Abstract
Cognitive linguistics seeks to explain how language functions to make meaning possible. It does this by examining the structures of human languages and the biological structures which allow our perception and necessarily mediate it. Its practitioners design experiments to test aspects of human cognition and the production of meaning. Its insights offer a means of abstracting from the particularities of individual languages to gain a look at human cognition itself. For a theologian, perhaps the most interesting aspect of their findings is how they describe language that theologians call “literal,” “metaphorical,” and “analogical.” This chapter provides a basic introduction to the field which will allow its application to the problem of differentiated consensus in the rest of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
Other theories of metaphoric knowing developed during this same time. The most familiar to many theologians may be that of Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell. Their theory of “metaphoric process” developed from different concerns from that of the cognitive linguists, and as such has different language and emphasizes different concerns. I would argue that these theories are compatible, if distinct. Important works include Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding, (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984); New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion, (New York: Continuum, 2001). For an overview of Gerhart and Russell’s work and its relationship to the cognitive linguistic proposal, see Masson, Without Metaphor, 22–24, 59–94. A symposium containing articles authored by them, Betty Birner, and Robert Masson is also quite helpful, “Symposium: Metaphor as a Space for Religion/Science Engagement,” Zygon 39 no. 1 (2004): 5–75. There are also tantalizing similarities between the insights of the cognitive linguists and aspects of the thought of Paul Ricoeur, especially The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Robert Czerny, trans., (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Other important engagements with metaphoric thought and religious language include Herwi Rikhof, The Concept of Church: A Methodological Inquiry into the Use of Metaphors in Ecclesiology, (Sheperdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1981); Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); and Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The limits of this chapter do not allow a thorough engagement with these various understandings of metaphor.
- 2.
A blend is “the mental space which results from conceptual integration, giving rise to emergent structure.” Vyvyan Evans, A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 11. Also available at www.vyvevans.net/GLOSSARY.pdf (Accessed July 14, 2014).
Through repeated use, it can come to bind the particular basic components more closely together in habits of thought such that it acquires its own stable existence that shapes meaning. Blends not only receive content from their “inputs,” but have their own emergent content.
- 3.
These terms are used differently by different thinkers, often to opposite effect. I therefore avoid them whenever possible.
- 4.
Masson, Without Metaphor, 31. The point about literality not being the default of human language and metaphor a kind of “ornamental aspect of language, but a fundamental scheme by which people conceptualize the world and their own activities” is absolutely central to the argument. See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. “Metaphor and Thought: The State of the Art” 3–13 in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., ed., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. See also, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, “A Deflationary Account of Metaphor,” 84–105 and Rachel Giora, “Is Metaphor Unique?”143–160 in the same volume.
- 5.
For a clear, extended description of the roles of theories of the mind’s relationship to the outside world among the cognitive linguists, see Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction, (New York: Oxford, 2006), 3–37.
- 6.
The basic theory of linguistic relativity was proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the middle of the 20c. His research, based on differences between Indo-European languages and Hopi pointed to differences regarding color and time, but suggested that space might be a universal human experience, or “given substantially the same form by experience.” Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carrol, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956), 158–59.
Later research by John B. Haviland and Stephen Levinson describes linguistic families with substantially different experiences of space, related not to the human person (i.e. front, behind, left, right etc.), but reckoned with great specificity to the absolute orientation, (i.e. as equivalents of North, South, North-by-North-East, etc.). John B. Haviland, “Guugu Yimithirr” 27–180 in Handbook of Australian Languages, R.M. Dixon and B. Blake, eds., (Canberra: ANU Press, 1979); Stephen C. Levinson, Language and Cognition: The Cognitive Consequences of Spatial Description in Guugu Yimithirr, (Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, 1992).
On this basis, Levinson argues, that “it can also be demonstrated experimentally that [Guugu Yimithirr speakers] remember spatial arrays not in terms of ego-centric coordinates … but in terms of the cardinal directions in which objects lie. Thus Guugu Yimithirr speakers appear to think about space in a fundamentally different way than we do.” Idem, Relativity in Spatial Conception and Description, in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180.
- 7.
It is summarized in all of the major authors. I will be citing the description of their findings found in Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 31–33.
- 8.
Basic color terms tend to be monolexemic (i.e. “red” vs. “bur-gun-dy”), not contained in a more basic category (burgundy is a kind of red), not generally restricted to a single object (burgundy to wine), and generally known, i.e. operative in most people’s working vocabularies. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), cited by Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 31.
- 9.
Ibid., 32.
- 10.
Martha J. Farah, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision, (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 4–8.
- 11.
That is, “yellow and blue make green.”
- 12.
The fact that the spectrum of visible light is a true spectrum, (i.e. a continuous and dense range), and that human engagement with the spectrum is always based in categories, lends further support to the explanation.
- 13.
