue 8, April 2006. Lee, David 2001 Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, Beth 1993 English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

65

Mairal, Ricardo and Pamela Faber 2007 Lexical templates within a functional cognitive theory of meaning. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 5: 137–172. Marı´n, Juana I. 1996 To die, to sleep: a contrastive study of metaphors for death and dying in English and Spanish. Language Sciences 18: 37–52. Matlock, Teenie 2004a Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory & Cognition 32: 1389–1400. Matlock, Teenie 2004b The conceptual motivation of fictive motion. In: Gu¨nter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Motivation, 221–248. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1945 Phe´nome´nologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1962 Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1979 Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Michaelis, Laura A. 2003 Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 163–209. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Morgan, Pamela S. 2001 The semantics of an impeachment. In: Rene´ Dirven, Roslyn M. Frank and Cornelia Ilie (eds.), Language and Ideology. Volume II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches, 77–106. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Oakley, Todd and Anders Hougaard 2008 Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Gu¨nter Radden (eds.) 1999 Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg (eds.) 2003 Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pen˜a, Sandra 2003 Topology and Cognition: What Image-Schemas Reveal about the Metaphorical Language of Emotions. lincom europa: lincom Studies in Cognitive Linguistics. Pires de Olivera, Roberta 2001 Language and ideology: An interview with George Lako¤. In: Rene´ Dirven, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.),

66

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Language and Ideology. Volume 1: Theoretical Cognitive Approaches, 23–47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pustejovsky, James 1995 The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Queller, Kurt 2003 Metonymic sense shift: Its origins in hearers’ abductive construal of usage in context. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 211– 241. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Radden, Gu¨nter 1985 Spatial metaphors underlying propositions of causality. In: Wolf Paprotte´ and Rene´ Dirven (eds.), The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought, 177–207. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Radden, Gu¨nter 2000 How metonymic are metaphors? In: Antonio Barcelona (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, 93–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Radden, Gu¨nter and Zolta´n Ko¨vecses 1999 Towards a theory of metonymy. In: Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden (eds.), Metonymy in Language and Thought, 17–59. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Radden, Gu¨nter and Klaus-Uwe Panther 2004 Introduction: Reflections on motivation. In: Gu¨nter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Motivation, 1– 46. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Radden, Gu¨nter and Rene´ Dirven 2007 Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rice, Sally 2003 Growth of a lexical network: Nine English prepositions in acquisition. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 243–260. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rosch, Eleanor 1977 Human categorization. In: Neil Warren (ed.), Studies in Crosscultural Psychology, 1–49. New York/London: Academic Press. Rosch, Eleanor 1978 Principles of categorization. In: Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization, 27–48. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. 1998 On the nature of blending as a cognitive phenomenon. Journal of Pragmatics 30/3: 259–274. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. 2000 The role of mappings and domains in understanding metonymy. In: Antonio Barcelona (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

67

Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective, 109–132. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. 2008 Cross-linguistic analysis, second language teaching and cognitive semantics: the case of Spanish diminutives and reflexive constructions. In: Sabine De Knop and Teun De Rycker (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar – Volume in Honor of Rene´ Dirven, 121–152. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Jose´ Luis Otal Campo 2002 Metonymy, Grammar, and Communication. Albolote, Granada: Editorial Comares. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Lorena Pe´rez Herna´ndez 2003 Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication. In: Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg (eds.), Metonymy and Pragmatic, 293–320. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Olga I. Dı´ez Velasco 2004 Metonymic motivation in anaphoric reference. In Gu¨nter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Motivation, 23–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel 2005 Conceptual interaction, cognitive operations and projection spaces. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, 254–280. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Annalisa Baicchi 2007 Illocutionary Constructions: Cognitive Motivation and Linguistic Realization. In: Istvan Kecskes and Laurence Horn (eds.), Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Intercultural Aspects, 95–128. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Ricardo Mairal 2007 High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction. In: Gu¨nter Radden, Klaus-Michael Ko¨pcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund (eds.), Aspects of Meaning Construction in Lexicon and Grammar, 33–49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco J. and Ricardo Mairal 2008 Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: an introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model. Folia Linguistica 42/2: 355–400. Sandra, Dominiek and Sally Rice 1995 Network analyses of prepositional meaning: mirroring whose mind – the linguist’s or the language user’s? Cognitive Linguistics 6(1): 89–130.

68

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Saussure, Ferdinand de 1974 Course in General Linguistics (trans. Wade Baskin). London: Fontana/Collins. First published [1916]. Schmitt, Rudolf 2005 Systematic metaphor analysis as a method of qualitative research. The Qualitative Report 10: 358–394. Schwarz, Monika ¨ berarbeitete und 1996 Einfu¨hrung in die Kognitive Linguistik. 2. U Aktualisierte Auflage. Tu¨bingen: Franke Verlag. Searle, John R. 1979 A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In: John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 2005 The phenomenological illusion. In: Maria E. Reicher and Johann C. Marek (eds.), Experience and Analysis. Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein-Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, ¨ bvehpt. August 2004, 17–36. Vienna: O Selg, H. 1966 Einfu¨hrung in die Experimentelle Psychologie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Talmy, Leonard 1975 Figure and ground in complex sentences. BLS 1: 419–430 Berkeley, Cal.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Talmy, Leonard 1978 Figure and ground in complex sentences. In: Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language. Volume 4: Syntax, 625–649. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Talmy, Leonard 1988a The relation of grammar to cognition. In: Brygida RudzkaOstyn (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, 165–205. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Talmy, Leonard 1988b Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. Talmy, Leonard 1997 Relating language to other cognitive systems. Ms. Talmy, Leonard 2000a Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. I: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Talmy, Leonard 2000b Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Looking back at 30 years of Cognitive Linguistics

69

Taylor, John R. 1995a Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. 2nd Revised Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, John R. 1995b Models of word meaning in comparison: The two-level model (Manfred Bierwisch) and the network model (Ronald Langacker). In: Rene´ Dirven and Johan Vanparys (eds.), Current Approaches to the Lexicon, 3–26. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Taylor, John R. 1998 Syntactic constructions as prototype categories. In: Michael Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, 177–202. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Taylor, John R. 2002 Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thornburg, Linda and Klaus-Uwe Panther 1997 Speech act metonymies. In: Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Gisela Redeker and Linda Waugh (eds.), Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics, 205–219. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier 1995 Conceptual integration and formal expression. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10: 183–204. Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans 2001 Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of ‘over’. Language 77: 724–765. Tyler, Stephen 1995 The semantics of time and space. American Anthropologist 97: 567–592. Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jo¨rg Schmid 22006 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London/New York: Longman. Verboven, Hans 2003 Die Metapher als Ideologie: Eine kognitiv-semantische Analyse der Kriegsmetaphorik im Fru¨hwerk Ernst Ju¨ngers. Heidelberg: CarlWinter. Vervaeke, John and John M. Kennedy 1996 Metaphors in language and thought: Falsification and multiple meanings. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11: 273–284. Vervaeke, John and Christopher D. Green 1997 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Theories: A Critique of Lako¤ ’s Theory of Categorization. Metaphor and Symbol 12: 59–80. Violi, Patrizia 2004 Embodiment at the crossroads between cognition and semiosis. Recherches en Communication 19: 199–217.

70

Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez

Violi, Patrizia 2008

Beyond the body: towards a full embodied semiosis. In: M. Frank, Rene´ Dirven, Tom Ziemke, Enrique Berna´rdez (eds.), Body, Language and Mind. Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness, 53–76. Roslyn Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Warren, Beatrice 2002 An alternative account of the interpretation of referential metonymy and metaphor. In: Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, 113–130. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, Anna 1996 Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiggins, Osborne 1994 Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. In: Mano Daniel and Lester Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 67–83. Dordrecht: Springer. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1991 Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. First published [1953]. Wright, Cory D. 2007 Review of Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John R. Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cognitive Linguistics 18(4): 570–579. Yoshimura, Kimihiro 1998 The Middle Construction in English: A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis. Department of Linguistics, University of Otago: Ph.D. dissertation. Yu, Ning 1998 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. A Perspective from Chinese: John Benjamins. Yu, Ning 2009 The Chinese HEART in a Cognitive Perspective: Culture, Body, and Language. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ziemke, Tom, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (eds.) 2007 Body, Language, and Mind. Volume 1: Embodiment. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Zlatev, Jordan 2003 Polysemy or generality? Mu. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven and John Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, 447–494. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Zlatev, Jordan 2007 Embodiment, language, and mimesis. In: Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (eds.), Body, Language, and Mind. Volume 1: Embodiment, 297–337. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Recontextualizing Grammar: Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics Dirk Geeraerts 1. Cognitive Linguistics: radial set or schematic network? Cognitive Linguistics is a success: from the relatively marginal position that it originally occupied in the linguistic landscape, it has developed into one of the mainstream trends in current linguistics. A search on the strings ‘‘cognitive linguistics’’ and ‘‘cognitive grammar’’, in contrast with ‘‘generative linguistics’’ and ‘‘generative grammar’’ in the LLBA bibliography, broken down over four periods of five years starting in 1988, yields the figures presented in Table 1. Although the search terms could be extended to get a more complete picture, the present figures already indicate with su‰cient force that Cognitive Linguistics seems to be overtaking the generativist enterprise in terms of scholarly productivity and appeal. This conspicuous success raises the question whether there is a common denominator in the expansion of Cognitive Linguistics? A cursory inspection would seem to suggest that the internal evolution of Cognitive Linguistics is of the radial network type (to put the matter in an appropriate terminology). A number of core ideas – like grammatical construal, prototypicality, radial networks, ICMs, conceptual integration, constructions – are pursued and developed rather independently of each other, to the extent that each of them constitutes a mini research programme of its own. But what is it that keeps these separate approaches together – if anything?

Table 1. The presence of Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Grammar in the LLBA from 1998 to 2007 (figures as of October 15, 2007)

generative grammar / linguistics cognitive grammar / linguistics

88–92

93–97

98–02

03–07

304 81

538 337

337 376

296 916

72

Dirk Geeraerts

In Geeraerts 2006a, written as an introduction to a collection of basic readings in Cognitive Linguistics, two principles of cohesion were mentioned. On the one hand, the central concepts of Cognitive Linguistics are mutually related because they derive from a common set of underlying fundamentals: the principle that language is all about meaning, in the broadest possible sense, in combination with four specific assumptions about the nature of linguistic meaning – that meaning is flexible and dynamic, that it is encyclopedic and non-autonomous, that it is based on usage and experience, and that it is perspectival in nature. On the other hand, repeating a point originally formulated in Geeraerts (2003), it was suggested that the various strands of Cognitive Linguistics belong together because they exhibit various ways of recontextualizing the study of language. In this sense (once again applying the models of categorization developed in Cognitive Linguistics), we can not only say that the various branches of Cognitive Linguistics constitute a radial network, but also that there is a schematic commonality over and above the radial structure. In the present paper, the recontextualizing nature of Cognitive Linguistics is further analyzed: the paper will present the di¤erent parts of the recontextualization in more detail, and it will show that the internal development of the framework and the chronological steps in the gradual elaboration of the radial set structure are guided by the recontextualization programme. This analysis will lead to a brief consideration of a further question that arises from the success of Cognitive Linguistics: to what extent is the manifest success of Cognitive Linguistics also a threat? Under which conditions could the very wealth of the research undermine the unity of the approach? Or conversely, would the conceptual unity that we may discern if we look at the evolution of Cognitive Linguistics be su‰cient to maintain its success? As a practical introductory remark, it should be noted that the present paper is a highly synthetic one that assumes familiarity with the basic concepts of Cognitive Linguistics. The purpose is to reveal an underlying but largely unheeded pattern in the rich variety of approaches in Cognitive Linguistics, not to present these approaches as such. Discovering such a pattern, to the extent that it is successful, will be important for the decision how to further elaborate Cognitive Linguistics. But it also serves a more immediate, didactic purpose: it may help to introduce the full breadth of research in Cognitive Linguistics within a synthetic and systematic framework.

