Cognitive Semantics

Cognitive Semantics

• the relationship can work in the other direction
• e.g. image relationship

'In reality, the girl with brown eyes has blue eyes'

trigger: image

target: real girl

4. Reflexive sense:

- The object is moving above and across itself. e.g. Turn the paper over.

Any path schema will allow a focus on the endpoint (stative/motion variant).

a. He walked across the road. = motion variant

b. He works across the road. = stative variant: identifies endpoint of path

Modal verbs

= force schema to describe polysemy in modal verbs

You must hand in your term essay before the end of this week. obligation

You may enter the studio when the light goes out. permission

She can swim much better than me. ability

Metaphor

= Figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two different things that have something important in common

• “metaphor” comes from a Greek word meaning

“to transfer” / “to carry across”

• It’s something like a simile

Terminology

• Source domain (comparison concept) Love is a journey

• Target domain (described concept) Love is a journey

The target domain X is understood in terms of the source domain Y

Metaphor

He is like a lion. (Simile)

He is a lion. (Metaphor)

1.) Which one of the four senses of over is represented in the different sentences?

a. She spread the tablecloth over the table.

b. Roll the log over.

c. The helicopter is hovering over the hill.

d. Harry still hasn’t gotten over his divorce.

2.) Which one is the motion and which one is the stative variant of sentences a and b?

a. You go around the corner.

b. She lives around the corner.

a. His office is through the atrium and to the left.

b. Walk through the atrium and turn to the left.

3.) Explain the terms “sequential scanning” and “summary scanning”. Decide which one is represented in sentence a and b.

a. Wheeler fell of the cliff.

b. Wheeler’s fall from the cliff

4.) What is the meaning relationship in the two sentences?

a. I heard it on the radio.

b. I heard it in the radio.

• compared to the relationship between beliefs & reality
• we can say:

- Len believes that the girl with blue eyes has

green eyes

- Len wants the girl with blue eyes to have

green eyes

examples create mental spaces by talking of paintings and a person's beliefs and wishes

whole range of linguistic elements which you can use as triggers for setting up mental spaces

spacebuilders

e.g. "In Joan's novel, in Peter's painting..."

" possibly, really..."

" believe, hope, imagine..."

example of belief contexts

Connections between spaces

Cognitive Semantics

• when a sentence is uttered the context will give background information/mental space
• parent space = including space, when spaces are packed inside one another

Example I

Example II

'In Len's painting, the girl with blue eyes has green eyes.'

• interpretation: the speaker knows the identity of the model & knows that she has blue eyes in reality
• speaker says - the painter has decided to give her green eyes
• proposal: two mental spaces are set up

- reality (girl with blue eyes)

- space of the painting (girl with green eyes)

Looking at a photo of a friend I might say 'Julia looks very young'

so the name 'Julia' refers to the picture of Julia (reality: looks far from young)

Name: trigger

image: target

photos & the people in them are related by viewer's recognition of resemblance

e.g. “Love is a journey”

“I’m feeling up. My spirits rose.”

“I’m feeling down. I’m depressed.”

3. Covering sense:

• path element represents the motion of the at least two-dimensional TR into its position over (or extending across) the LM

e.g. The blanket is over the bed.

• Quantifier: changes the nature of the TR

e.g. The guards were posted all over the hill.

multiplex trajector = various individual elements

• reference to entities by a number of indirect strategies

• terms: trigger & target

Traditional positions of metaphors

• Classical view

- Metaphor as a kind of decorative addition to

ordinary plain language

- Metaphor as a rhetorical device to be used to gain

effects

• Romantic view

- Metaphor as an integral to language

- Metaphor thought as a way of experiencing the

world

Features of metaphors:

1.) Conventionality

• Raises the issue of the novelty of the metaphor

• Dead metaphors

2.) Systematicity

• Metaphor does not set up a single point of

comparison

• Features of target and source domain are

joined

“Life is a journey”

- The person leading a life is a traveler

- His purposes are destinations

- Difficulties in life are impediments to

travel Etc.

Deontic uses:

• must: Compulsion Force schema

teacher’s authority or moral religious force  conceptual link between someone physically pushing or morally impelling you to do something in a certain way

• may: removing (social) barrier or keeping back a potential absent barrier

Similar: to let

a. I’ll let you smoke in the car, but just for today.

