Intro to Basic Concepts of COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

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JohnQPublik wrote:Time to discuss metaphor...
This is what I've been waiting for! :mrgreen: And John, you have no idea how much these lessons are helping me! Thanks!

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Chapter 7: Conceptual Metaphors and Implications for Conlanging

7.0 Background on Metaphor
Most people think of metaphor (as do most linguists other than cognitive linguists) as a consciously applied rhetorical device, as in He must have wings on his feet to get here so fast! As such, metaphor prior to cognitive linguistics was considered to have little if any bearing on the relationship between semantics and syntax or morpho-syntax. Then in 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, immediately establishing one of the central pillars of cognitive linguistics, and creating implications beyond linguistics in the realm of philosophy and psychology which continue to be felt.

7.1 Conceptual Metaphor
Lakoff and Johnson?s premise is fairly straightforward on its surface, but profound in its implications upon further analysis: human beings structure their understanding of their experiences in the world via ?conceptual metaphors? derived from basic sensorimotor, spatial, emotional, and other fundamental concepts learned during infancy and early childhood, in which these simpler, more basic concepts are used as a framework for conceptualizing more abstract experiences and situations. In fact, basic childhood concepts are the ?source? domains which are in turn cognitively mapped to a ?target? domain. Note that these target domains do not literally lend themselves to the source domain in any overtly physical or literal manner. Thus, these ?mappings? are entirely metaphorical in nature. For some simple examples of what Lakoff and Johnson are talking about, observe the following pairs of sentences (those preceded by ?? are considered questionable in terms of acceptance by native speakers, i.e., they sound ?weird? or even nonsensical):

1a) We?re head up north.
1b) ??We?re headed down north.
1c) We?re vacationing up in San Francisco. [if said, for example, to a neighbor in Los Angeles]
1d) ??We?re vacationing up in San Francisco. [if said, for example, to a neighbor in Vancouver, Canada]

2a) We?re headed down south.
2b) ??We?re headed up south. [EDIT: this example corrected Jan.19, 2006]
2c) We?re vacationing down in San Francisco. [if said, for example, to a neighbor in Vancouver, Canada]
2d) ??We?re vacationing down in San Francisco. [if said, for example, to a neighbor in Los Angeles]

3a) We?re headed out west.
3b) ??We?re headed out east. (This example is at least questionable in the U.S.; I?m uncertain about the U.K.)

4a) We?re headed back east.
4b) ??We?re headed back west. (This example is acceptable only if the intended meaning is ?we?re returning westward.)

From the above examples, the following conceptual metaphors can be elicited:

NORTH(WARD) IS UP(WARD)
SOUTH(WARD) IS DOWN(WARD)
EAST(WARD) IS BACK(WARD)
WEST(WARD) IS OUT(WARD)

There is no literal relation in the physical world between upward movement (i.e., toward the sky) and moving northward on (or parallel to) the ground, nor any literal relation between moving downward (i.e., in the direction of gravity) and moving southward, yet it is likely most native English speakers would need to think about this consciously before agreeing. This is because the above conceptual metaphors are so ingrained into the way we think of traveling long distances in the cardinal directions that they have become largely subconscious, used as if there is a literal relationship between the cardinal direction and the image schemas (see Lesson 5) for ?up?, ?down?, ?back? and ?out?.

Such conceptual metaphors exist in virtually every realm of abstract thought as expressed in language. Naturally, many of these are spatial in nature as seen in the above examples. Other spatial metaphors in English include:

MORE IS UP / LESS IS DOWN
GOOD IS UP / BAD IS DOWN
HAPPY IS UP / SAD IS DOWN
THE FUTURE IS AHEAD / THE PAST IS BEHIND

Here are a few other examples of the hundreds that have been identified in English.

SEEING IS TOUCHING/EYES ARE LIMBS
I can?t take my eyes off her.
His eyes were glued to the the TV.
I was able to pick out every detail of the pattern.
She ran her eyes over his body.


EMOTIONAL EFFECT IS PHYSICAL CONTACT
Her death hit him hard.
I was struck by his sincerity.
She?s a knockout.
She was touched by his remark.
I was blown away, dude.


LIFE IS A GAMBLING GAME
I?ll take my chances.
The odds are against us.
It?s a toss-up.
He?s got an ace up his sleeve.
He plays it close to the vest.
Where were you when the chips were down?


LOVE IS MADNESS
I?m crazy about her.
You?re driving me out of my mind.
He always raves about you.
Her fans are mad for her.
I?m just wild about Harry.


A key point to understand about conceptual metaphor is that these metaphors are not static ?idiomatic? structures specific to the specific linguisitic expressions. Rather, it is the entirety of the source domain which is utilized as a means for understanding the target domain and many different elements from the source domain can be mapped to a corresponding element in the target domain. Thus, in mapping the source domain of ?heat of a fluid? to the target domain of ?anger,? various expressions associated with the source domain can be used to talk about and think about the target domain, thus:
I reached my boiling point.
She blew up on me.
His anger boiled over.
Their anger simmered during the presentation.
He erupted in anger.
I could feel my anger building up inside.


7.2 Metaphor and Construal
It is important to realize that Metaphor is linked with construal (see Lesson 2) because different ways of thinking about a particular event or situation (i.e., different construals of the event or situation) are associated with different conceptual metaphors. For example, it is common to conceptualize ?intimacy? in terms of temperature, e.g.,
She finally warmed up to him.
He is a cold person
I treated her very cooly
Those two are hot for each other.


However, it is possible to equate intimacy with distance as well, e.g.,
I feel very close to you.
Her manner is very distant.
We?re drifting apart
He is very unapproachable.