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

73

2. Decontextualization and recontextualization in 20th century linguistics If we are interested in what drives the development of Cognitive Linguistics and keeps its various branches together, we may start by trying to determine what distinguishes Cognitive Linguistics from other approaches in modern linguistics. How does Cognitive Linguistics fit into the development of theoretical linguistics? An answer to that question requires an insight into the basic lines of evolution of modern linguistics. So, if we were to present the history of 20th century linguistics in a nutshell, what would be the main lines of its development? Would it at all be possible to synthesize a century of theoretical development into a few pages? The following pages will try to identify some of the main lines in the development of 20th century linguistics, arguing that this development is characterized by a succession of a decontextualising and a recontextualizing movement. Obviously, there is a price to pay for the attempt to cover such a vast domain. For one thing, we will be able to focus only on the mainstream developments in the international scene of linguistics, disregarding local traditions, isolated individual achievements, avant-gardes and rearguards. For another, a historiographical programme of this type basically takes the form of a logical reconstruction: can we retrospectively find a perspective that brings order into the apparent chaos? To what extent does the development lend itself to a rational reconstruction, where the di¤erent steps in the development are interpreted as an elaboration of a basic research question? Such a rational reconstruction implies that hardly any attention can be given to the actual biographical factors and the sociological interactions. Also, the analysis presented here does not claim to be the only possible one. We will take our starting-point in the di¤erences between the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole and the Chomskyan dichotomy of competence and performance, but that does not rule out the possibility that the story could be told with a di¤erent point of departure and from a di¤erent point of view. 2.1. Gaps in the system: Saussure and Chomsky The Saussurean dichotomy between langue and parole creates an internally divided grammar, a conception of language with, so to speak, a hole in the middle. On the one hand, langue is defined as a social system, a set of collective conventions, a common code shared by a community:

74

Dirk Geeraerts Mais qu’est-ce que la langue? . . . C’est a` la fois un produit social de la faculte´ du langage et un ensemble de conventions ne´cessaires, adopte´es par le corps social pour permettre l’exercice de cette faculte´ chez les individus [But what is language? . . . It is at the same time a social product of the language faculty and a collection of necessary conventions adopted by a community to allow individuals to use that faculty] (1976: 25).

On the other hand, parole is an individual, psychological activity that consists of producing specific combinations from the elements that are present in the code: La parole est au contraire un acte individuel de volonte´ et d’intelligence, dans lequel il convient de distinguer 1) les combinaisons par lesquelles le sujet parlant utilise le code de la langue en vue d’exprimer sa pense´e personelle 2) le me´canisme psycho-physique qui lui permet d’exte´rioriser ces combinaisons [Speech on the other hand is a deliberate and intelligent individual act, in which we can distinguish, first, the combinations by means of which the individual subject uses the code of the language to express his personal thought, and second, the psycho-physical mechanism that allows him to exteriorize those combinations] (1967: 30).

When langue and parole are defined in this way, there is a gap between both: what is the mediating factor that bridges the distance between the social and the psychological, between the community and the individual, between the system and the application of the system, between the code and the actual use of the code? The Chomskyan distinction between competence and performance formulates the fundamental answer to this question: the missing link between the social code and the individual usage is the individual’s knowledge of the code. Performance is basically equivalent with parole, but competence interiorizes the notion of linguistic system: competence is the internal grammar of the language user, the knowledge that the language user has of the linguistic system and that he puts to use in actual performance. Remarkably, however, Chomsky introduces a new gap into the system. Rather than the trichotomy that one might expect, he restricts his conception of language to a new dichotomy: the social aspects of language are largely ignored. In comparison with a ternary distinction distinguishing between langue, competence, and parole/performance (between social system, individual knowledge of the system, and actual use of the system), the binary distinction between competence and performance creates a new empty slot, leaving the social aspects of language largely out of sight. Figure 1 schematically summarizes the Saussurean and the Chomskyan positions, highlighting the systematic relationship between both. The ques-

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

75

Figure 1. Schematic representation of the gaps in the Saussurean (upper picture) and Chomskyan (lower picture) conception of language

tion marks indicate those aspects of language that disappear in either of the two approaches. Relegating the social nature of language to the background, in the Chomskyan approach, correlates with a switch towards the phylogenetic universality of language. The Chomskyan emphasis on the genetic nature of natural language links up rationally with his apparent lack of interest for language as a social semiotic. Where, in particular, does the individual knowledge of the language come from? If the source of linguistic knowledge is not social, what else can it be than an innate and universal endowment? If the language is not learned through acculturation in a linguistic community (given that a language is not primarily a social code), what other source could there be for linguistic knowledge except genetics? 2.2. The decontextualization of grammar The link between the Chomskyan genetic perspective and the absence of any fundamental interest in language as a social phenomenon engenders a stepping-stone development, leading by an internal logic to an isolation of the grammar. Let us go through the argument in the form of the following chain of (deliberately succinct and somewhat simplistic) propositions. First, if natural language is not primarily social, it has to be genetic. This is the basic proposition that was described in the previous paragraph. The relationship could of course be construed in the other direction as well. As presented above, the Chomskyan predilection for a genetic per-

76

Dirk Geeraerts

spective in linguistics follows from his lack of interest for the social side of language. But in actual historical fact, Chomsky’s preference for a genetic conception of language probably grew more from his discussion with behaviorist learning theory (Skinner in particular) than from a confrontation with Saussure. Because the amazing ability of young children to acquire language cannot be explained on the basis of a stimulus-response theory – so the argument goes – an innate knowledge of language has to be assumed. But if one of the major features of language is its genetic nature, then of course the social aspects of language are epiphenomenal. Regardless of the direction in which the link is construed, however, the e¤ects are clear. Second, if natural language is primarily a genetic entity, semantics or the lexicon cannot be part of the core of language (or the core business of linguistics). Meanings constitute the variable, contextual, cultural aspects of language par excellence. Because social interaction, the exchange of ideas, changing conceptions of the world are primarily mediated through the meaning of linguistic expressions, it is unlikely that the genetic aspects of language will be found in the realm of meaning. Further, if the lexicon is the main repository of linguistically encoded meaning, studying the lexicon is of secondary importance. Here as before, though, it should be pointed out that the actual historical development is less straightforward than the reconstruction might suggest. The desemanticization of the grammar did not happen at once (nor was it absolute, for that matter). Triggered by the introduction of meaning in the ‘‘standard model’’ of generative grammar (Chomsky 1965), the ‘‘Linguistic Wars’’ (see Harris 1995) of the late 1960s that opposed Generative Semantics and Interpretive Semantics basically involved the demarcation of grammar with regard to semantics. The answer that Chomsky ultimately favoured implied a restrictive stance with regard to the introduction of meaning into the grammar, but this position was certainly not reached in one step; it was prepared by severe debates in the generativist community. Third, if semantics or the lexicon cannot be part of the core of linguistics, linguistics will focus on formal rule systems. The preference for formal syntax that characterizes generative grammar follows from the fact that generative grammar links up with cognitive science as it originated in the late 1950s and the 1960s, which sees knowledge as a set of internal symbolic representations, and mental processing as internal symbol manipulation. The Chomskyan emphasis on the formal syntax fits in with the symbol manipulation paradigm that was dominant in cognitive

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

77

science. But it also follows by elimination from generative grammar’s genetic orientation: formality is required to restrict the impact of meaning, and studying syntax (or more generally, the rule-based aspects of language) correlates with the diminished interest in the lexicon. It should be added that the focus on rules is not only determined by a negative attitude with regard to meanings, but also by a focus on the infinity of language: language as an infinite set of sentences requires a rule system that can generate an infinity of entities. (At this point, an additional undercurrent in the history of 20th century linguistics crops up: the relationship between linguistics and logic. Chomsky, in fact, got the inspiration for his conception of linguistic rule systems from the architecture of logical proof theory. This is not a line to be pursued here, though.) Finally, if linguistics focuses on formal rule systems, the application of the rule systems in actual usage is relatively uninteresting. If the rules define the grammar, it is hard to see what added value could be derived from studying the way in which the rules are actually put to use. The study of performance, in other words, is just as secondary as research into the lexicon. This chain of consequences leads to a decontextualisation of the grammar. It embodies a restrictive strategy that separates the autonomous grammatical module from di¤erent forms of context. Without further consideration of the interrelationship between the various aspects of the decontextualising drift, the main e¤ects can be summarized as follows. First, through the basic Chomskyan shift from langue to competence, linguistics is separated from the social context of language as a social code. Second, through the focus on the genetic aspects of the language, linguistics is separated from the cognitive context that shows up in the semantic side of the language. Third, through the focus on formal rule systems, linguistics is separated from the situational context of actual language use. And fourth, these two last features tend to favour the study of formal syntactic rules over the study of the lexicon. 2.3. Trends towards recontextualization In terms of the subdisciplines covered by linguistics, this means that the core of linguistics in Chomskyan terms disfavours the study of language in its social context, any model of language in which semantics or the lexicon is at the heart of the grammar, and the investigation of language in actual usage. This does not mean, however, that these areas of research,