Ebru Gökbulut, Christine Lamparter, Kathrina Duschl, Nicole Weth

"Barry is in the pub. His wife thinks he's in the office."

• reality/parent space: Barry is in the pub
• spacebuilder: his wife thinks

new mental space is set up by the spacebuilder:

Barry is in the office

Mental spaces

Referential Opacity

opaque/non-specific reading: Jones doesn't know the idetity

in reality but has a belief about this person

“Metonymy is a referential strategy, describing it in traditional terms as identifying a referent by something associated with it”

knowledge interacts with reference

b) Using prepositions metaphorically: interaction of metaphorical structures available to users

e.g. Harry still hasn’t gotten over Hedwig’s death. LIFE AS A JOURNEY metaphor

2. Above sense:

• stative, no path element

e.g. The painting is over the mantel.

• shape of LM is unrestricted; no contact between TR and LM
• Use of another preposition when contact between TR and LM

e.g. The painting is on the mantel.

The influence of metaphors

• Metaphors exert an influence over a wide range of linguistic behavior

MIND-AS-BODY metaphors

e.g. Seeing understanding

Hearing obeying

Tasting choosing

Epistemic uses:

• uses for rational arguments and judgement are derived from their uses for the real world of social obligation and permission

must: reasonable conclusion e.g. It’s dead. The battery must have

run down.

may: possibility e.g. You may feel a bit sick when we take off.

3.) Asymmetry

• Metaphors are directional

• They provoke the listener to transfer features

from the source to the target

“Life is a journey” ?

4.) Abstraction

• Related to asymmetry

“Life is a journey”

- Exhibits this feature: the common, everyday

experience of physically moving about the earth is used to characterize the mysterious processes of birth and death, etc.

= conceptual structures from Gill Fauconnier

• focus on the cognitive process while having a discourse

• when we use language, we are permanent constructing domains

Metaphor vs. Metonymy

Similarities:

• Both are conceptual processes

• Both may be conventionalized

• Both are used to create new lexical resources in

language

• Both show the same dependence on real-world

knowledge or cognitive frames

Differences:

• Metonymy establishes a connection within a single

domain

• Metaphor is viewed as a mapping across

conceptual domains

Example:

"Jones believes that the leader of the Black Gang is a sociopath."

spacebuilder: believe

transparent/specific reading: Jones knows the identity of the

gangleader in reality and sets up a

belief space where he describes that

gangleader as a sociopath

1.) What is the specific/transparent reading and what sentence shows the non-specific/opaque reading?

„The Captain suspects that a detective in the squad is taking

bribes“

a) the captain suspects a particular detective

b) The captain suspects that one of the detectives is involved but

doesn’t know which one

2.) Where do we have a presupposition and in which sentence is the presupposition cancelled?

a) “Aunt Lola drank the whole bottle of wine before she finished the

meal.”

b) “Aunt Lola finished the meal.”

c) “Aunt Lola dropped dead before she finished the meal.

3.) What kind of spacebuilders are there? And give examples.

4.) What is the parent space?

"Ben thinks the supermarket is open, but actually it isn't."

Example

• if we talk about Shakespeare's play 'Julius Ceasar'

• we'll receive several domains / mental spaces

• different usage - different links: historical person, role in a play, actor playing the role & figure of that actor

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Presupposition

• PLACE for INSTITUTION

Downing Street had made no comment.

• INSITUTION for PEOPLE

The senate isn’t happy with this bill.

• PLACE for EVENT

Hiroshima changed our view of war.

• CONTROLLED for CONTROLLER

All the hospitals are on strike.

• CAUSE for EFFECT

His native tongue is Hausa.

As with metaphor, metonymy is a productive way of creating new vocabulary

= term that covers the way in which texts are connected with each other

problem: defeasibility / cancellability

Image schemas

• are an important form of conceptual structure in the cognitive semantics literature

• basic idea:

Because of our physical experience of being and acting in the world we

form basic conceptual structures which we then use to organize thought

across a range of more abstract domains

1. Containment schema:

• Derives from our experience of the human body itself as a container and from experience of being physically located ourselves within bounded location and also of putting objects into containers

abstract schema of physical containment which can be

represented in a very simple image

Scanning (of process)

• Sequential scanning = process as sequence of component sub-events

describing an event verbally

• Summary scanning = process as complete unit where all sub-events are seen as an integrated whole

describing event with nominal

a. Keegan entered the room.

b. Keegan’s entrance into the room

Speaker’s construal of situation determines the meaning!