An argument can be conceptualized as a building, e.g.,
That supports what I?m saying.
Your argument is crumbling.
I have evidence that buttresses her statement.
I?m building up evidence for my claim.


On the other hand, an argument can also be conceptualized as a journey, e.g.,
What are you driving at?
I want to take that point a little further.
That leads to the following conclusion.
I don?t follow you.
You?ve lost me.
I?m not with you
.

Many of the conceptual metaphors found in English can be shown to be more specific sorts of instances of more general conceptual metaphors. Some of the main conceptual metaphors for English are:

STATES ARE LOCATIONS
CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS
CAUSES ARE FORCES
ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS
PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS
MEANS ARE PATHS TO DESTINATIONS
ACTION IS DIRECTED MOTION

Lakoff and Johnson state that conceptual metaphors do not simply involve how we talk about our experience, but also how we think about them. They and others have shown many examples of how this has political and social implications. One line of research in the use of conceptual metaphor showed that official government publications have almost always utilized conceptual metaphor when talking about nuclear weapons, using source domains which make the topic more ?palatable? to the general public. Other research has shown how the description of the human body within the medical profession and medical schools has evolved from seeing the body as a machine where things are either ?broken or fixed? to one where the human body is a homeostatic system capable of being ?in or out of balance.? This paradigm shift has led to new treatments for disease and whole new lines of medical research and practices. Lakoff believes that ?vast domains of our experience, understanding, reasoning, and practice are metaphorically structured.?

7.3 Implications For Conlanging
Hopefully, you are now beginning to see just how intricate, the subconscious structure of language can be in terms of the relationship between subconscious conceptualization and its correspondence with actual words.

In designing your conlangs, how many of you have ever thought about sentence pairs like those shown in Lesson 5? Have you ever asked yourself ?Should my language allow opposite locative constructions to refer to the same or similar situations, and the same locative structure to apply to opposite situations? If so, should I use the same pattern as English, or should I come up with a system of correspondence unique to my language? If I do, what conceptual logic will underly it? (In other words, how can I be sure I?m not just creating an ?idiom? but instead am reflecting a straightforward cognitive extension of meaning from basic spatially-oriented usages to abstract, non-spatial contexts?) Are you now seeing that a lot of what you probably considered to be ?idiomatic? constructions in language, are in fact simply the application of subconscious conceptual mappings from a basic domain of human experience and cognition to a more complex one.

What conceptual metaphors shall I use? When the time comes to translate an English sentence like ?I?m crazy about her?? are you simply going to go looking up your conlang?s word for ?crazy? or are you first going to say, ?Wait! The choice to conceptualize love metaphorically with madness is arbitrary to English (and other languages). Why can?t I make my conlang?s conceptual metaphor something different that says something about the personality of my conworld inhabitants? psyche and culture? Say, perhaps, LOVE IS FOOD (?She is my strawberry pie.?) or LOVE IS DANCING, etc.

Doesn?t this make you want to grab your notes and start mapping out your conlang?s image schemas and conceptual metaphors? I did image schemas for Ithkuil spatial roots (the language doesn?t have prepositions). How about you? Do you really want your language to say that a poster hangs ?on? a wall, or should it be like French which uses ??? as a reflection of a different image schema? Or a different image schema entirely? The Ithkuil root used to describe posters on a wall conveys a basic spatial meaning of ?vertical? support against gravity, as opposed to the ?horizontal? (or perpendicular) support against gravity of English ?on?. Perhaps some of you might want to come up with even more interesting ways to designate such a spatial relationship.

Interesting stuff, eh?
Last edited by JohnQPublik on Thu Jan 19, 2006 2:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

This is wonderful! :D You got me even more excited about conlanging, now I can't wait to add metaphors and image schemas etc. to it!

One question though:
You said that you can't say "She's on the car" because a car is too small, compared to a bus/boat/train/plane. What about a small boat? A boat that's even smaller than a car? You can still say "She's on the boat" when it's a small boat, or can't you?
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Post by JohnQPublik »

Dingbats wrote:One question though:
You said that you can't say "She's on the car" because a car is too small, compared to a bus/boat/train/plane. What about a small boat? A boat that's even smaller than a car? You can still say "She's on the boat" when it's a small boat, or can't you?
Good question. My guess would be that we conceptually see small boats as being both containers (explaining the use of "in") as well as having the same open-to-the-air aspect that allows us to say "on a motorcycle." Think about it: while it's easy to see a small boat (e.g., a canoe, rowboat, etc.) as a "tub-like" container against the water, we don't think of small boats as having a "roof" to their interior space the way a car, bus, or large boat has. Consequently, like motorcycles, we can say we're "on" them based on the "support-against-gravity" schema. That's my two cents on the matter.

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

JohnQPublik wrote:
Dingbats wrote:One question though:
You said that you can't say "She's on the car" because a car is too small, compared to a bus/boat/train/plane. What about a small boat? A boat that's even smaller than a car? You can still say "She's on the boat" when it's a small boat, or can't you?
Good question. My guess would be that we conceptually see small boats as being both containers (explaining the use of "in") as well as having the same open-to-the-air aspect that allows us to say "on a motorcycle." Think about it: while it's easy to see a small boat (e.g., a canoe, rowboat, etc.) as a "tub-like" container against the water, we don't think of small boats as having a "roof" to their interior space the way a car, bus, or large boat has. Consequently, like motorcycles, we can say we're "on" them based on the "support-against-gravity" schema. That's my two cents on the matter.
Yes, perhaps you're right.
Couldn't it also be that because you can say "on" about a big boat, by analogy that is extended to small boats as well? Or doesn't it work that way?
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Post by chris_notts »