78

Dirk Geeraerts

which would be considered peripheral from the generativist point of view, were totally non-existent in the heyday of generative grammar. In fact, the generativist era witnessed the birth of approaches that autonomously developed the aspects that were rejected or downplayed by generative grammar. A brief overview may su‰ce to establish that the period from the late 1960s to the 1980s constitutes a crucial period for the development of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and semantics: if we look at what would now be considered foundational publications for the approaches in question, we see that they are situated precisely in the period from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. (If the main factors that were dispelled by generative grammar are meaning, the lexicon, language use, and the social context of language, then the approaches mentioned here cover three out of four factors. Lexicology, in fact, did not boom as a separate discipline in the way the other three did.) Sociolinguistics in its present form (including the sociology of language, the ethnography of speaking, and sociohistorical linguistics, next to sociolinguistics in the narrow, Labovian sense) came into existence with works such as Labov (1972), Haugen (1966), Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), Gumperz and Dell Hymes (1972). Pragmatics as a separate discipline started o¤ in the wake of Grice (1975) and Austin (1962). In seminal works such as Stalnaker (1974) or Gazdar (1979), a Gricean, logically inspired form of pragmatics saw the light, focusing on questions of presupposition, conversational implicature, and contextual interpretation. In the same period, Searle (1969) developed Austin’s approach into speech act theory. Somewhat later, a broader type of discourse linguistics and conversational analysis was introduced by Coulthard (1977), Gumperz (1982), Brown and Yule (1983), or Tannen (1984), to name just a few of the early works. Semantics received a major impetus through the development of formal semantics, as in Montague (1974), Partee (1979), Dowty (1979). Building on the achievements of formal logic, formal semantics is a type of meaning-based grammar, but the conception of meaning that lies at the basis of formal semantics is restricted to the referential, truth-theoretical aspects of meaning. (In this sense, it is a more or less restricted form of semantics. Later developments like Cognitive Linguistics will take a less restrictive approach to meaning, as we will see.) In short, the decontextualising, autonomist attitude of generative grammar was to some extent compensated by the development of disciplines that explore the aspects of language that are relegated to the background

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

79

by generative grammar. The works quoted above are indicative of the initial stages in the development of these disciplines: anyone familiar with the history of contemporary linguistics will recognize that each of them flourished afterwards. With the exception of formal semantics (specifically in its association with categorial grammar), these approaches are not models of the grammar, if we think of the grammar as the description of the internal structure of the language. As separate disciplines (or, at best, as separate ‘‘modules’’ in a modular conception of language) sociolinguistics and pragmatics developed alongside grammatical theory rather than interacting with it intensively. This suggests that the recuperation of the contextual aspects rejected by generative grammar can be carried one step further, if the study of context does not take the form of a set of separate disciplines but if context features are introduced into the heart of the grammar. This is exactly what is happening in a number of more recent trends in linguistics. From roughly 1980 onwards, a number of developments in linguistics appear to link the grammar more closely to the contextual aspects that were severed by generative theorizing. The peripheral aspects – meaning, the lexicon, language use, the social context of language – that were being developed largely separately and autonomously, are now being linked up more narrowly with the grammar itself. The following overview of the relevant tendencies will again be brief and schematic. Its main purpose is to point out the existence of the trends, not to describe them in much detail. This also means, for instance, that no attention will be paid to the overlap that may exist between di¤erent tendencies. The reintroduction of the lexicon into the grammar is probably the most widespread of the tendencies to be mentioned here; it is, in fact, relatively clear within generative grammar itself. This lexicalist tendency in grammatical theory is triggered by the recognition that describing grammatical rules appears to imply describing the lexical sets that the rules apply to. Reversing the descriptive perspective then leads to a description of the valency of the lexical items (i.e. the structures that an item can appear in). The lexicalist tendency appears in various forms in the more formal approaches to grammar: one may think of the projections and theta-roles of generative grammar, of the central role of the lexicon in Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 2001), and of the lexically driven grammar developed in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag, Wasow and Bender 2003). Hudson’s Word Grammar (1991) is a functionally oriented type of lexical grammar.

80

Dirk Geeraerts

Approaches that give meaning a major, if not dominant, role in linguistics were not restricted to formal semantics. As we mentioned already, within generative grammar, the Generative Semantics movement had to give way to the supremacy of the semantically restricted Chomskyan approach. But parallel to generative grammar, a cluster of functionalist approaches to grammatical description gave pride of place to meaning. This holds true for Functional Grammar as defined by Dik (1989), for the functional-typological approaches developed by Givon (1979), and for Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (1994), to mention only the most important representatives. Typically, these approaches take a broad view of meaning, i.e. they include pragmatics: in all forms of functional linguistics, discursive and interactional communicative functions are seen as essential features of natural language. For instance, a number of functionalist approaches try to find (potentially universal) discourse motivations for grammatical constructs. Discourse is then no longer the mere application of grammatical rules, but the grammatical rules themselves are motivated by the discourse functions that the grammar has to fulfill. The existence of passives in a given language, for instance, is explained as a topicalization mechanism: grammars contain passives because topicalizing direct objects is a useful function in discourse. Seminal publications within this approach include Givon (1979), Hopper and Thompson (1980), Hopper (1987). The communicative aspect inherent in this family of functional approaches also means that the social aspects of language are explicitly recognized. If language is primarily seen as an instrument for communicative interaction, a social conception of language is automatically implied. Within the group of functionalist frameworks, Systemic Functional Linguistics is the one that most distinctly follows up on this social conception of language. Thinking about language in social, interactional terms suggests that the systemic descriptive and theoretical framework might be particularly suited for socially oriented types of linguistic investigation. In practice, this shows up in the many studies in Systemic Functional Linguistics that are geared towards the analysis of text and discourse from a social perspective (see e.g. Eggins 1994; Thompson 1994). Not surprisingly, the methodology of Systemic Functional Linguistics has also been embraced by Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995). At the same time, this social perspective in Systemic Functional Linguistics seems to be restricted primarily to the study of text types and register di¤erences, without a lot of attention for language-internal variation of a lectal or sociolinguistic kind.

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

81

3. Cognitive Linguistics as a recontextualizing approach It is not di‰cult to establish that the four elements of context that we mentioned earlier (meaning, the lexicon, discourse and use, and the social context) receive particular attention in Cognitive Linguistics. Meaning – Cognitive Linguistics constitutes an outspoken attempt to give meaning a central position in the architecture of the grammar. The basic vocabulary of the cognitive framework involves semantics: the notion of prototype, schematic network, conceptual metaphor, metonymy, conceptual integration, idealized cognitive models, frames, and all sorts of construal mechanisms are semantic notions. Crucially, these semantic concepts involve a contextualized view of semantics. There are several ways of making that clear. To begin with, if we compare Cognitive Linguistics with formal semantics, it is obvious that the conception of meaning that lies at the basis of the cognitive approach is not restricted to a referential, truth-functional type of meaning. Linguistic structures are thought to express conceptualizations, i.e. conceptualization is central for linguistic structure – and conceptualization goes further than mere reference. It involves imagery in the broadest sense of the word: ways of making sense, of imposing meaning. Further, if we come down from this very general level and look more closely into the semantic concepts in question, we can see that they systematically refer to various contextualized forms of meaning. Cognitive Linguistics embodies a fully contextualized conception of meaning in that its central semantic concepts describe di¤erent ways in which the conceptualizations that are expressed in the language have an experiential basis: the type of relevant context is di¤erent for various central concepts. Prototypicality e¤ects and the various aspects of categorial polysemy, including conceptual mechanisms like metonymy and metaphor, derive from the fact that new knowledge is constituted against the background of existing cognitive and linguistic categories: existing categories provide a context for the development of new nuances and extended meanings. Frames in the Fillmorean sense, Idealized Cognitive Models, and mental spaces in the sense of conceptual integration theory (a.k.a. blending) represent the idea that linguistically relevant knowledge is structured knowledge of the world: language has to be seen in the context of encyclopedic cognition, and not as an autonomous realm of the mind. Mechanisms of grammatical construal like figure/ground perspectivization implement the idea that linguistic meaning has to be studied in corre-

82

Dirk Geeraerts

lation with general cognitive mechanisms, like the gestalt features of knowledge in the case of figure/ground alignment. The neural theory of language developed by Lako¤ shows that the embodied nature of language is not only considered in a psychological sense (focusing on individual experience in a phenomenological sense), but also in the most literal sense possible: the neural embodiment of the mind in the brain constitutes the material context of natural language semantics. Lexicon – From very early on, treating grammatical categories according to the model provided by the lexicon was a natural thing to do in Cognitive Linguistics: if meaning description is the focus of Cognitive Linguistics, and if the models for the description of meaning were primarily developed in the realm of lexical semantics, it is no surprise to find that notions of prototypicality and polysemy were applied to grammatical categories. But it is only with the rise of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995; Croft 2001; Langacker 2005) that the lexicalization of the grammar becomes outspoken, because it is only at that point that the lexicon begins to play a role on the form side of the grammatical description. There are two aspects to be mentioned. First, the concept of a construction introduces lexical material into the notion of a grammatical entity. Constructions of the ‘‘let alone’’ type (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1988) constitute combinations of specific words and abstract patterns. Second, while not all constructions need be of this mixed type (e.g. the ditransitive construction does not include specific lexical materials), there is no a priori dividing line between the lexically specific and the abstract patterns. Between fully lexicalized formal units (words and idioms) and patterns that can only be described in terms of abstract grammatical categories (like traditional immediate constituent analyses), there are intermediate entities at di¤erent levels of abstraction. In this sense, lexicon and grammar are integrated, as di¤erent levels of abstraction in an inventory of constructional patterns. Language use and discourse – The most immediate type of discourserelated investigation in Cognitive Linguistics is the study of all kinds of pragmatic and discursive phenomena, like discourse particles and pragmatic markers (Fischer 2000), information structure (Sanders and Spooren 2007), grounding (Brisard 2002), Current Discourse Space (Langacker 2001), etc. – the references are indicative only. A recent development along these lines is the investigation of blending phenomena as on-line meaning construction, as in Coulson (2006). However, there is a more fundamental link between Cognitive Linguistics and the study of performance: more and more, Cognitive Linguistics

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

83

conceives of itself as a usage-based approach to language. According to a number of programmatic accounts of usage-based linguistics (Bybee and Hopper 2001; Kemmer and Barlow 2000; Langacker 1999; Tomasello 2000; Verhagen and Van de Weijer 2003), the essential idea of a usagebased linguistics is the dialectic nature of the relation between language use and the language system. The grammar does not only constitute a knowledge repository to be employed in language use, but it is also itself the product of language use. The former perspective considers usage events as specific, actual instantiations of the language system. According to this view, one can gain insight into the language system by analyzing the usage events that instantiate it. This is a strong motivation for empirical research: the usage data constitute the empirical foundation from which general patterns can be abstracted. The latter perspective considers usage events as the empirical source of the system. From this point of view, usage events define and continuously redefine the language system in a dynamic way. As a result, every usage event may slightly redefine a person’s internal language system. The consequences of such a position are both thematic and methodological. Thematically speaking, a usage-based approach fosters interest in specific topics and fields of investigation. For instance, it follows from the dialectic relationship between structure and use that the analysis of linguistic change (Bybee 2007) is a natural domain of application for any usage-based approach. Similarly, literary analysis from a cognitive point of view (Freeman 2007; Broˆne and Vandaele 2009) ensues naturally from an interest in language use: if the analysis of discourse is a legitimate (and, in fact, important) goal for Cognitive Linguistics, cognitive poetics is likely to emerge as the study of the very specific type of discourse represented by literary texts. This holds more generally for cognitive stylistics in its various forms (Semino and Culpeper 2002). Further, interesting perspectives for language acquisition research open up: the usage-based approach holds the promise of answering the acquisition problem that looms large in the Chomskyan delimitation of linguistics. In the work done by Tomasello and his group (2003), an alternative is presented for the Chomskyan genetic argument. These researchers develop a model of language acquisition in which each successive stage is (co)determined by the actual knowledge and use of the child at a given stage, i.e. language acquisition is described as a series of step by step usage-based extensions of the child’s grammar. The grammar, so to speak, emerges from the child’s interactive performance. At the same time, there are methodological consequences: you cannot

