Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind : Cultural, Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics [1 ed.] 9789004349094, 9789004349049

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Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind

Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics Edited by Fuyin (Thomas) Li (Beihang University, Beijing) Guest Editor Yuan Gao (Beihang University, Beijing) Editorial Assistants Jing Du, Hongxia Jia and Lin Yu (doctoral students at Beihang University) Editorial Board Jürgen Bohnemeyer (State University of New York at Buffalo) – Alan Cienki (Vrije Universiteit (VU) at Amsterdam, Netherlands and Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia) – William Croft (University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, USA) – Ewa Dąbrowska (Northumbria University, UK) – Gilles Fauconnier (University of California at San Diego, USA) – Dirk Geeraerts (University of Leuven, Belgium) – Nikolas Gisborne (The University of Edinburgh, UK) – Cliff Goddard (Griffith University, Australia) – Stefan Gries (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) – Laura A. Janda (University of Tromsø, Norway) – Zoltán Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary) – George Lakoff (University of California at Berkeley, USA) – Ronald W. Langacker (University of California at San Diego, USA) – Chris Sinha (Hunan University, China) – Leonard Talmy (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) – John R. Taylor (University of Otago, New Zealand) – Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University, USA) – Sherman Wilcox (University of New Mexico, USA) – Phillip Wolff (Emory University, USA) Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics publishes the keynote lectures series given by prominent international scholars at the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics since 2004. Each volume contains the edited transcripts of 10 lectures under one theme given by an acknowledged expert on a subject and readers have access to the audio recordings of the lectures through links in the e-book and QR codes in the printed volume. This series provides a unique course on the broad subject of Cognitive Linguistics. Speakers include George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, Laura Janda, Dirk Geeraerts, Ewa Dąbrowska and many others.

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dlcl

Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind Cultural, Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics

By

Chris Sinha

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017020185

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2468-4872 isbn 978-90-04-34904-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34909-4 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Note on Supplementary Material vii Preface viii Preface by the Author ix About the Author xii 1

Language, Culture and Mind: Independence or Interdependence? 1

2

The Psychological Roots of Cognitive Linguistics—and Beyond 19

3

Meaning, Representation, Conceptualization 35

4

From Signal to Symbol to System: The Emergence of Language 49

5

Patterns of Mapping: Distributed Spatial Semantics, Cognitive Typology and Language Development 73

6

Concept, Context and Extended Embodiment: Spatial Language and Cognitive Development 89

7

Space, Time, Semiosis and Cognitive Artefacts: Evidence from an Amazonian Culture and Language 105

8

Participation, Practice and Cultural Learning: Children’s Play as Acts of Meaning 123

9

Language as a Biocultural Niche and Social Institution 139

10

Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism: Realism, Relativism and Representation 157 Important Resources for Cognitive Linguistics 177 Appendix 179

Note on Supplementary Material All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via a QR code for the print version of this book, in the e-book both the QR code and dynamic links will be available which can be accessed by a mouse-click. The material can be accessed on figshare.com through a PC internet browser or via mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. To listen to the audiorecording on hand-held devices, the QR code that appears at the beginning of each chapter should be scanned with a smart phone or tablet. A QR reader/ scanner and audio player should be installed on these devices. Alternatively, for the e-book version, one can simply click on the QR code provided to be redirected to the appropriate website. This book has been made with the intent that the book and the audio, are both available and usable as separate entities. Both are complemented by the availability of the actual files of the presentations and material provided as hand-outs at the time these lectures have been given. All rights and permission remain with the authors of the respective works, the audio-recording and supplementary material are made available in Open Access via a CC-BY-NC license and are reproduced with kind permission from the authors. The recordings are courtesy of the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (http:// cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/), funded by the Beihang University Grant for International Outstanding Scholars.

The complete collection of lectures by Chris Sinha can be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.c.3783677. © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3783677

Preface The present text, entitled Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind: Cultural, Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics by Chris Sinha, is a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor Chris Sinha in May 2008 as the forum speaker for the 6th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics provides a forum for eminent international scholars to talk to Chinese audiences. It is a continuing program organized by six prestigious universities in Beijing. The main organizing institution is Beihang University (BUAA); its co-sponsors include Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and Beijing Language and Culture University. Professor Sinha’s lecture series was mainly supported by the Beihang Grant for International Outstanding Scientists for 2008 (Project number: Z0852, Project organizer: Thomas Fuyin Li). The transcription of the video, proofreading of the text, and publication of the work in its present book form, have involved many people’s strenuous inputs. The initial drafts were done by the following: Mo Chen, Ya’nan Hu, Fan Wang, Liqin Xiong, Lingyan Zheng, Jie Yang, Shuying Yin, Wenjuan Yuan, Yujie Zhou. Then we editors did the word-by-word and line-by-line proofreading work and prepared the Chinese guide. To improve the readability of the text, we deleted the false starts, repetitions, fillers like now, so, you know, OK, and so on, again, of course, if you like, sort of, etc. Occasionally, the written version needs an additional word to be clear (a word that was not actually spoken in the lecture). We’ve added such words between double brackets [[…]]. To make the written version readable, even without watching the film, we’ve added a few “stage instructions”, in italics within single brackets: […]. The stage instruction describes what the speaker was doing (pointing at a slide, showing an object, etc.). The speaker, Professor Chris Sinha did the final word-by-word revision. The published version is the final version approved by the speaker. Thomas Fuyin Li

Beihang University (BUAA) [email protected]

Yuan Gao

Beihang University (BUAA) [email protected]

Preface by the Author I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to Prof Li Fuyin (Thomas) and his students at Beihang University (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), for the honour of being invited to deliver these ten lectures in Beijing, for the hospitality that they offered during my stay, and for the work they put in that made possible the publication of this book. Being a compilation of edited lectures, this book lacks extensive references. The topics addressed in the lectures are also treated in various other of my publications, listed below with reference to specific lectures, in which references to other authors and works can also be found. Sinha, C. (1988) Language and Representation: A Socio-Naturalistic Approach to Human Development. Hemel Hempstead, Harvester-Wheatsheaf & New York, New York University Press. Lectures 1, 3, 5, 10. Sinha, C. (1999) Grounding, mapping and acts of meaning. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (eds.) Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 223–255. Lectures 3, 10. Sinha, C. (2004) The Evolution of Language: From Signals to Symbols to System. In D. Kimbrough Oller and Ulrike Griebel (eds.) Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach.” Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 217–235. Lecture 4. Sinha, C. (2005) Blending out of the Background: Play, props and staging in the material world. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1537–1554. Lecture 8. Sinha, C. (2006) Epigenetics, semiotics and the mysteries of the organism. Biological Theory 1, 112–115. Lectures 4, 9. Sinha, C. (2007) Cognitive linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. In D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 1266–1294. Lectures 1, 2. Sinha, C. (2007) Relativism. Entry in D.S. Clark (Ed.) (2007) The Encyclopedia of Law and Society, Thousand Oaks, Sage, pp. 1287–1292. Lecture 10. Sinha, C. (2009a) Objects in a storied world: materiality, narrativity and normativity. Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6–8): 167–190. Lecture 8. Sinha, C. (2009b) Language as a biocultural niche and social institution. In Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel (Eds.) New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 289–310. Lecture 9. Sinha, C. (2015) Language and other artifacts: socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction. Frontiers in Psychology (Cognitive Science) 6: 1601. doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2015.01601. Lectures 8, 9.

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PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Sinha, C., Thorseng, L., Hayashi, M. and Plunkett, K. (1994) Comparative spatial semantics and language acquisition: Evidence from Danish, English and Japanese.” Journal of Semantics 11, 253–287. Lecture 6. Sinha, C. and Kuteva, T. (1995) Distributed spatial semantics. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 18, 167–199. Lecture 6. Sinha, C. and Jensen de López, K. (2000) Language, culture and the embodiment of spatial cognition. Cognitive Linguistics 11, 17–41. Lecture 5. Sinha, C. and Rodríguez, C. (2008) Language and the signifying object: from convention to imagination. In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen (eds.) The Shared Mind: Perspectives on intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 358–378. Lectures 5, 8. Sinha, C., Silva Sinha, V. da, Zinken, J. and Sampaio, W. (2011) When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture. Language and Cognition 3(1): 137–169. doi: 10.1515/LANGCOG.2011.006. Lecture 7. Jensen de López, K., Hayashi, M. and Sinha, C. (2005) “Early shaping of spatial meanings in three languages and cultures: linguistic or cultural relativity?” In Adam Makkai, William J. Sullivan, & Arle R. Lommel (eds.) Selected Papers from the LACUS Forum XXXI 2003: Interconnections. Houston, Texas: Linguistic Association of Canada and the Unites States, pp. 379–388. Zlatev, J., Racine, T., Sinha, C. and Itkonen, I. (eds.) (2008) The Shared Mind. Perspectives on intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lectures 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10. Amongst other unforgettable experiences during my visit to Beijing was a trip to the Great Wall, accompanied by some of the Beihang University Masters’ students, who asked me to write a poem about it. The poem, dedicated with thanks to Thomas and the students, is printed overleaf.

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Great Wall 12 December 2008 Snow caps the mountains The beacon tower looks cold and desolate Ice encrusts the steps My boots slide like skates Going up seemed easier We lose our footing returning. Ascending the steeper side, our lungs Suck in crisp air A wall, frozen labour of tens of thousands, Did they ever pause from the backbreaking work Look up at the mountains Contemplating eternity? Chris Sinha

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About the Author Chris Sinha is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University. He gained his BA in Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex and his doctorate at the University of Utrecht. He has taught in departments of Education, Psychology, and Language and Communication, in Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, India and Sweden. He is Past President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association; was founding General Editor of the journal Language and Cognition; and is a member of four international journal editorial boards and three international book series editorial boards.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008646.

Lecture 1

Language, Culture and Mind: Independence or Interdependence? The first thing I want to do is introduce myself. My field is psychology of language. My background and training is in developmental psychology and developmental psycholinguistics. My theoretical and empirical research attempts to critically situate Cognitive Linguistics within a socio-cultural, semiotic approach to mind and language. And a very strong characteristic of my research, as you will see, is that my methods are interdisciplinary. My work belongs within what I would call the situated, embodied and enactivist approach in cognitive science, which I will explain. The general name that I give to my theoretical and methodological commitments is the socio-naturalistic approach, which roughly translates as attempting to understand the phenomena of human language and the human mind from a perspective which integrates the biological with the socio-cultural. Here is the cover of a book I published twenty years ago, Language and Representation: A Socio-naturalistic Approach to Human Development. On the cover you will see a detail from a painting by Veronese, an Italian Renaissance painter. This painting has different titles if you look for it on the internet, but one of the titles is The Dialectic, and the detail that you see here represents my way of trying to understand the human understanding of the network of meaning within which we all live, the way that we reflexively reflect upon language and meaning as a kind of web. A web which binds us together with each other, with other human beings, and a web which we can examine in order to foster our own cognitive creativity. My research interests are in language and cognitive development; in semantics and typology, especially the language of space and time; in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of cognition and human development; in evolutionary biology, cultural evolution and language evolution; and in cognitive semiotics, meaning and materiality. In this lecture I’m going to talk about two opposing paradigms in cognitive science. I’m going to talk about different theoretical conceptions of the three terms which make up the title of this lecture series, namely, Language, Culture and Mind. And I’m going to outline different views of the relationships between them. And of course I’m going to tell you what my view is as well.

© Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_002

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Figure 1.1 Front cover of Sinha (1988) with detail from Veronese’s “Arachne”.

First of all, let’s ask ourselves what is cognitive science? In a way we all know the answer. But I think it’s worth going through it again. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind. The disciplines involved in contemporary cognitive science are Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Neuroscience, which is increasingly important. And we should note that Neuroscience itself is also an interdisciplinary enterprise comprising different sciences of the brain. The term cognitive science started to be used in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. But in a way the idea is older. In my next lecture, I’ll be exploring some ways in which the ideas that inspire Cognitive Linguistics come from an older tradition in general psychology which predates cognitive science. So we can ask ourselves: is cognitive science an inheritor of or a replacement for what used to be called general psychology, comprehending many sciences of the mind? And we can also ask ourselves: where do we stand now in cognitive science in the first decade of the 21st century, some forty years since people started to come up with the idea of a new cognitive science? I’m going to suggest to you that cognitive science is now the site of contestation between two paradigms. These two paradigms are the Classical Cognitivist paradigm and

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the new paradigm. The classical paradigm is often called “rules and symbols cognitivism”. And the new paradigm is a rather more diverse one, not so easily encapsulated. But I have given it a name: situated, embodied, enactive cognition. The first difference I want to emphasize between these paradigms is that the classical cognitivist paradigm is formal and very much inspired by the formalist approach in linguistics, whereas situated, embodied, enactive cognition (which I will henceforth call the new paradigm) is much more functional in its approach. While the classical paradigm is nativist, the new paradigm is based on epigenetic-developmental principles—dynamic principles in development. While the classical paradigm is modular, emphasizing separate processes for different domains of cognition, the new paradigm emphasizes general principles of learning and organization and dynamism. Whereas the classical paradigm is determinedly Universalist, the new paradigm recognizes the importance of context and of particularity. Whereas the classical paradigm is monologic, situating its theories in the mind of individual speaker-hearers without much concern for the process of communication, the new paradigm is interactional and dialogic. Whereas the old paradigm is very much based upon linguistic theory, and in particular formalist linguistics, and is logocentric in the sense that it is orientated toward word-like symbols, the new paradigm is multi-modal, emphasizing that communication is a matter of many media and of the whole body. Whereas the classical paradigm is based upon methodological individualism, in which it is the individual Cartesian Mind/Brain which is the focus of attention, the situated, embodied paradigm focuses on the culturally extended and socially distributed mind. Whereas the classical paradigm looks at the disembodied mind, the new paradigm is based upon the notion of the embodied mind. And finally, because computational theories are an important part of cognitive science, we have to look at the different theories of computation which currently fall into at least two paradigms. The classical paradigm, as many of you know, is based upon an algorithmic view of the manipulation of internal symbols analogously to a computer program based on a von Neumann serial processing architecture, whereas the new paradigm is very much inspired by connectionist neural network models of human cognition. So where does Cognitive Linguistics fit in these paradigms? I’m sure that you will all agree that Cognitive Linguistics rejects formalism and embraces a general functional perspective—which is why we often call it CognitiveFunctional Linguistics. However, it is my contention that some of its leading exponents retain some of the assumptions of Classical Cognitivism in regard to a number of issues, in particular nativism, theoretical and methodological

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individualism, and the assumption that language reflects cognition without equally emphasizing that language actually transforms cognition. And it is on some of these issues that I will be trying to push forward the Cognitive Linguistics agenda in the coming lectures. In talking about the relationships between language, culture and mind, we need to know what we are talking about. We need to define our terms. Let’s start with language. For formalist approaches, in particular the approach of the early Chomsky, language is defined as an infinite set of sentences. More generally, language is conceived as a rule-governed system of symbols, possessing the following features. Productivity, which means in this paradigm the combinatorial rules enabling the generation or construction of novel legal sentences, or of an infinite set of legal sentences; so this is the set of rules which underline the infinite set of legal sentences. Systematicity, which means within this paradigm the stability of symbolic value across lawful combinations. For example we could take the two sentences: The lectures are in Beijing and The lectures in Beijing take place in December. And we have to assume that each identical symbol entering into these two different sentential strings has the same value across both sentences. Otherwise we will not be able to have a productive system in which meanings are stable across the combinations. For Formalism, the issue of the stability of meaning is a problem. Why? Because Formalist theories are syntax driven—the rules determine the possible forms of legal combinations. For a formal description of language to “hook up” with the world, as we might say, a semantics is required that maps sentences in the language to objective states of affairs in the world, which is why Lakoff and others talk about the Objectivist commitment of formalist linguistics. And this referential relationship has to be determinate, in other words, there must be a clear and unequivocal relationship between the sentence strings and “states of affairs” in the world, and the way this is usually secured is by invoking the notion of truth as correspondence. And this leads to the hypothesis—or really it’s not a hypothesis. I think for classical cognitivism, we can say it is an axiom: that the mind is to be considered as “a syntactically driven machine whose state transitions satisfy semantical criteria of coherence”. That’s a quotation from the arch priest of Classical Cognitivism, Jerry Fodor, and his colleague Zenon Pylyshyn. Therefore formalist theories require strict compositionality to account for systematicity: the meanings of legal combinations are built up from the meanings of their constituents. But there is a problem, for which formalism doesn’t have a solution. In point of fact, natural language expressions are difficult to characterise in terms of strict compositionality.

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Let’s take those same two sentences, they seem to be pretty OK to begin with, but if we examine them more closely, and we just highlight that little word in, in the two sentences: The lectures are in Beijing. The lectures in Beijing take place in December. It becomes clear that for the three usages of “in”, of the three usages, there seem to be two different meanings of the word “in”, one referring to location, and the other referring to time. And that is why Formalist theories of language prefer to posit general meanings, very general abstract meanings, instead of recognizing the polysemy or “many meaningfulness”, of many natural language items, whereas the recognition of polysemy is historically central to Cognitive Linguistics. But now let’s step up one level of abstraction, away from the meanings of natural language, to the meanings which have to be entertained in the Classical theory by this hypothetical syntactically-driven machine in its entirety. The general solution posited by classical cognitivism to the problem of meaning is the idea of a computational Language of Thought, which was first proposed by Jerry Fodor. The Language of Thought is not a natural language. It’s meant to be a universal language in which the thoughts of all human beings are internally represented. Natural language expressions are derived by some kinds of translation mechanism from this Language of Thought, and the Language of Thought is completely unequivocal, monologic and univocal: it doesn’t have polysemy, ambiguity and all of the rest of the messy stuff of natural language. The amazing thing about the classical cognitivist program, is that from the start, it takes us further and further away from the real world of language, as people actually use it, towards some kind of idealized mechanistic system, existing in a strange formal universe, a bleached out and un-fleshed universe of pure form. In any case, for Classical Cognitivism this Language of Thought is what anchors natural languages in the form of “knowledge of language”, or as Chomsky calls it internal language or I-language. For Chomsky, it is the internal language which is primary, which takes precedence over, the empirically real language which is out there in the world, the language which you and I used to communicate with each other. Now let’s contrast this with Cognitive-Functional Linguistics, for which languages are conventional symbol systems enabling communication, conceptualization and construal. These are the three Cs of Cognitive Linguistics (or

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four Cs if you count Cognitive). Cognitive Linguistics is about communication, conceptualization, and construal. Languages, you will perhaps recognize this from the work of Langacker, are open inventories of symbolic assemblies at different levels of organization. That’s our alternative in Cognitive Linguistics to the formalist idea of an infinite set of sentences. In place of that, we have for any language an open inventory of symbolic assemblies, but not one which is generated by some kind of mechanistic productivity process. Finally, languages are multi-level systems of mapping between linguistic conceptualization and linguistic expression. And this notion of a multi-level system of mapping is taken further in the work of well known cognitive linguists such as Fauconnier, Lakoff, Langacker, Talmy and others. Now I am not saying that all these notions in Cognitive Linguistics are without problems, as a matter of fact, I think there are problems which I will try to explore further in later lectures. But let’s just take this as being a basic characterization of the very different ideas of what language is in formalist linguistics and in cognitive-functional linguistics. So, those are two different ideas of what we might call language as a system. But now here is another view of language. Another metaphor, if you like, for language: language as a tool. Of course, language as a tool is a fundamental idea in all varieties of functionalism. Language is a tool whose form or structure is shaped by its use for communication. This is an idea which we find in the Prague School Linguistics of Roman Jakobson, Mukaróvsky and others. We also find that in the theories of the great psychologist of language Karl Bühler, who developed what he called the Organon model of language and communication, Organon being the Ancient Greek word for tool. And we also find it in later functionalist linguistic theories such as those of Simon Dik, Michael Halliday and Talmy Givón. However, language is not only a communicative tool—language is also a tool for thought, which shapes cognition. And this is the notion of semiotic mediation, of cognition through signs and sign systems. This idea, that human higher cognitive processes use the tool of language and signification to transform learning, memory and all cognitive, all higher cognitive processes, we can find in the Western tradition as long as ago as the French Enlightenment philosopher Condillac. Most famously, in psychology, the concept of semiotic mediation gets taken up by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky; and the idea that this semiotic mediation in some kind of way shapes our cognitive processes, giving them form, we find also in the work of the American linguists Whorf and Sapir. So we have looked at language as a system and we have looked at language as a tool, but there is more: language is also a social institution. It’s part of, if you like, the social mind, because grammars are normative and conventional,

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and normativity and conventionality are hallmarks of human social institutions. There are rules for what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do, there are right and wrong ways of going about things. Before we move on from this, let me note something else. For structuralism, in tradition of Saussure, the notion of conventionality gets confused, I would say, with the notion of arbitrariness. The point is that not all conventions are arbitrary; some of them are motivated. And one of the great virtues of cognitive-functional linguistics is to point out that many phenomena in language, while being conventional, are nonetheless motivated by deep cognitive and communicative processes. In other words, there is a reason for why a part of language is this way rather than that way, and this is part of more general functional perspective within Cognitive Linguistics. Now I return to the question of normativity. Norms are intersubjectively shared rules that regulate conduct and are objects of common knowledge. In other words, the rules of language or any other normative systems are the rules we follow when we do things. They regulate conduct, but also they are rules to which we orientate in trying to understand another. They are objects of common knowledge, shared intersubjectively between people. And if that is the case, please note that knowledge of language is not identical to language (contra Chomsky—against Chomsky’ claim). The importance of this has been stressed many times by my friend and colleague, a linguist from Finland, Esa Itkonen. Chomsky’s claim is that language is knowledge of language. My response (and Itkonen’s) is that there is language on the one hand, and there is knowledge of language on the other hand. Because if we recognize that knowledge is a social institution, we cannot say that the institution is the same as the knowledge of the institution. They are two different things. Think of it in this way, there are the rules of football. In order to play football correctly, you have to know those rules; that is indisputable. But there is football played under the rules of football, and then there is socially shared knowledge of the rules of football, they are not at all identical. Of course, football would not exist if nobody used its rules, but these rules exist in some way independently of their particular individual representation by any given person. Knowledge may vary inter-individually. Again take football, imagine a small kid comes in and joins in a game which bigger kids are playing. The bigger kids know more of the rules than the smaller kid. But when he starts to play, the smaller kid still plays football, right? He is joining in. Think about that as a metaphor for language acquisition. Rules are shared between people, and that is where something else important comes in, which is Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. Wittgenstein said that it is not possible for somebody to

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just invent a private language which only they know, because how would they know, if they try to remember the rules of that language, how would they know whether they would be right or wrong? There would be nobody else around to correct them. That’s the way Wittgenstein argues it, but anyway, the point is that I am using this argument to show that once we acknowledge that language is social institution, the Chomskian fiction that knowledge of language is the same as language itself and the internal language is the primary language can be shown, to be logically, and methodologically, completely misguided; and the same applies to its supposed foundation in a universal Language of Thought. Language is also a biocultural ecological niche. This kind of notion may be less familiar to you. But it will be central to what I will be saying later. First of all, language is a biologically grounded communication system. Now, as I will be saying in Lecture 4 there are many biologically grounded communication systems, because in the natural world, the animal world, there are many ways of communicating, and many systems for doing so. All of them are of course biologically grounded in the sense they are grounded in the organism, in evolution and in biological function. And language is no different; language did not, as it were, descend from the sky to replace other biologically grounded communication systems. It emerges somehow out of non-linguistic or prelinguistic biologically grounded communication systems. Language is a species-unique ecological niche that is absolutely fundamental to human culture. As we shall see, culture is not necessarily something that only humans have—but the kind of culture that we have, is a culture which is dependent on language for its transmission, for its day-to-day living, for its enactment. That is unique to humans and it’s our niche. All species exist in some kind of ecological niche, a system of constraints and supports that enable actions. We are no different, but what is interesting and important about human beings is that language is a constitutive, essential part of our human cultural niche. So language, I will submit to you, can be viewed as a biocultural niche. And the title of one of the later lectures in the series is “language as a biocultural niche and social institution”, in which we are trying to understand how it is we can articulate those points of views convincingly. So much for now for language, what about culture? What is culture? One thing we can say about culture is that something shared by one group but not another group. It is about specificity and it is about difference. For example, I can talk about British culture, and I can talk about Chinese culture, and there wouldn’t be any point in talking about these two cultures on that level of analysis if there were no interesting differences between British and Chinese culture. Or I can step up to another more abstract level of analysis in the way I just

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was doing. And I can talk about human culture, in which case, I am probably contrasting it to some other culture of some other species. In any case, culture is always about sharing, and it is always about difference, which is what makes it so intriguing, and of course, one of the aspects of difference, is that this difference can be viewed both positively and negatively. Cultural difference is a dangerous topic in that sense. So what is it that is actually shared by one group that we call a cultural group? There are different answers to this question. One way to think about this, is that it’s ways of doing things, different kinds of practices, practices which may be to do with communication, or maybe to do with making things, or anything under the sun, practices. But it’s also to do with ways of thinking, mental models, schemas, and worldviews. Culture (at least human culture) is also ways of talking, discourses. The ways in which we talk about things are significant to us. Now to me, it’s not important to say that one or other of the definitions, ways of doing things, ways of thinking and ways of talking, is the correct way of defining culture. In fact, they are all correct ways of defining culture. They are all part of the package that we call culture, they are different aspects of it. Moreover, we can also say there is another level of analysis; we can talk about “High” and “Low” cultures, subcultures and so on. There is no final limit to the level of granularity at which we may analyse culture. Cultures can be micro-cultures, we can talk about the cultures for example, of organizations, we can talk about the culture of Beihang University. Or we can talk about the particular culture of a profession or a working group, or a sports club, you name it. That’s why in recent years, anthropologists who study culture have become very interested in such local and specific forms of culture. Now, I’m going to give you two more answers to the question: What is culture? The first is what I call the human science answer: culture as a pattern or patterns of meaning. Culture is definitely about meaning, which is thematized in some way, by a stock of narratives. Culture is often about stories, stories we tell about ourselves as a group and others. But these narratives are complemented by other kinds of “thematizers” which express and organize cultural identity, such as rituals, myths, icons, and emblems. Culture is a normative order, realized and reproduced in semiotic systems or vehicles including language, and in enduring artefacts and institutions; and enacted and renewed in social and communicative practices. Culture is also not just about cognition, it’s about the binding of cognition and affect in specific space-time configurations, the here and now bits of culture, which count for the members of culture, the things that make them feel as well as understand, the things that give a sense of belonging. The space-time bindings of cognition