Incidentally, googling produced:

http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/MetaphorHome.html
http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/metaphors/

which seems to be a list of some metaphors (from English?). I don't know if anyone's already linked to it or not...
Try the online version of the HaSC sound change applier: http://chrisdb.dyndns-at-home.com/HaSC

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

chris_notts wrote:Incidentally, googling produced:

http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/MetaphorHome.html
http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/metaphors/

which seems to be a list of some metaphors (from English?). I don't know if anyone's already linked to it or not...
That's useful as a resource for checking up the principle behind real metaphors. :)
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Lesson No. 8: Frames

If you were asked to define the word ?eat? most of us would offer some variation of a simple ?dictionary? type of definition such as ?ingest food.? However, the word ?eat?, in addition to having a simple ?definition? is associated with a semantic frame, a subconscious schematic representation of a particular type of situation together with a mental list of all the different participants, props, and other conceptual roles that are seen as components of such situations. Thus for ?eat? we automatically conceive of associated concepts such as food, silverware, cups and plates, a heating source such as a stove, microwave or campfire, packages and cans of processed food, grocery stores, restaurants, menus, as well as more abstract concepts such as hunger. Those items that do not fit the frame, give rise to semantically unacceptable sentences such as *The rock ate the candy bar or *Will you be eating the vacuum cleaner or the pencil sharpener for lunch?

Often, a particular frame represents a situation which is associated with a simplistic, idealized view of reality which, in fact, does not lend itself well to modern real-life situations. An example of this is the word ?bachelor.? Most people, when asked to define the word bachelor, would say something like ?an unmarried adult male? or perhaps ?an adult male human being who has never been married.? However, note the difficulty that bachelor presents in the following exercise:

Are the following persons ?bachelors??
1a) The Pope
1b) Tarzan
1c) An adult male living with his longtime girlfriend
1d) A male homosexual
1e) A male homosexual living with his longtime boyfriend

The idea of frames is important in that it goes against the classical or standard notion that the meaning of concepts is a plus-or-minus set of defining ?features? for any given concept. Thus, ?bachelor? is merely a concept consisting of a collection of semantic features such as [+MALE], [+ADULT], [? MARRIED]. Needless to say, the above examples belie this feature-based notion of conceptualization.

As can also be inferred from the ?bachelor? examples above, frames are often associated with culturally-conditioned attitudes and expectations as well. Because frames operate mostly subconsciously, they can be used for clever social manipulation. In a recent book, Lakoff wrote about how the Republican party in the U.S. has co-opted the debate on taxes over the past decade or more by equating the ?taxation? frame with the ?relief? frame. The word ?relief? conjures up thoughts of release from pain or an uncomfortable or unfair burden. By equating the two via the phrase ?tax relief? and hitting the public over the head with the phrase again and again, they have succeeded in instilling a new frame into the minds of Americans, against which the Democrats have little defense. Even when the Democrats try to make a case for raising taxes, they subconsciously defend the idea within the ?tax relief? frame. Lakoff suggests that the Democrats fight fire with fire by coining their own new frame and selling it to the public themselves, the frame being ?tax responsibility? in which taxes would be seen as one paying his/her fair share for services and conveniences which one uses but could never create or build for oneself, e.g., roads, schools, and other public infrastructure.

Frames also overlap and borrow elements from one another, so the ?commercial transaction? frame with it?s associated words like buy, sell, cost, price, money, credit card, purchase, customer, salesperson, store, etc. overlaps with frames associated with ?money? and ?product? and ?economy.?

Frames have important ramifications for those conlangers whose conlangs are associated with a particular conculture/conworld. Semantic frames are specific to any given language (in fact, probably any given dialect group, given the differences in certain frames you can probably think of yourself between American versus British usage, e.g., ?sports? frame ? cricket anyone?)

Frame semantics was first conceived by the UC Berkeley linguist Charles Fillmore. He has devoted the past few years to creating FrameNet, a massive database and query system that attempts to identify the semantic frames within the English language, showing their associations and lists of words. The FrameNet website is absolutely fascinating and has much more information about frames than I have presented here. You can also look up a particular frame and use a tool called FrameGrapher to see a graphic representation of how it relates to other frames. The website is here. I would recommend that anyone visiting the site start with the FAQs, which give a good overview of the site's purpose, how to use it, and more information in general about frame semantics.

p.s. Thanks, Chris, for finding those great links to lists of English conceptual metaphors. Those lists should convince anyone of just how extensively the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor permeates language.

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

I don't understand completely how you would use frames in a good way in a conlang. Could you give an example of a con-frame?
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Post by zompist »

FWIW, Fillmore's idea of frames is very close to that of Marvin Minsky. I don't have copies of the relevant papers and Googling is tedious, but so far as I can see Minsky originated the term in 1975 (in "A Framework for Representing Knowledge"), while Fillmore's key work is from 1977 ("Scenes-and-frame semantics"). There was some important cross-fertilization between AI and linguistics at that time. Schank's 'scripts' (Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, 1977) are essentially the same idea.