84

Dirk Geeraerts

have a usage-based linguistics unless you study actual usage – as it appears in an online and elicited form in experimental settings or as it appears in its most natural form in corpora in the shape of spontaneous, non-elicited language data. We can indeed see that the interest in corpus-based and experimental studies is growing, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it has become the standard approach in Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Geeraerts 2006b; Tummers, Heylen and Geeraerts 2005). Social context – There are four, more or less hierarchically ordered levels at which Cognitive Linguistics pays explicit attention to the social nature of language. The first level is that of language as such: the definition and the basic architecture of language are recognized as involving not just cognition, but socially and culturally situated cognition. The type of work produced from this perspective emphasizes and analyzes the way in which the emergence of language as such and the presence of specific features in a language can only be adequately conceived of if one takes into account the socially interactive nature of linguistic communication. Examples of this strand of research include Sinha (2000, 2007) on language as an epigenetic system, Zlatev (2005) on situated embodiment, Itkonen (2003) on the social nature of the linguistic system, Verhagen (2005) on the central role of intersubjectivity in language, and Harder (2003) on the socio-functional background of language. Taking one step towards a more specific approach, the next level is that of variation among languages and cultures. This is the oldest form of a social perspective in Cognitive Linguistics: the notion of cultural model played a significant role in the emergence of the new framework. However, a tension existed between a more universalist approach and a more culturally oriented approach. A typical case in point is the discussion between Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995) on the one hand and Ko¨vecses (1995) on the other regarding the nature of anger is heat metaphors: while the former emphasized the culturally specific and historically contingent nature of such metaphorical patterns, the latter defended a universalist, physiologically grounded position. In recent years, however, the socio-cultural perspective has been gaining ground: see Palmer (1996) and, very explicitly, Ko¨vecses (2005). In practical terms, this type of sociocultural investigation takes the form of a historical investigation into changing conceptualizations within a given language or culture, or of cultural and anthropological comparisons. Within the latter group, we can also place the flourishing research tradition of cross-linguistic and crosscultural investigation into the relationship between language and thought,

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

85

as illustrated by works like Slobin (1996), Boroditsky (2000) and Levinson (2003). The third level considers not variation between languages, but variation within languages: to what extent do the phenomena that we typically focus on in Cognitive Linguistics exhibit variation within the same linguistic community? The research conducted within this approach links up with the research traditions of sociolinguistics, dialectology, and stylistic analysis, using the same type of meticulous empirical research methods: see Kristiansen and Dirven (2008). This attempt to bring grammatical analysis and variationist research closer together cannot be disentangled from the usage-based perspective mentioned above. Usage-based and meaning-based models of grammar introduce more variation into the grammar than a rule-based approach tends to do: the language-internal or discourse-related factors that influence the use of a particular construction may be manifold, and the presence or absence of a construction is not an all-or-none matter. In the analysis of this type of variation, it often appears that the variation is co-determined by ‘‘external’’, sociolinguistic factors: the variation that appears in actual usage (as attested in corpora) may be determined simultaneously by grammatical, discursive, and sociolinguistic factors. Disentangling those di¤erent factors, then, becomes one methodological endeavour: in the actual practice of a usage-based enquiry, grammatical analysis and variationist analysis will go hand in hand. At this level, there is also a less descriptive and more critical form of Cognitive Linguistics to be mentioned – a form of analysis, in other words, that not only intends to describe but that also takes an evaluative stance. The best known example is Lako¤’s study of metaphorical models of the family exploited in a political context (1996). This work led to his practical interest in the ‘‘framing’’ of public issues (and to his active involvement in US political debate). Lako¤’s work, though highly visible, is not the only one in this domain. There is a growing body of research on ideology (see Dirven, Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007), and in works such as Chilton (2004), Musol¤ (2006), Hart and Lukes (2007), we witness an exciting convergence between ‘‘critical’’ Cognitive Linguistics and the older British tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis. The final and most specific level overlaps with the discourse related approach mentioned above: this is the level where actual conversations and communicative exchanges are analyzed from a socially interactionist point of view. In the context of socially oriented linguistics, this perspec-

86

Dirk Geeraerts

Figure 2. The reintroduction of context features into Cognitive Linguistics

tive links up with interactionist sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology rather than with variationist sociolinguistics (as was the case on the third level of analysis). In Cognitive Linguistics circles, representatives of this approach tend to take some of their inspiration from Clark (1996): see Croft (2009), and most elaborately, Tomasello (2003) on the interactionist nature of language acquisition. Figure 2 o¤ers a schematic representation of the reintroduction of the four crucial context factors into the grammar as conceived of by Cognitive Linguistics. The external boxes in the figure indicate the four elements as we discussed them above, and the labelled arrows represent the reintroductory movements by means of keywords. 3.2. Stages in the expansion of Cognitive Linguistics and the chronological recovery of context The previous section demonstrates that Cognitive Linguistics indeed embodies the recontextualizing trends in contemporary linguistics in a singular way: all the aspects of recontextualization that we identified in our overview of the history of 20th century linguistics are substantially covered by Cognitive Linguistics; even more importantly, they determine core features of Cognitive Linguistics, like the importance of meaning for grammatical description and the choice for a usage-based approach. Now, if recontextualization is indeed a core feature, would it also be the case that the internal development of Cognitive Linguistics is characterized by a gradual expansion towards the various forms of recontextualization that we distinguished? Does recontextualization not only portray Cognitive

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

87

Linguistics at large, against the broad canvas of modern linguistics, but does it also characterize its internal growth? Does the internal evolution of Cognitive Linguistics take the form of a progressive recovery of the various types of context? To answer that question, we first need to have a look at the history of Cognitive Linguistics from the point of view of the sociology of science: if we look at it from an external point of view (not with a focus on the development of ideas and theories, but with a focus on the people it mobilizes, the public appeal it exerts, the organizational and institutional entrenchment it achieves), what are the main periods in its development? The seeds of Cognitive Linguistics were planted some thirty years ago: Len Talmy published his ‘‘figure and ground’’ paper in 1975, Ron Langacker started working on his Cognitive Grammar in 1976, and George Lako¤ published his ‘‘linguistic gestalts’’ article in 1977. But the real public life and the international expansion of Cognitive Linguistics started about ten years later. The year 1987 is an outspoken landmark, with the publication of Lako¤ ’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and the first volume of Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. In 1988, Brygida Rudzka edited the seminal Topics in Cognitive Linguistics volume, and in 1989, John Taylor published his Linguistic Categorization, which is still one of the best readable introductions to Cognitive Linguistics. 1989 is important in another sense as well: it is the year that the first International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) took place in Duisburg, Germany. It was one of the so-called LAUD symposia (where LAUD stands for Linguistic Agency of the University of Duisburg) that had been organized by Rene´ Dirven since 1977 and where some of the world’s most distinguished linguists were invited to present their work. So in 1989, Rene´ Dirven (whose role in the international expansion of Cognitive Linguistics can hardly be underestimated) invited Lako¤ and Langacker for a ‘‘Symposium on Cognitive Linguistics’’. The Duisburg conference was of crucial importance for the institutionalization and the international expansion of Cognitive Linguistics: it was there and then that the International Cognitive Linguistics Association was founded (the conference was accordingly rebaptized as the First International Cognitive Linguistics Conference), that plans were made to launch the journal Cognitive Linguistics, and that the monograph series Cognitive Linguistics Research was announced. The next twenty years can be roughly divided into two more periods of ten years. The first ten years leading to the present situation – roughly, up to 1997 – were years of international consolidation. The whole approach

88

Dirk Geeraerts

demonstrated its viability on the international forum, in a number of senses: the newly founded journal was able to attract high-quality contributions, and the successful series of biannual ICLC conferences proved that there was a broad interest in the framework. The years from, say, 1997 up to now were marked by the international institutionalization of Cognitive Linguistics; the whole framework got firmly entrenched in the international fabric of linguistic studies. This is most clear if you look at the emergence of national ICLA a‰liates. These are ICLA branches defined by region or country (and occasionally by language). The first one to be founded was the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association (1998), whose a‰liation was formally approved at the 1999 ICLC. The year 2001 saw the a‰liation of the Finnish, the Polish, and the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Associations. Further a‰liates include the Russian Association of Cognitive Linguists (2004), the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (2005), the Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Association of Korea (2005), the Association Franc¸aise de Linguistique Cognitive (2005), the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association (2005), the Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Association (2005), the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association (2006), the Chinese Association for Cognitive Linguistics (2006), and BeNeCla, the Cognitive Linguistics association of Belgium and The Netherlands (2008). Another unmistakable sign of the institutionalization of Cognitive Linguistics is the number of introductory books and reference works published in the last decade: Ungerer and Schmid was first published in 1996, Dirven and Verspoor in 1998, Violi in 2001, Croft and Cruse in 2004, Evans and Green in 2006, the Basic Readings collection (Geeraerts 2006c) and the companion volume edited by Kristiansen, Achard, Dirven and Ruiz de Mendoza in 2006, Geeraerts and Cuyckens in 2007. Next to Cognitive Linguistics, the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics provides a second journal specifically dedicated to publications in Cognitive Linguistics. Given this classification into three periods of more or less ten years each (a foundational one, a period of expansion, and a period of institutionalization), is there any correlation with the internal development, in terms of ideas and theoretical constructs? In very general terms, it would seem to be the case that the major steps in the recovery of context are situated in the past decade. After the foundational first decade, the second decade, up to the middle of the 1990s, focused on the basic notions of cognitive semantics: prototypes, radial networks, conceptual metaphor, image schemas, and the various aspects of Langacker’s and Talmy’s construal-based grammars.