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and affect I call, after the English cultural theorist Raymond Williams, “structures of feeling”. And finally, culture is not “opposed to” Nature, but linked to and interfaced to nature by conventions which canalize and partially govern the reproduction-enaction of the cultural-symbolic order. Something about which I will say more later in this lecture series. A different kind of answer given to the question “What is culture?” is the biological science answer. Culture is about intra-species group differences, that is, differences inside species, within species, in behavioural patterns and repertoires. These differences are not directly determined by ecological circumstances such as the availability of particular resources employed in the different behavioural repertoires. So for example, if we take two groups of non-human primates, and we find that they have different ways of, for example, foraging for food, based upon differences in availability of food types in the different habitats, then we can’t say it’s a cultural difference. It is an ecologically determined behavioural difference. However, if both groups have the same food resources, but they have different ways of finding it, or preparing it, that’s a cultural difference. And such differences have to be learned and transmitted across generations. They shouldn’t be genetically transmitted. Two very important examples of nonhuman cultural difference, which I shall call upon in these lectures, are primate tool use and birdsong, which interestingly on the above criterion turns out to be a cultural phenomenon. So, on the biological definition, what is culture? Humans are definitely not the only species to have culture, it turns out that culture is much more widespread in the animal kingdom than has been previously thought, and that is important, it’s important because look, way back in the time of the European Enlightenment (and perhaps this is true of reflections on these matters in other cultural traditions as well) it was often supposed that we get the human mind, human language, and human culture, all of these in one indivisible package. You know the idea, we are the only ones with mind, we are the only ones with language, we are the only ones with culture. But now we know that language, culture and mind may be a single package for us, perhaps even the package that makes us human, but if we look more widely across species, it’s not, certainly not, an indivisible package. Let’s ask now, what is the cultural approach within psychology? And I’ll give you an answer; it includes, but is not identical with, cross-cultural psychology as a method. It focuses on what the cultural psychologist Jaan Valsiner calls “the systemic and dynamic nature of culture in psychology, and psychology in culture”. It is about the semiotic mediation of higher cognitive processes and

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it is about culturally situated learning and cognition. And very frequently, cultural psychology makes use of the cultural-historical-developmental perspective derived from Vygotsky, who was the main founder of Cultural-Historical Psychology. What about Cultural Linguistics? What’s that? We can go back a long way here, to the great American, originally German actually, American anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, who said this: “the purely linguistic inquiry [in other words, just looking at language] is part and parcel of the thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world”. By the way, the plural here, “peoples”, is very important. Boas believed that psychology must investigate both similarities and differences between peoples with different cultures and languages. And he probably took this idea from one of the founding fathers of the psychology discipline, Wilhelm Wundt, who is usually credited in history books for founding the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in the 1870’s, but who devoted much of his life to writing about what we now call cultural psychology, that is the comparative psychology of peoples. Bringing us more up to date, we have another quote: “Cultural linguistics is concerned with most of the same domains of language and culture as Boasians [that is, as linguists who follow Boas] in the first part of the last century. It assumes a perspective which is essentially cognitive”. This is a quote from Gary Palmer, who is a cognitive linguist and cultural linguist. He also says: “Linguistic meaning is subsumed within world view”, by which term, “World View”, he means the entires assembly of cultural schemas and meanings specific for that culture. What Palmer says is very important. He is saying that linguistic meanings are only part of the meanings by which we live, as it were. And linguistics, like psychology, needs to be situated in cultural context. Palmer is a real pioneer of the cognitive linguistic study of culture. So, we’ve done language, we’ve done culture. What about mind? There is a wide variety of versions of mind currently on offer in the market of cog­nitive science. The Classical Cognitivist mind is The Computational & Represen­ tational Mind, as represented by theorists such as Fodor, Johnson-Laird, and Jackendoff. The Embodied Mind is represented by Varela, Thompson & Rosch; and Lakoff & Johnson. The Extended & Distributed Mind, about which I will say more later, is represented by philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, psychologists in the Vygotskian tradition, contemporary philosophers like Andy Clark, and cognitive anthropologists such as Edwin Hutchins. The Discursive and Dialogic Mind, in the tradition of the Russian linguistic and literature theorist Bakhtin, is represented by psychologists such as Rom Harré, Ivana Marková, and James Wertsch. Finally, for now, The Shared (or Intersubjective) Mind is represented by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology based on Husserl,

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the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and psychologists such as Colwyn Trevarthen. On the topic of the Shared Mind, I’ll also say a little bit more later. Let’s go back here, though, to talk about The Extended & Distributed Mind. The idea here is that the embodiment of mind extends beyond the organismic boundaries of the single human individual, to encompass both cultural artefacts and socially organized collectives. The term I prefer to use for this, logically enough, is extended embodiment. One of my favourite psychologists, Jerome Bruner, as long ago as 1966, was one of the first people in cognitive science to take the idea of cultural situatedness seriously. He wrote: “[It] is always difficult for the psychologist to think of anything ‘existing’ in a culture. We are, alas, wedded to the idea that human reality exists within the limited boundary of the human skin!” Bruner directed that criticism against the psychologists, but it could equally well be directed against many linguists and philosophers. I will suggest to you now that in fact, the same criticism could be also addressed to some cognitive linguists, such as Lakoff and Johnson, who talk about embodiment as the primary reality, meaning essentially that which takes place within the skin of individual, or even more radically within the brain. To counter this tendency, here is a quote from the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, which I think impressively and beautifully elaborates the idea of extended embodiment: “The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world.” In a way what Merleau-Ponty is saying here is that we have two human natures. The nature which is common to us on account of our shared organismic bodies, but also the human nature that we create for ourselves as cultural form, cultural mediation and cultural meaning. And here is another quote, a rather lengthy one from an article that I wrote, which is about everyday artefacts. The kinds of things that we find all around in this room, which is itself an artefact. ‘Everyday artefacts are not “culturally neutral”, not just in the sense that they may be more or less familiar to individuals from different cultures, but also because they embody different conceptualizations or cultural schemas. This “extended embodiment” does not exist in a vacuum: it is not, as it were, a property of the objects “in themselves”. Rather, it is constituted and exemplified by the participation of the objects in an entire matrix of cultural practices, some of which are linguistic (or discursive) practices, and some of which are nonlinguistic. Furthermore, cultural schemas find a further manifestation, or expression, in the lexical-grammatical structures of natural languages, and it is from it

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is this perspective perhaps no surprise that children should be so adept, as Bowerman and her colleagues have shown, in acquiring the specific conceptualization-expression mappings of their mother tongue.’ I will return to these issues in Lectures Five and Six. I mentioned above the notion of the shared mind, and at this point, I’ll just do a little publicity for a book of which I was one of the co-editors, called The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, published by John Benjamins. This volume brings together work by linguists, psychologists, philosophers and primatologists. So let me now take up this important notion of Intersubjectivity. I consider intersubjectivity to be as crucial for Cognitive Linguistics as subjectivity. Cognitive linguists have often emphasized the importance of subjective perspective, which is correct. I don’t wish to argue with that. But it is also important to emphasize the critically central nature of intersubjectivity. That is, that which we share. I’ll give you two definitions. “The sharing of experiential content (feelings, perceptions, thoughts and linguistic meanings) among two or more subjects.” That’s from the introduction to the book I co-edited. Perhaps more generally, “the shared meanings and sense of community engendered by participation by subjects in joint action and interaction.” That reminds me to mention another important notion which I will focus on later on in the lectures, which is the notion of Participation. Here we have anthropologist and linguist, husband and wife team, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin, defining participation thus: “Actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk …” Goodwin and Goodwin come from a perspective which tries to integrate anthropology and Conversation Analysis; they go on to acknowledge that “we need to expand our notion of human participation in a historically built social and material world by attending to material structure in the environment.” So now we’ve looked separately at the notions of Language, Culture and Mind. Now let’s look at their interrelationships. Let’s think about mind and language. Let’s return to the first paradigm that we identified, Classical Cognitivism. Formalist Cognitivism views language as a sort of imperfect “print-out” of the internal processes taking place in the computational, representational mind. Why is it an imperfect “print-out”, not a perfect one? Well, because the human mind is resource-limited. It doesn’t have sufficient working memory resources etc. to enable a perfect print-out. So you have to do a lot of inference to figure out what is really going on, behind the imperfect print-out, in the Representational mind. But let’s call this the “print-out” metaphor. It is the basis of Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance. The print-out is performance, and behind it there is competence (without limitations imposed by working memory etc), and linguists have to figure out

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what that competence consists of. This Print-Out Metaphor is closely linked to Chomsky’s Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus, which I am not going to rehearse now. I’m sure many of you know it, and anyway I don’t really have time—and it’s not my job here to explain Chomsky’s theory in detail. However, the argument from the poverty of the stimulus was extended by Fodor to encompass not just syntax, but also semantics in the form of The Language of Thought; which leads directly to the conclusion that the human mind is characterized by Innateness, Modularity, and Encapsulation of different processes/ domains. A completely and totally different, in fact converse view of the relationship between mind and language, we find in the work of linguistic relativity theorists such as Whorf and Sapir. Here is a quote from Whorf in 1940: “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and hence different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world”. Well, you can see that Whorf is somehow influenced by, perhaps trying to create a parallel with, Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics. The basic idea is that languages create different perspectives on the world. The uses of different languages involving these different perspectives are entrenched in grammars. And consequently, the users of different languages have different world views. But interestingly, that was not all of what Whorf said. Because he didn’t actually believe that there was nothing humans have in common at all, when it came to perception and cognition of the world. Whorf also acknowledged that there was a kind of universality as well. As he said: “Gestalt psychology gives us a canon of reference for all observers, irrespective of their languages or scientific jargons, by which to break down and describe all visually observable situations and many other situations as well”. So the relativist Whorf intriguingly announced that there was at least one theory that was going to be useful in trying to explain similarities as well as differences between different languages and their uses. And the theory that he landed on was Gestalt psychology, which I will be talking about in the next lecture. So an important question is: How can the universalistic and relativistic perspectives be reconciled, if at all? Now, let’s look at Piaget, another great developmental psychologist. For Piaget too, cognition has priority over language. Language is a kind of expression of cognition. Piaget emphasized the priority of cognition over language. He considered the basis of all cognition to be sensori-motor intelligence, defined as the structured co-ordination of action and perception. Does that sound familiar? It sounds like much of Cognitive Linguistics. Piagetian theory can be considered as a forerunner of modern theories of the basis of cognition

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in perception-action linkages of circuits, including the importance of mimetic or imitative linkages by mirror neurons. Piaget, the cognitive developmental psychologist, considered that language is a manifestation of symbolic thought, first occurring with the emergence of what he called the semiotic function towards the end of the second year of human life. He believed that language does not significantly transform thought: it merely expresses increasingly complex modes of coordination of action. Piaget was an important precursor of Cognitive Linguistics, but he also under-emphasized the significance of imagery in schematization. Conversely, cognitive linguists often under-emphasize the importance of development and of the semiotic basis of language. Now let’s turn to Vygotsky, who I mentioned before, what’s his view of relationship between mind and language? Here is the most famous and most widely cited quotation from Vygotsky. He was also of course a developmental psychologist: “Every function in the child’s development appears twice: first on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). All the higher functions by which it means the higher cognitive functions, which means memory, reasoning and language. All the higher functions originate as actual relations towards human individuals.” Another key notion in Vygotsky’s psychology was The Zone of Proximal Development. This is what he said about the Zone Proximal Development in children’s learning: “The difference or gap between what the child can achieve by independent activity and problem solving, and what she or he can accomplish with help of a more competent person.” Actually I don’t think that is a quote from Vygotsky but it’s a good definition of the Zone of Proximal Development. And the key here is the role that language plays both in the general process of internalizing social communicative relations and cognitive structures, and in the micro-processes of advancing understanding through tuition in the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky believed that all higher cognitive functions were semiotically mediated, and that the internalization of cultural forms of behaviour involves the reconstruction of psychological activity on the basis of sign operations. Let me talk about the notion of semiotic mediation, for which Vygotsky used the example of a knot in a child’s handkerchief, which the child uses as an aide-mémoire, as a kind of cue for memory. I don’t know whether in China, this is a widespread cultural custom. It certainly isn’t any longer current where I come from, in Britain. But believe it or not, I am old enough to remember this particular little device, which is basically that you go to school and your mum gives you a handkerchief, and if you’ve got to take a message to the teacher, she

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ties a knot in the handkerchief to remind you that you’ve got to give that message to the teacher. Vygotsky’s point was this little knot in the handkerchief is a sign, and the sign function is added to the original function of the handkerchief, which is no longer just a single functional thing, for wiping your nose. The handkerchief now has a further semiotic function, or at least the knot has a semiotic function. And this semiotic function transforms the child’s memory. Vygotsky uses that as a little example of a universal complex process of the semiotic transformation of higher cognitive processes, under the influence of cultural practices. So, for Vygotsky, culture consists of a body of practices involving a complex relationship between Externalization and Internalization, by means of which human cognition is embodied, not just in the body, but in the products of material and symbolic culture (tools, artefacts and signs). And the developing human being internalizes or appropriates the use of these products by way of guidance by, or apprenticeship to, adults. Jerome Bruner uses for this process the metaphor of scaffolding. Another interesting point from Vygotsky is the analogy he draws, which we will return to in later lectures, between sign use and tool use. Here is another quote from Vygotsky: “The analogy between sign and tool use rests on the mediating function that characterizes each of them [But] the tool is externally oriented [by which Vygotsky means it’s oriented into the transformation of the material world] [while] the sign is internally oriented. [It’s oriented to the transformation of the mental, cognitive and cultural world.] The use of artificial means, the transition to mediated activity, fundamentally changes all psychological operations. Higher psychological function [is] the combination of tool and sign in psychological activity.” Vygotsky also claimed that human development involves the merging of two lines of development. He actually called them the “natural” and “cultural” lines of development. I will re-label these two paths of development to bring them more into line with the sort of usage that we are more accustomed to in Cognitive Linguistics. You have, on the one hand, sensory-motor development, the development of the embodied organism, as individual organism. And you have, on the other hand, pre-linguistic communication, and where those two paths of development meet you get language or, I will say, you get symbolic communication. In one of my later lectures, I will try to give a more extended account of this process in the context of language evolution and language development. Well, I’ve taken us on a brief trip around theories of, and approaches to, language, culture and mind. What conclusions can be drawn? So far, very few

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without further evidence. Still, we have been able to discern some broad dimensions that distinguish the Classical Cognitivist, or Formalist program from all the others that we have discussed. And that’s why my work is very much about trying to integrate the cognitive-functional approach in linguistics with the socio-cultural developmental approach in psychology about which we’ve been talking: including Piaget, including Vygotsky. I’ll conclude by delineating these broad differences between Formalism and Functionalism as two views of language, communication and learning. For Formalism, Language is a formal system of rules and symbols. Communication is about the transmission of ideas from one individual head to another individual. And Learning is the internalization of the system of rules and symbols on the basis of linguistic input. Whereas for Functionalism, Language is a semiotic vehicle and a cognitive and communicative tool. Communication is symbolic action in an intersubjective field. And Learning is situated, embodied and socially scaffolded. As to autonomy versus holism, Formalist theories emphasize the autonomy of syntax from meaning, as you know, and they view [lexical] semantics as only trivially culturally variable. For Formalist theories, language is autonomous from culture. It doesn’t really have anything to do with culture. On the other hand, Functionalist theories definitely recognize universal motivations, universal functional motivations of linguistic structure, but they also view language as a part of symbolic culture. Functional theories therefore leave open a space for culturally determined cross-linguistic variation. In other words, culture, language and mind for functionalists are not three radically separate phenomena or systems, but interdependent in their holistic interaction; and that’s where I leave this lecture for today, thank you very much.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008649.

Lecture 2

The Psychological Roots of Cognitive Linguistics— and Beyond Good afternoon! Some of what I’ll be talking about this afternoon could be summed up with the metaphor: new wine in old bottles. Maybe some of you are familiar with this saying in English, which means that sometimes people try to disguise things, pretending that something has got a greater degree of antiquity than it really has, by putting it in an old-looking package: a new wine in an old bottle. On this occasion I had better reverse the metaphor, and speak of an old wine in a new bottle. My use of the metaphor is not intended to indicate anything negative. The new bottle, in this case, is Cognitive Linguistics. And the old wine, I think, is a pretty good wine … My main point will be that in many respects Cognitive Linguistics draws upon old ideas, although it does so in a way that significantly refashions and reshapes these ideas. Cognitive Linguistics is a new theoretical approach in linguistics, whose key theoretical texts are barely a quarter of a century old. We’re talking here of the classic works by the people who are regarded as the founding fathers: Lakoff, Langacker, Talmy. However, it draws upon concepts from earlier research traditions, both in linguistics and in psychology. If you’re interested in exploring some of the points that I will make in this lecture in more detail, in particular the historical dimensions of it, you will be able to find two chapters in the Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, which was published in 2007, by Oxford University Press. This is a major work with chapters by just about all the leading cognitive linguists in the world. And it has two historically oriented chapters, one by an author called Brigitte Nerlich, which looks at the history of cognitive linguistic concepts in earlier schools of linguistics, in particular the Prague School tradition, in functional linguistics and so forth, that I was mentioning this morning. And there is another chapter by myself, which is called “Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science”, which unpacks the ideas I shall be talking about today and follows the historical thread that I will be trying to trace in much more detail than I’m able to do in a single lecture. So I recommend those two chapters to those of you who are interested in history. And even if you are not particularly interested in history in itself, I think it is important to have some idea of the provenance of the concepts that are formative of Cognitive Linguistics.

© Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_003

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So, to repeat, in the discipline of Linguistics, the main relevant previous tradition is functional linguistics, which we talked a little bit about this morning. But unsurprisingly, many of the most important concepts used by cognitive linguists derive from the discipline of Psychology. Here are some key psychological concepts used in Cognitive Linguistics: Gestalt, schema, frame, FigureGround organization. Now, it is often claimed that “before Chomsky” there was only Behaviourism in Psychology. The story is that prior to the so-called Cognitive Revolution you just had this kind of rather mindless behaviourist psychology, and for that matter behaviourist approaches such as that of Bloomfield also dominated linguistics; and then along came Chomsky and made the mind once again a legitimate object to study. There is some truth in this, inasmuch as American psychology in the period up until the late 1950s or really even into the 1960s was completely dominated by behaviourist ideas. And indeed I would say that even when I was studying psychology, at the beginning of the 1970s, behaviourism was still regarded by many psychologists as being the most important and dominant paradigm, and very boring it was too. But this is a somewhat particular view of the matter, because the truth is that psychology had talked about the mind and mental concepts in the period before, and at the same time as, the rise of behaviourism in the United States. But the point is it did so not so much in the Anglos-Saxon world as in Germany, and most of the concepts that have been used by cognitive linguists actually originate in the German psychology of before the 2nd World War. Now you can see immediately why it might be the case that this psychological tradition became forgotten, essentially because of World War II and because of the prewar rise of Nazi ideology and the Nazi party’s taking of power. Why did the rise of Nazism in Germany have this consequence? In the first place, many of the psychologists whose ideas I shall talk about today were Jewish, or if they were not Jewish, they were opponents of the Nazis and their ideas were suppressed. And secondly, and equally unsurprisingly, the 2nd World War meant, first of all the emigration of many of the most famous German psychologists before the War, and then the destruction of the institutional basis of German psychology before and during the War. German psychology, especially Gestalt psychology, never really recovered, and gave way to the dominance of the behaviourist tradition, until that in turn was overthrown by the cognitive revolution inspired by formalist linguistics, and giving rise to Classical Cognitivism. So although it is often claimed that before Chomsky there was only behaviourism, it’s not true. The concepts and methods of pre-World War II cognitive

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psychology in Germany were very modern-sounding and surprisingly interdisciplinary. Let me give you two examples. This morning I referred very briefly to the man who is often considered to be the founder of modern psychology: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, way back in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a little known fact among linguists that the person who invented the tree diagram notation for the description of the constituent structure of language was Wilhelm Wundt, a psychologist. A second example, which will become much clearer in subsequent lectures, was the work of the Austrian psychologist of language Karl Bühler. In the 1930s, Bühler headed the largest psychological laboratory in the world, in Vienna, and wrote extensively about language, developing what is still, I suppose, the major reference work for understanding deixis in language. Bühler was also very much interested in the comparative study of human and nonhuman communication. Bühler’s wife Charlotte (who was a famous developmental psychologist and later founded Gestalt therapy) was Jewish, and he was an anti-Nazi, and they were forced to flee to the United States. Almost all of his work in linguistics and psychology of language never got translated until about ten years ago. A lot of his work on comparative psychology of communication did get translated, and he became known for that in the United States. But he didn’t speak very good English and so when he died his linguistics work died with him until it was finally translated many years later. Let’s start with the notion of Gestalt, which everybody knows something about, I suppose. Gestalt is a German word meaning “whole” or “complete pattern”. In perception, that’s where Gestalt psychology began, as a psychology of perception, Gestalt meant a focus upon the relationships between individual elements, and not just the isolated elements. Gestalt psychology was predicated upon the assumption that it is the whole that gives meaning to the parts. As far as I know (I might be wrong about this but I have looked a little bit at the historical literature) the first usage of the word Gestalt as a technical term in psychology was by a psychologist called Von Ehrenfels, as long ago as 1890, who used as an example the perception and recognition of a melody. If you think of a melody, you can play it on an instrument or sing the melody in different keys, but no matter what key the melody is sung or played in, you recognize it as being the same melody, even if no one single note in the two renderings is identical, even if there is no identical element across the two renderings in the different keys, still it’s the same melody. So what makes us able to recognize it as the same, the identical melody? It’s Gestalt, its whole quality, the patterned relationship between the elements.

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This is very interesting. And something which is amazing about this is it invites us to think. To what extent is this fact about human perception unique to humans? Do you think other animals have the ability to perceive this Gestalt quality or is it something which may be at least more highly developed in humans than in other species? So the origins of the Gestalt notion in psychology go back to before the First World War, but it mainly flourished in Germany in the inter-war years. Gestalt psychology represented a break with atomism and sensation-based psychology. Sensation-based psychology goes back to the very earliest days of psychology in the work of Helmholtz, who was actually a physiologist. The idea of atomist psychology was that perception is made up of lots and lots of sensations, which are somehow discriminated and added together associatively to make perceptions. So, for the early psychology of the atomists, it was the sensation which was the basic unit of the study of perception. Gestaltists challenged this notion, but they also rejected the behaviourist notion of “stimulus”, in favour of a focus on whole, real objects in relation to the activity of a whole organism. Remember that for the behaviourist, the stimulus must be able to be isolated and measured. “No” said the Gestaltists, this is not the point. The important thing is not the measurability or quantitative nature of the “stimulus” but rather its qualitative wholeness and its dynamism. So Gestalt psychology in a very significant way prefigured the “ecological” theory of perception of James Gibson, and it was also related to another notion, the notion of “Umwelt”, which was developed by an animal behavior theorist called von Uexküll. I’ll say a little word about Gibson. Gibson was a psychologist of perception working after the Gestaltists. His interest was in dynamic perception and he was interested in real world perception. As a matter of fact, he did much in applied research in and after the Second World War, in which his interest was in how pilots land planes given a pattern of lights along runways, that is how given a pattern of lights at night a pilot can safely land the plane. And he said it’s no good looking at this kind of perception in the way in which we usually do that in the laboratory, which is by sitting the subjects down and making them stay still, looking at a static scene, instead we have to have subjects look at dynamic scenes. He developed from this the theory of what he call direct perception, that is to say, he said it’s not the case that we pick up the sensations and then we process them using some computational or inferential mechanism, and after that come to the object. “No” he said. We directly perceive objects. Objects are meaningful. And that was the basis of ecological psychology.

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The whole meaning of the term “ecological” is to emphasize the strength of this bond between organism and environment, the way which organismic activity is adapted to a real environment, and this interrelationship is one of mutuality. The Gestaltists, I guess, were also influenced by this idea of the Umwelt, which was basically, simply the notion that for every organism there is a particular environment within which it exists and which is significant for that organism. And even the most humble animal, even one-cell organisms, nematodes, or multi-cellular extremely simple organisms, have an environment to which they respond. So a one-cell organism, for example, responds to nutrient gradience in the water around it, swimming up towards more concentrated nutrient solutions. For every organism their environment is restricted by the perceptual mechanisms which select what is relevant for its own survival. Gestalt psychology kind of builds on this notion by suggesting that in fact it is whole objects and indeed entire complex patternings which are meaningful in our human Umwelt, or environment, or ecological niche. The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler was the first researcher to study non-human primates using film. He claimed from his observations that chimpanzees are capable of what he called “insight learning”. He did experiments where he put objects in a cage with the ape together with food that was out of reach. He would wait to see whether the apes would put the objects which were made available together in such a way that they could use these objects in order to attain a goal. So for example he would see whether the chimpanzee was able to put two sticks together in order to reach a banana, which was out of reach using just one stick. And doing a number of these kinds of experiments, he found they were able to do this. So what they were able to do was they were able to take diverse objects to hand and mentally construct patterns which would be a new object, and they did not do this using trial and error. He didn’t find that they used one stick trying to get a banana and then another stick trying to get the banana and through trial and error put the two sticks together. No. They seemed to demonstrate insight, putting the two sticks together to make a longer stick. And he said yes, they are able to do that. So his claim was that at least some of the kind of qualities which characterize human cognition and perception, namely its Gestalt quality, at least some of this is available to other species as well. Interestingly, Gestalt psychology was also influential in modern art movements. Can you all see what this (Figure 2.1) is a picture of? Can anybody see anything in this abstract picture? A man on a horse. How many people saw that before I said it? How many people had to hear me say

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Figure 2.1 De Ruiter Bart van der Leck.

before they saw it? Oh, did everybody see it? Yes, anyway, it’s a man on a horse. So in the kind of painting that this artist Van der Leck did, what he was trying to do was show was how by using patterned elements, you could actually get a sort of representational alphabet. He could do representational paintings which look like abstract paintings but they are in fact put together in such a way that the Gestalt quality becomes apparent to the perceiver. I’m going to ask some questions about the previous slide. Does that slide suggest that representation, what we call representation, has more to do with the recognition of representational intent than with the fidelity to the original? Now that’s important. Think about this in the context of the debate that went

Figure 2.2  The old woman/young woman.