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Lesson No. 9: More on Frames & Implications for Conlanging
Dingbats wrote:I don't understand completely how you would use frames in a good way in a conlang. Could you give an example of a con-frame?
An excellent example of the implications of frame semantics is given by Lakoff and Johnson involving the word ?gun.? (NOTE: Lakoff & Johnson do not use the term ?frame? in their book, referring to the concept in a more descriptive way as ?an experiential gestalt of inherent and interactional properties.?) Ask a person to define a ?gun? and they will give a dictionary-style definition of a gun which mentions its inherent physical properties as well as its primary function use (i.e., to shoot bullets). But Lakoff & Johnson demonstrate how ?gun? carries with it a subconscious semantic frame which is a necessary part of our conceptual understanding of the word. I say ?necessary? because without the subconscious entailments inherent in the frame for ?gun,? there are phrases and sentences which would make no sense to us. The reason such phrases or sentences do make sense to us is because of our subconscious understanding of the frame. Lakoff & Johnson demonstrate this by applying the adjective ?fake? to render the form ?fake gun.? On a conscious level, we generally consider that a ?fake gun? is not a gun, applying an either-or, classical binary logic, i.e., a gun is either real or fake, with no other conditions necessary to understand what that means in context. However, observe the following about the phrase ?fake gun?:

A fake gun has to look enough like a gun for the purpose at hand, e.g., as a prop in a play or movie, as a means of threatening someone with a weapon, etc. The props manager of the play can?t hand you a dishtowel and say ?Here?s your fake gun for the scene, Mr. Bogart.? This implies that the object ?has to have the contextuallly appropriate perceptual properties of a gun? (to quote L&J).

You also have to be able to perform enough of the appropriate physical manipulations that you would with a real gun, i.e., be able to hold it or use it a certain way by which observers will acknowledge its appearance/use is as a gun. As L&J put it, it has to ?maintain what we might call motor-activity properties of a gun.?

There?s also the point of why you have or are using a fake gun. It must serve at least some of the purposes that a real gun would serve, e.g., for threatening, for display, etc.

So, what makes the gun fake is that it cannot function like a real gun, i.e., it can?t shoot bullets.

Lastly, it cannot have originally been manufactured to function as a real gun, i.e., a broken or inoperable gun is not a ?fake gun.?

The fact that the above semantic entailments naturally emerge when we juxtapose the adjective ?fake? with the noun ?gun? means that the adjective ?fake? actually serves to preserve some properties of guns and negates others. The properties it preserves are perceptual properties (it looks like a gun), motor-activity preoperties (you handle it like a gun), and puposive properties (it serves some of the same purposes as a gun), while the properties it negates are functional (it doesn?t shoot bullets) and historical (if it was once a real gun, it can?t be a fake).

The fact that ?fake? can cause these factors to emerge from the concept ?gun? implies that our subconscious conceptualization of the word ?gun? contains at least five different semantic properties functioning as an experiential gestalt (i.e., the sum total of the components is readily understood as a single unit, more easily than the understanding of the individual components themselves), which would all be part of what Fillmore calls a frame. In plain terms, when we think of guns, we automatically think of what they look like, how one handles/manipulates them, what they?re used for, how they work, and whether they were ever genuine. What is important to note is that several of these properties are NOT inherent properties of the gun itself, but rather interactional properties, i.e., properties relating to how humans interact with guns.

Frames explain phenomena such as why the words ?bachelor? and ?spinster? are not full semantic counterparts, even though a classical ?feature?-based theory of semantics would show them as such. Frames allow you to a systematic way of incorporatin cultural attributes into your conlangs.

So when creating words in your conlang, you should be asking yourself, ?Do I want to automatically carry over all of the frame surrounding this particular word from English (or your native language if not English), or should my conculture/con-inhabitants have a different frame for, what on the surface, looks like merely a translation of this word. So, for example, in your conlang, it might be possible to say that a broken gun is a ?fake gun? because the frame is different and does not include the subconscious historical component. Or you might want to add a semantic component to objects like guns such as whether they are considered holy, so that saying they are ?fake? would be a blasphemous utterance. You could even extend the idea into the grammar, so that certain classes of objects or the application of certain adjectives can never be spoken of in the past tense because it violates a parameter of the subconscious semantic frame. The possibilities abound.

The ?KILLING? frame provides another example. The components of this frame in English are as follows (excerpted/modified from the FrameNet website):

Core Frame Elements:
CAUSE (of death), e.g., drowning, stabbing, shooting, falling, hitting over the head, etc.
INSTRUMENT [must be tangible entity], e.g., gun, knife, etc.
MEANS/METHOD, e.g., cutting off access to food, pushing off of a cliff, etc.
PERPETRATOR [must be sentient]
VICTIM [must be alive prior to the killing]

Non-Core Frame Elements:
DEGREE [with adjectives describes killing potential; with nouns indicates extent of effect], e.g., that poison is deadly, They?re guilty ofmass murder.
DEPICTIVE [the state of the killer or victim during the killing]
MANNER, e.g., quietly, loudly, sloppily, competently, etc.
PLACE [the geographical location where the killing took place]
PURPOSE [the state of affairs the killer is trying to bring about by killing]
REASON [the preexisting state of affairs the killer is responding to]
RESULT [this is often redundant depending on the chosen verb, e.g., I beat him to death vs. * I decapitated him to death]
TIME

Looking at the above frame elements for killings in English, I can already think of two ways I might modify this frame for a conlang. I might add in a frame-element called BODY PART which specifies what part of the anatomy or anatomical system was the target of the instrument or the source of the cause of death. This would be manifested in grammatical sentences which, in English, would have to be awkwardly paraphrased such as ?He stomached him (to death),? meaning ?He killed him by attacking him in the stomach (e.g., using a knife to stab him). Another example would be a sentence literally translatable as ?I throat-killed him.?

The second way I can think of to modify the frame would be to add in an element called JUSTIFICATION. Maybe in your conculture, killing is considered moral in certain social or ritual circumstances and the word-forms used in the sentence carry with them a sense of such moral justification.

Another way to modify the frame for use in your conlang might be to eliminate certain elements that are part of the English frame.

I hope this helps to clarify how frame semantics can come into play when designing a conlang/conculture.

