Müller's target article aims to summarize approaches to the question of how language elements (phonemes, morphemes, etc.) and rules are laid down in the brain. However, it suffers from being too vague about basic assumptions and empirical predictions of neurobiological models, and the empirical evidence available to test the models is not appropriately evaluated. (1) In a neuroscientific model of language, different cortical localizations of words can only be based on biological principles. These need to be made explicit. (2) Evidence (...) for and against word class differences could be evaluated more rigorously. (3) All (and only) humans are able to learn languages with complex syntactic structures; it is, therefore, not appropriate to deny innateness and universality of syntactic principles. The real question appears to be the following: Which neurobiological principles are the linguistic principles based on? (shrink)

The present paper focuses on the use of deliberately misleading or unintentionally misinformative phrases related to the so called “Polish concentration camp” issue. This problem has been gaining increasing attention in the Polish media and political sphere. In the article I present the background of the problem including the current legal situation, as well as a linguistic analysis of a selection of problematic collocations. I attempt to maintain an objective stance and refrain from passing any emotional judgement on the issue, (...) providing, at the same time, an in-depth analysis of the linguistic data. I frame the present paper within the cognitive linguistics methodology. I combineGilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s (2002)Conceptual Integration TheorywithKerstin Norén and Per Linell’s (2007)concept ofmeaning potentialsin order to account for the emergent and modifiable nature of meanings of complex expressions. (shrink)

Neurobiological models of language need a level of analysis that can account for the typical range of language phenomena. Because linguistically motivated models have been successful in explaining numerous language properties, it is premature to dismiss them as biologically irrelevant. Models attempting to unify neurobiology and linguistics need to be sensitive to both sources of evidence.

Why has responsible management been so difficult and why is the chorus of stakeholders demanding such responsibility getting louder? We argue that management learning has been framed within the narrative of economism. As such, we argue that managers need to be aware of the paradigmatic frame of the dominant economistic narrative and learn to transcend it. We also argue that for true managerial responsibility, an alternative humanistic narrative is more fit for purpose. This humanistic narrative is based on epistemological metaphors (...) and ontological insights that integrate the latest insights from evolutionists suggesting that humans only survived by being responsible. This understanding has consequences for responsible management learning in that it focuses on dignity literacy, balance orientation, as well as creativity and innovation for the common good. We argue that managerial learning within a humanistic paradigm is more likely to lead to ethical and sustainable business conduct. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computa- tional science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of ‘‘blueprints’’ for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as ‘‘factories’’ and organisms themselves become analogous to machines. Accordingly, when the human genome project was initially announced, the promise was that we would soon know how a human being is made, just as we know how to make airplanes and buildings. Impor- tantly, (...) modern proponents of Intelligent Design, the latest version of creationism, have exploited biologists’ use of the language of information and blueprints to make their spurious case, based on pseudoscientific concepts such as ‘‘irreducible complexity’’ and on flawed analogies between living cells and mechanical factories. However, the living organ- ism = machine analogy was criticized already by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In line with Hume’s criticism, over the past several years a more nuanced and accurate understanding of what genes are and how they operate has emerged, ironically in part from the work of computational scientists who take biology, and in particular developmental biology, more seriously than some biologists seem to do. In this article we connect Hume’s original criticism of the living organism = machine analogy with the modern ID movement, and illustrate how the use of misleading and outdated metaphors in science can play into the hands of pseudoscientists. Thus, we argue that dropping the blueprint and similar metaphors will improve both the science of biology and its understanding by the general public. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to use a frame-based account to explain some empirical findings regarding the accessibility of synaesthetic metaphors. Therefore, some results of empirical studies will be discussed with regard to the question of how much it matters whether the concept of the source domain in a synaesthetic metaphor is a scalar or a quality concept. Furthermore, typed frames are introduced, and it is explained how the notion of a minimal upper attribute can be used in the (...) analysis of adjective-noun compounds. Finally, frames are used to analyze synaesthetic metaphors; it turns out that they offer an adequate basis for the explanation of different accessibility rates found in empirical studies. (shrink)