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on in modern art about what representation really is. Because the traditional view was that for something to represent something it has to really resemble it very closely, but then other people would say “No, the important thing is, if I say it’s a representation, it’s a representation.” And this example suggests actually the representational status of the image has got to do more with the intentionality than with fidelity. But on the other hand you can’t get rid of fidelity altogether, because the Gestalt has got to somehow or another bring to mind what is represented, so recognition of this representational intent must also involve the recognition of what is intended to be represented. Now, I introduce that consideration because I’m going to explore it further tomorrow, when I look at the notion of representation which is central to contemporary cognitive science in more detail and critically. The Gestalt notion has also been very important in thinking about visual ambiguity and visual illusion. I want to ask you a question: how many of you have seen this picture before? Can you put your hands right up? All of you who have seen this before, keep quiet, OK? Those of you who have not seen this before, how many of you can see a young woman? How many of you can see an old woman? Can anybody see both the young woman and the old woman? OK, so look. This is a figure in which when you see the young woman, the young woman is looking away. She is looking over there and this is the top of her cheekbone and hollow of the eye there. And you can see an eyelash back there. She’s looking over there. That’s her hair and here is the line of her jaw. And here is a delicate little ear. And here is a necklace, OK? So that’s the young woman. The old woman, this part is her hair and this here is her nose, these her eyes. And here’s her mouth and this is

Figure 2.3 The vase/faces.

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her chin. So can all of you now see both of them? Even if you can’t see them both together, you can choose each one more or less at will. So the point here is that exactly the same visual information can be fitted together into two different patterns or Gestalts. Yes? In the language of psychology, the same stimulus has got two different interpretations. In our everyday language, one which is closer to linguistics, we could say the same visual information can have two different meanings, it’s ambiguous. The line drawing that you’ve just seen is often referred to as the “old woman / young woman” illusion. But it is not really an illusion, rather it’s a puzzle. It’s a puzzle of construal, to use the term that Langacker uses in cognitive grammar. Once the observer construes the image in a certain way, this construal determines the significance of each of the elements. And that is the essence of the Gestalt phenomenon. And that’s why Langacker’s notion of construal in cognitive linguistics is intimately connected with Gestalt theory. Here is another notion which is often used in cognitive linguistics—Figure and Ground. These terms were introduced into psychology by a Danish psychologist called Edgar Rubin in 1941. And this is a very abstract representation of the notion that when we perceive a visual scene we perceive always a figure against a ground. Here is a very common puzzle which is based on the Figure-Ground phenomenon. I guess almost everybody has seen this one before, yes? Depending on which is the Figure and which is the Ground, you either see a black vase—the Figure—against a white background—the Ground; or you see two white faces (Figure) against a black Ground, yes? So by reversing the Figure and Ground relationship you get two different construals. Langacker develops this into the notion of Trajector and Landmark, where we say for example, that if the trajector is a moving object, it has a path of motion in relation to some kind of landmark or ground. We say, for example, the ball is going or flying over the house, something like that. This is a very schematic drawing. [see the Powerpoint slide] More concretely we could say “the plane is flying over the house”, but we could also reverse the Figure-Ground relation, and say, the “house is under the plane”. We’ll look at these issues in more depth when we talk about spatial semantics. But the point is that the Figure-Ground relationship, and our ability to flip between alternative Figure-Ground construals, also gives us flexible linguistic construal of spatial relations, so that in this case we could look at this particular configuration and we could say either “The star is above the cross”, in which the star is the Figure and the cross is the Ground, or we could say the “cross is below the star”, where the cross is the Figure and the star is the Ground [see Powerpoint slide].

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In summary, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in cognitive linguistics. For Gestalt psychologists, experience was not merely the registration of sensations and the attempt to tie them together through association. Experience was considered to involve the active contribution of the subject and his or her point of view. Cognitive linguists such as Lakoff, Langacker and Talmy have built on these notions in emphasizing that speakers are also embodied experiencers and active cognizers. But are some forms of flexible construal only available to language users? That’s a question I shall leave for later, but it is possible that the possession of natural language enables us to construct new kinds of construals which are not available to creatures that do not have language. Perhaps language is a key part of the human Umwelt not only because it reflects cognition and perception, but also because it transforms them, through what I this morning called semiotic mediation. The next concept that we shall look at is “schema”. Remember I said in this morning’s lecture that Classical Cognitivism inherited from Formalist linguistics the idea that rules operate over internal symbols, sometimes called the physical symbol system. In place of rules, cognitive-functional linguistics employs the concept of schema. A schema is a principle of organization applying to, and unifying, perception and cognition (or conceptualization as we call it in cognitive linguistics). The term conceptualization is central. The notion of schema goes back to arguments made by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant from way back in 1781. Kant’s starting point was that, since Antiquity, it had been generally agreed that concepts are related to abstract images or mental pictures. Certainly, Greek philosophers like Aristotle thought that words were signs of images, and images were cognitive objects in the mind. But Kant pointed out that any single member of a category, or any single image, will always be too particular to cover all cases. Even an ideal image will be too concrete, so you could say for example that the ideal triangle is an equilateral triangle (that is the triangle with three equal sides). But an equilateral triangle cannot represent all triangles because many triangles have got unequal sides. Actually you can see from this, and from Gestalt theory as well, that if you think about the image as a representation, a specific image can’t cover all particularities of the entire class or category which we’re trying to represent. So that is what Kant said. “Indeed,” he went on to say, “it is schemas, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts …” Now I should tell you that this is from a translation made in the 1920s, so the English is a bit old fashioned, but I think it’s still the main translation available. But anyway we’ll go through Kant’s argument. “It is schemas, not images of objects which underlie our pure sensible concepts.” By which he means something like our conceptual

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categories for perceivable objects. “The concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule,” he says— note, a rule—“according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto [concretely], actually presents.” Well, it’s a rather long winded way to say, look, we cannot represent concepts by mental images, instead we need schemas, which are like rules in bringing different individual instances together into something which looks like in some way a concept or at least a category. And then he says: “whereas all intuitions” (by which I think he means perceptions) “rest on affections”, by which I think he means sensations, “concepts”, he says, “rest on functions”. Then he defines his terms further: “by ‘function’ I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations together under one common representation.” And that’s a schema, which is like a rule. It’s like a rule because it’s functionally equivalent to a rule. The schema is like a rule, functionally, but it is not a rule because it is not “determinate”. An algorithmic rule of the kind defined in, for example, transformational grammar has got to take a determinate form on the left hand side and yield a determinate form on the right hand side. But the schema is not determinate or exact in that way. However, Kant thought that the concepts of language, what he called discursive concepts, are determinate in at least one sense, in the sense that they have stability of meaning, or at least we can use them in a determinate way. So Kant, interestingly—and think about this when you think about cognitive linguistics, particularly when you think about George Lakoff’s theory of meaning—Kant did not say that schema and concept are the same, he actually thought that schemas bridge perception and conception. Schemas are the mental functional processes if you like, which enable us to unify perception in such a way that we can actually develop concepts out of perception. How does the schema work? Well, obviously schemas are stored representations in memory. The question then is how can they “abstract” from specific objects or episodes and yet be flexible enough to accommodate new instances of the category to which they apply? Because the schema has to be able to accommodate novelty. Kant did not know the answer to this, but he did actually think that in the end science would provide the answer. As it happens, the answer was provided in the 1980s by the computational theory called Parallel Distributed Processing, or Connectionism. This is what Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group wrote in their book in 1986. [They use for the plural of the word ‘schema’ the term ‘schemata’, which is the Latin way of doing it. Piaget, who also used

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the word ‘schema’, also used the plural term ‘schemata’]. Anyway this is what Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group say: “On the one hand, schemata are the structure of the mind. On the other hand, schemata must be sufficiently malleable [that means flexible] to fit around most anything … There is no representational object that is a schema. Rather, schemata emerge at the moment they are needed from the interaction of large numbers of much smaller elements working in concert with one another.” And that’s the essence of Parallel Distributed Processing, about which I’m not really going to say much more but I consider it to be very significant. So, at the same time that cognitive linguists like George Lakoff were coming up with the theory of image schemas, computer scientists and computational psychologists like Rumelhart and McClelland were coming up with ways of modelling human perception and the human cognitive system, which showed how schemas could be modelled, and in fact from then onwards there has been enormous debate in cognitive science about whether you can actually get as far as concepts from Parallel Distributed Processing; with the classical cognitivists saying, PDP may be helpful in understanding perception, but it’s not good enough for understanding concepts. I think (like Kant) that you can get from schematically organized perception to concepts and that’s what I am going to talk about now. Connectionist neural networks that implement schemas also give rise, as an effect of way they work, to prototype effects in perception. And this is actually a natural consequence of the computational mechanism itself. All of you I guess have read in the work of Lakoff and others about prototype effects. And it is important to point out the prototype effects are not just experimentally proven through perception research with human beings. They’re also inevitable byproducts, almost, of the way that neural networks work. Prototypes are in fact consequences of the way the brain works, if we assume that connectionist artificial neural networks are a good model of the way the actual, real brain works. Now let’s examine uses of the term “schema” in Cognitive Linguistics. Here are some uses of the term schema. First of all, we have the well-known notion of the image schema, for example the image schema for “over” as discussed by Lakoff and Brugman. And image schemas, Lakoff continually emphasizes, are preconceptual. Idealized Cognitive Models. For example the idealized cognitive model for the word “bachelor” discussed by Lakoff (following Fillmore), which is based upon Fillmore’s Frame Semantics. The interesting thing about Idealized Cognitive Models is that I think if you look at Lakoff’s discussion of this, they are no longer preconceptual. They are actually meant to be conceptual models.

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Event Schemas, for example, the schema Agent-Action-Object. Construction Schemas, for example, the Dual Object schema discussed by Adele Goldberg. So the notion of schema has got very wide application in cognitive linguistics all the way from preconceptual through conceptual to linguistic organization. Related notions to schemas are scripts and frames. Schank and Abelson in 1977 published a book called Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. And their question was how to computationally represent conventional sequences of action. And a famous example that they used (which Lakoff uses quite a lot in his presentations) is the restaurant script. The restaurant script says basically how things go, and in what order when you walk into a restaurant, you know, first of all, you go in, you find a table, you sit down, order the courses in a certain order, and then you ask for the bill, you pay the bill, etc. And of course an important issue here, which may seem rather trivial in the example of the restaurant script, but may not be at all trivial in other contexts, is the question of the degree of cultural variation in the way in which the scripts operate in different cultures. So in summary, schemata can exist at different levels of organization. That’s to say, all the way from image schemas or schemas of perception up to higher level cognitive schemas like the restaurant script. Now, frames and scripts. A frame is really basically a big schema with lots of different sub-schemas in it. Frames and scripts can be partitioned or segmented. In other words, they are not indivisible, they can have complex constituent structures. So how is this notion being applied to various areas of cognitive science? Well, it’s being looked at in language, cognitive and cultural development. For example, children learn early words by embedding their use in repetitively occurring events that can be schematically represented. For example, Katherine Nelson has looked at how children acquire the meaning of the word ball from the context of interaction with somebody visible or answerable. Michael Tomasello has shown how children learn grammar by partitioning the “slots” of construction frames and recombining words and expressions. Narratives are also important higher order frames for understanding self, other and world, as has been explored by Katherine Nelson and by Jerry Bruner. Because, obviously, narratives have got a frame structure which involves various participants, protagonists, antagonists, obstacles, and goals to be attained. Furthermore, people tend to structure the way they think about their own self in narrative terms. Now let’s get back and examine again this notion of the similarities and differences between the idea of the schema and the idea of the rule. As I said, a

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schema is like a rule, but note that a schema can be either pre-conceptual or conceptual. In preconceptual cases schemas cannot be rules in the strict sense, because a rule in the strict sense has got to be conceptual, has got to be explicit. For example, Parallel Distributed Processing models contain no rules, the only rules are those imposed by the observer. But schemas can also be conceptual, and when they are conceptual schemas they can be the object as well as the means of cognition: let’s take as an example kinship systems. A kinship system can be thought of as a schema with various relationships between family members as nodes in a network, or slots in an intergenerational frame. And we use such schemas when we’re thinking about family relationships, they are part of our human Umwelt, or what I shall later call our bio-cultural niche. However, we can also take a kinship schema as an object of knowledge and we can try to describe it. The schemas of language which govern the assembly of constructions, as in construction grammar, are conventionally organized. So in that sense language does have rules, but they are not autonomous rules like Chomsky’s autonomous syntax, since they are based in meaningful schematic elements. And they are not, as it were, autonomous from usage either, like Chomsky’s I-language rules. Construction schemas, on the contrary, are the rules which govern the way that language is used. Furthermore, a schema can be private and entirely unconscious, so that, for example, if we want to understand the schemas underlying perception, object perception for example, this certainly something which can exist purely at the individual level and is inaccessible to consciousness. However, a rule cannot be either private, or inaccessible to consciousness. That’s something we talked about this morning, when we discussed very briefly Wittgenstein’s objection against the idea of a private language and Itkonen’s expansion of this. Rules are normative by definition. Schemata can also be normative, for example a kinship system is normative. It does say what should be and what shouldn’t be, for example, anthropologists know that in some kinship systems it is not permitted for first cousins to marry, while in other kinship systems, in other cultures, it is permitted for first cousins to marry. Let’s look briefly at cultural and linguistic schemas. Schemas may be culturally specific. For example, the politeness script is a very typical one, and we all know the pitfalls which lurk in the way of the unwary traveller going from one culture to another, not knowing quite what is polite behaviour in this culture and whether it corresponds to polite behaviour in their own culture. Kinship frames can also be culturally variable, and so can schemas for cultural spaces

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and times, what to do and at what time, where to be, those kinds of things, who’s allowed to be in this space, who’s supposed to be in this space. All of those kinds of schemas can vary between cultures. In such cases, we speak of cultural schemas or cultural models. Cultural models are intersubjectively shared by members of a cultural community, and they differ from the cultural schemas of other communities. And what we know from the work of cultural linguists, such as for example Gary Palmer, whom I quoted this morning, is that cultural models may motivate grammatical facts in a language: for example, classifier systems, spatial frames of reference and (something that I shall talk about in another lecture in this series) notions of time, and linguistic expressions of time. A final point about schemas is the question of where they are to be located. Our discussion of schemas seems to go all over the place. It seems to go from the brain all the way through to culture. So where do schemas really exist? We’ve talked about the organization of schemas at the following levels: the neural level, as in PDP modelling; the individual psychological level, as in language acquisition and development; and the intersubjective, social and cultural level as in cultural schemas. At which level do schemas really exist, which level do they belong to? I think that they exist at all these levels simultaneously, as a matter of fact. I think the schema is a notion or construct that binds together cognitive processes at all these levels, enabling the integration of individual with social cognition, which after all is one of the most fundamental issues in cognitive science. When we put together all these individuals, we get a community, and I don’t mean just community of bodies but community of minds as well. Schemas offer a way to understand how this could be. Lower level schemas are pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic. Some examples are schemas for containment, for support, or schemas for object categories. High-level schemas organizing abstract domains like time, for example calendars, are linguistically organized, conceptual, socially shared and normative. Their schemas depend upon semiotic mediation and are not pre-linguistic. And this semiotic mediation extends actually beyond language itself into human artefacts, for example here is a picture of a medieval clock from the city of Lund in Sweden in the cathedral there. [See Powerpoint slide]. It’s a very complicated artefact. At the top it’s got a clock face showing the 24 hours of the day. Down here it’s got the Zodiac characters (the Indo-Arabic-European, not the Chinese ones). Here it’s got some mechanical figures which come out of the clock, when the music is played on the hour; and so on. But these physical faces around which hands move are actually representations of schemas,

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and in fact they are not just representations, they are embodiments of schemas in that artefact. So that clock is an instance of the extended embodiment of schemas, and remember that extended embodiment was one of the key concepts that I introduced this morning. Well, that brings us to towards the conclusion of what I am talking about for today, namely schemas and the materiality of representation. Schemas are where the cultural and the individual meet and interface. Because they can be embodied in artefacts, they are also where the representation of the mind in language and symbolization achieves material structure not just in the brain but in the world, in extended embodiment. Thank you!

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008652.

Lecture 3

Meaning, Representation, Conceptualization This morning’s lecture is called “Meaning, Representation and Conceptualiza­ tion”. Meaning is crucial for cognitive linguistics. Conceptualization is crucial for cognitive linguistics; and Representation is a notion that has been central to cognitive science for the last 50 years or so. No concept has been more cen­ tral, nor more problematic, in cognitive science than representation. In Classical Cognitivism, the mind is viewed as a system of language-like mental representations. These representations consist of symbolic strings manipulated by algorithmic rules. In strong formulations of the theory of the computational mind, such language-like representations (and the syntactic rules governing them) are all that there is in the mind. That’s it. The idea is that you can achieve a complete theory of the human mind by producing an ac­ count based on language-like representations and rules. This perhaps sounds a bit crazy, but believe me, it certainly used to be the case that people believed this. I remember going in the 1980’s to a conference at which I heard an emi­ nent Artificial Intelligence scientist, who worked in language, saying that all we had to do was to find the right natural computational language, and the rules for it, and they would be able to produce an intelligent machine. And they would also have a full explanation of the human mind. The idea is that this computational system is somehow instantiated in the brain. It’s somehow in there in your brain. And you could say that this is the way in which Classical Cognitivism tries to solve the Mind-Body problem, the traditional problem of the relationship between the mind and the body, recast as the problem of Physical Symbols in the brain. So, according to Classical Cognitivism, in your brain, you’ve got physical symbols. These symbols are an actual physical reality in your brain, which is a bit of a problem, because how did they get there, where are they, and why can’t you see them if you look into brains? Well, that may be a naïve kind of criticism but it does have some point. For the cognitivist, the next problem is that somehow this computational system has got to be interfaced with the world outside the organism, outside the brain. And this is often known as the Grounding problem, or more fully the Symbol Grounding problem. What about meaning, though? In what way has all this got to do with mean­ ing? Well, this is how the story goes. Those of you who know the work of Lakoff, know that Lakoff is very critical of the point of view that he calls Objectivism. That is, it is not just Lakoff who calls it Objectivism. For Classical Cognitivism, © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_004

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meaning is an objective, truth-based relationship between the symbol (or symbol string) and states-of-affairs in the world. This is the basis of modeltheoretic, formal semantics. Its history goes back to the work of the logician Carnap, in the 1930s and 40s, through to a modern version based in a particular formal language called Montague Grammar, which is supposed to give a for­ mal description from an Objectivist point of view of natural languages. I remember that some years ago, people got really excited about Montague Grammar, they thought that maybe you could really describe what’s going on inside people’s heads in this way. I was never so enthusiastic myself, I may say. Anyway, that’s Objectivism in a nutshell, and it means that all meaning, not just linguistic meaning, but all meaning, including non-linguistic meanings, are symbolic, in a very special sense, consisting in a relationship between an internal, physically instantiated symbol or symbol string, and an external ob­ ject or state of affairs. So cognition is nothing else except the process of the manipulation of symbol strings by algorithms. Algorithms are essentially mathematical operations, which take one string on the left and transform it into another string on the right. (It doesn’t have to be left and right, you know, they just transform one string into another string). And that was the basis of Chomsky’s original idea, many years ago, of the Transformational Generative Grammar. So look, if that’s what it’s all about, where do the meanings of these “physical symbols” come from? In other words, how do they actually get to hook up with the world outside? Because, so far, we’re just talking about this computational system that is churning away inside people’s heads. How does it relate to the outside world? If mental representation is structured like a language under a formal description (you maybe remember yesterday what I quoted from Fodor—“a syntactical machine with semantic criteria of coherence”)—if that’s what it’s like, then Chomsky’s Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus also applies to all mental representational symbols. Therefore, according to Fodor, who is the arch-high priest philosopher of Classical Cognitivism, the Language of Thought is innate. In other words, according to Fodor, human infants are not only born with a Universal Grammar, as claimed by Chomsky, but they are also born with a Language of Thought, which enables thought and language to hook up with the world outside. Now some people believe this, but I never believed it. I thought it was mad, I still think it’s mad. But I realized that the people who advocated it are not only not stupid, but they are in fact extremely intelligent. I mean, Fodor is a world-renowned philosopher. So it’s not stupidity by any means, but there is something wrong with it. The idea that I am born with all the concepts I need for the rest of my life—I just can’t buy that idea, not as a developmental psychologist. But if we want to have an alternative,

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we have to be just as good at arguing for it as Fodor is at arguing for Classical Cognitivism. Anyway, I’ve always asked myself, reading people like Fodor, and Chomsky for that matter, how could this be true, and how could we be born with this Universal Grammar, and a Language of Thought providing its semantics? How could such a system possibly emerge in biological evolution? Is there no “missing link” between the general purpose learning mechanisms of the be­ haviourists, and the dedicated processing modules of the nativists? And if not, where did cognition, or “higher mental processes”, begin in evolution? Did this Language of Thought kind of come out of the sky, out of nowhere? Or was it just some kind of amazing biological but miraculous event? Now these philosophical and psychological arguments, add further force to the criticism that is made by many cognitive linguists, including Lakoff and Langacker, who argue that formalism can not adequately account for mean­ ing in natural language, and for important phenomena such as metaphor and polysemy. What I’m saying is that not only can it not account for language itself, it can’t account for how language and symbolic cognition get there in the first place, except by arguing for an extreme version of nativism. And as a developmental psychologist, I always ask myself about development. I always ask: “how the hell did this capacity get there in the course of development from infancy to adulthood?” There are of course alternatives to Cognitivism. The first alternative is to get rid of Representation altogether. Just say that it’s too troublesome, and that the concept misleads us. Let’s get rid of it. As I pointed out yesterday, ecological psychologists, starting with Gibson, have argued against the need for an infer­ ential account of perception, because they claim direct perception will do the job. We really do actually basically just perceive the world as it is, no problem. And there’s another set of people called the Dynamic Systems theorists, who emphasize that highly complex forms of behaviour can emerge in relatively simple organisms like insects, without any kind of representational control. Their arguments are partly based on robotics, because you can get robots to do pretty clever things without building complicated artificial intelligence stuff or trying to simulate the brain. You just basically let the body and some simple programs do the work in conjunction with the physical world. This point of view is called Emergentism, or at least it is one version of Emergentism. Dynamic systems theory is the idea that out of a lot of relatively simple subsystems, and the way that they operate together and coordinate, you end up with a quite complicated higher level system which doesn’t have any controller. So it doesn’t require any representation, but it is still very efficient in getting around the place. And it works very well for functions like locomotion

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and, to some extent, vision. So maybe a Non-Representational, Embodied, Enactive theory evolving Direct Perception plus perception-action linkages can be sufficient. That’s one point of view, but it’s not mine. Now, some of you will have read Lakoff and Johnson’s book from 1999, called Philosophy in the Flesh. Lakoff and Johnson’s 1999 theory is nonRepresentational in this sense, because they emphasize (back to our discus­ sions yesterday) that image schemas are pre-conceptual, not conceptual. They ground the different senses of polysemous items like prepositions in imageschemas, so suggesting that linguistic meaning is at base pre-conceptual. They avoid the term Representation and they say rather it’s all about interac­ tion between organism and environment. And they derive abstract meanings from embodied, experiential, pre-conceptual meanings through domain-todomain conceptual metaphoric mapping. So, anyway their theory is a nonrepresentational theory. But I have problems with Lakoff and Johnson’s 1999 theory, because it’s not clear whether there are any truly conceptual meanings at all in that theory, and if so how do they differ from pre-conceptual image schematic meanings? Perhaps, you could say, that it’s simply the inter-domain mapping potential of the system that makes it conceptual. But that would suggest that it’s only the abstract metaphorical meanings that are conceptual, whereas all the other concrete meanings are pre-conceptual, and that suggests that linguistic mean­ ing in Lakoff and Johnson’s theory is reduced to, and eventually made identical to, schematic and enactive meaning. But if that’s true, in what way are humans any different as symbol users from other species? This is just like every other non-representational theory. It ends up not really explaining how humans use language at all. So for Lakoff and Johnson, is language a symbolic system at all, or is it just an expression of pre-symbolic schemas? So instead of getting rid of Representation, let’s try Alternative 2, which is Rethinking Representation: trying to re-conceptualize the notion of represen­ tation. This is something which I have been doing since my book ‘Language and Representation’ in 1988. I am hoping that I will eventually be proved right! Now, this second alternative does have some definite points of agree­ ment with the first alternative, OK? The first alternative was to get rid of Representation, the second alternative is to rethink it, so where do we agree? We agree that meaning is not only linguistic, because we are all cognitive linguists, in some sense or another. These are basic propositions of cogni­ tive linguists. Meaning is not only linguistic. In fact, we agree that meaning is not even primarily linguistic. We do agree that meaning is, in some very wide sense—that applies not only to humans but also to other organisms as well, as we discussed when we discussed the ecological approaches in general—we