89

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics Table 2. Nine topical items in the Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography, divided over five-year periods 77–81

82–86

87–91

92–96

97–01

02–06

247

591

1093

1647

2416

2557

Meaning

23

66

137

275

458

603

Semantics

15

53

128

201

281

300

Construction

9

28

66

150

295

439

Usage-based

0

0

4

2

16

48

13

23

62

141

255

394

Pragmatic(s)

6

19

37

98

162

209

Sociolinguistic(s)

2

0

4

3

15

42

Social Cultural

7 2

13 5

38 38

61 87

127 159

176 240

No. of articles

Discourse

In the third decade, however, we witness a broadening of the type of context that is deemed relevant: the majority of the publications that were mentioned above under the rubric of ‘‘lexicon’’, ‘‘usage’’, and ‘‘social context’’ are situated in the second half of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium. The initial insight of Cognitive Linguistics is that the semantics of natural language expressions needs to be studied in a broader cognitive context: individual meanings are part of polysemous structures, of frames, of Idealized Cognitive Models – whatever structure the experiential basis of language takes. Moving beyond this initial cognitive context, the previous decade has introduced the context of use in its various forms: in the attention for the performative usage level as the dialectic basis of grammar, in the attention for the lexicon as the embodiment of abstract grammatical patterns, in the attention for the social context of language. That the wave of types of research contextualizing grammar came after a first wave of research exploring the semantics of language also becomes clear when we have a look at the presence of certain topics in the Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography compiled by Rene´ Dirven (The Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography is made available annually as an electronic addition to the journal Cognitive Linguistics.). Table 2 lists the frequencies of topical items in the bibliography, divided over five-year periods. The items

90

Dirk Geeraerts

Figure 3. The development of recontextualizing themes in the Bibliography of Cognitive Linguistics

may be grouped into four groups corresponding to the four types of contextualization that we distinguished earlier: meaning and semantics under the label semantics, construction under the label construct(ion grammar), usage-based, discourse, and pragmatic(s) under the label usage, and sociolinguistic(s), social and cultural under the label social. We then calculate the proportion of each item with regard to number of articles in each period, and average over the items in each group. If we then trace the development of the four groups over time, as is done in Figure 3, we can indeed confirm that the interest in meaning comes first in the development of Cognitive Linguistics, while the interest in constructions, in usage-based models, in the social context of language takes o¤ later. Also, while the attention for meaning has reached a stable level since the beginning of the 1990s, the focus on the other three forms of recontextualization is still increasing. (It should be noted that, while it is straightforward to have a look at the temporal development of the lines,

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

91

we should be careful with a direct comparison of the level of the lines among each other. The figures give the proportion of articles that contain one of the topical keywords, calculated against the total number of articles in a given period. However, because di¤erent keywords may occur together within the same article, any given article may be referred to more than once at a certain point in time.)

4. Cognitive Linguistics in Context So far, we have established two crucial things. First, thinking about Cognitive Linguistics in terms of the recontextualization of grammar adequately captures the singular position of Cognitive Linguistics in the context of contemporary linguistics. If post-Chomskyan linguistics is characterized by an emerging tendency to reintroduce into the grammar those aspects of context that were discarded as irrelevant by hardcore generativism, then Cognitive Linguistics may be seen to embody that tendency in an outspoken way. All the relevant features – meaning, the lexicon, the level of performance and language use, and the social context – are saliently present in the theoretical and descriptive apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics. And some of them, like the importance of meaning and the usage-based character of linguistics, even belong to the core beliefs of Cognitive Linguistics. Second, thinking about Cognitive Linguistics in terms of the recontextualization of grammar not only helps to determine its external position in the context of linguistics at large, it also sheds a revealing light on the internal development of the framework. Parallel to the sociological expansion of Cognitive Linguistics as an international movement, we observe an internal expansion that is driven by the gradual recovery of context. The conceptual drift of Cognitive Linguistics (if we may use that term) seems to reside precisely in the recontextualizing movement. It appears, in other words, that recontextualization is a common denominator that keeps together – at least conceptually speaking – the various branches of Cognitive Linguistics that are being developed in an era of massive international expansion. But if, coming back to the introduction to this article, recontextualization can indeed be seen as the schematic node overarching the radial network of cognitive approaches, does that theoretical common denominator su‰ce to keep Cognitive Linguistics together on a practical and sociological level? Will the centripetal force of an underlying trend be stronger than the centrifugal forces that are

92

Dirk Geeraerts

inherent in a radial development, where each separate topic of interest may start to develop into a domain of investigation and a sociological network of its own? 4.1. Cognitive Linguistics as a scientific paradigm To see more clearly why there might be a di‰culty, we may have a look at what the sociology of science has to say about the lifecycle of theories. Indeed, if we see Cognitive Linguistics as a paradigm in the sense of Kuhn’s theory of science, and if we then apply a sociological perspective to the development of the paradigm, we inevitably come across one of the most intriguing questions in the sociology of science: what determines the lifecycle of scientific paradigms, (sub)disciplines and specialties? There are various lifecycle models in the sociology of science, but for the present purposes, it may su‰ce to have a look at the one that is presented in De Mey (1992). It distinguishes between four stages. In the pioneering stage, the paradigm is formulated. The methodological and rhetorical justification focuses on the originality of the approach. The organization of the field is informal at most. In the building stage, the paradigm works according to the ‘‘normal science’’ model described by Kuhn: the basic tenets are accepted without questioning by the adherents; research is geared towards productively showing the applicability of the approach. At the same time, an organizational structure is set up, in the form of journals and conferences. The third stage, that of internal criticism, has a two-sided character. On the one hand, it is a period of conceptual organization: the findings that were reached somewhat disorderly during the building stage have to receive a place within the overall framework; you might say: the body of knowledge accumulated in the building stage needs to be consolidated within the theoretical fabric of the paradigm. This is typically the stage, then, in which textbooks and reference works appear. On the other hand, the third stage is also the period in which the internal anomalies of the paradigm become apparent. The initial confirmation has been carried through massively in the building stage, so that the attention may now shift to the resistant problems. Those problems may inspire new research and new ideas within the paradigm, but they may also lead some people to question the overall approach and perhaps abandon the framework. In the final stage, that of external criticism, the internal problems have become so important that the paradigm loses its attractiveness. Although

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

93

the existing institutional organization may ensure a prolonged existence of the framework, it has stopped to grow, and it loses terrain with regard to newer, more appealing alternatives. Now, if we accept this classification, it is obvious that Cognitive Linguistics has moved beyond the pioneering stage (the first decade) and the building stage (the second and third decade). The current situation, at the end of the third decade of its existence, definitely exhibits at least one side of the third stage mentioned by De Mey: we are living in a period of consolidation, in the form of textbooks and reference works. In fact, a retrospective article like the present one is probably typical of this stage in the development: one aspect of the consolidating movement is the e¤ort to provide clear overviews of the history of the discipline. 4.2. Cognitive Linguistics within cognitive science If this is correct, we also need to ask the question whether the other aspects of the third stage of development – a growing awareness of outstanding problems, increasing tensions between potentially rival approaches, fragmentation into independent subdisciplines – are part of the current situation in Cognitive Linguistics. If recontextualization is at the center of Cognitive Linguistics, is there any indication that the centre may not hold? To round o¤ this discussion of the basic tendencies within Cognitive Linguistics, we may try to identify a number of factors that could either constitute a threat or a safeguard for the unity of Cognitive Linguistics. On the negative side, we may observe that the thematic unity of Cognitive Linguistics as a recontextualizing approach to grammar is as yet a highly schematic one, which is not accompanied by an outspoken tendency towards theatrical unification or the development of appropriate methods. First, building a unified theory has never been a prominent feature of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive linguists work with a number of key notions that are motivated by general assumptions about language and cognition, but the exact relationship between many concepts and approaches within Cognitive Linguistics is still unclear. How exactly do a Langacker-type approach and a Talmy-type approach to grammar relate to each other? On which points are they notational variants, on which points are they compatible, on which points are they in opposition to each other? And if there is an incompatibility, what kind of evidence could decide between the two? Similar questions may be asked about Concep-

94

Dirk Geeraerts

tual Metaphor Theory and a Mental Spaces approach: in some respects, the latter is an extension of the former, but could it completely replace Conceptual Metaphor Theory or not? Further, what about the di¤erent crucial components of recontextualization (like the di¤erent forms of socially oriented Cognitive Linguistics)? In short, there are lots of theoretical issues in Cognitive Linguistics that need further clarification. Progress in Cognitive Linguistics now basically takes the form of developing and applying one or the other central concept or well established approach. Now that Cognitive Linguistics is reaching a mature age, systematic attempts at theory formation are called for. Second, if we can agree that Cognitive Linguistics is essentially characterized by a recontextualizing ‘‘drift’’, there are specific consequences with regard to the observational basis and the analytical method of linguistic research. If one takes a usage-based model of the grammar seriously, one will have to study actual language use. In terms of the observational basis of Cognitive Linguistics, this suggests a shift from introspective conceptual analysis to the study of non-elicited language use, as epitomized by corpus linguistics, and to the study of on line processes, as epitomized by experimental research. Further, if one wishes to investigate how diverse factors like meaning, structure, discourse and lectal variation interact, the sheer complexity of the phenomena calls for appropriate analytic methods, i.e. for a shift towards quantitative testing of hypotheses. The complexity of a fully recontextualized grammar requires a methodology that goes beyond the traditional reliance on introspection: disentangling the e¤ect of the various contextual factors that enter into the constitution of actual language use requires an advanced quantitative analysis that is able to capture the multivariate nature of linguistic usage. Now, while there are various indications for such an ‘‘empirical turn’’ in Cognitive Linguistics, the tendency is not dominant, and explicit defenses of an empirical approach are countered by equally outspoken defenses of introspection (cf., for instance, Geeraerts 2006b and Talmy 2007). Such a ‘‘methodenstreit’’, if it continues, would obviously not contribute to the unity of the framework. In contrast with the absence of outspoken internal tendencies towards theoretical and methodological unification, there is an external factor that is likely to contribute strongly to the integrity of Cognitive Linguistics: the recontextualizing trend that we have identified as the unifying factor within the theoretical and methodological pluralism of Cognitive Linguistics is not restricted to linguistics. It is, in fact, a growing tendency within the cognitive sciences at large. In an overview article charting the

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

95

development of cognitive psychology, Wagemans (2005) characterizes the recent evolution of cognitive science with two well-chosen phrases: ‘‘downward into the brain’’ and ‘‘outward into the environment’’. By thinking of the human mind as a machine algorithmically manipulating symbols, the traditional paradigm of cognitive science (as it arose in the 1960s) isolates the mind both from the brain and the environment. By contrast, in the contemporary developments within cognitive psychology, ‘‘intelligence became embodied again and cognition became situated in its context again’’ (Wagemans 2005: 359). The parallelism with Cognitive Linguistics is striking, and fits entirely into Sinha’s (2007) argument that Cognitive Linguistics is part of ‘‘second generation cognitive science’’, just like generative linguistics (the culmination in the decontextualization of grammar) belonged to the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s. The recontextualizing tendency in cognitive science at large will undoubtedly buttress the recontextualizing drift in Cognitive Linguistics. But at the same time, the question concerning the internal cohesion of Cognitive Linguistics receives a di¤erent interpretation when we consider Cognitive Linguistics in the context of cognitive science: what is important from this perspective is not primarily internal cohesion as such, but rather the way in which Cognitive Linguistics may optimally contribute to the interdisciplinary development of a contextualized cognitive science. But that, of course, is a task for the next thirty years.