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Post by JohnQPublik »

Additional Considerations for Conlangers

Our next lesson will be on prototypes and prototype theory, followed by a look at Fauconnier's theory of Mental Spaces. However, while we're on the topic of what considerations conlangers should give to all this cognitive stuff when designing a conlang, another example from Lakoff & Johnson regarding spatially-oriented conceptual metaphors is particularly useful for any of you who have constructed or are planning to construct non-humanoid conlangs.

Human beings, by nature of how our bodies are constructed, naturally face in one direction, normally walk/run in one direction (frontward), and stand erect, perpendicular to the horizon and the ground. Because these orientational factors about one's body are recognized and understood in infancy, they are subconsciously ingrained as conceptual reference points which become the basis for many conceptual metaphors. To these are added other aspects of our early experience that form the basis for conceptual metaphors, e.g., we spend most of our time performing actions rather than doing nothing, and we tend to view our own selves as being naturally "good". Because of all these factors, we tend to conceive of ourselves and others metaphorically as being more UP than DOWN, more FRONT then BACK, more ACTIVE than PASSIVE, and more GOOD than BAD. Similarly we spend our lives with a notion of knowing we exist in the place where we are located, in the temporal present, thus we metaphorically conceive of ourselves as being more HERE than THERE and more NOW than THEN. Thus the "canonical" person (to quote L&J) is UP, FRONT, ACTIVE, GOOD, HERE, and NOW, while a non-canonical (and therefore less desirable or less admired person) is DOWN, BACKWARD, PASSIVE, BAD, THERE and THEN. By metaphorical extension, these properties are applied to things and situations as well. This conceptualization is carried over into the overt syntactic form of language, as seen in sequential ordering of phrases. Thus we say "up and down," "front and back", "active and passive", "good and bad", "here and there", and "now and then" while we are very unlikely to say "?down and up", "?back and front", "?passive and active", "?bad and good", "?there and here", or "?then and now." All of these orderings are in turn manifestations of a conceptual metaphor: NEAREST COMES FIRST.

So, for those of you with non-humanoid speakers of your conlangs, especially those with a different body symmetry other than a front-to-back bilateral symmetry, ask yourself how likely or at least arbitrary would it be for the same humanoid-bodily oriented metaphors to arise? Given what we know now from the lessons above, do you think that beings with radial body symmetry and 360-degree vision would actually say "The rock is in front of me?" What would "in front of me" mean to such a being? They'd use completely different orientational metaphors, which by extension would lead to a different set of conceptual metaphors for describing "canonical" things, situations, and people.

Even for those of you with human or humanoid speakers of your conlangs, the sorts of metaphors described above are culture-specific. Do you want your conworld to use the same metaphors for conceptualizing "canonical" events, things, and persons as Indo-European languages? (I suppose if your conlang is supposed to be IE-related you would, but otherwise...)

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

That makes it a little clearer. But still, wouldn't it be extremely tedious to come up with a frame for every single word you create? Or is it enough to come up with frames like "killing" that apply to many words, and using those frames as guidelines for what every word includes when writing dictionary entries?

And that "nearest comes first" was a good thing to know for conlanging.

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Post by JohnQPublik »

zompist wrote:FWIW, Fillmore's idea of frames is very close to that of Marvin Minsky. I don't have copies of the relevant papers and Googling is tedious, but so far as I can see Minsky originated the term in 1975 (in "A Framework for Representing Knowledge"), while Fillmore's key work is from 1977 ("Scenes-and-frame semantics"). There was some important cross-fertilization between AI and linguistics at that time. Schank's 'scripts' (Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, 1977) are essentially the same idea.
I've also read in passing that Fillmore's frames are similar to something called "lexical field theory" with which I'm unfamiliar.

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Post by chris_notts »

This is all interesting... I guess the problem I have with it as a conlanger is that most of the examples so far have been in English. It would helpful if we could have some detailed examples from other natural languages as well. For instance, if TIME IS A FINITE RESOURCE (IIRC) is an English metaphor, how do languages conceptualize it that lack this English (or IE) metaphor? I might guess that in some language the hypothetical TIME (/WORK?) IS A JOURNEY might replace it as the primary way of conceptualizing time, giving things like:

"I'm busy" (translated)

Dubious: ? I don't have the time

Normal: I'm already travelling / going somewhere / some other travel related phrase

"I'm free"

Dubious: ? I have time

Normal: I'm resting / some other lack of travel phrase even if the person is actually moving doing some non essential activity

but guessing and seeing examples of how different natural languages conceptualize things like time is a different thing. Incidentally, I borrowed "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" and "Metaphors We Live By" from the Nottingham University library, but unfortunately apart from the Dyirbal class system and a couple of other bits and pieces it too seems to be mostly focused on English... I would have liked to have seen more concrete details of how other languages differ. :(
Try the online version of the HaSC sound change applier: http://chrisdb.dyndns-at-home.com/HaSC

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Post by Rik »

Looking at the above frame elements for killings in English, I can already think of two ways I might modify this frame for a conlang. I might add in a frame-element called BODY PART which specifies what part of the anatomy or anatomical system was the target of the instrument or the source of the cause of death. This would be manifested in grammatical sentences which, in English, would have to be awkwardly paraphrased such as "He stomached him (to death),"
This made me smile, as it reminded me of the colloquial British verb for murder/execution - top - as in "they topped him at dawn". Just as I was reading the passage it clicked: "top" equates to cutting of the top of something - "she topped and tailed the carrots". But then I always thought the proper English word for death by axe to neck should have been deheading.

On a more personal level, I've enjoyed reading these lessons - mostly because they've been very informative, but also partly with a hint of relief that I won't have to do too much work to rejig Gevey to fit into the cognitive linguistics worldview. The prepositions are pretty much there already, though I'll need to check whether the stative (spatial) and dynamic (motive, temporal) matches are the right ones. I'll also have to do some thinking about less obvious prepositions such as "for".