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agree that meaning is in the relationship between the organism and its eco­ logical niche or Umwelt. And we agree that linguistic meanings are continuous with non-linguistic meanings, such as schemas, with some kind of continuity. But we also have some profound disagreements with Alternative One. Why? Because I am saying that linguistic meanings do have a very special represen­ tational and symbolic character. It’s just that Classical Cognitivism has got it wrong. It doesn’t have the right account of it. Because if you want to think about the human ecological niche, the one that we live in as a species, it is sym­ bolic. As Terrence Deacon says, we are the Symbolic Species. So, why should we pretend that language is not symbolic? We cannot treat it in the same way as non-symbolic niches. But here we start to meet up again with some more mainstream, cogni­ tive linguistic propositions: that the language system is a communicative sys­ tem, permitting representational and symbolic communication. That is what Langacker says too. Language needs to be analyzed as one communication system amongst others, but one with very special characteristics, because lan­ guage makes possible true conceptualization. Also, in making possible true conceptualization, it also permits virtual cognition, cognition which goes be­ yond the here and now. Anything which has no representation at all, any or­ ganism without representation at all is kind of stuck in the here and now. It can’t talk about yesterday or tomorrow. It can’t talk about possible situations which have not yet been encountered. It can’t talk about imaginary charac­ ters in narratives, because you need symbolization to do that. That’s a point that was made very many years ago by an American linguist, called Charles Hockett, who wrote a classical article on what he called the Design Features of Language. It was basically a theory of what needs to be present for a communi­ cation system to count as a language, what things does a language have to have to be a language, and one of those characteristics he called displacement, the ability to talk about virtual realities. Piaget, too, considered such displacement to be essential for symbolization. So, when we rethink representation, the first thing we do is we say represen­ tation is not an objective relationship between Symbol and Object, or symbol strings and states of affairs. It’s nothing like what formal logicians study, in that sense. Instead representation is a relationship established in the course of communication, between Speaker, Hearer and Situation. And linguistic rep­ resentation is based in the communicative use of the sign system of language. And all of the uses—including the use of language signs to represent the world for oneself, which we do all the time, because we talk to ourselves, use language as a medium of inner speech, but that is secondary—the basis of all linguistic representation is communication. And that’s a completely different point of

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view from the point of view of Classical Cognitivism, for which communica­ tion is only secondary. Now we’re getting to the Nitty-Gritty of this, and are going to try to define the notion of Representation. And I do this by specifying what I call the Conditions on Representation, which are as follows: To represent something is to cause something (the signifier) to stand for something else (the signified) in such a way that both the relationship of standing for, and whatever it is that is represented, are recognizable to the listener. There we are, that’s representation. Think again of Figure 2.1, the rider on the horse. Causing something to stand for something else, where a certain geomet­ ric pattern is perceived as Figure and Ground which stands for something else, the signified meaning of it. And the meaning of it is “a man on a horse”, that is what is signified is a man on a horse. And you could only really figure that out if you know there is a standing-for relationship, because you could be mistaken and look at this and say it’s just an abstract pattern, it doesn’t stand for anything. But if you do know that it stands for something, you will be trying to figure out what it does stand for; and what it stands for is whatever is represented, so you recognize both those things, and there you are. You see a man on a horse, so this is the logic of the Conditions on Representation. This is a philosophical and logical point; it doesn’t just apply to language, it defines whether we are talking about Representation or something else. The representational relationship is independent, then, of the medium of representation, which may be linguistic, gestural or pictorial. For example, to use the traditional semiotic categories of Charles Sanders Peirce, maps com­ bine iconic and symbolic representations to produce a single representational synthesis. Take for example a map of China. [Powerpoint slide]. Because the map traces the shape of the physical geography of China, it’s iconic. But also it’s got words in there, so it’s also symbolic. And the symbolic and the iconic collaborate together to produce the representation. Language and representation. Language is a symbolic semiotic system. The core symbolic function of language is representation. But representation is a function of language, OK? It’s not like what Fodor and other Classical Cognitivists believe. Representation is not kind of apriori property of a physi­ cal symbol, it’s rather that representation is the core symbolic function of real language, the language that you speak, and the language that I speak. Representation is both communicatively and cognitively complex. And com­ municative representation, this is the hypothesis, was the key functional

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attribute driving the evolution of language, that’s what was selected for. And that’s what I will talk about in the next lecture. Now the next point is where we meet a very important notion in cognitive linguistics. I’m going to say now: linguistic representation is the same as lin­ guistic conceptualization. So language represents by means of concepts. And these concepts, if you remember our lecture yesterday, are the concepts that the philosopher Kant called discursive concepts. We could also call them lin­ guistic concepts. So what does language represent, we’ve been talking about this function of language, what is represented? It is often said (including by cognitive linguists) that language represents ideas, or concepts, or image schemas, etc. That’s not what I’m saying, I say language represents by means of concepts, which is dif­ ferent. But the idea that language is basically just there for representing ideas has a very long history. Let’s see how ancient this idea is. Here is Aristotle from the third century before the Common Era: Words are signs or symbols of the affections of the soul; whereas the affections of the soul are not signs or symbols of things in the real world, but copies of them (although natural copies and therefore identical for the human race). So that’s what Aristotle believed. And that’s actually what Kant was arguing against, re­ member that Kant said that concepts can’t actually be images, and the idea that they are images or copies, came all the way down through the ages from Aristotle, but Aristotle then also says that words are the signs or the symbols of these images. Let’s jump a few centuries forward, getting on for a thousand years, and the British Empiricist philosopher John Locke says: “That then which words are the marks of, are the ideas of the speaker. Nor can anyone apply them, as Marks, immediately to anything else, but the Ideas, that he himself hath.” (Sorry about the Archaic English). So words are marks of ideas, or signs of ideas. And then the father of modern linguistics, as he is often called, Ferdinand de Saussure, writing or lecturing around about 1919, says “the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.” Despite its antiquity, this proposal, that words stand for ideas, is mislead­ ing, although it’s not perhaps entirely wrong. We could perhaps say that words signify concepts, but the mistake then is to think that signifying concepts is the same as representing concepts, which it is not. Words perhaps may be said to signify concepts, but they represent what is conceptualized. An alter­ native formulation will go something like this (and this is what I think is the right interpretation of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics): Linguis­ tic expressions represent linguistically conceptualized situations. So repre­ sentation, to use a wonderful phrase of Jerome Bruner, representation is an

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Act of Meaning. Linguistic expressions represent linguistically conceptualized situations. This formulation emphasizes several things: the contextuality of mean­ ing, because the situation is a context; the fact that representation is based on communication; the nature of meaning as a conventional mapping from conceptualization to expression; and the distinction between linguistic con­ ceptualization (Kant’s “discursive concepts”) and pre-conceptual schemas. Representational meaning, the representational meaning of a term or expres­ sion can be considered as equivalent to the traditional notion of sense, which is its signified content as a discursive concept, enabling it to fulfil, in discourse, the Conditions on Representation. Now I’m not going to go in detail into the now quite old arguments about the distinction between sense and reference in the philosophy of language. Frege, who invented the use of the term “sense”, thought that senses are a kind of Platonic entities, he didn’t think they were psychological entities in the head, but Platonic entities, in the universe of pure Ideas. Karl Bühler, writing in the 1930’s, had a very good, robust response to Frege, when he proposed a social-cultural account of sense. Bühler says that Plato called objects that man­ ifest similarities to linguistic meanings Ideas, Objective ideas in an ideal world. Bühler went on to say that he has transformed the ‘eternal and immutable’ into the “ ‘intersubjective’ … which only needs to be said in order to exclude misunderstandings.” So sense is essentially a mapping pattern. And I’m proposing that instead of seeing senses as mental objects, or schemas, or nodes in semantic networks, we should view them as relatively stable or entrenched patterns of mapping, from contextualized conceptualization to linguistic expression, in the course of the dynamic construction of acts of meaning, in which the goal of the action is to successfully achieve (through linguistic means) joint reference in an inter­ subjectively shared Universe of Discourse. So there you are, that’s what I think it is. I’ll just remind you again of the Conditions on Representation: To represent something is to cause something to stand for something else, in such a way that both the relationship of standing for, and what­ ever is represented, are recognizable to the listener. But now we have to add to this: recognizable to the listener in the intersub­ jectively shared situation, or shared Universe of Discourse. This brings us to the question of reference. The question, as it were, of Aboutness, that’s the way the philosopher John Searle tries to characterize the notion of reference: “aboutness”. So if I say, for example, “this cup”, what is my utterance or expres­ sion, “this cup”, about? Well there are two possible answers. Basically either

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the expression “this cup” could actually be about this cup, or it could be about something in the head, my concept of this cup. Now you gather that actually I believe that when we use the expression ‘this cup’, it’s about this cup. Not about my concept of the cup, or my idea of the cup. It’s about this cup. Unfortunately many Cognitive Linguists seem to believe that words refer not to the world, but to the conceptualizations. And this, I am saying, is erroneous: words and linguistic expressions refer (fundamentally) to the world outside language. Here, I am using the term “the world” in the ecological sense of the real­ ity of the Umwelt. Words refer to world in a mediating fashion, not because they are magically hooked up with the world, but because we mean them to do that. Because we refer; in fact words mediate reference by speakers; they don’t have reference on their own. Words on their own, in the absence of their use, are just nothing. Words only acquire these magical properties of sense and reference, when they’re actually used by speakers in some kind of situation. And that means we can only refer linguistically to the world using the represen­ tational meanings available in our language, which I think is what is meant by the rather enigmatic and cryptic claim of Wittgenstein, who said, “whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent”: because we can only refer linguistically to the world using the representational meanings available in our language. Now that doesn’t mean, of course, and I don’t think Wittgenstein is saying that, the world consists only of our language or linguistic meanings. He’s not saying this. He says what we can speak about is given by the representational mean­ ings or resources of our language. Of course that leads us to the question of linguistic relativity. If the senses or representational meanings in one language differ from those in another, in what sense is it possible to refer to the same things in the same way in these two different languages? Now, the argument that I’m making is an argument against all versions of solipsism. Solipsism is basically the idea that I, as an in­ dividual, am trapped in my own world. Solipsism includes more recently what I call “neural solipsism”, a neural variety of solipsism put forward by some phi­ losophers. I claim on the contrary that in using language we refer either to a directly perceived shared reality, or sometimes when we use language, we refer to a symbolically mediated world, in which we are engaged as both embodied and discursive actors. This reality is schematized linguistically, conceptually and also preconceptually. But it is the world we speak about, not the contents of something called the “Mind/Brain”, which is a fiction dreamt up by certain misguided cognitive scientists. Please note that the position I argue for is not Objectiv­ ism. Linguistic expressions represent linguistically conceptualized situations, and this semiotic relationship is not the same as saying that the linguistic

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expressions represent objective “states of affairs”, because linguistic represen­ tation also implies conceptual construal or schematization. And of course, it also implies use. In essence, representational meanings are the same as what Immanuel Kant called discursive concepts. Now I’m going to outline for you a few properties of such discursive concepts. Discursive concepts are public, because they are an­ chored in a language system. And a language system is the property of a com­ munity: remember Wittengenstein’s argument against possibility of a private language. So discursive concepts are public. Discursive concepts are also nor­ mative. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that there are right and wrong ways of using them, involving right and wrong ways of talking about the world. So if I say, ‘this cup’, that’s OK, that’s correct, in English. However, if I say, ‘this egg’, it’s wrong. It’s incorrect in English. That’s normativity. And thirdly, discursive concepts are intersubjectively shared. Discursive concepts are shared meanings. So in a sense, we could say, metaphorically, that discursive concepts are the property of the language community and, to con­ tinue this metaphor, they are only “loaned” by the individual language user who employs them. And that’s a metaphor that we owe to the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. In fact, I think he says something to the effect that when we use language, we are like tenants in the house of language, we just temporarily occupy it. Another thing about discursive concepts. They develop and change over historical time. Let’s take an example; an example would be a concept like “wheel”. Originally, presumably, a wheel is something that was fitted to the ve­ hicle to enable it to have locomotion when it was pulled or pushed by some­ body, or by some animal. But now, for example, if we say “the wheel of the car”, we could mean either the wheel which is in contact with the road, or (at least in English), the wheel that the driver uses to steer the car. There are many, many such examples, which cognitive linguists who study things like grammaticalization processes have looked at. Discursive concepts are not fixed for all time, which they would have to be, if they were part of something like Fodor’s Language of Thought. No, discursive concepts change over time, because communities change and the world changes. And we change the world. But as well as discursive concepts, we do also have what I shall call psychological concepts. This is because in order for discursive con­ cepts to be employed by the speaker, that speaker does have to have some kind of psychological or personal understanding of that discursive concept. So psychological concepts are subjective, individual and variable. They need not be shared by the whole community. So for example, here we are, in the Beihang University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and somewhere within

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one kilometre of here there must be an awful lot of people who know a hell of lot about concepts like “re-entry velocity”. Personally, I don’t know much about that. My psychological concept of that discursive concept is pretty minimal. And that is a manifestation of what the philosopher Hilary Putnam calls the social division of linguistic labor. It’s not necessary for everybody in every lin­ guistic community to know everything about every concept which is available in that community. That would not even be possible, especially in complex technologically advanced societies, such as ours, but even in less complex so­ cieties, not everybody knows everything. There may be domains of knowledge that are restricted to certain groups, and only those groups know the concepts that characterize that domain fully. So, in parallel with the notion of social authority, Putnam also proposes the notion of cognitive authority, which is basically expert knowledge. For exam­ ple, if you want to know the concepts of philosophy, go and ask an authority, somebody with cognitive authority, somebody who really knows about the subject. And then maybe if you are lucky, you will bring your own psychologi­ cal concepts into line with those of the expert. And you will be able to use the discursive concepts with more expertise. And of course that is what the process of education is all about. It is about expanding our psychological concepts, so that they match the fullest specification in the community of the discursive concepts. So discursive concepts develop and change over historical time, and psychological concepts develop and change over ontogenetic time—the time of the development of the individual. Let me give you another example. Let’s take the term ‘atom’. We know from the history of science that the term is a very old one. The history of science books will tell us that it goes back to somebody called Lucretius, who had an atomistic theory of matter; he was an ancient Greek philosopher. For all I know, there may well have been ancient Chinese philosophies, as well, that held atomistic theories of matter. Were they the same theories as our modern theory of the atom? Absolutely not. This term ‘atom’ has got some kind of con­ tinuity down through the ages as a discursive concept. But it’s also changed. It’s changed because our knowledge has changed. Because the theories and discourses of the science of physics have changed, over historical time. And if you want to educate people, you need to get their psychological concepts up to the level of most advanced contemporary employment of these discursive concepts in scientific theories. Let’s return to the problem that has been posed by the Classical Cognitivist theory of representation, the so-called Symbol Grounding problem. In the traditional formulation it is posed as something like the question: how do symbols “hook up” with the world? And this is cast as a theoretical problem.

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Philosophers beat their brains out over this theoretical problem. How do I get the symbols to match up with the world? But in reality it’s not a theoretical problem. In fact I would say there is no theoretical problem at all. Since sym­ bols emerge in communicative practice, in the context of participatory sensemaking by speaking human beings, Symbol Grounding develops through the coordination in development of psychological meanings with discursive meanings. The psychological meanings are grounded in functional image sche­ mas, and up to this point I am in agreement with Lakoff and Johnson. They are grounded in functional image schemas, and perception-action linkages. But they are also grounded (and Lakoff and Johnson do not discuss this at all) in discursive concepts, which the developing person has to appropriate. And these discursive concepts are grounded in the conventions of the language sys­ tem of the language community. So “Grounding” is the same as acquisition and development, and occurs through the coordination of psychological mean­ ings with discursive meanings. The coordination, if you like, of the subjective with the intersubjective, through a dual grounding process of sensori-motor and discursive grounding. It is this combination of sensorimotor plus discur­ sive grounding that I call dual grounding. I will say some more about it in the next lecture. So this is my last slide, in which I come back to my definition of what I call the socio-naturalistic approach in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Linguistics. The socio-naturalistic approach bases itself in both the evolutionary biological and the socio-cultural ecology of the human mind, in which language is a part of human ecology and specifically of human symbolic ecology, and in which it is simultaneously a product of biological evolution and of cultural evolution, by which means it is a product of biological and cultural co-evolution. And that is a process that I will talk about this afternoon. Thank you very much.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008655.

Lecture 4

From Signal to Symbol to System: The Emergence of Language My title this afternoon is “From Signal to Symbol to System: The Emergence of Language”. I try here to lead directly on from the issues that I was talking about in the previous lecture, by trying to give an answer to this question: “If language is a symbolic system, which is used for conceptualization and representation—How did this come about? How did this amazing capacity come about, how did this symbolic tool, that we use every day almost without thinking about it, how did it come about in evolution?” Now here is an evolutionary developmental puzzle. If we look at ourselves as biological organisms, many of the neuro-cognitive prerequisites for language, and some of the cultural prerequisites, are present in non-human communication and cognition. We are neurologically actually very like other higher primate species. Also humans share a very large proportion of genetic material with non-human animals. Maybe I should just explain that a little bit. We know that the human genome has between 95% and 98% identical chromosomal material (depending on how you measure it) with those of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. But evolutionary modern human natural languages are qualitatively different from any other communication system, so even though we are so genetically similar we are, in terms of the communication system that we use, completely different. Why? What’s the solution to this puzzle? Here is an outline solution. The evolution of language (from some kind of proto-language) was, I will suggest, mainly dependent upon extra-somatic, ­socio-cultural processes. By extra-somatic, I mean things that go on outside the body, not inside. I will suggest that language is a normative and conventional system (which we have already talked about), and that both ontogenetic language development and phylogenetic language evolution must be conceptualized in an epigenetic and socio-naturalistic framework. I use here the term epigenetic, and I need to explain to you what is epigenesis. Epigenesis is a process of development of organisms. It is a process in which the role of the environment in development is constructive and not just selective. It’s a process in which an initial repertoire is elaborated through experience of a relevant environment, and in which organismic plasticity and informational openness yields to relative, although not complete, rigidity and

© Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_005

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informational closure. Now this is a quite technical definition, and I need to explain it a little bit better. Traditionally there has been a distinction between theories of learning, and theories in which behaviors are innate. In theories in which behaviors are innate nothing is really contributed by the environment. A typical theory of innate behavior and knowledge is Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition. According to Chomsky, each human being is born with a Universal Grammar module, a basic knowledge of language which is innate. And this Universal Grammar is characterized by a number of principles of organization which yield different specific forms according to the particular language which the child is exposed to. These principles are therefore adjusted in their formal realization by the values taken by different parameters; for example word order: subject-verb-object versus verb-subject-object. And the idea is that when the child is exposed to a particular language, that exposure triggers a particular parameter switch, a kind of switch which turns the developmental process one way or the other; but actually the environment doesn’t really add any information because all the information is already there in the genes encoding the innate knowledge of Universal Grammar. In contrast, in the epigenetic approach, we have a relatively simple initial repertoire of behaviours, which you can think of if you like as being innate (I will give an example of this in a minute). In epigenesis, that repertoire is elaborated through experience in the developmentally relevant environment. And that environment itself contributes to increasing complexity. Also, in epigenetic development, development is taking place in a manner which is irreversible, that is to say, as the information comes in and the system builds itself up, the system becomes less and less open to new information and so it becomes more and more of a closed system which is not going to return to its previously simple state. Again we’ll explain this in greater detail as we go along. Now, I’m going to combine this approach, as you might expect, with the cognitive-functional approach to language development, in which to learn a language is to learn to communicate symbolically, in which symbolic communication involves a conventional mapping from conceptualization to expression and in which natural languages are considered to be flexible, multi-level symbolic systems. The mapping in natural languages is from conceptualization to expression, and that is exactly what I was talking about in the previous lecture, in which expression, what is sometimes called form, is motivated by conceptualization, what is sometimes called content. And at the same time, conceptualization is shaped by expression. In other words, the resources that we are given by our language for conceptualizing the situations which we wish to refer to are shaping in some kind of sense the way in which that

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conceptualization occurs. And as a further point, again as I said in Lecture 3, all linguistic conceptualization is contextually situated in a Universe of Discourse that is the universe of communication which language gives us. Now what about grammar in this cognitive-functional perspective? In Cognitive-functional linguistics, grammar is not merely a system of rules at the level of form or expression. This is quite important and perhaps it is something which other speakers in these lectures have made a lot of. As you know, in traditional grammars, the kind of grammars which tend to be used in schools and universities for teaching foreign languages, grammars tell us how to put together constructions focusing on the form. This idea that grammars are about form is also preserved in generativist linguistics, and that is why we can talk about Generative Linguistics as a formalist approach within linguistics. Cognitive linguistics is different, because in cognitive linguistics, grammar is not just a system of rules at the level of form or expression; it’s a conventional system of mappings from conceptualization to expression. So if you want to take the whole system: conceptualization, mapping rules, or mapping schemas if you like, and expression schemas; if you want to take the whole thing together then you can actually say meaning is part of grammar. And that of course is the basic insight which Langacker has given us in his Cognitive Grammar. So in terms of learning language, it is not the case that there are several different processes: of lexical learning, morphological learning and syntax learning. No, it’s all one process. Learning syntax is continuous with learning lexicon and learning morphology. At this point I’m going to remind you of some notions that came up yesterday. Important notions in Cognitive Linguistics include Figure and Ground, which are key to the work of both Talmy and Langacker (the latter deploying the distinction in terms of the concepts of trajector and landmark). Building on those notions we can talk about the basic principles of cognitive-functional motivation. These are the basic principles that motivate the pathways or mapping schemas that connect linguistic conceptualization with linguistic expression. The first of these is iconicity and analogy. As an example of iconicity, let’s take word order frequencies in the languages of the world. In very many languages we find a word order of subject object verb (SOV), we also find quite a large number of languages that have the word order subject verb object (SVO) and some more which have the word order verb subject object (VSO). There are almost no languages, a very very small number, in which the object is canonically the first mentioned syntactic constituent, such as OVS. Why should that be? The most simple answer is the iconicity answer; that is, that in our perception of events and our segmentation of event structures (our partition of

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events into an event schema), the most perceptually salient aspects and the first occurring aspects are the agent and the action, not the patient or the object. Most languages just mirror or iconically duplicate that structure in perception and event parsing. There are very many phenomena in language which are to do with iconicity, and the linguist John Haiman has done a lot of work on this. Analogy is related. Essentially, and very simply, it is the process whereby new expressions are formed by analogy with older expressions, whereby we get innovation in language and we get patterns propagating themselves through the system recruiting new members to that pattern. Let me give you a rather simple example. We can say in English “the street is closed off”. OK, so we have the verb “closed”, which is to do with accessibility to motion; and the “off” is a satellite, to use Talmy’s term, which really means something to do with the prohibition of motion through that obstacle. So I think we can say that “closed off” is an expression for a force dynamic schema, for those of you who are familiar with Talmy’s work. However, we can also say (at least in British English), if the police shut off the street by putting traffic cones in front of the entrance, we can say the street is “coned off”. What’s happening here is that the noun “cone” is being used as a verb, and is being used as a verb in a very particular construction frame. And the original meaning of that noun “cone” (which means a particular geometric shape) has got nothing whatsoever to do with accessibility to motion. But by putting it in that construction frame, everybody knows exactly what you are saying. The process is one of creating a new expression by analogy. This is actually a new kind of conceptualization as well, which is very economically expressed through analogy, which is not ambiguous at all, and which nobody even notices as being something new. However, the minute you notice these kinds of things, and you go to look (in English anyway) you notice the very high frequency with which verbs turn into nouns and nouns turn into verbs, in very specific construction frames—and you see that analogy is everywhere in language. This is a point whose theoretical importance is stressed by the Finnish linguist Esa Itkonen. The next basic principle of cognitive functional motivation, which we have already talked about, is Figure-Ground organization, which is fundamental to flexible construal, so that we can say for example, the microphone is over the computer or we can say the computer is under the microphone. In the first case the microphone is the trajector or figure and the computer is the landmark or ground. And in the second case the Figure—Ground structure is reversed. A third principle of cognitive-functional motivation is topic/comment organization, and this is of course particularly relevant to Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese. I know very little about Chinese. One of a few little bits of general linguistic knowledge that I know, is that Chinese is a topic language rather than

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a subject language, or it is often characterized this way. Topicalization is another way in which we can flexibly construe situations for the benefit of more effective communication with the listener. So a typical example here, let’s carry on with our microphone/computer example would be instead of saying the computer is under the microphone we can say under the microphone is the computer. Especially in English, these kinds of topicalization devices for raising prominence are often used for poetic effect. So, instead of saying something like the night was dark, we can say something like dark was the night, which emphasizes or makes salient the quality of the attribute. A fourth principle of cognitive-functional motivation is perspective and profiling. And here, English offers the number of interesting examples of relatively subtle distinctions. Let’s take this first pair here: The girl in the picture The girl on the poster Now a picture, as you all know, is a two-dimensional surface, and anything that is actually part of that picture is part of that two-dimensional surface. And whether it is a painted picture or a printed poster doesn’t matter, physically speaking, all parts of the picture occupy the same two-dimensional surface. However, in a representational picture, something like a landscape with human figures in it, we would be likely to pick out one of those human figures by talking about the girl in the picture, or the girl with the hat in the picture or something like that. You can all form a mental image of this. But if we are talking about a poster, say a poster advertising a theatre event or a rock concert or something like that, as part of which there is a prominent image of a girl, kind of leaping out at you, then we are more likely in English to talk about the girl on the poster, and in fact it would be very strange to say the girl in the poster. Why is that? It’s in all essentials the same physical relationship, but we use two different prepositions. It’s to do with our own perspectives. When we talk about the girl in the picture, the point of view which is adopted in the linguistic construal is one which has got, conceptually, three-dimensional depth to it. So the point of view is one which comprehends the interiority of the framing landscape or Ground, within which we are located as observer. So we say the girl in the picture, in the same way that we would say the girl in the room, or the girl in the field. Contrast this with a poster, which is very much a two dimensional object, and construed and conceptualized as such. Here, the point of view adopted is entirely external, a point of view in which we view the figure as adhering to the ground, so we conceptualize the girl as being on the poster in the same way that the poster is on the wall, so we say “the

