Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley)
Thursday, May 17th
Buchanan A104
Because cognition and language are based in human embodied experience, which is essentially viewpointed, human representations are pervaded by viewpoint. Within the frameworks of mental spaces and conceptual blending, I will discuss some of the ways in which complex viewpoint is creatively built in language (spoken, written and signed), as well as in co-speech gesture. An interesting new direction for this work is the examination of crosslinguistic as well as crossmodal differences in constraints on viewpoint construction strategies. These differences can be seen both in representation of literal spatial viewpoint and in abstract temporal and social viewpoint structure. The workshop will also touch on ongoing work by Stec and Sweetser on multimodal mental space network negotiation and viewpoint shifts in English-language story-telling events.
Terry Janzen (University of Manitoba)
Friday, May 18th
To say that language is embodied means that the structure of language is shaped to some extent by our bodily experience of interacting with our environment. Important in this conceptualization of the world and of our language use (because we also conceptualize the link between ideas and language form) is that the human body is oriented in space in a particular way, with a particular perspective on that space. Signed languages are especially revealing because of their visible articulation around a rather large external space; conceptualized spatial elements are visibly mapped on to real space elements in signers’ discourse. In this talk we look at how the embodied perspective of the signer has led over time to entrenched grammatical structures. We look at the roles of gesture, pragmatic inferencing and semantic generalization in the emerging grammar of constructions in ASL in an attempt to elucidate how grammaticalization plays out in a signed language.
Daniel Casasanto (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics/New School for Social Research)
Saturday, May 19th
People are not all the same. There is astonishing diversity among human cultures, languages, and bodies. How is the diversity of the human experience reflected in the mind? In this talk, I will review research into the mechanisms and the consequences of linguistic relativity, cultural relativity, and what I have called by analogy bodily relativity. So far, we have learned that subtle contrasts between languages and cultures can influence our most basic perceptual and conceptual representations. Differences between people’s bodies also predict differences in their neural and mental representations, in domains including language, mental imagery, and emotion. Interactions with the physical and social world remake the mind, on various timescales, such that people with different patterns of linguistic, cultural, and bodily experience develop correspondingly different ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Arie Verhagen (Leiden University)
Sunday, May 20th
The (re)presentation of different perspectives (subjects of consciousness and the contents of their minds) is crucial to the interpretation and coherence of (narrative) discourse, both fictional and non-fictional (e.g. certain types of journalistic texts). Important traditional distinctions in this regard are those between direct, indirect, and free indirect speech and thought representation (STR). More recently, additional distinctions have been proposed, for example between the representation of communication and that of cognition within all three types, between all of the above and a plain ‘report of speech act’ (or ‘report of cognitive process’) without indication of its (propositional) content, and another ‘intermediate’ category of distanced indirect STR (in between indirect and free indirect). There seems to be a risk, then, of a proliferation of types of STR.
Moreover, it turns out that in practice, these distinctions, including the traditional ones, are often hard to apply, especially when it comes to linking them to specific linguistic elements. This problem is even bigger when one attempts to apply them consistently across languages. And theoretical approaches, for example in terms of mental spaces, suggest that other linguistic items than those associated with the traditional types may be highly relevant to STR as well, so that the traditional set seems to have been delimited somewhat arbitrarily.
An analysis of some text fragments considered typical for the differences between types of STR shows that the specific interpretive and stylistic effects involved may also be explained more directly in terms of the meanings of the actual linguistic elements involved, avoiding the problems mentioned above. But this advantage apparently comes with a cost: abandoning the idea(l) of a language independent characterization of kinds of STR. I will, however, argue, that this is precisely the consequence we should accept, and that it in fact provides us with a more plausible image not only of the way STR works, but also of the historical development of different patterns of STR.
This situation is curiously analogous to one in grammatical analysis, in the following way. Different varieties STR are realized by the (patterns of combination of) linguistic elements in discourse. An insight from (radical) constructional approaches to grammar is that profound theoretical consequences follow from the basic idea that all units of language are language specific: as there are no universal words or constructions, there can be no universal grammatical categories defined in terms of these, while grammatical categories can only be so defined. Analogously, types of STR may not constitute universal categories, but rather emerge from combinations of specific linguistic units, with different conceptual ‘centers’ and different ‘boundaries’, as well as with all kinds of ‘intermediate’ varieties, depending on the linguistic items available (or not) in a language. Similarities exist, but they have to be accounted for differently.
David DeLiema (UCLA), Francis Steen (UCLA), and Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University)
Sunday, May 20th
We propose to extend cognitive linguistics in two ways: (1) to the study of multimodal constructions, and (2) to the study of amounts of data so massive as to be intractable absent powerful computational and statistical methods. As part of an ongoing, multidisciplinary research team, we propose to extend cognitive linguistics to the study of a massive multimodal dataset, the UCLA Communication Studies Archive. This online archive holds 150,000 hours of television news video, indexed by some 800 million words and 50 million images, growing by a hundred programs a day. Television news coverage is an immersive, global, ecologically strong, and culturally central communicative genre, presenting a series of opportunities and challenges to cognitive approaches to the study of narratives incorporating language, gesture, and audiovisual communication. Participants will have full access to the Communication Studies Archive during the conference and the hands-on workshop, including a textual search engine, a coverflow image browser, and a flexible online annotation tool. The managers of the workshop will have already presented talks at the conference based on our work in the archive.
Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University)
Thursday, May 17th
Although we think of TV network news as sober reporting of events—”the latest facts”— a viewer’s understanding of the news is actually the result of elaborate and highly creative cognitive construction of meaning in response to minimal cues. This talk will analyze the nature of some of these cues and the nature of human communicative creativity. My data come from the UCLA Communication Studies Archive, a world-class database under construction and not previously announced to the cognitive science community. It offers over 180,000 hours of TV network news from around the world, as well as over a billion words of close-captioned texts and transcripts. It will be used for an analysis of the system of linguistic, gestural, visual, and auditory cues used in media and the way that system derives from the creative capacities of the human mind.
Peter Stockwell (Nottingham University)
Thursday, May 17th
The development of cognitive poetics as a form of application of cognitive science to literary scholarship has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, with research and methods drawn from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. For the most part, the direction of influence has been one-way, with relatively little evidence that the work being done on literary reading effects has worked its way back to these source disciplines. In particular, cognitive poetics in the European tradition has drawn more on cognitive psychology than on cognitive linguistics, which is perhaps surprising given its roots in textual stylistics. In this presentation, I argue for closer attention to be paid to linguistic matters in the cognitive tradition (particularly cognitive grammar), and hope to demonstrate that the unique environment of literary applications has a great deal of relevance to those working in non-literary linguistics. Ultimately, I will argue that cognitive poetics is becoming a central and unified single discipline, marking a reconfiguration of the study of language, literature and culture.
Cornelia Müller (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder))
Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201
The paper investigates the emergence and interactive elaboration of metaphoric meaning in ballet training. It explores how bodily experiences serve as a source for the emergence of a multimodal metaphor, how the metaphor established by the teacher makes its way through the entire lesson, and how the embodied understandings of the students differ and change as they work with the “silk thread metaphor”. Note, that metaphoric meaning is expressed in body motion and speech. In more technical terms multimodal metaphor refers to a metaphor in which source and target are expressed in different modalities (cf. also Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009; Müller & Cienki 2009).
The case study is based on video data (90min) collected during a ballet lesson in which the students worked on balance and posture. Additionally, the students were interviewed. Methods applied to examine the emergence and the elaboration of the “silk thread metaphor” are a linguistic analysis of gestures (Müller 1998, Müller forthc., Bressem et al. forthc.) and a documentation of activated metaphoricity based on the dynamic foregrounding of metaphors in use (Müller 2008a,b, Müller & Tag 2010).
The analysis revealed, that metaphoricity in speech and body movement is dynamically orchestrated on a micro- and a macro-level. Put differently, the dynamics of embodied ‘experiential conceptualizations’ change across time and speakers–even though it’s all about one verbal metaphoric expression: a silk-thread running through the body. What we observe here is a dynamic grounding of metaphoric meaning in constantly changing bodily experiences. The data allows us to reconstruct empirically, what the phenomenologist Sheets-Johnstone has termed “the languaging of movement” (cf., Kolter et al. 2012), or what we have termed the affective grounding of metaphors in felt sensations (cf., Kappelhoff & Müller 2011).
References:
Bressem, J., S. Ladewig, & C. Müller (forthcoming). A linguistic annotation system for gesture analysis. In: Body – Language – Communication / Körper – Sprache – Kommunikation. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kom munikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (Vol. 1). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Forceville, C., & E. Urios-Aparisi (2009). Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin, New York: Mouton De Gruyter.
Kappelhoff, H., & C. Müller (2011). Embodied meaning construction. Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement in speech, gesture, and in feature film. In Metaphor in the Social World, 121-153.
Kolter, A., S.H. Ladewig, M. Summa, C. Müller, S. Koch, & T. Fuchs (2012). Body memory and emergence of metaphor in movement and speech. An interdisciplinary case study. In: Koch, Sabine, Thomas Fuchs & Cornelia Müller (Eds.) Body Memory, Metaphor, and Movement. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 201-226.
Müller, C. (2008a). Metaphors dead and alive, sleeping and waking: a dynamic view. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Müller, C. (2008b). What gestures reveal about the nature of metaphor. In: A. Cienki & C. Müller (Eds.) Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 249-275. Müller, C., & A. Cienki (2009). Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use of spoken language. In: C. Forceville, & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.) Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 297-328.
Müller, C., & S. Tag (2010). The Embodied Dynamics of Metaphoricity. Activating Metaphoricity in Conversational Interaction. Cognitive Semiotics, 6.
Müller, C., (forthcoming). Methods of linguistic gesture analysis. In: Body – Language – Communication / Körper – Sprache – Kommunikation. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kom munikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (Vol. 1). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). The primacy of movement. New York: John Benjamins.
Teenie Matlock (University of California, Merced)
Thursday, May 17th
2:30pm-3:30pm
In the late 1990s Barsalou (1999) and other cognitive psychologists argued that grammar plays a role in constraining mental simulation of states and actions in the communication of concepts. On this view, the meanings of grammatical elements are believed to impose constraints on conceptual content of words and phrases. Theoretical work to support this assumption has been provided again and again by cognitive semanticists, including Talmy (1983) and Langacker (1987) over the years. Still, relatively little is known about how grammatical form creates meaning in real time, and the extent to which it is driven by simulation. Of special interest is how grammatical form creates, biases, and sustains perceptions and belief states in comprehension and production. Discussion will include results from investigations of literal and non-literal language in spatial, social, and political domains.