Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
The various contributions: foundations, applications and future perspectives
The conceptual leap
We survey the various ways in which human thought manages to explore and conceptually structure the experiential world of man by means of mainly three cognitive operations: conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and conceptual integration or blending, probably based to different degrees on underlying pre-conceptual building stones such as image schemas. The chapter by Tim Rohrer, “Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science” critically reviews a series of recent approaches to another fundamental cornerstone in Cognitive Linguistics, namely the assumption that conceptual structure is “embodied”. Rohrer argues against any non-socially and non-culturally based conception of embodiment which envisages it as if it were (a) an eliminativist project (i.e. one which places the main or sole emphasis on brain structures and neurons, to the detriment of the role of socio-cultural factors), (b) a static or fixed model (as opposed to a temporally flexible and dynamic model, as well in ontogenetic, in historical as in phylogenetic terms), and (c) ultimately compatible with methods of conscious introspection. In this respect, Rohrer highlights the importance of findings resulting from cross-disciplinary empirical and experimental methods, and, like most contributors to the volume calls for empirical methodological approaches which will place Cognitive Linguistics more firmly within the broader experimentally-oriented community of Cognitive Science.
In his chapter, entitled “Metonymy as a usage event”, Klaus-Uwe Panther examines the interrelation between metonymy and metaphor, arguing that the hardly distinguishable notions of ‘domain’, ‘subdomain’, ‘single domain’, and ‘separate domains’, which since 1980 have often been used as definitional criteria for differentiating metonymy from metaphor, are unclear and unreliable because they are cover terms for heterogeneous concepts and conceptual relations. Instead, Panther returns to the semiotic approach advocated by C. S. Peirce according to which the difference between metaphor and metonymy resides in the type of semiotic relation between their respective source and target: metaphor is an iconic relation and metonymy an indexical relation. In consonance with this idea, metonymy is a kind of meaning elaboration whose result is a conceptually prominent target meaning, an integrated whole that contains the backgrounded source meaning and novel meaning components resulting from the process of elaboration. Panther explores the role of context in the interpretation of metonymy in usage events in two detailed case studies and concludes that one important function of metonymy is to provide generic prompts, serving as inputs for additional pragmatic inferences that flesh out the specifics of the intended utterance meaning.
How do the cognitive operations of metaphor, metonymy and blending relate to each other and to the world of thought? In her chapter entitled “Conceptual blending in thought, rhetoric and ideology”, Seana Coulson first introduces the reader to the framework of conceptual blending theory and provides an example of a rhetorically motivated blend. Then she goes on to describe the commonalities and differences of conceptual blending and conceptual metaphor. Coulson exemplifies these by means of humorous blends and suggests that processes of conceptual blending mediate the exploitation of stable conventional mapping schemes in order to adapt shared cultural models to the idiosyncratic needs of individuals. In her section on “Persuasive absurdity,” a number of examples of persuasive texts and discourse are analyzed to highlight the point that the creative elaboration and accommodation of cultural models relies heavily on conventionalized mapping and blending schemes. Coulson briefly also touches on the relationship between the meaning of sentences and the meaning of utterances, i.e. between the standard default meanings explored by linguists and the idiosyncratic meanings speakers derive in situated instances of language use.