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girl on the poster”. Exactly the same principle applies if you compare the two expressions “the boat on the lake” and “the boat in the lake”. They might be referring to exactly the same physical situation. There is a boat and the boat is floating in the water in the lake. But imagining that you are in a plane and you are flying over the lake and you are looking down at the scene from quite a long distance, and you look down and you say there is a boat on the lake. Now imagine, on the contrary, that you are down there on the bank of the lake, and you want to get the boat in the water: then you say let’s put the boat in the lake. It’s a matter of perspective, proximity and point of view. Before cognitive linguists started to pay attention to them, these phenomena were never noticed, let alone analyzed, in linguistics, because linguists did not take account of human cognitive processes and principles of cognitivefunctional motivation. Another example, which we owe to Langacker, is the example of kinship terms, where we can refer to the same individual in different ways. We can say, for example, Sara is the mother of Jane, but we can also say Sara is the daughter of Mary. The lexical expressions ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ each involve the profiling of one pole, if you like, of a bipolar relationship of kinship and descent. So kinship terms, in their very semantics, involve point of view and profiling. Given these principles of motivation, what kind of features of complexity do we find in the languages of the world? We certainly find grammatical complexity, although, beyond nouns and verbs, it is not certain that any other grammatical classes are truly universal (and some linguists even contest the notion that nouns form a universal word class). There is therefore a wide variation in terms of the organisation of form classes between different languages, but it’s also true that grammatical complexity is a general feature of languages. All languages employ a rich variety of grammatical structures (this is presumably what Edward Sapir meant when he said that all languages display “formally completeness”: see Lecture 10). And of course it is the dimension of grammatical complexity that generative linguists have seized upon in saying that language is a particularly complex (and indeed according to them unlearnable) system. But what I want to say is that grammatical complexity has to be situated within the framework of other dimensions of complexity as well, such as symbolic complexity, involving all of these dimensions of flexible construal and alternate conceptualization which I have been talking about, and also involving displacement or the capacity for virtual conceptualization. Displacement is the use of language to conceptualize and refer to spatially and temporally remote, imaginary, and unobservable things and events, employing systematic constructional means to do so. There is also what we might call cognitive and pragmatic complexity, because among the cognitive semantic resources of all languages are resources

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which specify: location and relations, both static and dynamic, in space and time; the manner of the movement of objects or the manner of the occurrence of events; relations of probability, certainty, obligation, and evidentiality; deictic relations between speaker, hearer and third parties; logical and coherence relations between discourse units; number, definiteness and/or classification and the performative force of the speech act. All languages are not only able to actually perform particular pragmatic functions, but they are able to mark as well as actually perform the function. They are, indeed, able to mark the function and to actually perform the function through the marking: that’s what the philosopher John Searle calls performativity or performative speech acts, which includes the use of such verbs as ‘promise’ or ‘deny’ or ‘warn’. For example, if I say to somebody ‘I promise I’ll pay you back that five pounds tomorrow’, then what I’m doing in uttering the verb promise (which is a performative verb) is actually performing a promise. And there isn’t really any other way that we can incur that particular obligation towards the listener, except by uttering that performative verb. And that’s why people in fact place such importance on such performative verbs. So for example, somebody says I’ll come tomorrow, and the listener might say: “can you promise?” and the speaker might reply: “Yes, all right. I promise.” Now think about this for a moment. There are very many communication systems in the animal world in which communicative functions are carried out by communicative signals, as we shall see in a moment. However, there are no communication systems in the animal world which involve the use of anything like performative utterances. Let me clarify this by giving an example. A dog, for example, can certainly convey in some kind of way the fact that he is threatening. A dog can growl, and bare its teeth, and adopt a posture with its front legs and its haunches up and its tail, not wagging, and its eyes looking very fierce. And any person coming across a dog adopting that posture and making those kinds of noises will know that the dog is adopting what we call a threat position. But one thing a dog can’t do is say: “I’m warning you.” He can’t do that. In human languages we can, we have this amazing flexibility in communicative function. And all languages can do all of those things. So we have extraordinary richness of dimensions of complexity. Here is another example of flexible construal and symbolic power. It exemplifies a phenomenon first identified by Talmy. He calls it fictive or virtual motion. We can use expressions like “the tunnel goes from Dover to Calais.” Dover is a town in England, and Calais is a town in France. And each of them is a coastal town, a port on the English Channel which separates England from France. And as you perhaps know, there is in fact a tunnel which connects England and France, and which is underneath the English Channel. So we can say the tunnel goes from Dover to Calais. But wait a minute! Actually the tunnel

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doesn’t go anywhere. In fact, if it did, that would be a very bad thing. It would be a pretty bad piece of engineering, if it was too mobile. In fact, what we are doing is we are conceptualizing the path of the tunnel—which is a stative locative relationship similar to “the tunnel connects Dover with Calais”—but we are conceptualizing that stative spatial relationship by imaginatively adopting the point of view of a human subject traveling through the tunnel (which of course is what the tunnel is built for). And interestingly, we’re doing it from the perspective of a traveler who starts in England and ends up in France. So that expression would be usually uttered by somebody on the English side of the tunnel, whereas somebody on the French side of the tunnel would be more likely to say the tunnel goes from Calais to Dover. But now we can go further than that. We can say things like: The competition will run throughout the entire weekend, or perhaps earlier this year we could have said something like The Olympics will run from August to September. Now actually competitions, or institutional events like the Olympic Games, do not actually run. They do not engage in physical motion. So what we have here is a metaphoric extension of the virtual or fictive motion construction to talk about temporal duration. I hope you will have noticed that, when we extend a construction schema from something like the tunnel goes from Dover to Calais to something like the competition will run throughout the entire weekend, this is an example of the cognitive-functional principle of motivation which we’ve called analogy. It’s construction through analogy. Now: signals vs. symbols, that’s part of my title. I want to draw a distinction between signals, which are the basic communication devices which are used throughout the animal kingdom, and symbols. Let’s start by talking about signals. A signal is an instruction (possibly coded) to behave. And think of that dog and threat posture. The dog is trying to get you to go away. And a communicative signal, such as that dog’s signal, is a stimulus emitted under stimulus control, usually by a conspecific, a member of the same species. As the dog example shows, communication by signals is not always restricted to con-specifics, because a dog can also warn human by using that signal. Signaling is communication by the co-ordination of individual behavior. Signals are by, definition, indexical signs, if you want to use Peircian semiotics. I just want to say a little bit about this. Signaling is communication by the coordination of individual behavior. By that, I mean signaling is a process which takes place by transmission from one individual organism to another. And it doesn’t necessarily involve what I will be calling shared meaning, or intersubjectivity. Communication by signals is ubiquitous in the animal world, it happens all the time, and humans do it too. A lot of what is often called

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Organism

Response

Figure 4.1 A Non-Communicative Signal.

paralinguistic features, including gesturing, including large parts of what is often informally called body language, consists of signals and signal systems, and much of it we are not conscious of using. Figure 4.1 is a diagram of the simple signal. Now this is a diagram of a noncommunicative signal, say for example, you have here a signal which is the presence of some kind of food, and the organism response to that signal by eating the food. That is a kind of diagram which psychologists, at least, are familiar with from traditional classical learning theory. Now let’s make the diagram a little bit more complicated and talk about signaling systems which are used for animal communication (Figure 4.2). Here we an event, that is something happens in the world which impinges as a stimulus on an organism whose response is a communicative signal, which is then picked up by a second organism that responds by carrying out some kind of indicated behavior. I will try to make this a little bit more concrete by talking about the research conducted by two researchers in primatology, Cheyney and Sefarth. They studied a colony of a species of monkeys called vervet monkeys in West Africa, and they discovered that these vervet monkeys communicated with each other by using communicative signals. Their communication system consisted of a variety of vocal calls, and they distinguish three kinds of calls. I don’t know what they sounded like. But the researchers could distinguish between the three calls and so could the monkeys. Now each of these calls was actually a warning call, in functional terms. And each one of these calls was associated with a particular predator which is dangerous for the vervet monkey. The three predators are eagles, leopards and snakes. And for each call, the monkeys who listened to it or heard it engaged in a particular kind of behavior. For example, if they heard the eagle call and they were located towards the top of the tree,

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Organism1

Response1/ Signal2

Organism2

Response2

Figure 4.2 A communicative signal.

they would go down the tree. If they heard the leopard call, they would go further up the tree. And if they were on the ground and they heard the snake call, the monkey would get up on two legs and sort of scan the ground around it. So this is really an amazingly compact and yet very effective communication signal system. If you see an eagle, that’s the stimulus, organism number one sees this eagle, utters the eagle call, and all the other little vervet monkeys climb down out of the tree. Now notice something about this. In order for this to function effectively as a communication system conferring evolutionary or selective advantage, the monkeys don’t have to know anything about what is going on in each other’s heads, and they don’t have to be orienting towards the same shared segment of reality. There’s no necessary intersubjectivity involved. It just requires a kind of almost mechanical stimulus-response chain. Now, it is kind of difficult to know how much these monkeys do know about meaning, reference and so on. But I would suspect not very much. And you don’t need to attribute complex understanding of meanings to them, because signal systems just work like that, almost as a chain reaction. And I want to contrast that with human language, which is based not on signals but on symbols (Figure 4.3). Conventional symbol systems, including the multi-level symbol system of human language, are grounded in an intersubjective meaning-field. They are grounded in shared meanings. Symbols, to continue a topic which we talked

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Referential Situation

Representation

Symbol Expression

Speaker

Appeal

Hearer

Figure 4.3 Symbolic communication. A modified version of Bühler’s Organon model of language. Broken lines represent joint attention.

about this morning, are representational. Speakers represent, through symbolic action, some segment or aspect of reality for hearers. And it is this representational function which is unique to symbolization, and also is precisely what distinguishes a symbol from a signal. Symbolic representation also is intentional. In other words, there is a communicative intention involved in symbolic utterance. Now, when we think about signals, like the vervet monkey signal, we are not sure, in real terms, what are the real intentions to communicate. I don’t want to say there isn’t any intention. But we can’t be sure that there is, whereas with symbolic communication we can always be sure that there is. Figure 4.3 is a version of Karl Bühler’s Organon Model of Language, Organon being the Greek word for tool. So here language is a symbolic tool which enables the speaker to construct an expression, a symbolic expression, which represents in some way a linguistically conceptualized referent, appealing to the hearer to share this aspect of the world with the speaker. And importantly, speaker and hearer share a mental orientation towards the referent, and it is that mental-orientation which at the highest level of organization we call construal; at its minimal level of organization, it might just be sharing attention.

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Here is this term intersubjectivity that I keep using, cropping up again in relation to symbols. Remember I said that signals are instructions to behave. When the vervet monkey hears the ‘eagle’ call signal, that vervet monkey has actually got to do something, and do it quickly. In contrast, symbols are not directly oriented to changing people’s behavior, although this may be their indirect goal. However, symbols are more fundamentally directed to guiding the construal of the hearer, or interpreter, or receiver, or at least to minimally catch their attention, as in “see that cup over there”. This can only occur within an intersubjectively shared field of joint reference: minimally, joint attention, and maximally, a symbolically constructed and shared Universe of Discourse. What about intentionality? I said that symbol usage is intentional. What do we mean by intentional? That’s a difficult question, because intentionality is itself a concept which is much disputed by psychologists, philosophers and linguists. I want to distinguish between three meanings of intentionality. The first meaning is intentionality as purposiveness or goal-directedness. That is the usual meaning of the word intentional in English. If a child comes along and kicks a football through my window, breaking my window, I might go up and say: “Did you do that on purpose?” and he or she probably would reply, “No, mister. It was an accident.” Obviously, on the one hand, if they did it on purpose it was intentional; if it was really an accident, it was not intentional, but an unintended consequence. There is, however, a second meaning of intentionality which is particularly focused on by some philosophers, and that is the notion of intentionality as directedness to the world, or reference. The idea is this: our attention, or our perception, or our thoughts can all be directed to something in the world, and so can our language, or at least, let’s say, our linguistic utterances. And why do linguistic utterances have this intentional directness? That’s what we call reference, as in “that cup there” or “you see that cup”. That’s reference. But intentionality is involved not just in linguistic reference: even if I just hold the cup up there, and I don’t say anything, there is no linguistic reference but still, if you’re paying attention to it, you are intentionally directing your attention to it. Finally, there is a third notion of intentionality, a derived, higher level notion of intentionality, which we almost might call something like mental intentions, which is our orientation not to some aspect to the world, but to other people, our orientation has towards them as “minded” beings, who themselves have intentions, and who are perspectivally situated experiencers in the same way that we are. And in that sense the third level of intentionality is a kind of intersubjective intentionality. Symbolic communication is intentional in all three senses. It is the purposeful use by a speaker of a symbolic sign to manipulate or direct the mental

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orientation of a hearer with respect to an intersubjectively shared referential situation. In this definition, the purposeful use by the speaker is at the the first level of definition of intentionality. The referential situation involves the second level of intentionality; and to manipulate or direct the mental orientation of the hearer is the third level of intentionality. And, the mental orientation of the hearer may be full-blown linguistic construal, or it may be something as simple as sharing attention. So we could be just engaging in intentional acts coordinating joint attention. And by the way, for those of you are interested in Peircian semiotics, this suggests that even indices and icons can therefore also in a sense be symbols, when they are used symbolically or representationally. That connects to the point that I made this morning, when I showed you a map: the iconic and symbolic signs can collaborate together when they are properly used to serve the representational function. Now, from this analysis, we can start to construct the scenario of the evolutionary emergence of symbolization. First, let’s just imagine something quite simple like the vervet monkey communication situation, in which there is a sender of the signal and a receiver of the signal. But let’s now suppose that the receiver comes to pay attention to the sender as the source of communicative signals. So vervet monkeys start to notice that there exist other vervet monkeys who are giving off the signals, and they start to track the other members of their community, watching out to witness them start to make signals. And this is almost the beginning, not quite yet, but it is almost, it is a sort of little seed for a shared communication, an intersubjectively shared world of communication. But now, secondly, let’s imagine that the sender of the signal wants to make sure that the signal is efficiently sent, that it actually has the effect they wanted it to have. Remember, the signal is now intentionally sent, and the sender comes to pay attention to the receiver as a recipient of some kind of communicated information, in order to verify that the intended effect has been achieved. So now we have a kind of mutuality emerging, in which the members of the community are paying attention to each other: both the senders and receivers. And then the receiver, this is the next step, the receiver starts to pay attention to the evidential reliability of the sender’s signals as a source of information, by checking what the sender is paying attention to, or doing. Why would they want to do that? Well, the answer is that in animal societies, certainly in nonhuman primate societies which have been studied by primatologists, a lot of deceptive signaling goes on. A lot of attempts to deceive the individual who is receiving a signal. Why is that? Well, it’s to do with the two basic things which

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are important in the lives of non-human primates: which are food and sex. What they often try to do is to conceal the fact that they are paying attention to some potential source of food, so that nobody else gets to consume it before they do. And they also try to conceal the fact that they are having sex with another member of the group, because they might get punished for having sex by an individual higher in the hierarchy. So there is a lot of evolutionary benefit in paying attention to not only what the sender is signaling, but also what the sender is actually doing, and that opens up the way to some kind of monitoring of attention. And we are beginning to get here into a truly intersubjectively shared field. And then, finally, the sender comes to pay attention to the receiver’s readiness to reliably act upon the information sent, by paying attention to what the receiver is paying attention to, or doing, because it is advantageous if the signal is acted on in a way which the sender wishes it to be acted upon. So all of this is as it were, a little story, perhaps a rather artificial story, but nonetheless a scenario, if you like, which helps to account for how, once you reach a level of signaling—which is similar perhaps to that of the vervet monkey—out of this, through evolutionary selection, a symbol system might emerge. Now I just want to come back to development. I am going to talk a bit about human development, in the ontogenetic sense. The two next lectures, by the way, are both going to be about cognitive and language development in children. So this is a kind of transition from the evolutionary biological to the ontogenetic, and later in the lecture series we will be coming back to the biological and evolutionary. Remember, this morning I talked about the dual grounding of language. Sensori-motor grounding: which is embodied grounding in the perceptual-motor system in its ecological niche; and discursive grounding: embodied grounding in pre-linguistic communication. Now I will show you again this diagram [see Powerpoint slide] which I think I showed in the first lecture, which is the notion which we owe to Vygotsky of the convergence of two lines of development: Sensori-motor development and pre-linguistic communication, eventuating in symbolic communication. I want to talk to you now for most of the rest of the lecture about communication between infants and their caretakers. A developmental psychologist called Colwyn Trevarthen has looked at the interaction patterns between very young babies and their mothers. And he finds that there are communications of a kind that involves what he calls primary intersubjectivity. In primary intersubjectivity, we have an essentially closed communication circuit, one which is characterized very much by the responsivity of the mother to the baby and the imitation by the baby of the facial expressions, vocalizations and the timing of

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the movement which are made by the mother (Figure 4.4). The mother largely controls the interaction by being responsive to the baby. But you could also say that the baby is sometimes taking the initiative in these—what Trevarthen calls proto-conversations—by taking the initiative, by actually coming out sometimes with new movements, new expressions. However, the important thing about primary intersubjectivity is that it does not involve the sharing of communicative intentions in any symbolic sense. It’s much more about the sharing of the simple experience, as it were, of being together. And something very interesting about primary intersubjectivity is that the timing of it is very important, and Trevarthen has worked together with a musician, who is also a music theorist, and what he finds is that the rhythm of interaction is very similar to the rhythms we find in music. And there is nothing else in any other species which is like this. So this orientation towards the other is something unique to the human species. And you can find it, according to Trevarthen, as early as about three hours after birth. From about six months of age, the circuit of primary intersubjectivity starts to open up to the outside world, infants start to be able to monitor the gaze of their caretaker. The mother looks at something and the baby sort of follows their gaze, more or less in the same direction. So they are building up a kind of zone of joint attention (Figure 4.5). It is not yet true joint attention, but it is the beginning of the responsiveness towards the attention of another, which is the beginning of that third level of intentionality which is paying attention, or an orientation towards, another person as a minded being, already happening from six month of age. True joint attention is what Trevarthen calls secondary intersubjectivity. It appears around about ten months of age, certainly between nine and twelve months, usually around ten months (Figure 4.6). And that’s when both participants in an interaction are able not only to follow the gaze of the other but also to manipulate it. So for example the baby can follow a point by the mother and can also, in the beginning, turn their head towards something, and expect that their mother will follow that gaze and even around about twelve Controls Interaction

Caretaker

Infant

Figure 4.4 Primary Intersubjectivity, Neonates: Trevarthen et al.

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Zone of attention

Monitors

Caretaker

Infant

Figure 4.5 Infant Gaze Following, 6 mo., Scaife and Bruner, Butterworth et al.

months of age will start to produce the pointing gestures themselves, making vocalizations like “ah, ah” and expecting the mother or other caretaker to follow. So now I think you’ve got truly something else, which is you’ve got true intersubjectivity, and this intersubjectivity is often directed to a genuine Figure in joint attention. So you have a real Figure-Ground situation, with a sharing of Figure against Ground. So you have something which is a prerequisite for linguistic reference. So both mother and baby, each of them can direct and follow the other’s attention. And often this takes place also in the form of joint action, in which the caretaker and the infant are actually doing something together, using an object together, like for example the mother may be feeding the baby with a cup and drawing attention to that cup and so on and so forth, so you’ve got a whole routine of participation in joint action as well as joint attention. Sometimes this basic situation is called the referential triangle, because it’s got a triangular kind of structure to it, which then becomes elaborated into the next stage of intersubjective communication, which involves semiotic mediation: referring by symbolizing, and of course by symbolizing usually, but not always, with words. So, for example, the child might say something like drink, or they might produce a word in combination with the gesture such as a pointing gesture. And that combination itself is clearly by now something which is entering into the realm of symbolization. We have gone beyond signals, and we are already in the domain of symbolization involving a true semiotic triangle,

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Figure 4.6 Joint Attention.

where the symbol is representing this Figure in joint attention, and what we are talking about here are the sort of communications which characterize the early utterances of word plus gesture productions of children from maybe 12 to 14 months of age onwards (Figure 4.7). From then, the way is prepared for the elaboration of this communication into truly linguistic conceptualization, in which increasing command of the resources of language enables both communicators to use linguistic expressions to schematize referential situations in terms of Figure-Ground organization, against the background of a shared Universe of Discourse, including shared knowledge of the language (figure 4.8). Of course, this is a highly schematic scenario of the way in which language development occurs. But I think it is a realistic one, and it shows how starting from very elementary relationship between two people in communication, simple responsiveness to signals, like the gaze of another person, can in the right circumstances and given symbolic semiotic mediation elaborate into a full blown linguistic competence. Now that obviously doesn’t happen all at once in ontogenesis, and of course we cannot assume that in the case of evolution, which is a clearly different process involving more than just a mother and a baby, that there are no differences of details in a very long drawn-out evolutionary process.

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Figure 4.7 Semiotic Mediation.

But nonetheless there are lessons to be learned I think about the emergence of symbolic communication in infancy. The first lesson is the primacy of intersubjectivity, first supported by signal-sensitivity. Intersubjectivity is fundamental. I referred in my first lecture to Deacon’s characterization of humans as a symbolic species. I think that we can also quite fairly say that humans are the intersubjective species. But primary intersubjectivity is not initially intentional. Intentionality probably first emerges in praxic action before it emerges in communicative action, by which I mean by that the time the baby is just a few months old, they are learning to reach for objects, to push things around, to bring things close to their eyes to examine them, to reject things as well as to demand them. So intentionality emerges first in praxic action, then in communicative action, and then it is integrated into and co-develops with intersubjectivity, yielding in the end symbolic competences. So the three crucial characteristics of linguistic symbolization are successively emergent in infancy: first, intentionality and intersubjectivity; second, conventionalization, including conventional gestures like pointing, not just conventional words but conventional gestures and body movements as well. And everybody who has got children knows there are certain little movements

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Figure 4.8 Linguistic Conceptualization.

that you make which you share with the pre-linguistic infant, which have become kind of virtualized and conventionalized between you; and then finally, elaboration which in the end yields systematicity and productivity of the symbolic system. Maybe this does tell us something about how this might have happened in evolution, because at this point it is useful to look very briefly at language change. Let’s look at a little bit at some of the processes which underline what is called grammaticalization. In grammaticalization theory, linguists look at how languages change over time, how grammars emerge and change. Here are the cognitive functional principles which motivate grammaticalization. One of them is that the lexical item becomes a grammatical item, so for example in English the noun “front” becomes the preposition “in front of”. Grammaticalization involves, as I’ve already said, iconicity and analogy based upon imagery and experience, the elaboration of mental spaces, perspective and profiling, and the reduction of morphological marking, whereby a lexeme becomes a morpheme. There is a kind of schema of grammaticalization in language evolution, and it’s one which looks a little bit like the schema of development in child

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language acquisition, in which we start out by a new intentional usage which is conventionalized and becomes elaborated through its use in the community, and then becomes entrenched as part of the system which then serves as the basis for new intentional innovations or extensions of usage (Figure 4.9). And I think that is something like the way in which language evolved, once you’ve got the very first step. The very first step would have been into something like a proto-language, which was a limited set of symbols of some kind, not even necessarily verbal symbols. They could have been symbols which were both verbal and gestural. This inventory, this proto-language could have stayed stable over time spans of tens of thousands of years, until for some reason or another, some kind of functional pressure, the schema of grammaticalization emerged, which in the end gives us something like evolutionarily modern languages. Language development and evolution, involves the increasing semanticization of thought, the increasing guiding of thought by symbolic mediation, and the grammaticalization of speech. And my claim is that the schema of elaboration in ontogenesis recapitulates that schema in language history and prehistory, although I’m not claiming the particular stages of development are recapitulated. Let us ask ourselves now the question: when in human prehistory did evolutionary modern human languages emerge? Of course, it is impossible to know

Figure 4.9 The Schema of Grammaticalization in Language Evolution.