References Austin, John 1962

How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Boroditsky, Lera 2000 Metaphorical structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75: 1–28. Bresnan, Joan 2001 Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Brisard, Frank (ed.) 2002 Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brown, Gillian and George Yule 1983 Discourse analysis. Cambridge: CUP. Broˆne, Geert and Jeroen Vandaele (eds.) 2009 Cognitive Poetics. Goals, Gains and Gaps. (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 10.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

96

Dirk Geeraerts

Bybee, Joan 2007

Diachronic linguistics; In: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 945–987. New York: Oxford University Press. Bybee, Joan and Paul Hopper (eds.) 2001 Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chilton, Paul 2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London/ New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis). Chomsky, Noam 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Clark, Herbert H. 1996 Using Language. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Coulson, Seana 2006 Conceptual blending in thought, rhetoric and ideology. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, 187–208. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Coulthard, Malcolm 1977 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Croft, William 2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory from a Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William 2009 Toward a Social Cognitive Linguistics. In: Vyvyan Evans and Ste´phanie Pourcel (eds.), New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Croft, William and D. Allan Cruse 2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Mey, Marc 1992 The Cognitive Paradigm. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dik, Simon 1989 The Theory of Functional Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris. Dirven, Rene´ and Marjolein Verspoor (eds.) 1998 Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics in Practice 1. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dirven, Rene´, Frank Polzenhagen and Hans-Georg Wolf 2007 Cognitive linguistics, ideology, and critical discourse analysis. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1222–1240. New York, Oxford University Press. Dowty, David 1979 Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

97

Eggins, Susanne 1994 An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Pinter. Evans, Vyvian and Melanie Green 2006 Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Mawhaw, N.J.; Edinburgh, U.K.: Lawrence Erlbaum; Edinburgh University Press. Fairclough, Norman 1995 Critical Discourse Analysis: the Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Catherine O’Connor 1988 ‘‘Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical construction: The case of ‘let alone’ ’’. Language 64: 501–538. Fischer, Kerstin 2000 From Cognitive Semantics to Lexical Pragmatics: The Functional Polysemy of Discourse Particles. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Freeman, Margaret 2007 Cognitive linguistic approaches to literary studies: state of the art in cognitive poetics. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1175–1202. New York: Oxford University Press. Gazdar, Gerald 1979 Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press. Geeraerts, Dirk 2003 Decontextualizing and recontextualizing tendencies in 20thcentury linguistics and literary theory. In: Ewald Mengel, HansJoerg Schmid and Michael Steppat (eds.), Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth. 369–379. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Geeraerts, Dirk 2006a A rough guide to Cognitive Linguistics. In: Dirk Geeraerts (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, 1–28. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk 2006b Methodology in Cognitive Linguistics. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, Rene´. Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, 21–49. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk (ed.) 2006c Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Cognitive Linguistics Research. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk and Stefan Grondelaers 1995 Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In: John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the

98

Dirk Geeraerts

Cognitive Construal of the World, 153–179. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.) 2007 The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Givon, Talmy 1979 On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Goldberg, Adele E. 1995 Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grice, Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Gumperz, John (ed.) 1982 Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: CUP. Gumperz, John and Dell Hymes (eds.) 1972 Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Halliday, Michael. A.K. 1994 Introduction to Functional Grammar. Second Edition. London: Edward Arnold. Harder, Peter 2003 The status of linguistic facts: Rethinking the relation between cognition, social institution and utterance from a functional point of view. Mind and Language 18: 52–76. Harris, Randy A. 1995 The Linguistic Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hart, Christopher and Dominik Lukes (eds.) 2007 Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haugen, Einar 1966 Language Conflict and Languages Planning: the Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hopper, Paul 1987 Emergent grammar. Berkeley Linguistic Society 13: 139–157. Hopper, Paul and Sandra Thompson 1980 Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56: 251–299. Hudson, Richard A. 1991 English Word Grammar. Oxford, Blackwell. Itkonen, Esa 2003 What is Language? A Study in the Philosophy of Linguistics. ˚ bo Akademis tryckeri. Turku: A Kemmer, Suzanne and Barlow, Michael 2000 Introduction. In: Usage-Based Models of Language, Michael Barlow and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), vii–xxviii. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

99

Ko¨vecses, Zoltan 1995 Anger: Its language, conceptualization, and physiology in the light of cross-cultural evidence.In: John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, 181–196, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ko¨vecses, Zoltan 2005 Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Kristiansen, Gitte, Michel Achard, Rene´ Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez (eds.) 2006 Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 1. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kristiansen, Gitte and Rene´ Dirven (eds.) 2008 Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language Variation, Cultural Models, Social Systems. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lako¤, George 1977 Linguistic Gestalts. Papers from the Thirteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, Ill., Chicago Linguistic Society: 236–287. Lako¤, George 1987 Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lako¤, George 1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1.: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999 A dynamic usage-based model. In: Ronald W. Langacker, Grammar and Conceptualization, 91–145. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2001 Discourse in cognitive grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 12: 143–188. Langacker, Ronald W. 2005 Construction grammars: Cognitive, radical, and less so. In: Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez and Sandra Pen˜a Cervel (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, 101–159. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Levinson, Stephen C. 2003 Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

100

Dirk Geeraerts

Montague, Richard 1974 Formal Philosophy. Selected papers of Richard Montague. New Haven: Yale University Press. Musol¤, Andreas 2006 Metaphor scenarios in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 21: 23–38. Palmer, Gary B. 1996 Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press. Partee, Barbara H. 1979 Semantics–mathematics or psychology? In: Rainer Ba¨urle, Urs Egli and Arnim von Stechow (eds.), Semantics from Di¤erent Points of View, 1–14. Berlin: Springer. Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.) 1988 Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sag, Ivan, Thomas Wasow and Emily Bender 2003 Syntactic Theory. A Formal Introduction. 2nd edition. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Sanders, Ted J. M. and Wilbert Spooren 2007 Discourse and text structure. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 916–941. New York: Oxford University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1967 Cours de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale. Paris: Payot. First published [1916]. Searle, John 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: CUP. Semino, Elena and John Culpeper (eds.) 2002 Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. (Linguistic Approaches to Literature 1.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sinha, Chris 2000 Culture, language and the emergence of subjectivity. Culture and Psychology 6: 197–207. Sinha, Chris 2007 Cognitive linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1266–1294. New York: Oxford University Press. Slobin, Dan I. 1996 From ‘‘thought and language’’ to ‘‘thinking for speaking’’. In: John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 70–96, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Underlying trends in thirty years of Cognitive Linguistics

101

Stalnaker, Robert 1974 Pragmatic presuppositions. In: Milton K. Munitz and Peter Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy, 197–214. New York: New York University Press. Talmy, Leonard 1975 Figure and ground in complex sentences. In: Cathy Cogen, Henry Thompson, Graham Thurgood, Kenneth Whistler and James Wright (eds.), Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 419–430. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Talmy, Leonard 2007 Introspection as a Methodology in Linguistics. Plenary lecture presented at the 10th ICLC conference, Krako´w, July 2007. Tannen, Deborah 1984 Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Taylor, John R. 1989 Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, Geo¤ 1994 Introducing Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Tomasello, Michael 2000 First Steps toward a Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cognitive Linguistics 11(1–2): 61–82. Tomasello, Michael 2003 Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Tummers, Jose´, Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts 2005 Usage-based approaches in Cognitive Linguistics: A technical state of the art. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1: 225–261. Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jo¨rg Schmid 1996 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London/New York: Longman. Verhagen, Arie 2005 Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verhagen, Arie and Jeroen Van de Weijer 2003 Introduction. In: Arie Verhagen and Jeroen van de Weijer (eds.), Usage-Based Approaches to Dutch, 1–6. Utrecht: LOT. Violi, Patrizia 2001 Meaning and Experience. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Wagemans, Johan 2005 Cognitive Psychology. In: Kimberly Kempf-Leonard (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Measurement 1, 351–359. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

102

Dirk Geeraerts

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog 1968 Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics, 98–127, 150–151, 183–195. Austin: University of Texas Press. Zlatev, Jordan 2005 What’s in a schema? Bodily Mimesis and the grounding of language. In: Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, 313–342. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory* Laura A. Janda 1. Introduction One of my best friends and favorite colleagues in the field of Slavic linguistics is a generativist whom I have known for over thirty years now. A few years ago I asked him what applications there might be for generative linguistics in the language classroom. His answer was: ‘‘Uh, none.’’ That was a real non-starter and it was clear that I needed to move the conversation quickly to another topic. For my friend, linguistic theory is something akin to a ‘‘pure’’ science like mathematics, and application is unnecessary to justify its existence. Indeed, even the suggestion that one might undertake such applications was apparently insulting. There is a general tendency to overlook and underestimate the value of application in linguistics, and this tendency is supported by the hiring, tenure and promotion processes at universities, as well as by the reviewing and ranking of scholarly publications. I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with these structures, but they do have an e¤ect on the relative prestige attached to achievements in theory in comparison with those in application. Nor do I wish to imply that either theory or application should be considered superior, one over the other. The intent is instead to show that theory and application can inform each other in a cyclic way as suggested by the title of this article. This article begins with a brief philosophical discussion on the roles of theory and application in linguistics in general and in cognitive linguistics in particular (section 2). Taking language pedagogy as an example of a domain where applications can be developed (cf. de Knop & de Rycker 2008), I describe the cycle of how theoretical endeavors are translated into language teaching materials, which then provoke further theoretical inquiry (section 3). I have gone through this cycle three times thus far (section 4), and can provide concrete examples of theoretical and pedagogical contributions relevant to case meaning (section 4.1), aspect meaning * I would like to thank my employer, the University of Tromsø.

104

Laura A. Janda

(section 4.2), and aspectual clusters of verbs (section 4.3). I conclude (section 5) that the development of pedagogical applications can reveal further research opportunities, thus enhancing one’s scholarly profile. Many of the pedagogical applications are available online via links from my homepage (http://hum.uit.no/lajanda/); these are noted as follows: (OL).

2. What is the role of linguistics? This is a question I have often posed to both myself and colleagues. In terms of theory and application, we might suggest that there are two answers, but it is important to keep in mind that these two answers are not mutually exclusive. The first answer is that linguistics is a theoretical enterprise and this justifies the pursuit of science for science’s sake. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, if we did not have visionary theorists, we would not have our science at all. So science for science’s sake is important. The other answer is that linguistics can contribute to applications that are valuable for people other than linguists. Some of these applications might include teaching materials and language resources, computer technologies for dealing with real-language interfaces, primary research on documenting languages and dialects, and consulting on programs to revitalize smaller languages and get them needed political protections. Cognitive linguistics has a tradition of being accountable to other disciplines, like psychology, neurobiology, etc. It seems logical that this tradition of accountability should extend also to society by making our theoretical achievements accessible in applications that are useful to others. Fortunately results achieved in cognitive linguistics can be transferred fairly easily to applications without requiring users to master a theoretical linguistic artifice because cognitive linguistics does not make any assumptions beyond those necessary and common to all cognition. In this article I focus on applications that can be used in the language classroom. All language learners have bodies, and they can use their embodied physical experience to make sense of the metaphors that underlie the grammars of foreign languages. Cognitive linguistics is utterly transparent in these applications, which do not require learners to have any linguistic expertise in order to access state-of-the-art analyses of linguistic subsystems of Slavic languages. I have often been warned that ‘‘real’’ linguists do not write language

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

105

textbooks, presumably because such activity would detract from their scholarly output and the results would not be comprehensible to the average layman. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that cognitive linguists can make contributions to language pedagogy while boosting their scholarly production at the same time.