On the metaphor front, I'm glad to say that I'd already made a start on the conceptual (I called them cognitive) metaphors, though the discussion and links will help me decide how I want to extend these. I'm sure there's lots of other tweaks I can make to the conlang to get it to play nicely with frames, prototypes, image schemas, etc. A good decade's worth of work, I think.

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Post by JohnQPublik »

Lesson 10: Categorization and Prototypes

10.0 Background
Evidence from cognitive psychology pioneered by Eleanor Rosch in the early 1970s and continuing to the present shows that human categorization does not function based on criteria as classical set theory (and Chomskian linguistics) would assume, i.e., membership in a category is not considered by the human mind to be an ?all-or-nothing? affair. Rather, human categorization appears to follow the rules of ?fuzzy logic? (also known as ?fuzzy set theory? first formalized by Lofti Zadeh in 1965) in which membership in a category is a gradient phenomenon, where different members of a category display the defining characteristics or attributes of the set to different degrees. Additionally, human categories display ?prototype? effects or centrality, where a particular member of a category may be seen as being the ?best example? of a category, while other members of the category are viewed comparably to the prototype. In many categories, there is no prototype, as no one member of the category shares all (or even most of) the attributes of any of the members of the category; the members of such categories are related by what are called ?family resemblances? and the category itself is known as a radial category.

To illustrate such categories, consider the human category ?furniture.? Studies have shown that people tend to identify chairs, tables, and sofas as being prototypical (i.e., ?best?) examples of the category, while clocks, radios, vases and ashtrays are seen as peripheral examples. Oranges and apples are generally given as prototypes for the category ?fruit?, while strawberries and dates are less prototypical and tomatoes are seen as being highly atypical members; indeed, the tomato is often seen as also being an atypical/peripheral member of the ?vegetable? category, following that fuzzy set theory allows for gradient overlap between two seemingly ?separate? categories.

An example of a radial category would be Wittgenstein?s famous ?game?, where no one member of the category manifests all the attributes found in each member and members at the extreme ?ends? of the category share almost no attributes, e.g., bowling versus Monopoly versus hide-and-seek versus word puzzles such as anagrams.

Large amounts of research in cognitive linguistics show that the concepts of centrality, fuzziness, and family resemblances apply to linguistic categories as well, and at all levels including semantics, syntax, morphology, even phonology. Let?s look first at morphology

10.1 Application to Linguistic Morphology
Consider the English suffix -able, typically assumed to be used with verbs to transform them into an adjective meaning ?able to be VERB?ed,? e.g., ?solvable? = ?able to be solved? or ?washable? = ?able to be washed.? However, it soon becomes apparent that this meaning begins to vary as we apply it to other verbs. A ?readable? book does not mean one that is able to be read (presumably ALL books are capable of being read) but rather it is easy or interesting to read. The very fact we can say a book is ?very readable? would make no sense if ?readable? simply meant ?able to be read.? More peripheral meanings for -able emerge when we look at ?payable? or ?comparable.? A bill in the mail which reads ?This bill is now payable? means it is due, not that it is able to be paid. When I ask a friend who is moving from the U.S. to Australia whether housing costs are ?comparable? I am not expecting him to answer ?Yes, they can be compared.? Why is this? Why the difference in meaning? It goes back to Frames and something called Foregrounding (which I?ve not previously discussed ? essentially, foregrounding means giving semantic prominence to part of, or a certain aspect of, a situation at the expense of other parts/aspects of the situation based on contextual relevance to the situation). In the case of ?comparable? it makes little sense for the meaning of ?comparable? to simply mean ?able to be compared? as any two or more things in the world can always be compared. Rather, it is the purpose of the act of comparison that is semantically relevant, i.e., what the degree of resemblance is between the two things being compared, as opposed to the act of comparison itself. Similar in principle are ?drinkable? where elements from the DRINKING frame determine the contextual/semantic meaning of the -able suffix here, in this case the element of ?safely,? which explains why hydrochloric acid is certainly able to be drunk, but it is not ?drinkable.?

A non-English example of a radial category in morphology is given by the diminutive in Romance languages such as Italian -ino, -etto, -ello. It can mean physical smallness, e.g., paese --> paesino ?small village?; affection, e.g., mamma --> mammina ?mommy? (?mummy? to our British contingent); shortened duration, e.g., sinfonia --> sinfonietta ?shorter symphony?; reduced amount/strength, e.g., cena --> cenetta ?light supper?; reduced scale, e.g., pioggia ?rain? --> piogerella ?drizzle?; bello ?beautiful? --> bellino ?pretty/cute?. With verbs, the diminutive suffix -icchiare/-ucchiare implies a process of intermittent or poor quality, e.g., dormire ?sleep? --> dormicchiare ?snooze?, lavorare ?work? --> lavoricchiare ?work half-heartedly?. Again, Frame and foregrounding operate to determine the contextual meaning of the diminutive. While it certainly feasible/possible for a language to have its morphological diminutive applied to the stem for ?mother? to mean ?small mother (in size)?, it is hardly relevant to most persons what size their mother is, whereas a convenient way of morphologically mapping the emotional bond a person feels as a small child toward his/her mother is more contextually salient.

10.2 Application to Syntax
The classic notion of ?parts of speech? in which classes of words such as ?nouns? and ?verbs? are assumed to display all aspects of their set-defining attributes/behaviors is easily shown by cognitive linguistics to be rubbish. Examples abound of nouns that are ?nounier? than others, as well as ?verbier? verbs. For example, note that the agentive nominalisation of transitive verbs works in some cases and not in others:

1a) John imports rugs. --> John is an importer of rugs.
1b) John knew that fact. --> *John was a knower of that fact.