To explain how abstract concepts are grounded in sensory-motor experiences, several theories have been proposed. I will discuss two of these proposals, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Situated Cognition, and argue why they do not fully explain grounding. A central idea in Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that image schemas ground abstract concepts in concrete experiences. Image schemas might themselves be abstractions, however, and therefore do not solve the grounding problem. Moreover, image schemas are too simple to explain the full richness of (...) abstract concepts. Situated cognition might provide such richness. Research in our laboratory, however, has shown that even for concrete concepts, sensory-motor grounding is task dependent. Therefore, it is questionable whether abstract concepts can be significantly grounded in sensory-motor processing. (shrink)

Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are common and costly in both primary and secondary health care. It is gradually being acknowledged that there needs to be a variety of interventions for patients with medically unexplained symptoms to meet the needs of different groups of patients with such chronic long-term symptoms. The proposed intervention described herewith is called The BodyMind Approach (TBMA) and promotes learning for self-management through establishing a dynamic and continuous process of emotional self-regulation. The problem is the mismatch between (...) the patient’s mind-set and profile and current interventions. This theoretical article, based on practice-based evidence, takes forward the idea that different approaches (other than cognitive behaviour therapy) are required for people with MUS. The mind-set and characteristics of patents with MUS are reflected upon to shape the rationale and design of this novel approach. Improving services for this population in primary care is crucial to prevent the iterative spiralling downwards of frequent GP visits, hospital appointments, and Accident and Emergency attendance, all of which are common for these patients. The approach derives from embodied psychotherapy (authentic movement in dance movement psychotherapy) and adult models of learning for self-management. It has been developed from research and practice-based evidence. In this article the problem of MUS in primary care is introduced and the importance of the reluctance of patients to accept a psychological/mental health referral in the first instance is drawn out. A description of the theoretical underpinnings and philosophy of the proposed alternative to current interventions is then presented related to the design, delivery, facilitation and educational content of the programme. The unique intervention is also described to give the reader a flavour. (shrink)

The metaphorical nature of biological language is examined and the use of metaphors for providing the linguistic context in which similarities and differences are made is described. Certain pervasive metaphors which are characterised by systemic properties are noted, and in order to provide some focus to the study, systemic metaphors associated with machine, text and organism are discussed. Other systemic metaphors such as society and circuit are also reported. Some details concerning interrelations between automaton and organism are presented in the (...) light of the previous discussion.An approach towards the analysis of biosystem metaphors is outlined which relates part-whole, organisational level and systemic metaphors in a single model. Examples are provided throughout the discussion and mainly come from computing. The potential for metaphorical transfers between these domains is considered. (shrink)

RésuméDans leur livre récent, George Lakoff et Rafael Núñez se livrent à une critique naturaliste soutenue du platonisme traditionnel concernant les entités mathématiques. Ils affirment que des résultats récents en sciences cognitives démontrent qu'il est faux. En particulier, ils estiment que la découverte que la cognition mathématique s'appuie pour une large part sur les métaphores conceptuelles est incompatible avec le platonisme. Nous montrons ici que tel n'est pas le cas. Nous examinons et rejetons également quelques arguments philosophiques que formulent Lakoff (...) et Núñez contre le platonisme. Enfin, nous lions leur hostilité au platonisme à certaines opinions sur les ramifications politiques de celui-ci. Pour conclure, nous faisons valoir que ces opinions sont sans fondements et présentent une image distordue des dimensions politiques du platonisme. (shrink)

Speakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way and whether they use space in a contrastive way when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ overall (...) tendency to use the same hand = 13.12, p =.001, 95% CI [.31,.43], d = 2.53) and same location = 7.47, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: = 4.19, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables. (shrink)

We analyze conceptual patterns shared by Michael Ende’s novel about time, Momo , and examples of time conceptualization from psychology, sociology, economics, conventional language, and real social practices. We study three major mappings in the materialization of time: time as money in relation with time banking, time units as objects produced by an internal clock, and time as a substance that flows. We show that binary projections between experiential domains are not enough to model the complexity of meaning construction in (...) these widely successful examples. To account for the intricacies of time materialization in context, we use generic integration templates , models for conceptual templates based on Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. The interplay of such detailed patterns with pragmatic and cultural factors, including diachronic aspects, is crucial to identify the cognitive models at work, and the factors that guide their instantiations as a variety of surface products. The blending model for the spatialized time can be refined and extended to the materialization of time. (shrink)