3. How theory can inspire application and application can inspire theory This section contrasts the goals and audiences of theoretical contributions which are typically tightly focused, o¤ering a narrow scope perspective on phenomena, with the goals and audiences of language teaching applications, which cover entire subsystems of languages and thus o¤er a broad scope perspective on phenomena. These two approaches can be complementary and mutually supportive. The narrow scope approach can make it possible to pinpoint a problem and work out a model, which can then be extended into a broader approach. The very process of extension inevitably uncovers some previously unnoticed wrinkles in the model, leading to more narrow scope investigations. Our scholarly publications tend to o¤er narrowly specified theoretical contributions aimed at a relatively small group of colleagues. This is partly due to the nature of science: linguistic research is hard to do, and the horizons of our knowledge are gradually pushed forward in tiny increments. It is also partly due to the peer-review process, which makes it easier to get narrow contributions published, and disadvantages broader works. A work that takes on a broader issue constitutes a bigger target for anonymous peer reviewers, and this problem is compounded if a scholar wants to suggest a truly original analysis of a broader issue, bringing into question traditional assumptions that most peer-reviewers are heavily invested in. It is thus often narrower works that receive the prestige of publication in scholarly journals. A consequence is that there is often less prestige and less recognition by our universities attached to broader applications. The audience of broader pedagogical applications is a potentially unlimited population of learners, whose goals include passing an exam at the end of the semester or learning to speak a language well. Learners are typically interested in macroscopic issues. They do not want part of an answer. They want an explanation that will apply as broadly and exhaustively as possible. The advantage is that they can force us as scholars to

106

Laura A. Janda

take a comprehensive look at a phenomenon and connect all the dots of a given system, often giving us new perspectives on language phenomena. As I have experienced it, the interaction between theory and application can be cyclic. Usually I start with a narrowly focused theoretical model developed on the basis of a limited dataset. This makes it possible for me to pinpoint a problem without excess ‘‘noise’’ and figure out what the relevant parameters are and how they interact. Once I understand the mechanics and have a model, I can extend it to account for an entire subsystem of a language and take it into the ‘‘noisy’’ environment of the language classroom. Thus a narrowly focused theoretical model is translated into a broadly focused pedagogical application. Usually the nice tidy solution suggested by a linguistic model turns out to need some readjustment when it is stretched to cover the needs of the learner, and these readjustments are opportunities for new research. The new patterns and issues revealed in this process thus inspire more narrowly focused research. Occasionally, this process also leads in the direction of a more philosophical discussion of linguistics (Janda 2008a). I find that the end product of this cycle tends to open up entirely new directions that send me back through the cycle again with a new topic. As detailed below in section 4, work on the first set of issues (case meaning) actually led to work on aspect meaning, which then led to work on aspectual clusters, so in a sense the process can be understood as a spiral.

4. Case studies of how theory and application inform each other This section presents three examples of cycles I have experienced in my work. In each example, I began with a theoretical investigation which led to a model designed to account for specific data. I was then tempted to try my model out in the classroom, and this led to the creation of pedagogical materials with a broader scope. However, in the course of creating pedagogical materials to account for entire subsystems in the grammars of Slavic languages, I discovered new patterns and phenomena that I might not have noticed otherwise. These discoveries launched further, more theory-oriented research. The pedagogical materials include interactive components, using sophisticated programming, graphics, and audio, and all of them are available in part or in their entirety over the Internet. These materials required teamwork to produce and have been supported by various grants; funding sources and collaborators are listed under Works Cited, Part 2.

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

107

4.1. Case meaning With the exceptions of Macedonian and Bulgarian, which retain only vestiges of a case system restricted to pronouns, in the remaining Slavic languages all noun phrases are case marked, in a system with six or seven cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Locative, Instrumental, and in some languages also Vocative. Case use, when explained at all in traditional grammars and textbooks, is usually described by listing typical syntactic roles, prepositions, and verbs associated with given cases. This information is atomistic and unsatisfactory for both linguistic description and language pedagogy. The research agenda described in this section was inspired by my own frustrations as a learner of Slavic languages. Often even though I knew all the words in a sentence and could parse it accurately, I still did not know what the sentence meant because my textbooks had told me about only a small portion of the uses of case. Later on, when I was able to consult academy grammars and linguistic publications I discovered that though they provided more detail, they lacked coherence. 4.1.1. Primary research on case meaning The initial goal of my theoretical research was to work out the relationships between the various submeanings in each grammatical case. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, it was apparent that the grammatical cases were examples of polysemy, because each case had multiple meanings. As a cognitivist, I was then inspired to look for the prototypical meanings that motivated each case. I could further assume that the prototypical meanings were grounded in concrete physical experiences that served as the source domain for extensions to abstract metaphorical meanings, and that all of the meanings of any given case were related to each other in a radial category. Here is an example to illustrate the kind of problems I was faced with as both a language learner and a linguist. The Genitive case in Russian presents at least eighteen submeanings governed by a rather ba¿ing array of constructions, involving over one hundred prepositions, a couple dozen verbs, and a wide variety of quantifiers. But when viewed from the perspective of a radial category, it is easier to see clear well-motivated patterns. One of the core prototypical meanings of the Genitive involves ‘withdrawal from’, most often associated with prepositions, as in this example:

108

Laura A. Janda

(1) Docˇ ’ prisˇla iz sˇkoly. [Daughter-N came from school-G] ‘My daughter has come from school.’ This meaning of physical withdrawal serves as the source domain for other, metaphorical, types of withdrawal, thus explaining the association of verbs like bojat’sja ‘be afraid’ and stydit’sja ‘be ashamed’ with the Genitive case, as in this example: (2) Docˇ ’ bojalas’/stydilas’ bednosti. [Daughter-N feared/was ashamed poverty-G] ‘My daughter was afraid/ashamed of poverty.’ Similar explanations can be found throughout the landscape of Slavic case. The research agenda on case meaning unfolded gradually, tackling one case at a time and building up the theoretical model over the course of twelve years. It began with some peculiar uses of the Dative case in Czech that are grammatically superfluous (not governed, but optional) and are used to assert authority or solidarity. These uses were explained in terms of a mapping of meaning into the pragmatic domain (Janda 1988). A larger study (Janda 1993) compared the full extent of two cases, the Dative and the Instrumental, in Czech and Russian. It was several more years before I managed to make sense of the Genitive (Janda 1999) and the Accusative (Janda 2000). 4.1.2. Pedagogical applications for case meaning I never actually finished the entire case system in developing the theoretical model, since I did not cover the Nominative and the Locative. But I had to make up for that deficiency when Steven Clancy and I took up the creation of pedagogical materials, which were complete descriptions of the case systems for Russian (Janda and Clancy 2002) and Czech (Janda and Clancy 2006), with a third book in the series devoted to Polish soon to be completed. The case system is also featured in a reference grammar of Czech (Janda and Townsend 2000). Scholars continue to cite my 1993 book on the dative and instrumental, overlooking the case books, where the analysis is more complete and mature. No doubt this is due to the fact that most people are not looking for theoretical contributions in pedagogical works. Though cognitive linguistics is the basis for all these applications, it is

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

109

never mentioned by name, and indeed, we specifically avoid any unnecessary linguistic terminology in the case books, restricting ourselves only to words like: noun, preposition, verb. These books prove that it is possible to translate a complex linguistic analysis into straightforward, useful language teaching materials without compromising on detail or depth. Sample chapters of the case books available online (OL) illustrate the manner of presentation, though they lack the interactive features of the full packages (which provide audio for all examples, with choice of male or female voice, plus instant navigation between indexes, table of contents, and text, making it possible to click and link to any meaning or use with any preposition, verb, etc.). The full menus of exercises can be accessed online (OL). All of the examples in the texts and exercises represent real language data, collected from various corpora, not sanitized textbook examples. Also, these materials are designed to cover all meanings of case in the given languages, which means that hundreds of examples are used, in both text and interactive exercises. A learner who has worked through these materials can expect to fully master the meanings of the cases, mimicking the proficiency of a native speaker, who can interpret and use case meaning even in novel situations. One advantage of writing material for non-linguists is that one’s audience is potentially unlimited, and this can lead to unexpected uses for such applications. Recently, for example, I was informed that The Case Book for Czech (Janda and Clancy 2006) is being used at Charles University in Prague to teach Czech to hearing-impaired students. For speakers of Czech Sign Language, the case system of Czech is just as foreign and mysterious as it is for speakers of non-Slavic languages, and colleagues in Prague have long been struggling to find a way to help their deaf students over this barrier to achieving literacy in Czech. The system of connected meanings grounded in physical experiences shared by all human beings, whether deaf or hearing, is accessible to these students. Thus The Case Book for Czech is now being used to teach Czech in the Czech Republic too. 4.1.3. Further research on case meaning inspired by applications Work on the Case Books inspired multiple new theoretical inquiries. Within a given Slavic language there are often border zones in the case system where a nearly synonymous idea can be expressed by more than one case. These instances of case competition made for some fine-tuned analyses (Janda 2002a, 2002c, 2004b, 2004c). Furthermore, there are

110

Laura A. Janda

significant di¤erences in the use of the ‘‘same’’ cases across the various Slavic languages. This led me to undertake some syntactic dialect geography, which yielded results mostly parallel to dialect geography of Slavic in terms of phonology (Janda 2002b, 2002e). Furthermore, when I looked at what kinds of cross-linguistic di¤erences in case marking there were within Slavic, I noticed that the domain that showed largest di¤erences was that of time. The time domain alone accounts for nearly a third of all variation in case marking among Slavic languages (Janda 2002d, 2002f ). Expressions of time were and continue to be a fascination, and this carried over into the later investigations of aspect, which are the topic of the remaining two case studies. I was not the only one to be fascinated by comparing case usage across Slavic languages – my case book co-author, Steven Clancy, has undertaken a more sophisticated comparison supported by multi-dimensional scale modeling (Clancy 2006). Case meaning continues to o¤er me new opportunities. Goldberg’s Constructions (1995) and Constructions at Work (2006) gave me the idea of piecing together a comprehensive construction grammar for a case language. A first draft accounts for the range of transitivity constructions facilitated by case usage in Russian, presenting them as a radial category of constructions (Janda 2008c). This approach has been further extended in two di¤erent directions, both involving case use and construal. A striking feature of Russian as opposed to English is the use of the Dative case in impersonal expressions to express ideas that would occasion a personal construction in English. In other words, whereas in English we would say I was cold, I was having a hard time, I had to leave, in Russian the equivalent expressions are Mne bylo xolodno, mne bylo trudno, mne prisˇ los’ ujti. All of the Russian expressions begin with a Dative first person singular pronoun, and their literal meanings are ‘to me it was cold, to me it was di‰cult, to me it arrived/was necessary to go’. This tendency to avoid expression of agency in Russian has its roots in the meanings of the Dative case and the relationship of the Dative to other cases in closely related constructions. This is an issue that I have pursued together with Dagmar Divjak (Divjak and Janda 2008). Wierzbicka (1999) and Ko¨vecses (2001) both claim that the metaphorical understanding of given emotions are language-specific, though the strategies may be universal. Russian has six terms typically translated as ‘sadness’: grust’, pecˇal’, toska, unynie, melanxolija, xandra. Together with Valery Solovyev, I have analyzed the relative corpus frequencies of the case constructions that these nouns appear in (Janda and Solovyev 2009). This type of analysis makes it possible to make precise distinctions