• metaphorical extension of deontic uses from an external concrete world to an internal world of cognition and emotion

may: parallel between barriers in social action and barriers in mental reasoning

a. You may be right.

b. There is no evidence preventing the conclusion that you are right.

must: evidence conceptualized as force analogous to social pressure and laws,

moving a person’s judgement in a certain direction

a. You must have driven too fast.

b. The evidence forces my conclusion that you drove too fast.

The uses are semantically related through the metaphorical extension of force and barriers schemas from the social world to our inner reasoning!

Name the four features of metaphors!

Implications:

a. Experience of containment typically involves protection from

outside forces.

b. Containment limits forces, such as movement, within the container.

c. The contained entity experiences relative fixity of location.

d. The containment affects an observer’s view of the contained entity,

either improving such a view or blocking it.

Typical strategies:

• PART for WHOLE (synecdoche)

All hands on deck.

• WHOLE for PART (synecdoche)

Last year, Germany won the world cup.

• CONTAINER for CONTENT

I don’t drink more than two bottles.

• MATERIAL for OBJECT

She needs a glass.

• PRODUCER for PRODUCT

I’ll buy you that Rembrandt

a) Adding more information to the schema:

Contact between TR and LM e.g. Sam walked over the hill.

More information about the LM viewed as different geometric shapes of LM:

• extended area e.g. The bird flew over the yard.
• vertical form e.g. The bird flew over the wall.
• focus on endpoint of path e.g. Sam lives over the hill.

Example:

a) "John hasn't stopped smoking."

b) "John used to smoke."

c) "John hasn't stopped smoking, because he never

smoked."

a) has the presupposition b), but this is cancelled

in c)

presuppositions can be cancelled by various kinds of contextual information

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Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (Ronald W. Langacker)

Conceptual Blending

A B

Path

Perspective (of observer)

• external or internal viewpoint
• Motion events: Figure = entity which is moving with respect to stationary surroundings

Focus depends on lexical significance, not separate verbs like:

a. The light emanated from a beacon.

b. The beacon emitted the light.

Different argument structures for the same verb are needed!

a. The bees swarmed in the field.

b. The field swarmed with bees.

= conceptual integration, ability to create and develop extended analogies

• Ability of speakers to take knowledge from different domains, viewed as mental spaces and combine them to create new relationships between the elements for the spaces

- Schema of containment can be extended by a process of metaphorical extension into abstract domains

Lackoff and Johnson:

Examples:

• visual field:

The ship is coming into view. / He’s out of sight now.

• Activities:

I put a lot of energy in washing the windows. / She’s deep in thought.

• States:

He’s in love. / We stood in silence.

2. There is not an arbitrary but systematic and natural link between various senses.

• Topographical approach i. e. a description employing spatial models
• Path image schema (Brugman, Lakoff):

trajector (TR, Figure) = moving entity which stands out in some way from the landmark

landmark (LM, Ground) = background against which the movement occurs

e.g. Four senses of over

1. Above-across sense:

• TR is on a path which passes above or across the LM.

e.g. The plane is flying over the hill.

Several other senses of over can be related by two basic processes:

• No distinction between grammar and semantics
• Larger structures are directly symbolic in the same way as words.

Constructions have meanings in and of themselves!

Nouns, verbs and clauses

• Naïve world view: Billiard ball model (theory of reality) = incorporates concepts of space, time, energy and matter

Objects “move around in space, make contact with one another, and participate in energy interactions.” (p. 389, Saeed)

Contrasts of objects and interactions in values like: instantiation, essential constituent, possibility of individual concepts prototypes for noun and verb categories

The fact that a schema has parts that ‘hang together’ in a way that is motivated by experience leads Johnson to call them gestalt structures:

• Organized, unified whole within our experience and understanding that manifests a repeatable pattern of structure

• Some use the term ‘gestalt’ to mean a mere form or shape with no internal structure

• BUT: his project shows that experiential gestalts have internal structure that connects up aspects of our experience and leads to inferences in our conceptual structure

- BUT: these schemas are in essence neither static nor restricted to images

They may be also dynamic

2. Path schema:

• Reflects our everyday experience of moving around the world and experiencing the movements of other entities

• Journeys have typically a beginning and an end, a sequence of places on the way and direction

• Other movements may include projected paths

• Based on such experiences the path schema contains a starting point, an endpoint and a sequence of contiguous locations connecting them

A B

Path

• Find out which schema suits to this sentences. Explain your decision by applying it to the schema.