Using an analogy in science and everyday life is a double-edged sword because they are accompanied by alternative ideas, in addition to scientific concepts. Schools and public education explain global warming by making a common analogy between this phenomenon and greenhouse effects. Unfortunately, this analogy sometimes produces various incorrect explanatory mental models. To construct a correct understanding of global warming, it is necessary: first, to investigate the attributes of analogical reasoning; second, to understand these features by restructuring the greenhouse analogy; (...) and third, to explore the problems and benefits of the greenhouse analogy. The characteristics of relations, rather than objects, must be mapped according to the principle of systematicity, but the public tends to preserve the attributes of the base domain, which is mapped relatively easily. In conclusion, certain facets of the prevailing greenhouse analogy cause a distorted public view of climate change. We must use the greenhouse analogy and yet simultaneously emphasize the relations and attributes highlighted and hidden in the analogy during evaluation. (shrink)

Recent developments in the psychological and social sciences have seen a surge of attention to concepts of embodiment. The burgeoning field of embodied cognition, as well as the long-standing tradition of phenomenological philosophy, offer valuable insights for theorising how people come to understand the world around them. However, the implications of human embodiment have been largely neglected by one of the key frameworks for conceptualising the development of social knowledge: Social Representations Theory. This article seeks to spark a dialogue between (...) Social Representations Theory and embodiment research. It outlines the position the body occupies in the existing theoretical and empirical social representations literature, and argues that incorporating concepts gleaned from embodiment research may facilitate a more comprehensive account of the aetiology of social representations. The value of analytic attention to embodiment is illustrated with reference to a recent study of social representations of neuroscience, which suggested that embodied experience can shape the extent to which people engage with certain topics, the conditions under which they do so, and the conceptual and affective content of the ensuing representations. The article argues that expanding Social Representations Theory's methodological and conceptual toolkit, in order to illuminate the interplay between embodied experience and social communication in the development of common-sense knowledge, promises productive directions for empirical and theoretical advancement. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a novel treatment of speech acts can be combined with a well-known liberal argument for multiculturalism in a way that will justify claims about the preservation, protection, or accommodation of minority languages. The key to the paper is the claim that every language makes a distinctive range of speech acts possible, acts that cannot be realized by means of any other language. As a result, when a language disappears, so does a class of speech (...) acts. If we accept that our social identities are in large part constituted by the decisions we make about how to speak, language loss, then, will amount to a substantial infringement on our autonomy in a particularly important domain. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 35-65.

Military metaphors are pervasive in biomedicine, including HIV research. Rooted in the mind set that regards pathogens as enemies to be defeated, terms such as “shock and kill” have become widely accepted idioms within HIV cure research. Such language and symbolism must be critically examined as they may be especially problematic when used to express scientific ideas within emerging health-related fields. In this article, philosophical analysis and an interdisciplinary literature review utilizing key texts from sociology, anthropology, history, and Chinese and (...) African studies were conducted to investigate the current proliferation of military metaphors. We found the use of these metaphors to be ironic, unfortunate, and unnecessary. To overcome military metaphors we propose to give them less aggressive meanings, and/or replace them with more peaceful metaphors. Building on previous authors' work, we argue for the increased use of “journey” metaphors as meaningful, cross-culturally app... (shrink)

Corporate organizations, in their corporate branding efforts, often associate or imbue themselves with values and attributes like dynamism, competitiveness and empowerment, which are reflective of post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalist ideology. This article examines how such values are semioticized by a particular group of organizations – Singapore's corporatized universities – as they enact their corporate brands both verbally and visually, specifically through metaphor and modality. In doing so, these organizations and their corporate brands are conceived of as nodes of neoliberal governmentality, where (...) they are subject to the regulatory influence of both the state and capital, while at the same time potentially exercising influence over brand recipients. The organizations' governmentalizing potential is actualized when stakeholders and brand supporters appropriate these corporate brands as symbolic and cultural resources in fashioning their individual subjectivities, making themselves amenable to the workings of capital, which in turn helps to sustain the prevailing neoliberal order. (shrink)