Our ?able suffix likewise implicates some verbs as being less ?verby? than others:

2a) That apple can be eaten. --> That apple is edible.
2b) That lighthouse can be spotted. --> *That lighthouse is spottable.

As does passivization:

3a) Sam kicked the ball. --> The ball was kicked by Sam.
3b) Sam owes two dollars. --> *Two dollars are owed by Sam.

The ?double-raising? transformation for nouns works for some nouns but not others:

4a) It is likely to be shown that Bill has cheated. --> John is likely to be shown to have cheated.
4b) It is likely to be shown that no headway has been made. --> *No headway is likely to be shown to have been made.

The ability to use ?tag questions? also implicates some nouns as nounier than others:

5a) Some headway has been made. --> Some headway has been made, hasn?t it?
5b) Little heed was paid to her. --> * Little heed was paid to her, was it?

10.3 Application to Lexico-Semantics
Lakoff has shown that languages utilize various adverbs and adverbial constructions termed ?hedges? to deliberately specify what are otherwise covert fuzzy relationships within lexico-semantic categories. Hedges in English include phrases such as ?technically speaking,? ?loosely speaking,? ?strictly speaking,? ?par excellence,? etc. Note how their use reveals centrality/prototype relations among various words in the following sentences:

6a) A sparrow is a bird par excellence.
6b) ??A chicken is a bird par excellence.

7a) Loosely speaking, an ashtray is a piece of furniture.
7b) ??Loosely speaking, an armchair is a piece of furniture.

8a) Strictly speaking, a tomato is a fruit.
8b) ??Strictly speaking, an apple is a fruit.

10.4 Application to Phonology
Research done in 1984 by Jaeger and Ohala showed that linguistically untrained laypersons psychologically perceive certain groups of consonants to be more voiced and less voiced than others on a gradient spectrum, rather than the either-or +voice/-voice that traditional phonetics describes. Specifically, the phonemes in question were grouped as follows:

VOICED CONSONANTS
Most voiced: /r, m, n/
Less voiced: /v, D, z/
Even less voiced: /w, j/
least voiced: /b, d, g/

VOICELESS CONSONANTS:
Less voiceless: /f, T, s, h, S/
Most voiceless: /p, t, k/

10.5 Implications for Conlanging
Starting with the psychologically-derived voiceless-voiced gradient spectrum listed immediately above, I see a definite possibilty for a totally new sort of six-level consonant harmony scheme analogous to the four-level vowel harmony scheme found in Turkish. Ideas for patterns of consonant mutation are implicit in the gradient scheme as well.

On the lexical scheme, you need to consider your lexical categories as to which members represent the prototypes of a given category or whether the category will instead be a radial category without a prototype. If radial category, what will be the common thread binding the category together in the absence of universally shared attributes? Every language is different here, so watch out that you don?t make yours like English (or whatever your native language).

How ?nouny? should a particular noun be in your language, and how ?verby? each verb? Should each noun be allowed to operate grammatically in all possible grammatical constructions? Not very likely if you?re conlang is supposed to be a ?natlang?-style, realistic language. So how to decide whether a particular noun/verb should be permissible in a given construction? Think about its Frame and contextual usage, i.e., what situations it needs to be able to refer to in the real world. Maybe in your conlang, ?headway? is something that is likely to be shown to have been made, ?heed? is something to which a tag question can apply, and two dollars is something that CAN be owed by someone. Or, maybe you might want to go the opposite direction, so that fewer nouns/verbs are permissible in a given construction. The thing to be aware of is why it is so or why it isn?t so from a standpoint of Frame, Construal, Foregrounding, Image schema, etc.

On the morphological front, what sort of categorization scheme for your affixes should you come up with? Should diminutives convey size, affection, scale, shortened duration, etc. as in Romance languages? Or do you want to eliminate one or two of these from your diminutive, split these among two or three different affixes, or add additional semantic distinctions beyond what is found in Romance languages, e.g., relevance, e.g., ?person? + diminutive = ?irrelevant person? or connotations of duplicity or mendacity, e.g., ?speak? + diminutive = ?to lie; tell falsehoods??
Last edited by JohnQPublik on Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Ulrike Meinhof »

Thanks a lot for that! :) That solves a lot of problems. I look forward to making my lexicon and morphology now!
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Post by aardwolf »

Whoops! I had a lot of catching up to do with your Cognitive Linguistics lessons there, but I got them done! I especially like the FRAMES part; I'll definately do some more reading up on that. I'm also quite happy that I'm not in a sea of jargon, and that I understand most of it (unlike other endeavours of mine into various linguistic fields. .. .)

Thank you!

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Post by Space Dracula »

Just thought that I'd throw in that I'm doing some very non-mainstream (= makes sense) literary analysis and have stumbled across some ideas tangent with cognitive linguistics, which is making me want to buy a more formal book on it. Of course the work isn't explicitly grammatical, but there are still connections.
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Post by Rik »

Where was this categorization/prototype research done? I ask only because some of the starred examples seem like reasonable constructions in my idiolect. (Though to be fair that could also be due to my work with poetry and my willingness to experiment with stereotype/archetype groupings, and with noun/verb/modifier distinctions).

Again, some thought provoking stuff here, which I think I can make good use of in my conlangs. Many thanks!