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this with any certainty. So what I’m saying now is essentially speculation. But I’m just going to point to some interesting facts. Anatomically and genetically modern humans date from 200 to 150 thousand years before the present. Between 200 and 150 thousand years ago, our species appeared as archaic Homo sapiens. In other words, they were genetically like us, and anatomically they were like us from about 150 thousand years before the present (BP) as well. That doesn’t mean they looked exactly like us, the skulls were slightly differently shaped, but they were like us. We also know from archeology and paleontology, that what archeologists call the “symbolic cultural revolution” only kicked in around about 100 to 40 thousand years ago. The 40 thousand year nearest time dating is from findings in Europe, but findings in other parts of the world suggest that this “symbolic cultural revolution” occurred perhaps earlier, although a hundred thousand years ago is an outer limit. It’s more likely 80 thousand years ago, 70 thousand years ago, something like that. And what do we mean by the “symbolic cultural revolution”? I don’t have much time to say much about this. What I really mean is that is we have evidence of things like cave-painting, artistic representation, the use of the representational function I talked about this morning. But it goes along with other things as well, including stylization in the manufacture of tools, more complex materials in the use of tools and a whole lot of other things. But in any case, it’s clear that there was a very, very long gap—if we take this time depth of 150 thousand years or 200 thousand years as a time span for speciation—there was a long gap between the emergence of our species as biological species, genetically and anatomically, and what looks like the emergence of true symbolization, the emergence of the symbolic species. So here is a hypothesis: for most or at least very large part of the pre-history of our species, we were not “language users”, but our species was a protolanguage user using limited but nonetheless symbolic resources. So language, as we know it now, is a modern cultural invention: and by modern I mean something like several tens of thousands of years ago. So I would say in a way that it was the invention, or emergence, of language that turned our species into true humans, after the biological emergence of our species. So language didn’t come along, I’m suggesting, in one single package as part of our genes. Language is something which was made possible by our genetic endowment as a species, and all the other behavioral and cognitive capacities with this. But that was only a potential, and it had to be actuated in certain cultural circumstances. So my hypothesis is that this symbolic revolution involved the co-evolution of praxic intentionality and intersubjectivity. Neither of these are specifically

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human, although I think maybe true intersubjectivity is specifically human. But the elaboration of joint reference to flexible construal is, without doubt, specifically human. And furthermore I hypothesize that the niche of infancy was the key site of evolution of symbolization. The emergence of proto-symbolization recruited joint attention capacities subsequently selected for in infancy. The cultural elaboration of the symbolic capacity into evolutionary modern languages was driven by requirements for perspectivization and flexible construal which probably were attendant on and consequent on social complexification. And there is a story to tell about this, which probably has something to do with the increasing size of human groups during pre-history. Acquisition of language is facilitated by early plasticity in epigenetic development, not programmed as a “critical period”. I want to contrast here two views of evolution and development. The traditional view suggests that everything in evolution happens at the evolutionary biological and neurophysiological level, which then causes certain effects or consequences at the individual psychological level, which then has further effects at the social or intersubjective, or socio-cultural and normative level. And that is very much the traditional view, that evolution is basically driven from the bottom up by biology. And I believe that many cognitive linguists still hold to that view. They think that our language is just a sort of expression of our biological essence, as it were. And I’m trying to put forward an alternative view (Figure 4.10). An alternative view in which evolutionary biological developments actually have consequences firstly at the intersubjective, sociocultural, and normative level, giving rise to the emergence of symbolization, but also certain communication patterns—particularly between the young of our species, the infants of our species and their caretakers, and their responsiveness to caretakers—which then have fundamental individual psychological consequences, when they capture what’s going on at the biological level. This is because it’s at that point our individual psychology becomes predominantly based upon what Vygotsky called higher mental processes, mental processes driven by symbolic and semiotic mediation. This alternative view, which is the view that I am advancing, is a view of the co-evolution of biology and culture. I will have much more to say about this in Lecture 9. Thank you very much.

From Signal to Symbol to System

Figure 4.10

Two Views of Evolution and Development.

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All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008658.

Lecture 5

Patterns of Mapping: Distributed Spatial Semantics, Cognitive Typology and Language Development The title for this lecture is Patterns of mapping: distributed spatial semantics, cognitive typology and language development. I should start off by saying that I have always been interested in language acquisition and development. And in fact, that’s where I started my work as a researcher, during my doctoral research on questions of language acquisition. The next two lectures both look at language acquisition in connection with cognitive development in children. And I should also say that the more recent research which I’ve done in language acquisition, including what I will be talking about today, is comparative. Because I think looking at acquisition processes in a comparative fashion, comparing between different languages and the way that children acquire them, tells us a great deal about the relationship between language and cognition, and much more than can be gained by looking at acquisition in just one language. For many years, including when I began my own research in language acquisition and development, it was very much a field in which there was only one language whose acquisition was studied, English. That is no longer the case. There are many acquisition studies, in many, many different languages, and an increasing number of comparative studies. The comparative method in language acquisition has been pioneered, I suppose, by one person in particular, that’s Dan Slobin, who has edited a very large number of books on language acquisition and development and the crosslinguistic study of language development. And I have to say that I am very glad to be one of the contributors to feature in a book in honour of Dan Slobin and his work, which appeared this year. Anyway, we’re going to start by talking about the notion of cognitive typology in language and linguistics. What is cognitive about cognitive typology? Because of course linguistic typology is, as a matter of fact, quite an old enterprise. People have been doing typology for well over a hundred years, trying to classify languages in terms of their families and trying to understand what the characteristics of different families are. So why do we now have cognitive typology? Well, there is evident continuity with the program of research which was initiated by and associated with the name of Joseph Greenberg, who tried to © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_006

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understand language typology in order to unearth language universals. But there is perhaps a difference, that cognitive typology is based upon a cognitivefunctional approach which analyzes mappings from conceptualization to expression, a key point that I’ve repeated throughout these lectures. And cognitive typology is concerned not just with universal cognitive motivations of structure, it is also concerned with linguistic and cognitive variation, and constraints on that variation. So, cognitive typology essentially has two complementary goals: To identify invariants or constraints in language structure, in language history and in language acquisition, and to explore dimensions of variation. The overall goal is to understand the relations between these dimensions, what kind of variations go together or perhaps are inversely instead of positively correlated; and their possible relations to cultural variation; and their cognitive correlates in speakers. Whether typological differences actually correlate in some way with cognitive differences—that, of course, is a crucial part of the exploration of the question of linguistic relativity, and has become quite a big research area today. Cognitive typology, culture and thought. The first aim is to establish relations of correlation and complementarity between dimensions of language variation. Viewing, perhaps, language or languages as equilibrated systems, in which, for example, if you put a lot of emphasis on one system, maybe you put less emphasis on another system. For example, if you have an elaborated case system in language, you may have a less elaborated system of prepositions, something like that. The second aim is to correlate these variations with dimensions of variation in the material and symbolic cultures of language communities. This is perhaps a little bit more controversial. But it is certainly what inspires my work, although not everybody’s work. Because, as I said and I hope it will become clear, I view language as part of the general symbolic culture, of a given culture, as part of the semiotic system, and I don’t think it is entirely independent of these. In lecture 6 I will be looking at one study that does that in detail. So, here the notion of semiotic mediation is once again relevant to what we are doing. Especially in relation to the third aim, which is to explore the cognitive correlates in individual speakers and learners of linguistic and cultural variation. Does variation in what languages people are using, and what languages they are acquiring, make a difference to the way that individuals think? The fourth aim, which is relevant to me as a psychologist of language, is to use this evidence to determine the main characteristics of plasticity in the human cognitive system. And by main characteristics I mean not only the openness of the plasticity, but also the extent to which it is constrained, the extent to which plasticity is actually limited. These limits give rise to universals.

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So, methodologically, the best way to do this is to employ converging evidence from different sources, for example experiment and observation, ethnography and field linguistic analysis and so on and so forth. We will be discussing methodological issues in more detail in the final lecture. Let’s now look at how we understand language variation within a cognitive functional framework. One way we can do that is we can say that language variation is a matter of preferential construal. In other words, as we have seen, within any given language, there are different ways that you can construe the same situation. However, not all languages have exactly the same construal devices. Sometimes it is really a kind of either-or situation, you either do it this way or you do it that way. And there may be a situation in which language A prefers to do it one way, and language B prefers to do it another way. Or sometimes the either-or relationship is a kind of “more or less” or “what you prefer” relationship. That’s a methodological point as well, because traditionally linguists have preferred to use absolute categorical distinctions in analyzing languages. I think that increasingly linguists are going to have to also accept the importance of statistical methods. And actually some linguistic phenomena are probabilistic, not absolute, and have to do with preferences and tendencies, and not absolute mandatory distinctions. So languages vary in their preferred patterns of construal. Languages can be viewed in a way as emergent, culturally situated cognitive systems. Now I don’t want to go too far in this. A language is only a cognitive system inasmuch as it is actually used by a speaker. I mean languages don’t actually themselves have cognition; languages don’t think; languages don’t perceive. But they do—because they are systems organized for underpinning construal—they do have influence upon the way in which their speakers think and perceive, because the speakers use them for symbolic communication. So in that kind of limited or perhaps metaphorical sense, we can say that languages are kind of cognitive systems. So we can say, well, that’s the way this language sees the world, and that’s the way that language sees the world. What we really mean by that is that’s the way this language forces a kind of general preference for a particular construal in speakers, as opposed to the way another language forces a different general preference in speakers, in the way they perceive the world. And as I perhaps said, the search for invariants is essentially the search for constraints on variation, there are very few absolute and complete universals. Such universals as there are, are usually kind of constraints on tendencies to vary. So, we are going to be talking in the next two lectures about space. That’s a domain which not only has been incredibly important in cognitive linguistics, and especially cognitive semantics, as you know, but it is also a domain which has been very much a part of my own research for many years. I don’t have time

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to tell you about all my research on aspects of spatial languages in different languages, so I’ve chosen to concentrate on acquisition phenomena and on some of my research on that today in these two lectures. Spatial language and cognition is interesting because spatial conceptualization in language exhibits striking cross-linguistic variation; and variation in conceptualization is accompanied by variation in expressional means as well, and in the mapping patterns from conceptualization to expression. So let’s look at these dimensions of variation in spatial language. When we look at conceptualization patterns, the following kind of things may vary across languages. Frame of Reference is a concept which has been used by the research group led by Stephen Levinson at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Holland. Frame of Reference is essentially to do with the way in which we conceptualize directional relationships in languages. So in English, for example, we can use an absolute frame of reference, based on geophysical coordinates like north, east, south and west. We can also use terms based on a relative frame of reference, such as ‘left’ and ‘right’, or ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’. There are other languages which, for example, only use the absolute frame of reference, and the Levinson group has been concerned to look at the relationship between frame of reference in languages and the way in which people think. Many languages use also body-part terms to talk about spatial relationships, in fact I would venture to guess that all languages use these in some way or the other, because the human body, as would be predicted by cognitive linguistics, is a very important source domain for talking about space. So in English for example, we use expressions like ‘the foot of the mountain’ or ‘the head of the river’. Now, you use such expressions in Chinese as well, but there are some languages, one of which I will be talking about this afternoon, which have a kind of grammaticalized body-part term usage in their way of talking about spatial relationships. There is a group of languages in Central America, for example, some of which use the human body as their basic schematic source, and others of which use the body of an animal—a kind of prototypical four-legged animal, as their basic schematic source. There are also differences in the way in which path is specified, and the extent to which this is detailed. In English, for example, we can say things like the path goes along the river, but we can also say the river winds through the valley, using a manner verb. There are other languages which just can’t do that, they can’t say things like the river winds through the valley, because they don’t have those kinds of manner verbs. Furthermore, the visibility or

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invisibility of trajector is marked in spatial terms in some languages and not others. And of course, speaker’s viewpoint is very important, it’s a foundational aspect of the deictic system. Deictic systems vary quite a lot between languages. So there are lots of different conceptualization patterns, but also surprisingly much variation in the systems of expression. If we think about this in terms of what we might call the traditional parts of speech, the grammatical classes which are used for expressing spatial relationships, we have verbs of motion, from simple verbs of motion like ‘go’ and ‘come’, through to non-deictic directionals like ‘enter’ and ‘exit’, and ‘climb’ and ‘fall’ and so on and so forth. Verbs of motions, you find everywhere. Also verbs of disposition, ‘stand’, ‘sit’, ‘lie’. Locative nouns (including body-part nouns); many languages use body part nouns, like head and foot, or front or back which are used to conceptualize spatial relationships. Verb-derived and nounderived adpositions, placed either before or after the landmark noun as preposition or postposition. Examples would be “in”, “on” and “in front of” in English. Postpositional languages include Japanese, which I will be talking about in this lecture. And another language that I’ll be looking at in these lectures, one of the large Tupi indigenous family of languages families of South America, has an elaborate postpositional system, which otherwise looks quite like a prepositional system of languages like English. Case inflections, which you find in many Indo-European languages, but also other language families such as Finno-Ugrian: for example Finnish has got an elaborate locative case system. Verbal prefixes and suffixes, which you often find in so called polysynthetic languages, which include many native, indigenous languages of North America, where you stick a morpheme in front of, or at the back of the verb, that does much of work that you’ll find in independent particles like prepositions in other languages. table 5.1

Mapping variation as lexical selection

Tr/lm

Cup/Table

Picture/Wall

Dog/Leash

Man/Field

Danish Dutch English Spanish

på op on en

på aan on en

i aan on en

på in in en

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Let’s just look variation and some of its subtleties as a lexical phenomenon. This little table shows the way in which prepositions are used in four different European languages. And along the top here, you can see noun pairs which are meant to be trajector-landmark pairs: cup/table, picture/wall, dog/leash and man/field. And if you go to the English row here, you’ll see the prepositions that we use in English for putting together, as it were, relating the canonical relationships between those trajectors and landmarks. So I’ll go through the languages one by one. In English we say the cup on the table, just like that [pointing]. We say the picture on the wall. Yeah, here we are, there is a picture on the wall [pointing in lecture theatre]. We say the dog is on the leash, and if we are talking about the man in relation to the field, we say that the man is in the field. English belongs to the family of Germanic languages and I have put two other Germanic languages here as well, both of which I know a little bit about. What you see is that if you want to talk about ‘the cup on the table’ in Dutch, you use the word “op”, which is usually translated as “on”: OK., I will do it for you “de kop op de tafel” (Dutch). But when you come to talk about the picture on the wall, in Dutch, you don’t use that prepostion “op”, you use another preposition: “aan”, for the picture/wall relationship. And that “aan” word is also the one you use for the dog on the leash, you say “de hond aan de leiband”, and that’s because “aan” implies not only contact, but also of verticality and support. Still, like in English, if you want to talk about the man in the field you use the word “in”. So, in subtle ways, overall, Dutch, though similar to English, is not identical, it’s different. What about Danish, another Germanic language? Just like in Dutch and English, we have this preposition “på” in Danish, which is usually translated as “on”. When you talk about the cup on the table, you use that word “på”, and like English, Danish uses “på”, the same word, the equivalent of ‘on’, for talking about the picture on the wall. That’s a relief—they don’t say funny things like the Dutch then, they’re much more like the English. But then in Denmark, when it comes to the dog in the leash, they use the word “i” which is their equivalent of “in”. So, you talk about the dog being ‘in the leash’. And when it comes to the man and the field, instead of like in Dutch and English saying “the man in the field”, Danish speakers use ‘på’ and say “the man on the field”. Well, you can try, if you like, to figure this out in terms of some kind of abstract systematic logic. And if you try, you will fail, because it’s all to do with conventional patterns of mapping from schematic conceptualization to expression. And you’ll see that even in three really closely related languages, there can be quite considerable variation. Of course that’s one reason why prepositions are such difficult words for second language learners to learn to use correctly.

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Now let’s contrast these languages with another language, another European language but non-Germanic, a Romance language, Spanish. Spanish is different again. It uses the same proposition “en” for all of these relationships. I mean, the first thing that you learn, if you learn Spanish, is that if you want to say ‘the cup is on the table’, you use “en”, and if you want say ‘the tea is in the cup’, you also use “en”. They’ve got only one “in/on” preposition, so they use the same preposition for all of those relationships. And that’s just the level of lexical variation. There is also, of course, variation in broad classes of schematic grounding. Here we have an example, which I will be exploring in more detail in the next lecture, which is the difference between English ‘in’ and ‘under’. If you take these two schemas, English has different word for expressing them: ‘in’ and ‘under’. Whereas the Central American body-part language, Zapotec, uses a single word, glossed as STOMACH, to denote both of them. English IN

UNDER

Zapotec STOMACH

STOMACH

Figure 5.1 Linguistic marking of containment schemas in English and Zapotec.

Then there is also a kind of variation which can be viewed as a construction parameter. Here we have to mention the path-breaking work of Leonard Talmy, and his distinction between satellite framed and verb framed languages. Here I’ve made a visual representation of this distinction. At the top we have a Portuguese expression. Portuguese is a Romance language, and verb framed. And here we have got the translation equivalent of that in English. In Portuguese, we say “o rapaz saiu correndo”, which literally translates as “the boy exited running”, using a gerundive construction. While the conventional English translation equivalent is “the boy ran out”. What I’ve

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o rapaz

saiu

tr

path

motion

the boy

ran

correndo

manner

out

Figure 5.2 Satellite and Verb Framed Mapping Patterns (Talmy).  

shown is how the different components of the conceptualization schema of motion, trajector, motion, path and manner, are mapped to different parts of the lexicalization of the construction schema in the different languages. And what you see is that you’ve got here a pattern where both motion and path are mapped to the verb of motion in Portuguese: “sair”, a verb meaning exit. OK, that’s an example of a pattern which Talmy calls conflation, the conflation of these two aspects of the schema. So now moving on from there, I am going to introduce a general theoretical framework for talking about this. I am not going to spend a lot of time on the theoretical framework, because I am going to focus on acquisition. So I am going to focus on the application of the theoretical framework. I developed the theoretical framework together with Tania Kuteva. It is called Distributed Spatial Semantics. And the basic idea is that we have to get away from the idea that there is one-to-one mapping between conceptualization and expression when we talk about space. We also developed it as an alternative to the notions of proliferating polysemy in much of cognitive semantics. Similar ideas have been expressed by Felix Ameka, who talked about the conspiracy theory of meaning, the way in which different elements conspire together to give you the whole meaning. Jordan Zlatev talks about Holistic Semantics, the way in which you can only understand the spatial semantics if you take the whole syntagmatic utterance frame into account. And the basic idea is that there is a many-to-many mapping from linguistic conceptualization to linguistic expression. I’ll give you some examples from different languages in a minute. The different patterns of many-to-many mapping can be (1) conflation (as in the Portuguese expression in Figure 5.2). This is conceptualization and this is expression. So you have two aspects of conceptualization conflated in a single lexeme of expression. And then you can have (2) compositionality, which is where you have a single conceptual aspect mapping to a single expression item. You could say that, for example, if you use in English the word ‘go’, which

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is a neutral, basic motion verb, then the motion component for the motion schema maps to ‘go’, but it doesn’t have any path specification in it. So that would be a one-to-one mapping. And (3) distribution is where you have a single conceptual aspect mapping to more than one expression items. We don’t see that in Talmy’s distinction between satellite and verb frame languages. But it is surprisingly common in the world’s languages, and I am going to give you some examples. Now let’s see how verb and preposition “conspire” together in English and Dutch, more particularly in Dutch. In English, we can say things like the vase is ON the table and the picture is ON the wall. We use the simple copular verb, the ‘to be’ verb, for marking that relationship. In Dutch, in common with some other Germanic languages, particularly Scandinavian languages, you basically don’t do that. You can, but you don’t normally do that, it’s not conventional. You would normally use a verb of disposition. So in Dutch to say the vase is ON the table, you use the expression ‘De vaas STAAT OP de tafel’, which translates literally as “the vase stands on the table”. OK, and to say that the picture is ON the wall, you would have to say the picture hangs on the wall. So part of that spatial relationship which in English is packaged just in the preposition; in Dutch it’s distributed over verb and preposition. There are more examples. I don’t really need to go through them. Here [see slides] is an example from a West African language, Ewe, where you’ve got an ‘exit’ verb here, and you’ve got the same ‘inside’ component (or ‘interior’) component in the semantics of the postposition. Ewe uses both prepositions and postpositions. Here is an example from Bulgarian, two examples from Bulgarian actually. Interestingly here, you see this morpheme here ‘do’. It occurs twice in this first example. It occurs first as a verbal prefix and secondly as a preposition, the same morpheme. It means something like ADJACENT+CONTACT. And the same here, you’ve got a verbal prefix ‘pre’ which means through, and a preposition which means above. So you’ve got verbal prefix and preposition both configuring the path here in this language as well as verbs of motion. So that’s another example of distributed spatial semantics. And finally, here [see slides] is an example from Japanese, which is a language which is more likely to be familiar to at least some of you than Bulgarian or Dutch. Anyway, I am not going to try to read this because I don’t speak Japanese. But the English literal gloss of this expression would be “The professor inserts the book inside of the box.” The translation equivalent would be “The professor puts the book in the box.” How do we say this? Here we have “professor”, and ‘wa’ is a topic marker; and then ‘hon’ the book; ‘o’ object; ‘hako’ box; and we can leave this for a moment. Then we have this postposition ‘ni’, which

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is a general locative, means it’s a locative expression. And then we have the verb, which is a verb equivalent to English ‘insert’. Japanese is a verb-framed language, in which path is expressed in the verb. So, you’ve got the path here, and you’ve got general location here; and you’ve got basically the agent and trajector and landmark here. But you can also say ‘no naka’, and ‘no’ is a genitive marker, and ‘naka’ is a locative noun meaning inside. So you can also put something about the path in this case, the goal of the path into a noun. But this is optional, apparently, in colloquial speech, and so is the postposition. So here you have a potential distribution of path to both noun and verb. What does this all this tell us? It tells us that there is an enormous amount of variation between languages, and distributed spatial semantics is actually quite common. And I can’t resist telling you that when we looked at an indigenous language in Brazil, we tried to do a Talmian analysis on this, and we found that it has a very highly distributed spatial semantics pattern which meant that it presented some difficulties for Talmy’s classification, which was quite nice to find. Right, now let’s go back; let’s now ask ourselves the simple question: Does any of this have any bearing on how children acquire language? That’s the question my colleagues and I tried to answer by looking at acquisition corpora of in total five children. Let’s just look again at our basic idea about language acquisition. To learn a language is to learn to communicate symbolically. Symbolic communication involves mappings, conventional mappings, from conceptualization to expression. And natural languages are multi-level symbolic systems permitting flexible construal, so what we looking at is the effects of these cognitive typological variations on the way in which kids actually learn to do these mappings. Now, there is a big issue in language acquisition, which is the relationship between pre-linguistic cognition and the process of the early acquisition of language. Because when children start to acquire language, they already have a developmental history, including the development of pre-conceptual and sensori-motor schemas. And this afternoon, I will say more about that in more detail. So what is the relationship between pre-linguistic cognitive development and early language acquisition? There must surely be some relationship, because language acquisition doesn’t sort of start from nowhere. The question is trying to specify exactly what that relationship might be. And there are two opposing hypotheses. The first is the cognition hypothesis, which predicts that children map spatial relational expressions to universal pre-existing spatial concepts, which have been acquired non-linguistically. Now if that’s true, and if there is very much variation between languages in their semantics, this should give rise to many and predictable errors, because children will try to map their language onto these universal set of pre-linguistic

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concepts. And often they will go wrong, because the universal initial concepts don’t quite map to the semantics of their language. Contrary to that hypothesis, is another hypothesis, which we will call the language-specific acquisition hypothesis, which predicts that children should pay attention to linguistic usage, changing their pre-linguistic cognition to conform with the mapping patterns in the target language, and making relatively few errors. This particular hypothesis is very much associated with the work of Melissa Bowerman. Learning to talk about space. Here is a very brief overview. Movement and dynamic spatial relations are amongst the earliest topics of child language. Children talk about movement in space very early on. That’s not surprising, because movement is very salient. I mean people, including children, talk more about things that are happening, than just static things that they are seeing. From very many studies conducted over many years, it seems that expressions containing meanings equivalent to in/into, out, on/onto, off, up, and down appear early in acquisition. Such expressions appear in the first 50–100 words in many different languages, although the construction types may vary widely. In contrast, terms like ‘in front of’, which mark deictic directional relationships, often appear much later. The psychologist Jean Piaget said that terms like ‘in’ and ‘on’ have meanings that belong to topological space, whereas ‘in front of’, ‘behind’, ‘to the left of’ have meanings that belong to a system of projected Euclidean space. Piaget said that topological space is an earlier cognitive development than projected Euclidean space. He would seem to be right in that prediction. So that seems to support the cognition hypothesis, that these early notions like in/into, contain/ support, up/down and so on are early acquired, whereas projective relations like ‘in front of’ are acquired later. However, some well-known studies by Bowerman cast doubt on this. Her studies seem to show that infants, at the stage when they actually acquire these spatial words, are very much semantic as well as just cognitive. So I call this slide [Powerpoint slide] “the semantic infant”. Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi compared acquisition patterns in both production and comprehension in English, Dutch and Korean. Korean is a verb-framed language with a language-specific verb, which is spelled k-k-i-t-a. Does anybody speak Korean here? No? OK, kkita is a verb that you use when you put two objects into a tight-fitting relationship. And what they found was that children’s acquisition patterns followed the semantics of the languages being acquired, supporting the language specific acquisition hypothesis. So this is the schematic rendering [Powerpoint slide] of the kind of events that Bowerman and Choi let children see as video-taped actions. So you could

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have something like this: putting a block on top of a couple of other blocks; and fitting a Lego brick together with another two Lego bricks. Now, in English both of these would be labeled using the expression ‘put on’. And then you would have a film of putting a photographic slide into a slide carousel. In English that would be marked by “put in”. So in English we have, on the one hand, two support relationships, and on the other hand one containment relationship. But in Korean, it doesn’t work like that. The English spatial system groups the two support relationships together, and distinguishes them from the containment relationship. Whereas, in Korean, it’s these two [fitting the Lego bricks together, and putting a photographic slide into a slide carousel] which go together, or at least have the same verb used for them, because they both involve the type of putting things together: so they fit together without one coming away from the other. So in Korean, these two should go together. Now if it is true, as has been proposed, that children start off with a nonlinguistic concept of containment and a non-linguistic concept of support, the English kids should do well, but the Korean children should get confused. In fact when they tested the children, in both production and comprehension, Bowerman and Choi found that none of them get confused. The Korean children, they knew what was going on in their language, as well as the English children knew what was going on in their language. Bowerman and Choi concluded that actually what is happening in development is that right from the start, children are following the semantics of their language, that’s why I call this the theory of the semantic infant. And that supports the language-specific acquisition hypothesis. Now mind you, this finding does raise a question: where could they get the information regarding these mappings from? Is there nothing going on outside language? Is it only the language, or is there something else as well? But we will leave that question for now. Now, the next study that I am going to tell you about is a study by my colleagues and myself of productive acquisition. (I will tell you about a comprehension study in the next lecture). We examined the transcribed corpora of four children in three languages, looking at the productive acquisition of spatial language. The three languages were English, Danish and Japanese. English and Danish are closely related, satellite-framed Germanic languages. Both languages are prepositional, but the morphology of the locative particle system in Danish is more complex than English. Japanese, by contrast, is a verb-framed language, which also employs optional locative nouns plus a small plus postpositions, only six of them. I believe that there are sixty-something prepositions in English, so Japanese has only one tenth the number of locative particles as