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

111

among the six synonyms, and also to examine what types of metaphors are used to understand the various types of ‘sadness’, revealing that only a portion of the phenomena are explainable via extension from the container source domain. Overall, case meaning is a treasure trove that I am still mining out. Creating pedagogical materials forced me to undertake a comprehensive description of case systems, but these in turn have yielded a wealth of ideas that I might never have had otherwise, because I might not have seen the patterns if I was not forced to connect all the dots. 4.2. Aspect meaning In the Slavic languages, a given verb, throughout its paradigm, is either Perfective or Imperfective, regardless of whatever other categories it might express. Like case meaning, aspect use was traditionally described in terms of long lists of uses, many of which appeared contradictory and unmotivated. 4.2.1. Primary research on aspect meaning Because I am a cognitive linguist, I suspected that there must be a metaphor motivating Slavic aspect, and that there must be an orderly polysemy behind the apparently chaotic inventories of usage. I went in search of a source domain that would account for the observed phenomena in a coherent way, and discovered that physical matter served this purpose (Janda 2004a). Physical matter, understood as a distinction between hard, solid objects vs. fluid substances, is a rich source domain because human beings have many experiences relating to this distinction, and these experiences are isomorphic to the distinctions in the Slavic aspect system. Perfective events are understood as metaphorical discrete solid objects, which have clear boundaries and are unique and countable, as opposed to Imperfective events which are understood as metaphorical fluid substances and therefore lack inherent boundaries and shapes, and are neither unique nor countable, but can be spread about. Furthermore, many of the seeming contradictions in use of aspect can be cleared up when we realize that this metaphor is applied at three di¤erent levels, and that subsequent levels can trump prior ones. At the first level the metaphor applies to the inherent structure of events. At the discourse level, the metaphor applies to how events interact, which can motivate a di¤erent construal. And lastly at the pragmatic level this metaphor invokes di¤erences in satisfaction, comfort, and danger associated with physical objects, again moti-

112

Laura A. Janda

vating construals that can concur with or override those at the event and discourse level. Here is an illustration of how the rich domain of embodied experience we all have with matter motivates Russian aspect. First let’s take a discrete solid object like an apple. It has a shape, it has edges, it has a distinct identity (no other apple can also be this apple, making this one unique), and I cannot put two apples into the exact same location – the best I can do is to set one next to the other one. These are just a few of the things that we know about discrete solid objects thanks to our embodied experience. Like an apple, a Perfective event has a definite shape, which means that we know that it had a discrete beginning and/or end, that we are talking about a single, unique event, and when I have more than one such event (discourse level), the normal interpretation is that they are not at the same temporal location, but next to each other, and therefore sequenced. Here is a sentence with two Perfective events, each of which has clear boundaries and is unique. (3) Oleg sel v masˇinu i poexal v restoran. ‘Oleg got into the car and drove to the restaurant.’ The normal interpretation of this sentence is as a sequence. This experience of discrete solid objects motivating Perfective aspect can be contrasted with that of substances motivating Imperfective events. A fluid substance like sand has no inherent shape or boundaries and cannot be counted unless it is put in buckets. Furthermore sand is just sand, without unique identity, and it can be spread around. If there are two piles of sand, they can be blended together in the same place. Like sand, an Imperfective event is not understood to have a clear beginning or end, it does not have to be unique, and if there are two such events, they can easily occupy the same temporal location, making them simultaneous. Here is a sentence with two Imperfective events, neither of which tell us anything about temporal boundaries or uniqueness, and which are understood to be simultaneous. (4) Oleg nosil galstuk i ezdil na sportivnoj masˇine. ‘Oleg wore a tie and drove a sportscar.’ Note that example (4) has the same syntactic structure as example (3), the only di¤erence being that the two past tense verbs joined by the conjunction in (3) are Perfective, whereas the verbs in (4) are Imperfective. These examples illustrate just a few of the meanings of Perfective and Imper-

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

113

fective that are isomorphic to parameters of physical matter; a fuller inventory can be found in Janda 2004a. 4.2.2. Pedagogical applications for aspect meaning In order to make the metaphorical model of Russian aspect accessible to teachers and learners of Russian I wrote an article for pedagogues (Janda 2003), and I got funding from the National Science Foundation to create an interactive media module (OL; note that starred items are under construction, completed items are the Introduction and, under Chapter 2, Module 1, sections headed ‘‘shape’’ and ‘‘convertibility’’). The Aspect in Russian media module combines text, audio, graphics, and animations to show users the relevant parameters of physical matter and how they correspond to the behaviors of Perfective and Imperfective verbs. Users can conduct virtual experiments on solid objects and fluid substances and compare the results with the uses of aspect in Russian. Key concepts can be reviewed, various interactive activities exercise the concepts, and all of the materials are illustrated with authentic natural language examples, with options to view translations and a choice of native speakers (male and female) o¤ering models for pronunciation. The site encourages users to search the internet for further examples for analysis. The Aspect in Russian media module has been integrated into the Russian language curriculum at over two dozen institutions across the US and Europe. 4.2.3. Further research on aspect meaning inspired by applications As we saw with case meaning, work on a comprehensive pedagogical presentation of the model led me back to basic research and ultimately led me to start a new cycle too. Among the new things I worked on was an outline of how the matter metaphor di¤ers in its extension across Slavic (Janda 2006). I also noticed that verbs showed various behaviors in terms of morphological derivation of Perfectives from Imperfectives and viceversa, and this initiated the idea of aspectual clusters. Furthermore, I began to realize that some similar metaphors were at work in determining what kinds of aspectual relations there were between verbs within a cluster (Janda 2008b). Thus my next move was to explore aspectual relationships among verbs built from the same lexical item, what I call clusters. 4.3. Aspectual clusters of verbs Traditionally it has been assumed in Slavic that the relationship between Perfective and Imperfective verbs built from the same lexical item was

114

Laura A. Janda

that of an aspectual ‘‘pair’’ containing a single Imperfective verb and its Perfective aspectual partner. The process of collecting data and illustrative examples for the metaphorical model of aspect gave me the insight that there could be an alternative to the pair model, a model that would comport better with the messy reality of aspectual relationships among Russian verbs. This is how the cluster model came into being. Given that there are aspectual relationships between Perfective and Imperfective verbs, there is no necessity to assume that they are paired in a one-to-one relationship. Other relationships, namely one-to-many relationships, could also account for the phenomena traditionally described as pairs, and I found that Russian actually has di¤erent types of Perfectives. My proposal is that aspectual ‘‘pairs’’ represent only a portion of a system where an Imperfective verb can be related to a number of Perfectives. 4.3.1. Primary research on aspectual clusters I first worked out the cluster model by taking a multiply stratified sample of the morphological types of Russian verbs. This means that I included all verbs from all non-productive classes, plus samples of productive classes. In other words, I used linguistic criteria to build this database, in order to assure that I had accounted for all morphological types of verbs. This meant that all paradigm types were included regardless of their type frequency. My database contains 283 clusters and approximately 2,000 verbs. Research on this database made it possible to discover the four types of Perfectives and the implicational hierarchy that determines how these elements can be combined in aspectual clusters of Russian verbs (Janda 2007). It is possible to distinguish four types of Perfectives in Russian. There is a Natural Perfective which describes the culmination of a completable activity, and it is usually this Perfective that is considered the aspectual partner in the pair model. So Russian has two verbs for ‘write’: one, pisat’, is Imperfective and describes the activity, and one, napisat’, that describes the completion of a document. In addition, there are Specialized Perfectives that give a specific path and goal to the action, and thus provide enough new lexical information to motivate the derivation of secondary imperfectives. Adding a prefix to pisat’ ‘write’ gives a Specialized Perfective such as perepisat’ ‘rewrite’ which can furthermore be su‰xed to give a secondary Imperfective, perepisyvat’ with the same meaning used to describe a process or repeated action. There are also Complex Act Perfec-

How theory informs teaching and how teaching informs theory

115

tives which take an atelic action and give it temporal boundaries, usually expressing action that lasts a certain time or begins or ends, in all cases without result. An example of a Complex Act Perfective is popisat’, ‘write for a while without result’. Finally, with some verbs it is possible to form a Single Act Perfective which removes a single cycle from a repeated atelic action, such as cˇixat’ ‘sneeze’, which has a Single Act Perfective cˇixnut’ used to describe a single sneeze. An aspectual cluster can contain zero, one, two, three or all four types of Perfectives, but there are strict constraints on what combinations are possible. In fact most theoretically possible combinations are not attested, and those that are attested follow an implicational hierarchy, described in detail in Janda 2007. The cluster model o¤ers several advantages over the traditional pair model. Firstly, the cluster model accounts for more aspectual relations among verbs, giving a more accurate picture of the aspectual system in Russian. Secondly, the pair model is often used to incorrectly identify Complex Act and Single Act Perfectives as the Perfective ‘‘partners’’ of Imperfective verbs, especially in clusters that lack Natural Perfectives. 4.3.2. Pedagogical applications for aspectual clusters The pair model is just as inadequate in language teaching as it is as a linguistic model. To remedy this situation, John Korba and I built a second database with the aim of providing a resource for instructors and learners. This database contains the 266 clusters of the verbs listed in the vocabularies for a first-year and a second-year textbook of Russian. This pedagogical database was designed to represent high-frequency verbs most useful for learners, regardless of morphological class (i.e., token frequency). There was some overlap in the linguistic and pedagogical databases and the databases were approximately the same size. The results of the pedagogical project were much more interesting than I had anticipated. On the one hand, the cluster model was perfectly confirmed by the pedagogical database. The pedagogical database showed the same four types of Perfectives, and the same implicational hierarchy, giving the same range of possible cluster structures. However the distribution of the cluster types was not identical in the two databases. Figure 1 compares the frequencies of the four most important cluster structures in the two databases. Whereas the linguistic database gave an order of cluster structures that seems rather arbitrary (A þ NP þ S