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Post by chris-gr »

JohnQPublik wrote:Should diminutives convey size, affection, scale, shortened duration, etc. as in Romance languages? Or do you want to eliminate one or two of these from your diminutive, split these among two or three different affixes, or add additional semantic distinctions beyond what is found in Romance languages, e.g., relevance, e.g., ?person? + diminutive = ?irrelevant person? or connotations of duplicity or mendacity, e.g., ?speak? + diminutive = ?to lie; tell falsehoods??
JohnQPublik has touched a really important issue here: diminutives (and their cousins: augmentatives). Mediterranean languages (Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Greek --and surprisingly Dutch) make heavy use of diminutives. Greek applies DIM suffixes to nouns, adjectives, adverbs to denote small size, affection, scale, shortened duration, 'feminine' or 'childish' speech, downgrading, and so on. But, my question is: why is that? whay the DIM suffixes and not something else?

/EDIT: And what's with the 'instability' of the DIM suffixes? You may use one but not another. Some Greek examples: from /jineka/ (woman) you can go to /jinekula/ (simple-minded woman), or /jinekaki/ (chick), but if you said */jinekitsa/ people would shoot you! Is there anything in the literature about that? Thanks in advance.
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Post by JohnQPublik »

Space Dracula wrote:Just thought that I'd throw in that I'm doing some very non-mainstream (= makes sense) literary analysis and have stumbled across some ideas tangent with cognitive linguistics, which is making me want to buy a more formal book on it. Of course the work isn't explicitly grammatical, but there are still connections.
You might try Lakoff and Turner's More Than Cool Reason or Turner's The Literary Mind, as well as Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts by Patrick Hogan or Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman.

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Post by aardwolf »

John, I have a question regarding Ithkuil: when you were thinking out all the different roots, did you have to think of exactly what frame they had? Like, when mapping out "to cut" (or whatever the Ithkuil equivalent is) did you define there and then that "to cut" is, for example:
INSTRUMENT
MANNER (hacking, sawing, slicing ...)
VICTIM (what is cut)

I guess I'm just trying to find ways to implement frames into my conlang to give it a different feel. Thanks.

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Post by JohnQPublik »

aardwolf wrote:John, I have a question regarding Ithkuil: when you were thinking out all the different roots, did you have to think of exactly what frame they had? Like, when mapping out "to cut" (or whatever the Ithkuil equivalent is) did you define there and then that "to cut" is, for example:
INSTRUMENT
MANNER (hacking, sawing, slicing ...)
VICTIM (what is cut)

I guess I'm just trying to find ways to implement frames into my conlang to give it a different feel. Thanks.
No, while I was conceptually familiar with frame semantics when mapping out the Ithkuil lexicon, I did not encounter FrameNet until quite recently. Figuring out roots in Ithkuil is essentially a 3-step process (with many sub-steps in each of the 3 steps). First, I look to see whether the concept I need to be able to translate is one that can be derived from another, simpler or more fundamental concept (whether a root already exists for that simpler concept or not), by means of the massive amounts of derivational morphology that the language makes available. That is a tedious task, given the hundreds of morphological categories and affixes.

Secondly, after I've determined that the concept cannot be morphologically derived from another root, I then ask myself whether the language, in fact, needs such root. I discuss this at length in Chapter 10 of the online grammar. So, for example, I may determine that I can't derive a root for a cat's "meow" from another root, but then I stop and ask myself is it necessary to distinguish a cat's manner of vocalization as an autonomous root versus a dog's, versus a cow's, etc.? Why not just have one of the stems associated with my root for "vocalization"? After all, cats can't bark, dogs don't meow, birds don't moo, etc. so why not just translate "meow" by saying "cat's vocalization"? It works the other way, too, so that sometimes, instead of generalization of the lexicon, we get specialization. For example, Ithkuil has many different roots relating to the different types of trajectories associated with translative motion, far more than in English. It is my own determination as to whether it is cognitively salient to distinguish highly specific trajectory-patterns at the lexical level, while collapsing animal vocalizations into one root due to a seeming needless over-specification in that conceptual realm. Basic-level categorization has a lot to do with lexical choice as well (I think I discussed basic-level categorization in the lessons above, didn't I?).

Lastly, I consider frame semantics, as to whether the associated items in a particular root's frame should mirror those from Western languages, or whether I should divide up the concept differently. To do this, I try to think about all the different situations a particular word gets applied to in the various natural languages that I know to see what the common elements are versus elements that seem arbitrary or peripheral (this is where FrameNet can really help you out).

To use your CUT example, I look at the physical manifestation of the concept (dividing a contiguous medium into parts or to create a slit-like puncture/hole in some contiguous medium), the fact that it implies an instrument or force (e.g., the wind cut through the trees) to accomplish it. Well, Ithkuil morphology provides lots of affixes to describe various classes of instruments used for accomplishing something, including tools and utensils. So it is unlikely that the Ithkuil equivalent for CUT would require an implied instrument as part of its frame or definition. Similarly, Ithkuil provides lots of affixes which specify whether an outcome is anticipated by the agent, accidental or deliberate, desired/undesired/expected/feared by the patient, etc., so there is no need for the frame to include this element. Likewise, Ithkuil provides affixes to describe the degree of precision, degree of strength, level of violence, etc. involved in an action, so the frame for "cut" would not need these components. Additionally, as detailed in Chapter 10 of the grammar, Ithkuil is focused on the underlying purpose behind an act. If the reason you're saying you "cut" something is because your aim is to divide it into parts, then you don't need to say "cut" at all, but rather simply "divide." So ultimately, there wouldn't be any need for a root "cut" in Ithkuil, because it's conceptual/semantic referents can all be accomplished by using roots for "divide" or "puncture/hole" or "damage/injure", depending on the agent's intent, along with an array of affixes to specify the degree of precision, violence, premeditation, deliberation, effect on victim, success of outcome, avoidability, etc.

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