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English. (And here is a reference to a paper in which we have reported this research) [Powerpoint slide]. First of all, let’s compare English and Danish. Lexically, English is somewhat more polysemous than Danish, and the overall lexical diversity of the Danish locative particle system is greater than that of English. Morphologically, Danish has a more complex combinatorial system than English, with basic and derived particles. To try giving you an idea of that, in English you can say put the brick in the cup, or you can say put the brick inside the cup. In Danish you can say something like put the brick “inside in” the cup. Which makes a it little bit more complicated, because they use the derived particles together with the basic particles; because they can collocate them. In Danish, this permits a higher degree of semantic profiling of the spatial relations which are conceptualized. But now let’s compare both Danish and English with Japanese. English and Danish are both satellite framed, whereas Japanese is verb framed. Japanese has only 6 locative postpositions as opposed to English which has sixty-something prepositions; and a small number of locative-partonymic nouns, nouns like top or side—they are not body-part nouns, by the way. Altogether, for conveying spatial relationships, there are 3 relevant and salient form classes in Japanese: the verb, the locative noun and the postposition; as opposed to Danish and English, where there is a principal reliance on just the preposition, or particle. So first of all we looked at two English children, and we found that 8 morphologically and cognitively simple particles were the most frequent in both child speech and speech directed by adults to the child. And they were, for both children, in, on, up, down, to, at, out and over. That seems to support Piaget, by the way, because they are have topological meanings. And those very same highly frequent 8 particles were also the ones which were earliest acquired by these two children. We found in English acquisition, in these two cases anyway, acquisition was rather late and slow, vocabulary only expanding to 6–8 items of these eight types between 24 and 27 months of age. That’s quite late, isn’t it? Two years old, before they are using more than just a few locative particle types. And the children seemed to start from a very small subset, two, three or four of the cognitively and semantically simplest particles, gradually extending their repertoire to include cognitively and semantically more complex ones, making very, very few mistakes incidentally. Semantically, the children seemed to be starting with a core “impetus” meaning, using a strategy of “one item-one meaning”, then following the radial structure of the different meanings or different polysemous senses or use types. And we called that a pattern of conservative learning. They were

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not over-generalizing; they were not sort of making wild guesses. They would stick very much with what they knew. That’s interesting, because that’s not what children do with nouns. They tend to overextend the meanings of nouns, whereas with these prepositional particles they under-extended the meanings and then gradually extended them towards new variants, and with almost no errors, since the basic pattern yielded by conservative learning is one of underextension, not over-extension. Now we turn to Danish acquisition. Again, just like in English, the first acquired particles are the most frequently occurring, cognitively and morphologically simple ones. 7 of the first 8 acquired particles were the same for each of the two children, and 6 of these are cognates with the 8 particles first acquired by the English children. That’s amazing, really. They acquire the same meanings first. And they acquire simple particles first, just like the English kids. However, within the group of 6–8 first acquired particles the acquisition orders in Danish and English were different. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether that just because we only had two children in each sample. They Danish children did seem to go a bit faster than English children, because their vocabulary expansion beyond six to eight items began at 18–24 months and at this point derived particles also began to be produced; although the simple particles, the basic ones, were most frequent throughout the period of study. There was no clear order of acquisition within the different derivational subdivisions of the derived particles. In summary, Danish children, it seems, also employ a conservative learning strategy, but their acquisition appears to be earlier and faster than that of the English children; and consistently with Danish morphology, they produce derived particles earlier and more frequently than English children. You see, in English we also have derived particles, ‘in front of’ is a derived particle as well, because it has got the ‘in’, the ‘front’ and the ‘of’. However, derived particles are more varied, frequent and regularly used in Danish. Now let’s turn to Japanese acquisition; this is actually, I am afraid, based on only one child. Remember, in Japanese there were three relevant form classes: the verb, the locative noun, and the postposition. Locative verbs were acquired before either locative postpositions or locative nouns. Maybe that is not surprising in a verb-framed language. And it’s not only a verb-framed language, by the way, Japanese is also a verb-initial language. You might say it’s a “verb heavy” language, there is a lot of semantic and discourse stress on the verb. Vocabulary expansion began at around 22 months, similarly to the Danish children. At that point, remember—around 22–24 months—the Danish children started to use derived as well as basic particles. Up till this point, the Japaneseacquiring child was only using verbs to talk about spatial relations. However, from that point in vocabulary expansion onwards, he started to use nouns and

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particles as well as verbs. So it seems he is moving out from the base of the verbs to employ the other form classes as well, in this distributed spatial semantic system. Particle use, that is the use of postpositions, remained extremely underextended and context bound in the Japanese-acquiring child; and there were virtually no errors in the use of items from any of the three form classes. Also— and this is important—with Danish and English kids, remember the first six to eight particles acquired by the children were also the most frequent ones in their production, and also in utterances addressed to them. But in Japanese, the frequency of particular form classes in input alone could not account for acquisition. So you could put it like this. This was a strategy which the children appeared to be developing cognitively on their own, and not just as a reflection of frequencies in input. And finally, very interestingly, the meanings expressed by first-acquired verbs in the early stages were cognate with dynamic meanings expressed by the first acquired prepositions in Danish and English. So again, in all three languages the language acquiring children are actually talking about the same thing, using the same meanings or similar meanings. What does all this mean? Well, we concluded that we need a two-phase model of the acquisition of spatial relational language. During the first phase, the child learns to express spatial relational meaning by selections from the form class which is dominant in the expression of spatial relational meaning for the target language. And the items first acquired will not be representative of every meaning in the language. The first acquired spatial meanings will include meanings involving with containment, support, vertical motion, goal directed motion and co-location. During the second phase, the child’s repertoire expands beyond 6–8 items, and you get something like a mini-version of the vocabulary explosion we see for nouns, but later in development than is the case for nouns. And also, at the same time as the number of items increase, the child’s usage will also expand into non-dominant form classes, and this will involve more complex profiling of spatial and motion relations. These results are consistent with Michael Tomasello’s verb island hypothesis. The verb island hypothesis, for present purposes, can be expressed as the claim that the earliest acquired prepositions (in prepositional languages) are used very much like verbs. Furthermore, the cognition hypothesis seems the best hypothesis to account for Phase 1 development, and especially for its semantic content. On the other hand, the language specific acquisition hypothesis seems best to account for Phase 2 semantic and morphological developments. And finally, conservative learning is characteristic of the acquisition process for spatial relational meaning and its linguistic expression across languages. Those are our conclusions from this particular study. Thank you!

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008661.

Lecture 6

Concept, Context and Extended Embodiment: Spatial Language and Cognitive Development I would like to say that I’m grateful for the invitation to talk here at Beijing Language and Culture University. The topic of this talk is “Concept, context and extended embodiment: Spatial language and cognitive development”; it continues the theme of the previous lecture, in that it is about space: the language of space, cognitive development, language acquisition and the comparative study of the development of language. Let’s start with a quote from Benjamin Lee Whorf about spatial conceptualization and language, across languages. Whorf says that “The concept of space will vary somewhat with language as an intellectual tool which is linguistically conditioned.” In other words, Whorf considered space to be one of those cognitive and conceptual domains which would be affected by or display linguistic relativity. We are going to see whether or not this is true, and whether we can detect such relativity effects in early cognitive development and language acquisition. Here is the outline of the talk. I will start by talking about spatial understanding in infancy. As I mentioned this morning, cognitive development does precede the acquisition of language, so we should look at cognitive development in spatial understanding in prelinguistic infants. First of all we will talk about the legacy of Piaget. We will ask the question: Do infants have concepts of space? (I mean pre-linguistic infants). Then we will ask the question: Is space a distinct domain when examined from the point of view of cognitive development? Then we will go on to present a study of the development of early spatial concepts in language, in a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective. Piaget was of course a giant of developmental psychology, and is very important in theories of cognitive development. So we should spend a little time looking at what Piaget said about spatial understanding. In general, his theory posited a developmental progression from sensori-motor understanding to conceptual representation, involving a relatively late emergence of concepts proper. In fact, for Piaget, the emergence of concepts was effectively simultaneous with the emergence of what he called the semiotic, or symbolic, function; which occurs around about the second half of the second year of life; so by © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_007

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around two years of age. And it is important to note that, for Piaget, cognitive development is not something which is domain specific. In fact he believed that development integrated domains, in global stages of development based upon the organization and coordination of actions. This was the principal, key theoretical notion in Piaget’s psychology. He also believed that cognitive development was an epigenetic process, and I have to say that the importance which I give to epigenesis as developmental process, which I have talked about, and will talk about more in subsequent lectures, is something that I have taken from Piaget; although I am perhaps not quite such a universalist as he was. He believed that not only is epigenesis a universal process, but also that the outcomes of ontogenetic development are universal. He believed that cognitive development is a universal process across all children from all human cultures. And, finally, he believed in the priority of cognition over language. Cognition leads language for Piaget. For Piaget, the acquisition of language is a consequence of, and manifestation of, cognitive development, rather than the other way round. So if we ask the question do infants have concepts of space?: this is the answer that Piaget gives. The development of the concept of the object implies a sensori-motor representation of spatial location. For Piaget, the key milestone in cognitive development is the attainment of the concept of object permanence. The object continues to exist, even when it is out of sight or when its location has changed. And so the development of the object concept implies the first representation of the coordination between an object and its location. Piaget also believed that representational understanding, which would be something like the cognitive linguistic notion of conceptualization, dose not emerge until mastery of the object concept itself is complete at around about 18 months. And it is this development in the second half of the second year of life that heralds the emergence of the semiotic function. Piaget also believed that there is a universal developmental sequence, from topological to projective spatial representations, and this is reflected in early language. Now those of you who are here now, and were also at Beihang University for my lecture this morning, will know that the data I presented for you of our studies on English, Danish and Japanese acquisition and development are absolutely consistent with this last part of Piaget’s hypothesis. However, more recently, researchers have questioned other aspects of Piaget’s account, and in particular they have suggested that there is an early understanding of space before Piaget believed to be the case—that is earlier in infancy. More recent research views spatial cognition not just as part of the object concept, but also as part of event structure cognition. Infants’ understanding of the way that, as it were, things happen in the world. And instead of Piaget’s

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tasks which involve the active, bodily engagement of the infant in the experimental situation, recent research uses experimental paradigms, such as habituation/dishabituation, violation of expectation and preferential looking, in which the infants is situated as a passive observer. All of these paradigms employ as an experimental variable the length of gaze the infant focuses on an event, or on aspect of event, as their experimental variable. It is claimed that the advantage of these kinds of tasks is that they do not require the child to have a high level of motor coordination. Instead, the infants can just register and observe things happening in the world. Other people, for the very same reason, question the utility of such methods, saying that in fact it also introduces distortions, but we won’t go into this methodological issue; we shall just look at the results that have been found. A lot of work has done into the relationship between spatial understanding and infants’ understanding of motion. Infants begin to display expectations about motion events in the physical world from 12 weeks of age or less. One of the earliest responses that infants have is the avoidance of looming objects. Objects which appear to be coming towards them in space, getting bigger as they move towards infant along the line of the infant’s gaze. Infants try to avoid such objects, as shown from their physiological reactions when they perceive this motion. Also, infants can anticipate and follow the path of a moving object, even when the path of motion is invisible. So for example, if an object is moving, and the motion takes the object behind another object which is occluding it, a screen or something like that, infants are not surprised when the object reappears from the other side of the occluder. That suggests that they expect the object to reappear. However, they are surprised if the object does reappear, but in the “wrong” place. That suggests that they’ve got quite a good idea, an elementary notion of the path of motion—and of course we should remember that path of motion is a fundamental constituent of the linguistic semantics of spatial motion. We can also look at studies of infants’ understanding of the spatial relationship of containment, and its relationship to occlusion or hiding. Infants of three and half months understand, when one object occludes or hides another, that whether the occluded object completely or partially disappears depends upon the relative heights of the objects. So they understand something about the relationship between the different sizes of objects and whether or not one object will then hide other objects in space. Also they can distinguish between occlusion that’s just hiding behind, and containment, from about 4.5 months; and they can reason about size in occlusion from 4.5 months, but not until 7.5 months in containment events. That suggests that containment is a rather more complicated relationship to understand than occlusion.

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So what kind of understanding do infants have of these fundamental concepts of support and containment, which we saw this morning are present early on in the language of the productive language of children acquiring Danish, English and Japanese? As young as 4.5 months, it seems that infants can distinguish between possible and impossible support events, and are surprised at impossible ones. And by 6.5 months they seem even to understand that balance plays a role in support against gravity. At 9 months of age, infants understand that upright containers are more likely to take their contents with them, when they are displaced than inverted containers, when tested using the infant search paradigm. That result is from work that my colleagues and myself carried out many years ago as a matter of fact. So that is a very simple but very important thing to understand, that if we take a container, and if the container is upright and I move it, then whatever it contains will move with it. [Demonstrating with a cup of tea]. But if I was foolish enough to turn the container upside down, all the tea would spill out of it: it would no longer carry the contents with it when it moves from one place to another. And it seems that infants of 9 months age do understand that; and please note that this is a task which did not use preferential looking. It actually did involve children’s or infants’ motor responses. So let’s try to sum this stuff up. Do infants have spatial concepts? Most of the experiments referred to above (I list a good number of them on the slide) involve an understanding that goes beyond perception, implying a level of spatial representation. This is a tricky notion, and I’ve already devoted one lecture to exploring the notion of representation. Here I’m talking about conceptualization, I’m not talking about linguistic representations. I’m just talking about what we might call psychological representation. I’m not claiming the existence of fully fledged concepts, or anything like that, but what the infant knows does seem to involve categorizations which go beyond immediate perception of the single situation; and it involves the ability to make some kind of perceptual predictions. And this is consistent also with findings in other domains such as object categorization. Particularly in the work of Jean Mandler, who has been probably the most important developmental psychologist looking at the development of categorization relevant to the kinds of things cognitive linguists are interested in terms of image schemas and so on. However, this understanding, so far as we’ve taken the infant’s development, to round about nine months of age, is context-specific, it is not yet generalized, and it is inseparably linked to other aspects of what we might call causal event cognition. These very early understandings of, for example, containment are not understandings of a concept of spatial containment which is separate from, or differentiated from, the schematization of motion for example. So we

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can actually see that spatial understanding can also mislead infants, and give rise to errors in predicting the nature of events and organizing actions. So, for example, infants’ understanding that an inverted container is not a “good” container, and it doesn’t take its contents with it, will actually mislead them; if the inverted container rests on a surface, and the object is underneath it, the container will take the contents with it, but young infants don’t understand that. So this as-yet undifferentiated spatial concept is all very much part of an emergent system of understanding, which is something more than just perception, but something less than true concepts. Now this leads to another rather important question. Often, modular theories of cognition go together with nativism. Suppose, now, that infant development consists of multiple processes of development in very specific and distinct cognitive domains, of which for example space would be one. Then the question is: is space a distinct cognitive domain? In one sense, it clearly is, for adults. If you think about it, when we talk about spatial semantics, for example, as we have been doing this morning, we make such a supposition, that there is a thing—or rather an abstract domain—called “space”. But is space a distinctive cognitive domain for infants as well? Well, I’m not sure about this, and in fact I am skeptical about it. Because spatial notions, it seems, for infants are integrated with—indeed sometimes inappropriately integrated with—other aspects of event cognition. Furthermore, spatial notions do not emerge simultaneously. We’ve just looked at some evidence that motion and gravity have priority. Maybe there is good reason for this. Motion and gravity have a high degree of perceptual salience in the infants’ world. If you drop an object, for example, or if the infant itself is trying to get up and falls over under the influence of gravity. And motion of course is fundamentally important, not just objects moving out of there in the world, but the infant itself being carried around by adults. All of these make sense from the experiential point of view. So I would say the evidence is consistent with the existence of innate predispositions for forming spatial representations, but much less so with the hypothesis of a unified spatial cognition “module”. So what does this tell us about cognition and spatial language acquisition? Or, rather, what kind of hypothesis might we form on the basis of this? Let’s come back to the points that we made this morning. We have seen that pre-linguistic infants have already constructed cognitive representations— which may perhaps be called proto-concepts. Jean Mandler thinks that prelinguistic infants really have concepts, but I’m not so sure that I agree with this, because I think that true concepts require language (I will argue this in other lectures). Anyway, let’s call these representations proto-concepts of spatial relations such as occlusion, support and containment. And if this is so, this can

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give plausibility to the cognition hypothesis, which I already talked about this morning. The cognition hypothesis was expressed as follows by Richard Cromer, who was the first person to give it this name: “We [by “we” is meant language acquiring and developing children] are able to understand and productively to use particular linguistic structures only when our cognitive abilities enable us to do so.” That is the cognition hypothesis, as formulated by Richard Cromer in 1974. And the version that I gave you is a relatively weak version. Actually, it is just about prerequisites, you know, you require a certain level of cognitive development to acquire language. We could also formulate a stronger version of the cognition hypothesis, which would be as follows: The process and content of early spatial semantic development is determined by universal pre- and nonlinguistic perceptual and cognitive processes and structures. That would be the strong version of the cognition hypothesis. Against this we have to see the fact that languages vary very widely in the particular ways in which they semantically organize space—which we did see this morning, right? And this is rather dramatically so, when we compare English prepositions with, for example, Japanese postpositions, or as I’ll show you in this lecture, with body-part locative languages. Then we can ask ourselves: what consequences might this have for language acquisition patterns? The fact of language variation, and the possibility that such variation may affect language acquisition patterns, is what motivates the alternative, competing, language-specific acquisition hypothesis, which predicts that children should pay attention to linguistic usage, changing their pre-linguistic cognition to conform with the mapping patterns in the target language, and making relatively few errors. This particular hypothesis is very much associated with the work of Melissa Bowerman. So here we have two hypotheses on cognition and early language acquisition. The cognition hypothesis predicts that children map spatial relational words to universal pre-existing spatial concepts. Since languages vary so much in their semantics, this should give rise to many and predictable errors; whereas the language-specific acquisition hypothesis predicts that children should pay attention to the usage in the language they are acquiring, changing their pre-linguistic cognition in the direction of the semantics, and making fewer errors. Now for the benefit of those of you who were not at the previous lecture, I should say that the data from our work on productive acquisition of spatial language in English, Danish, and Japanese suggested a two stage or two phase developmental process. The first of these phases is consistent with, perhaps governed by, the cognition hypothesis; while the second is much more

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consistent with the language specific acquisition hypothesis. What we found was that the first 6 to 8 items in the child’s productive lexical repertoire seem to be very similar across languages in terms of meaning, as the cognition hypothesis would predict. But after that children followed developmental pathways that were much more governed by the structure of the target language. However, that was a study of production only. This afternoon we are going to have a look at a study of comprehension, which tries to get much more directly at the underlying conceptualizations that children are acquiring. So I’m going to present some data from the comparative study of cognitive language development in the languages Danish and Zapotec, conducted by Kristine Jensen de López who was my PhD student; in which we found significant differences in performance between the two groups, Zapotec and Danish, which could seem to be motivated by the semantics of the two languages, in both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Now, I have to explain to you something about these two languages. You probably already know something, even if very little, about Danish, but it’s very likely that you know almost nothing about Zapotec. They are two very different languages and cultures. Danish is a Germanic language spoken in Northwest Europe. It is “Western” (in inverted commas, because the notion of “Western” no longer has much to do with geography. If you want to know which of these languages is further to the West geographically, it is Zapotec. The term “Western” in descriptions of culture, in geo-political discussions and so on is a kind of metonym for a whole class of attributes. Let’s not go into to this in detail). So, Denmark is a so-called Western, industrialized society with many canonically unifunctional artefacts. What I mean is that the material culture in Danish society, like the material culture in British society and Chinese society, is highly variegated. Their society has many artefacts which are used for one specific purpose. It also has a high degree of division of labor, with a predominance of non-manual labour. Linguistically, prepositions are the principal linguistic means for expressing spatial relations in Danish. Now we turn to Zapotec. Strictly speaking Zapotec is not a language, but a branch of a language family, or a sub-family. The family is called Otomanguean. Zapotec is a branch of Otomanguean languages spoken in Southern Mexico, in societies that can be characterized as it were as “Non-Western”: an agrarian society, a non-industrial society. It is an indigenous culture and language of Central America. Zapotec society is one in which there exist relatively few artefacts, which tend to be multifunctional. And therefore the things that people make as tools may tend to be used for more purposes than one. And you know, from knowledge of your own society and its socio-cultural distinction between agrarian and urban ways of life, you’ll know that in urban ways of life there are

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many more artefacts employed and they tend to be more specialized; while in agrarian ways of life there are fewer of artifacts, and each one tends to have more functions. (This is a generalization with exceptions). In Zapotec society, the human body is both the principal instrument of labor, because manual labor is dominant, and a culturally salient semantic source domain, because Zapotec is a body part language; that is uses body part locatives as the principal linguistic means for expressing spatial relations. These function just as we in English use body part terms to conceptualize spatial relations in expressions such as “the mouth of the river” or “the foot of the mountain”. However, in Zapotec this spatial relational use of body part terms is regularized and grammaticalized, and employed obligatorily for all spatial relationships. So, for example, where in English we would say “the cup is ON the table”, in Zapotec you would say the equivalent of “the cup is FACE the table”. These body part locative terms have become grammaticalized into, effectively, prepositions. I think you can really say they are prepositions. So this slide [Powerpoint slide] shows a little bit of the Zapotec body part locative (BPL) system. Zapotec BPL terms are regularly, productively and obligatorily used to express location. Lexically, the Body Part Locative is identical to the Body Part Noun. If I say the cup is face the table, I use the same word as the word for the body part, the face. BPLs are preposed to the Landmark NP, that is why they can be considered prepositions, or at least at an advanced stage on a grammaticalization path to being prepositions, with morphological reduction (no genitive marking), and constructional change. The particular variety of Zapotec that Jensen de López studied is San Marcos Tlapazola Zapotec, which is a variety of Valley Zapotec. The principal body part locatives are seven in number and can be glossed in terms of the English words: head, face, mouth, stomach, back, bottom and foot. So just a couple of notes about that. ‘Stomach’ is the general expression for containment; and ‘bottom’ is derived from the rear end part of the human anatomy. Body part locative usage is based upon the metaphorical projection of the human body schema in canonical orientation. In other words, the schema of the human body standing upright is projected onto physical objects, though usage is modulated by pragmatic-functional considerations. The first person to describe the system was Robert MacLaury in an article in 1989. And by the way, it is worth noting that the use of these body part locatives is not only for stative situations. For example if a bird is nesting at the top of a tree, you say the bird is head the tree and if the bird is flying over the tree you also say the bird is head the tree. Because each BPL can be regarded as defining a spatial regional zone which is projected from that part of the object.

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So you’ve got a metaphoric projection of an entire human body schema onto the object, and that schema then gives rise to various zones or regions which are also conceptualized using the relevant body part locative terms. Examples: If there is a chicken on the roof of the house you say chicken head house; if the chicken is in front of the house you say chicken face house; if the chicken is behind the house you say chicken back house; if the chicken is in the window or the doorway of the house you say chicken mouth house; if the chicken is inside the house you say chicken stomach house; if the chicken is on the table you say chicken face table, and that expression could also be used in the case of the chicken being in front of the table. So actually once you see it, it looks pretty logical, right? It works in the way you would expect it to work. And just note here something, related to something else I said this morning about human and non-human body part locative schemas: There is a closely related language or language group called Mixtec, from the same region of Mexico. Mixtec also uses body part locatives, but the Mixtec schema is based on the shape and morphology not of a human being, but of a four legged animal. The Mixtec system was described by Claudia Brugman, and George Lakoff writes about it in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Now, to focus on something on something specifically relevant for us, let us compare the English and Zapotec containment schemas. In English, if we view the landmark object as a container which could be indeterminate in size, it could be either something of the size of a cup or a basket, or it could be something bigger like house or dwelling. In English if it is a relatively small thing, let’s put it this way, if it is like a basket, then this [left] is expressed as an “in” relationship, and this [right] is expressed as an “under” relationship. In fact, as the landmark object gets bigger in English, if English IN

UNDER

Zapotec STOMACH STOMACH Figure 6.1 Linguistic marking of containment schemas in English and Zapotec.