What is the nature of number systems and arithmetic that we use in science for quantification, analysis, and modeling? I argue that number concepts and arithmetic are neither hardwired in the brain, nor do they exist out there in the universe. Innate subitizing and early cognitive preconditions for number— which we share with many other species—cannot provide the foundations for the precision, richness, and range of number concepts and simple arithmetic, let alone that of more complex mathematical concepts. Numbers and (...) arithmetic, and mathematics in general, have unique features—precision, objectivity, rigor, generalizability, stability, symbolizability, and applicability to the real world—that must be accounted for. They are sophisticated concepts that developed culturally only in recent human history. I suggest that numbers and arithmetic are realized through precise combinations of non-mathematical everyday cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination and abstraction possible. One such mechanism, conceptual metaphor, is a neurally instantiated inference-preserving cross-domain mapping that allows the conceptualization of abstract entities in terms of grounded bodily experience. I analyze how the inferential organization of the properties and “laws” of arithmetic emerge metaphorically from everyday meaningful actions. Numbers and arithmetic are thus—outside of natural selection—the product of the biologically constrained interaction of individuals with the appropriate cultural and historical phenotypic variation supported by language, writing systems, and education. (shrink)

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra (“front”) and qhipa (“back”), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate the nature of this encoding: (a) linguistic expressions and speech–gesture co-production, (b) linguistic patterns in the distinct regional Spanish-based variety Castellano Andino (...) (CA), (c) metaphorical extensions of CA’s spatial patterns to temporal ones, and (d) layouts of traditional houses. Findings indicate that, following fundamental principles of Aymara cosmology, people, objects, and land—as a whole—are conceived as having an implicit canonical orientation facing east, a primary landmark determined by the sunrise. The above bodily based lexicalizations are thus linguistic manifestations of a broader macro-cultural worldview and its psycho-cognitive reality. (shrink)

Because Müiller fails to distinguish between two senses of the term “autonomy,” there is a danger that his results will be misinterpreted by both linguists and neuroscientists. Although he may very well have been successful in refuting one sense of autonomy, he may actually have helped to provide an explanation for the correctness of autonomy in its other sense.

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

Most work on reflexivity has focused on individuals exercising their reflexivity through discourse. However, agents have three major aspects (intentionality, causal efficacy and embodiment) and they are fundamentally social. This article examines the possibility of collective reflexivity conducted not just by saying, but also by doing—that is, through their embodiment. By expanding the concept of ‘performatives’ to encompass not just speech acts but also acts that speak (i.e. embodied activities as socially meaningful) and applying the work of Charles S. Peirce (...) in order to develop an ontology of embodied reflexivity, it becomes possible to determine several criteria defining embodied collective reflexivity. Assessing possibilities such as legislative debate, political demonstrations, religious ritual and dramatic performance reveals that a certain set of practices does in fact meet those criteria and discloses additional aspects of what constitutes embodied collective reflexivity. (shrink)

This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis. It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to (...) make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from Susan Sontag’s notion of ‘rhetorical ownership’—applied not only to illness but also to the body more generally—this essay argues that philosophy, like medicine, has privileged a metaphorics of war and violence in its own discourses on embodiment. Drawing inspiration from Barbara Christian’s seminal essay ‘The Race for Theory,’ as well as literary theorist Eve Sedgwick’s account of what she calls ‘paranoid’ forms of inquiry in her book Touching Feeling, this essay explores the status of violence as an (...) especially resonant trope in discourses on materiality. One worry is that the omnipresence of violent metaphors in contemporary philosophy of the body may be narrowing the space for the elaboration of nonviolent understanding of corporeality that would imagine the body otherwise than as a battlefield or a site of violence. (shrink)

Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-PontyIntroductionMerleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close (...) relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent”, and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors... (shrink)