1. Tom has gone a long way toward changing his personality.

2. She's just starting out to make her fortune.

• Figure out the types of metonymic relations in the following sentences:

1. The gallery has just bought a Monet.

2. The demonstrators see Iraq as another Vietnam.

3. We do all the stuff the back office don’t do

• Provide your own examples of the following metonymic strategies:

1. Container for content

2. Whole for part

3. Part for whole

• What is the difference between metaphor and metonymy? Explain with examples.

Implications:

a. Since A and B are connected by a series of contiguous locations, getting from A

to B implies passing through the intermediate points.

b. Paths tend to be associated with directional movement along them, say from

to B.

c. There is an association with time. Since a person is traversing a path takes

time to do so, points on the path are readily associated with temporal sequence. Thus an implication is that the further along the path an entity is, the more time has elapsed.

These implications are evidenced in the metaphorical extension of this schema

into abstract domains for example achieving purposes as paths like:

• He’s writing a thesis paper and he’s nearly there.
• I meant to finish painting it yesterday, but I got side- tracked.

• two Input spaces: 1. knowledge about

Clinton, threatened by scandal but surviving

2. sinking of the Titanic

• Generic/General space: indentification of Clinton with the ship & iceberg with the scandal

• Blend space: elements from all domains are linked to create new scenario

(where the Clinton Titanic sinks the scandal-iceberg, reversing the causal relationship between the ship and iceberg)

important feature:

• blends create material that is not in any of the input spaces;
• speaker is able to elaborate the blend as far as they wish

Example:

"If Clinton had been the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk."

a joke that works by linking knowledge about the scandals of the Clinton years with the well-known episode of the sinking of the ship, the titanic

parent space will be reality

Sources

Preposition

Polysemy

Saeed, John I.2009.Semantics.Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Metaphor, Literary Devices: Definitions and Examples of Literary Terms. http://literarydevices.net/metaphor (accessed June 17, 2015).

Riemer, Nick.2010.Introducing Semantics.Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press.

Griffiths, Patrick.2006.An Introdution to English and pragmatics.Edinburgh Univ. Press.

Construal

= interpretation of a scene in alternative ways

Profiling

= choice of profiling/trimming of certain chain parts

a. Floyd broke the glass with a hammer.

b. The hammer broke the glass.

c. The glass broke.

Force schemas:

Compulsion:

F -------------------->

U

Force vector F acts on an entity u.

The essential element is movement along a trajectory

Dashed line represents the fact that the force may be blocked or

may continue

Blockage:

Force meets an obstruction and acts in various ways:

Being diverted, continuing on by moving the obstacle, passing through it

• Nouns: may describe time-stable states and processes normally identified by verbs

e.g. his arrival among us

Condition = product of cognitive processes and communicative

decision

• Prototypical transitive clause: viewpoint of speaker wanting to communicate a description of an event or scene
• Canonical transitive event: action chain (transmission of energy)

Removal of restraint schema:

Removal of a blockage allows an exertion of force to continue

along a trajectory

1. Several varying real-world situations are described metaphorical in nature relating to an underlying schema of containment.

a. The water in the vase obvious link between entity

(=water) and container (=vase)

b. The pear in the bowl not obvious where exactly

the pear is! = extended use

• (Typical and regular) Extensions = “inclusion of a geometric construct in a one-, two-, or three-dimensional geometric construct” (Herkovits, 1986, in Saeed)

= occurrence of a group of related but distinct meanings attached to a word

• Meanings depend on our ICM (= idealized conceptual model)

• Otherwise the uses are called semantic extensions.

• Radial category = description of characteristic patterns produced by metaphorical semantic extensions from a central origin

• Two variants: Prepositions, modal verbs

Thank you for listening!

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