A mapping is a match created between two spaces or frames that allows a blend to arise. Mappings can be dynamic and short-lived, or stable and persistent. They can be visualized in visual networks, which will be described below. Mappings can take different forms, depending on how many inputs there are, and what relationship those inputs have to each other. See Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 47. Evans, Glossary, 130.
- 14.
Masson, Without Metaphor, 52. Small caps are conventionally used to designate a schema, a frame, or a metaphor. Strictly speaking, “metaphor” is reserved to describe the concept which makes the cross-domain mapping sensible (i.e. More is Up), while a metaphoric expression is an instance of its employment, in this case, “the temperature is rising.” The expression also assumes Heat is a Quantity, which further points to the complexity of this seemingly “literal” metaphoric expression, although the authors do not generally point out this further complexity.
- 15.
Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 103.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
This has effects on the level of brain function, as repeating patterns of brain engagement reinforces those patterns and makes them more likely in the future. The habits of thought by which such connections are made become, in a sense, hardwired, producing patterns of thought in which one by necessity evokes the other. See Masson, Without Metaphor, 80.
- 18.
George Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor, 17–38 in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 30. As an example, the mental space “restaurant” can be activated by a gestalt node “restaurant” or “menu,” or it can be activated by a sufficient number of simpler elements in proximity, as in the example “the ham sandwich is asking for his check.”
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., 31.
- 21.
In describing thought processes in terms of underlying brain structures, one names “nodes” of neuronal activation which interrelate in a variety of means, including mutual activation or inhibition, or binding, in which we simultaneously activate several nodes but hold them together as a single object. One of the most important insights of this neurological investigation is the importance of habituation. This is usually expressed in terms of the motto, “neurons that fire together wire together. (Lakoff, “Neural Theory,” 19), meaning that “[d]uring learning, spreading activation strengthens synapses along the way. When the activation spreading from A meets the activation spreading from B, a link is formed, and the link gets stronger the more A and B fire together.” (Ibid., 19–20).
- 22.
Kövecses, 277–87.
- 23.
See Masson, Without Metaphor, 27–55; Kövecses, 39–95, Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 75–170.
- 24.
Kövecses, 99.
- 25.
A list of several kinds of examples will make the point. All of these are drawn from Kövecses, 100–106. The Vatican example is a case of “Whole and its Parts” Configuration, which can be further divided into Thing-and-part ICM (idealized cognitive model), the scale ICM, (How old are you?) in which an end of a scale stands in for the whole scale; the constitution ICM (there was cat all over the road) where object stands in for material; the complex event ICM (she’s in the hospital), in which a location stands in for a whole complex event; the category-and-property ICM (boys will be boys); and the category-and-member ICM (Do you have an aspirin?). A second category, the “Part and Part” Configuration, would include the action ICM (shampoo one’s hair) relating action to element within a frame; the causation ICM (She’s my joy/pride); and the control ICM (Nixon bombed Hanoi). Finally, a category of indeterminate relationships serves to hold other examples, including the one with which we started, The Ham Sandwich….
- 26.
Kövecses, 115.
- 27.
They provide a number of examples, including the process of imagining a rug in a showroom in your living room, which compresses unimportant aspects of both spaces and the distance between them. In the “riddle of the monk,” we are compressing time within one frame, and unimportant differences, such as age, between the monk traveling up and the monk traveling down. See Fauconnier and Turner, The Way we Think, 113–35 and 312–28.
- 28.
Infographic by Ryan Flynn, 2012. Data source, IAAF. Used under Creative Commons License. Available at http://www.parseerror.com/i/mg/100m/100m-1600.png , April 8, 2014.
- 29.
Metaphorice, see ST I.Q13.A3.
- 30.
Gerhart and Russell, Metaphoric Process, 109–119. For these authors, analogy is the broader category, which properly describes what we are calling single-scope blends. When the “field of meanings” requires distortion, what is produced is a metaphor. This will usually be something more like what we will describe below as a double-scope blend.
- 31.
Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 128.
- 32.
Ibid., 131. There is a parallel which can be drawn to the metaphoric theory of Gerhart and Russell. See n. 1 above. Masson argues convincingly that they are describing the same cognitive action. See Masson, Without Metaphor, 77–94. As Fauconnier and Turner point out, double-scope networks can be non-clashing, if the two inputs are mutually interpretive, but do not contain contradictory aspects. In this case, they would “both contribute to a blend that incorporates both of them. For example, if in a particular corporate community traveling business partners are typically lovers, we can develop the traveling business partners/lovers frame, with emergent structure, which can become familiar and used routinely in the culture.” Idem., The Way We Think, 135.
- 33.
See also Kövecses, 284.
- 34.
For an engagement with the relationship of visual and conceptual metaphors, see Elena Semino and Gerard Steen, “Metaphor in Literature,” 323–46 in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 238–39.
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Rinderknecht, J.K. (2016). Cognitive Linguistics and Consensus. In: Mapping the Differentiated Consensus of the Joint Declaration. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40099-0_6
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