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you really get to the size of the house, this [right] could also be an “in” relationship in English. Anyway, for smaller objects, this one on the right is an “under” relationship; whereas in Zapotec they pay no attention to the orientation of the container, as it were, and both of them, whatever size the container is, are marked by the BPL “stomach”. Both of them are expressed by the term “stomach”. We did some experiments with young children, comparing Danish and Zapotec children doing exactly the same experimental tasks. And these experiments were actually based upon some experiments that I carried out in English some years previously. As we continue, everything I say about the way the Danish children responded, you can also take to be representative of the way the English children in earlier experiments responded as well. And the two kinds of experiment were: one was a linguistic experiment and the other one was completely non-linguistic. The non-linguistic experiment was an imitation experiment in which the young child of around about 2 years of age was required to imitate an action resulting in a particular, spatial configuration; and the objects we used were little grains of corn and small baskets. So in the action imitation task, the experimenter had a basket and a little grain of corn and put the corn either “in”, “on” or “under” the upright or inverted basket. And then the child is given identical objects and they have to imitate the action of the experimenter with their own basket and grain of corn. In the language comprehension task, only the child had a basket and grain of corn, and they were asked to carry out an instruction to bring about a spatial configuration of the type we would label in English In, On, or Under the basket. Of course, for the Danish children, the prepositional equivalents were used, and for the Zapotec children, the words which can be glossed as head, stomach and foot were used. OK? Now so there are the baskets in upright or in inverted orientations. This is placing the corn inside the basket and on top of the basket and under the basket. [Powerpoint slides]. Now let’s analyze the results we obtained from this experiment. The spatial configuration produced by each child for each trial was coded. In other words, the actual end-state which the child produced, either in the action imitation task or in the language comprehension task, was coded independently of the semantics of either language. And then response type frequencies were counted and compared across conditions and languages. Table 6.1 gives a breakdown of the participants (or subjects) by age and language group. You can see that there were more Danish than Zapotec kids. It is quite difficult to get enough kids in the village, so the number of Danish participates was higher. And they were not so well balanced between male and female the in Zapotec sample. And these were the age groups, children between 17 and

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Concept, Context and Extended Embodiment Table 6.1

Subjects by age and language group

Age groups

Age range

Danish

Zapotec

Toal

Group I

17–24 months

Group II

25–35 months

Group III

36–46 months

10 male 9 female N = 19 19 male 2 female N = 35 9 male 8 female N = 17 71

5 male 1 female N=6 5 male 11 female N = 16 7 male 4 female N = 11 33

15 male 10 female N = 25 23 male 28 female N = 51 16 male 12 female N = 28 104

Totals

24 months, between 25 and 35 months and between 36 and 45 months, so we can safely say these were not pre-linguistic infants. They were language acquiring children from the second half of the second year of life onwards. Table 6.2 gives a breakdown of responses to the Language Comprehension task. You can see immediately that, for the Danish children, if we take the “inside” response of the child, whatever the actual instruction was, in the language comprehension task the number of responses in which the child put the grain of corn inside the basket was much higher than any of the other responses. Whereas, given the design of the experiment, they should have the same number of inside, on top of and under responses. So the Danish childrern’s responses showed a bias towards inside placements. We can call this a canonicality effect, since it reflects a bias towards acting so as to bring about a canonical containment relation between the upright (canonically oriented) basket and the grain of corn. This is the same pattern that my colleagues and I found in earlier work with English-acquiring children. What about the Zapotec children? That bias was not there: there was no canonicality effect. There is no statistically significant difference in the frequencies of inside, on top of and under responses. That’s what we found in the language comprehension task. Now let’s look at what we got in the action imitation task—in which the child is just imitating an action on the part of the adults without any use of spatial language. No prepositions in Danish; no body part terms in Zapotec; only the request to “Do what I did.” And incidentally this is a really great methodology, because you would be surprised how willing little

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Table 6.2 Responses to the language comprehension task by language group Language Inside

On top of basket

Under INV Basket

Under upright basket

Beside INV basket

Beside upright basket

Other response

No Total response

DK

118 (28%) 47 (36%)

55 (13%) 27 (20%)

16 (4%) 0 (0%)

2 (0%) 0 (0%)

7 (2%) 3 (2%)

6 (1%) 2 (2%)

38 (8%) 8 (6%)

ZAP

184 (44%) 45 (34%)

426 132

Table 6.3 Responses to the action imitation task by language group Language Inside

On top of basket

Under INV Basket

Under Beside Beside upright INV upright basket basket basket

Other response

No Total response

DK

131 (31%) 58 (30%)

100 (23%) 56 (28%)

1 (0%) 0 (0%)

4 (1%) 0 (0%)

21 (5%) 24 (12%)

ZAP

166 (39%) 60 (30%)

3 (1%) 0 (0%)

0 (0%) 0 (0%)

426 (100%) 198 (100%)

children are to imitate your actions. They love it. They really are very happy to do this. And what we find here (Table 6.3) is that in the Danish case we still have a preponderance of inside responses, which is again not the case for the Zapotec kids. What I’ve done next is shown in Table 6.4, in which all responses are grouped into 4 main response types, labeled: in responses, on responses, under responses and other responses. These are the actions of placing the grain of corn inside, on top of or underneath the basket, while everything else the children did counts as other responses, including when they didn’t respond at all. And I’ve displayed in the same table action imitation and language comprehension tasks, for both Danish and Zapotec groups. What we see here again, very clearly, is that in the Danish group, the “in” responses are higher frequency than the “on” responses, which are higher frequency than the “under” responses, in both action imitation and in language

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Concept, Context and Extended Embodiment Table 6.4 The four main response types to the action imitation task and the language comprehension task by language group Task

In responses

On responses

Under responses

Other responses

Total

Action Imitation a Danish Zapotec Language Comprehension b Danish Zapotec

39 % 30 %

31 % 30 %

23 % 28 %

 7% 12%

100 % 100 %

44 % 34 %

28 % 36 %

13 % 20 %

15 % 10 %

100 % 100 %

Between group differences in response patterns for each of the subtasks: a) 2-sided Test Pearson Chi-Square, p = .034. b) 2-sided Test Pearson Chi-Square, p = .013.

comprehension tasks; and that is not the case for the Zapotec children, and these between group differences are statistically significant. What do these results mean? The two language groups differed significantly in their response patterns on both tasks. These differences were parallel across tasks, across the language task and the non-linguistic task. The patterns for each group, the Danish and Zapotec, on the linguistic and non-linguistic tasks resembled each other, but differed from the patterns of the other group. The Danish children showed a In>On>Under frequency pattern which we can call an in preference, or canonicality effect. Why do we call it a canonicality effect? Because if you take a container such as a cup, or in this case a basket, the canonical orientation of the cup or basket is upright and its canonical function is to contain things. So the canonical or socially standard orientation and function is one which would lead you to an ‘inside’ response. And that’s what the Danish children do; and when we, in an earlier set of experiments, did the same experiment with English children (using cups not baskets), we observed exactly the same canonicality effect; which tells us something. It tells us that these children’s representations of spatial relationships are bound up with and related to their understanding of object function and use, and the social norms governing their orientation. The Zapotec children showed no such pattern or effect. In effect, they were just as happy to put the grain of corn inside, on top of or under the basket.

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These differences were not solely due to relative frequencies of correct vs. incorrect responses. Although the Zapotec children made fewer errors than the Danish children, both groups made erroneous placements. However, the pattern of errors for the Danish children was different from that of the Zapotec children. Why was this? The differences between the groups on the language comprehension task where the children are asked to make a placement of the grain of corn could be accounted for by the language specific acquisition hypothesis. It could be that in Danish they have been diverted by the object function of the basket as a container. It could be their knowledge of the canonical function of the basket which is leading them to produce this error pattern. Whereas we might say that Zapotec doesn’t linguistically profile any relationship as canonical containment (as do English and Danish, with their spatial prepositions). Zapotec lacks terms like “in”, and its BPLs are not associated with canonical containment, but rather with the part of the object and its metaphoric schematization on the model of the human body. You could then hypothesize that the Zapotec children are not being misled by the functional object properties and object orientation. And therefore their response patterns are much more evenly distributed amongst the different required end states. And this would be consistent with Jensen de López’s longitudinal production data (which I’m not talking about this afternoon) in which she found, perhaps not surprisingly, that Zapotec children used the body part locative terms appropriately and correctly more or less right from the start, with very few overextensions; which is also consistent with what we found in Danish, English and Japanese productive acquisition patterns for spatial language. So the language specific acquisition hypothesis can account for the language comprehension data, but it still doesn’t account for the differences on the action imitation task, in which there was no linguistic instruction, in which the instruction was basically just “do what I do”, imitate what I am doing. How do we account for that? To explain the difference in performance on the non-linguistic task, we could appeal to a Whorfian effect. We could suggest that the language that the children speak, or are learning to speak, is already affecting their non-linguistic representations or conceptions of the world. But is this really plausible at such a young age, when they are really only at an early stage of acquiring language? An alternative explanation might be found in the cultural practices of Zapotec community members using baskets as both containers and covers. This is what Jensen de López found in her ethnographic observations of life in this village. This is a quote from an article we wrote about this: “The Zapotec

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culture makes use of a smaller variety of artefacts than the Danish culture, and tends to employ them flexibly and multi-functionally. In the village where the Zapotec study was conducted, baskets are commonly used in ‘inverted’ orientation.” We put ‘inverted’ there in the inverted commas (or ‘scare quotes’), because from our point of view a basket with its opening downwards is an inverted basket; but maybe from the Zapotec point of view, it’s just as much canonically oriented as when it is what we would call “upright”. In the Zapotec culture, “Baskets are commonly used in ‘inverted’ orientation as ‘covers’ for tortillas”—which are kind of maize or cornflower pancakes— and other food items, and also “they are stacked for storage in inverted orientation”. So, they are stacked as a kind of cone, one on top of another. “These baskets are also frequently used in inverted orientation in children’s games, for example in catching chickens. Inverted baskets are sometimes placed over brooding chickens in order to keep them on their eggs, so that the eggs will hatch. If we suppose that the Zapotec containment schema involves constraint by the landmark of the location of the trajector, it would seem that in this culture, at least, the schema is not canonically associated with an orientation of the container with its cavity upwards.” So maybe these findings tell us something not just about the language, but also about the relationship between language and cultural practice, and the meanings of objects, at least that’s our hypothesis. So, here is my conclusion: Objects and spatial relations are not just physical, but also socio-cultural objects and relations. Biologically based spatial cognition, which maybe does begin with certain innate perceptual capacities in human infancy, is embedded in interwoven, culturally specific non-linguistic and linguistic practices. It is through their participation in such practices that children gain mastery of culturally and linguistically appropriate spatial cognition. And this takes us well beyond the Linguistic Relativity theory proposed by Whorf: because it leads us to conclude that the right question is not “does language determine thought?”, which I think is not actually the case, but rather “How does language both express and entrench cultural variations in universally constrained patterns of thinking?”. So, I will end this lecture with an apposite quote from Gary Palmer from his book Towards A Cultural Linguistics: “Language both expresses and constitutes world view, but could only fully determine it in a culture that lacked other means of expression and communication.” And amongst other means of expression and communication are the artefacts of everyday life, the cultural practices surrounding those artefacts of everyday life, and the objects that have meaning within cultural formations and cultural practices. Thank you!

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008664s.

Lecture 7

Space, Time, Semiosis and Cognitive Artefacts: Evidence from an Amazonian Culture and Language Firstly I would like to thank my colleagues and hosts here at Beijing Normal University for so kindly inviting me to give this talk. Before I start, I should acknowledge the support of the European Union in financing the research that I’m going to talk about. And I should make it clear that I’m talking on behalf of our research group, which includes Wany Sampaio from the Federal University of Rondônia, Brazil; Vera da Silva Sinha, and Jörg Zinken—my colleagues who like me were at the University of Portsmouth at the time that we carried out the research. I’m going to pose a riddle to you, and I would like to give you a little clue, OK? Very often, a riddle is sort of the inverse of a metaphor. It starts, as it were, with the source domain of a metaphor, expecting the hearer to give an answer by the identification of the target domain from knowing the source domain of a common metaphorical mapping. This is a riddle which I came across in reading about one of the ancient central American Civilizations of pre-Columbian America—the Mayan Civilization. So this is a Mayan riddle. The riddle is: What is a man on the road? Can anybody give me an answer? Another clue: the answer to this riddle is in the title of my talk. TIME [spoken by one of the audience]. Thanks very much! So some of you will recognize this is an example of a metaphor that we find in many cultures: LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Here, “the man on the road” metaphorically represents, as it were, progression through life’s journey. So time, by a process of metaphorical/metonymical condensation, becomes a man on the road. This is an outline of my talk. I’m going to talk about the hypothesized universality of space-to-time analogy in language. I’m going to talk about cognitive artefacts and time. I’m going to talk a little bit about the people who were the participants of the study (I’m talking about the Amondawa people). I’ll talk about time in the Amondawa language and culture, how time is expressed, and the parts of the day and seasons in this culture. I’m going to ask the question: is there Time-As-Such in Amondawa? I’ll explain this notion of Time-As-Such. And then I’ll raise a number of issues, and try to seek tentative conclusions.

© Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_008

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Cognitive Linguists have proposed that there is a universal tendency, and perhaps a universal expression of that tendency, across languages, to map spatial motion to temporal motion; to employ a metaphoric or analogical mapping between the conceptual domains of space and time. We can cite much linguistic evidence to support this hypothesis. The recruitment of locative words and constructions to express temporal relationships in language is widespread. I will give examples in a minute. These examples are from English but they are typical of Indo-European languages. And one of the things that I would like to ask you to do as we go through this lecture, in common with some of the other lectures, is to reflect a little bit about your language and culture, and to see how what I say fits with your experience of your language. In English, for example, we say the weekend is coming, using a basic motion verb, to come. We can say the summer has gone by. We can say he worked through the night, using a prepositional phrase. We can say the party is on Friday, again using a propositional phrase. We can say he is coming up to retirement, again using a motion construction, or we can say I am going to get up early tomorrow, using the “gonna” construction, which can be found in very many languages. Here are some conceptual schemas which have been proposed by cognitive linguists to organize space-time analogies underlying constructions such as the ones I’ve just shown you. We have the schema of an Experiencer moving through a time landscape. So, for example, he is coming up to retirement involves the movement of the Experiencer through a time-landscape towards a goal or landmark. We also have a schema in which events move past the Experiencer in a time-landscape, such as the summer has gone by, or Christmas is coming up. These two schemas are respectively called “Moving Ego” and “Moving Time”. In both “Moving Ego” and “Moving Time” in the English language, and in the vast majority of languages that have been studied, the past is conceptualized on a metaphorical time line, or within a metaphorical time-landscape, as being behind the Experiencer. However, there are languages in which there is a converse schema, in which the past is conceptualized as being in front of the Experiencer and the future behind them. One such language is an indigenous language of South American, Aymara, which has been studied by Rafael Nuñez and Eve Sweetser. When Aymara participants are asked about this, they say the past is in front of them, and they justify this by saying that the past is known but the future is unknown. You can see the past, but you can’t see the future. When we talk about events in the future, if we use the front-back (sagittal) plane to make gestures, we tend to point to events in the future in front of ourselves. Although in fact more commonly, English speakers use the left-right

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axis in gesturing to future and past. So in contrast, the Aymara, if they talk about the future, they gesture behind or to the left of them. So here we have a conceptual schema which is expressed in gestural communication as well as in language. And I have heard it said that the ancient Greeks also had the same schema as the Aymara, which would make sense, given the Greek preoccupation with the notion of fate, in which, of course, all of us move towards an irrevocable and yet unknown fate. There is also another schema, which I call positional time, which is the notion of time as a kind of spatialized sequence of co-present events, rather like beads on a string. This is the notion of time which underlies before/after constructions in English, in which, for example, we can reverse the order of mention of events, so for example in the future I will be able to say things like I was in China before Christmas, but I could also say Before Christmas I was in China. And this notion of positional time also underlies grammaticalized time in tense systems, in those languages which have tense systems, which, of course, is not the case for all languages. Now the question I want to ask is: is all of this Universal? Well, some people have claimed it is. Their claim rests on various reasons, including the assumption that there is a kind of natural analogy between space and time, and it has also been claimed that some aspects of neurological structure motivate this universal. Well, it is true that the recruitment of spatial lexical and grammatical resources for conceptualizing time is very widespread. So much has been established. However, research into space-time analogies in language has only investigated a limited example of languages and cultures. And this is a problem, because in such research, time is presupposed to be a distinct cognitive, and hence also linguistic domain in all languages and cultures. The idea is that all languages and cultures have this domain called Time. And I call this notion of time as a kind of abstraction, the notion of Time-As-Such. Of course, Time-As-Such is a concept which can be lexicalized in words like “time”. But I mean more than that. I mean the idea that there is a conceptual domain called Time, within which events occur. And I want to question whether this concept is universal. The other question that I think has never been properly posed is whether space-time analogies are a fact of language, or of cognition, or of culture? Is it primarily a cognitive phenomenon which is due, for example, to structure and processes in the human brain; or is it a cultural phenomenon, or is it somehow both of these? Now, at this point, I want to introduce you to the notion of cognitive artefacts. Those of you who have been to my earlier lectures know that I have placed a great deal of emphasis on the work of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky, in attempting to integrate cognitive linguistics with socio-cultural

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approaches to language and thought. The notion of a cognitive artefact owes a lot to Vygotskian cultural-historical psychology. What is a cognitive artefact? Cognitive artefacts can be defined as those artefacts which support conceptual and symbolic processes in specific meaning domains. Of course, all artefacts are cognitive in some general way, because they are products of cognition as well as physical practice. This cup here is a relatively simple artefact, which instantiates the concept of containment, as we were talking about on Sunday. And it is intentionally produced to fulfil the function of containment. But when I use the term cognitive artefact, I’m talking about a very specific subclass of artefacts, which enable us to carry out reasoning processes, or symbolically support reasoning processes in specific meaning domains. Here are some examples: notational systems such as writing systems or number systems; dials such as the dials you will find in a car or instrumentation dials on machines for reading out, tyre pressures or something like that. Calendars are cognitive artefacts, and I will be paying particular attention to calendars; or compasses, for example, are also cognitive artefacts, a Chinese invention actually. And the point about such cognitive artefacts is they enable people to do things in a way which they would not be able to do without such artefacts. They actually are transformative of human cognitive power. Now another thing is that the cultural and cognitive schemas I have talked about in earlier lectures—the cultural and cognitive schemas organizing, for example, time and number—can really be considered as dependent on, and not just expressed by, cognitive artefacts. So what I’m trying to say is that complex number systems, standardized number systems, depend on having number notations. That is, it is not the case that the number notation just expresses a concept of number which exists independently of that notation. Rather, the notation makes possible the number concept. Furthermore, if you think of time as it is expressed in a calendar for example, let’s take a cyclic notion such as the days of the week, such as when we give names to the days of the week as in English: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; and we embed these into a calendric system. What exactly are we doing? Are we taking concepts which already existed independently of that notation and independent of that organization into a calendric system? No, we are not. We could not even think of the days of the week without naming them, and without having some kind of cognitive artefact for representing that schema. Cognitive artefacts can be extremely complex. In the case of the cognitive artefacts which support human cognition in the temporal domain, they often are. They also have a history. They did not come into being all at once. They are part of human cognitive history, if you

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like. So the question I want to ask concerns the notion of “Time as Such”—a particular idea of what I also call “reified time”, the notion of time as somehow independent of the flow of events that actually really constitutes phenomenological time for humans. The question is whether this concept of Time as Such also has a history, whether we should look upon it as a concept that is not natural but culturally constructed. And here I want to come back to the notion that I have introduced to you in earlier lectures, of what I called extended embodiment. Many of you know that cognitive linguistics is an approach in linguistics which emphasizes the importance of embodiment, and in particular the human body as a privileged source domain for thinking about abstract conceptual domains. And of course I followed that insight when I discussed in Lecture 6 body part locative languages such as Zapotec. But in my view, embodiment does not stop with the corporeal human body. The embodiment of human cognition goes beyond the human body to incorporate artefacts, and amongst them, cognitive artefacts. Here is a quotation from the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He wrote: “The body is our general medium for having a world …”, then he went on to say, “sometimes the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world.” And that is exactly the point that I’m trying to make, by introducing this notion of cognitive artefacts. Cognitive artefacts are part of extended embodiment, the extended embodiment by which we project around ourselves a shared cultural and cognitive world. Here [Powerpoint slide] is an example of a cognitive artefact in the domain which we are talking about today, which is time. This is a medieval clock, a medieval clock which is still to be seen in the Cathedral in the Swedish city of Lund. Such medieval clocks can be found in many ancient cities of Western Northern Europe and Central Northern Europe as well. Let me bring to your attention the complexity of this artefact. Up here, you have a clock face: as a matter of fact, it’s a 24 hour clock face. Here you have a little automaton, and once a day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, these little guys come out and they circulate around here while the clock rings a chime. This face here is a face which displays years, and around the rim you will see the signs of the zodiac, not the Chinese zodiac, but the European zodiac. So this tells us something about the complexity of cognitive artefacts, and something that is amazingly striking is that for example monthly, yearly and hourly time interval systems are represented here cyclically, by a circle. Now that cyclical schematization of time, involving a kind of circle or wheel, emerged simultaneously with the emerging mechanical clock. Early mechanical clocks, whether these were Chinese water clocks or early European medieval clocks, did

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not have a face. They didn’t have this cyclical schema, actually they just used sound. The whole point of the early clocks in medieval Europe was to regulate labor in the field, it was only later the notion of the clock face was invented, so you see that these schemas, and the cognitive artefacts that organize, them are historically emergent. Calendric systems too, I’m going to suggest you, can be considered as instruments or artefacts which divide the “substance” of this rather fictional notion of Time-As-Such into quantitative units. Calendric systems have a recursive structure in which different time interval units are embedded within each other. And calendar systems are cyclic and, very importantly, they depend upon numeric systems. If we don’t have numbers for counting time intervals, you can’t have a calendar. OK, all of this was a sort of preamble. Now I’m going to tell you a little bit about the community with whom we did our field research in the language and cultural conceptualization of space and time, the Amondawa. The Amondawa are an indigenous group of around about 115 people, a very small community living in the State of Rondônia in Greater Amazonia, Brazil. The first official contact between this group and the outside world was in 1986. The language they speak is a Tupi Kawahib language, which is a sub-branch of the Tupi language family, which is the largest language family of South America. Tupi languages have actually been described in the ethnographical linguistic literature for centuries, ever since the Portuguese went to Brazil. The Amondawa language has been described, and ethnography has been conducted, for more than 10 years. All the speakers are bilingual in Amondawa and Portuguese except the 2 oldest people. By “bilingual” I don’t necessarily mean they are bilingual in the sense that they have an equivalent competence in two languages; I just mean that most people speak two languages in the sense that they are able to communicate in both of them. There is a school in the village in which the language of instruction is Amondawa. Just to give you an idea of indigenous people and their languages in Brazil [Powerpoint slide]. Each of the dots on this map of Brazil represents an indigenous language, there are more than 200 of them, all are indigenous language communities. And the group that I am talking about is one of these communities right up against the Bolivian border. Now I’ll tell you a little bit about the social organization of this group. It is based on exogamous marriage and division into two “clans”, or what anthropologists call ‘moitiés’ or moieties, meaning “half”, so that the community is formed of two groups. The two groups are called Mutum and Arara (or Kanidea). This kinship structure determines the onomastic, or naming, practices of the group. So it’s in fact the woman who marries out of her moiety into her husband’s moiety. And that is the rule: they have to marry someone of

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the other group. Each of these groups is named after a bird. This is a mutum, a dark colored ground dwelling bird, not a flightless bird, but they do spend most of their time on the ground. Here is an arara, (arara is actually the common name in Portuguese, the original Tupi name for this bird was Kanidea). And it’s a very brightly colored parakeet, which lives in trees, so you have here a kind of opposition between the ground and the sky, between dark and colored and so on. That’s [slide] the village. These houses are not traditional dwellings; these houses have been built since contact. There is a lot of stuff I could tell you about this, but I won’t. Each of these dwellings now houses a nuclear family, parents and children. Here are some photographs of the Amazonian natural environment [slides]. Here is a woman with a child. One of the things you can see here is that she has tattoos on her face. And this is part of the traditional culture. Part of the research we have done has been to examine the typology of spatial motion in this language; you have seen this slide in earlier lectures. Have a look at satellite versus verb framed mapping patterns. I’m not going to go this in detail, because it is not the main point of this lecture. But there is an important point be made, which is this: supposing we want to look at mappings from space to time in a given language, we have to be sure that we have lexical and constructional resources in the spatial domain to be mapped onto the time domain, right? So we examined the semantics and grammar of space and motion in Amondawa, and what we found is this: Tupi languages such as Amondawa employ a variety of form classes including verbs, postpositions and adverbs to express locative relations and motion in space. I am not going to go into detail in this lecture about Amondawa conceptualizations of space and motion; that research appeared in a festschrift for Dan Slobin, who has done a lot of work on the language of motion events. Anyway, you can see everything marked red here is a locative term, a motion verb or a locative postposition or, in this case, a deictic adverb. So you can see, although I’m not going to go through this in detail, you can see that there are a lot of constructional and lexical resources in Amondawa, the language has quite complex locative constructions, including gerundivisation which is quite typical of verb-framed languages. And these are the form classes, OK? Path conflating motion verbs, a go verb, an exit verb, an enter verb, an ascend or climb verb and a descend verb. Locative postpositions, which are obligatory, which are rather familiar in terms of their meanings. Many languages have these kinds of rather polysemous adpositions. And directional and deictic adverbs, which are verb derived, including inside, coming towards speaker and going away from speaker.

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Our analysis of the Amondawa space and motion system suggests the following: Amondawa regularly employs path conflating motion verbs in a wide range of construction types, and is “basically” verb-framed, in terms of the typology that Len Talmy has offered of motion constructions in languages. But it is not well characterized as a typical verb framed language. It also has some features of what Slobin calls “equipollent” languages, such as serial and multi-verb constructions, and a strong preference for the specification of landmark in the construction. Amondawa also has a profile of highly distributed spatial semantics, in terms of the theoretical approach that I was talking about on Sunday, with a high degree of specification of the path, in motion constructions. This Tupi language tells us much about the adequacy of existing cognitive typologies, in fact it tells us that they perhaps are not quite sensitive enough to all dimensions of variation, but there is nothing truly “exotic” about the language. Of course it’s unfamiliar, it’s unfamiliar to us the analysts, and unfamiliar to you. But it’s not particularly strange—if you know anything about languages in general, you can quite quickly get the idea of how Amondawa works. And there’s certainly nothing impoverished about the conceptualization and expression in Amondawa of motion in space, in terms of complexity, too, it looks like any other more familiar language. What about time in Amondawa? The Amondawa grammar and lexicon of time? The first thing to be said is that there is no abstract word meaning “time”. There is no word in Amondawa meaning “time”. It’s not the only language about which that has been observed. In general, the languages about which that have been observed are usually languages of non-technologically advanced cultures. Secondly, past and future are not expressed in verbal morphology. There is no verbal tense system. Well, that’s not so unusual either; as you well know, Chinese has no verbal tense system, either. And there are many other languages which do not have a verbal tense system. There is, however, a complex nominal aspect system in Amondawa—so what does that mean? We are used to the idea that temporal aspect is expressed on the verb. What does nominal aspect look like? Well, it just means that things like futurity, or already having happened, are expressed on nouns. And you could say it would be a little like English expressions such as “ex-wife”, or “my house-to-be”, or something like that. So aspect is marked on the noun. There are only four numerals in Amondawa, and I will say more about this. We think this is very significant. Some people find it difficult to believe this, they often think this is just one of those tall stories when we speak about languages which don’t have complex number systems. But there are languages known to only have 2 numbers. Amondawa has 4.

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There are no cardinal chronologies, in which are expressed things like ages of individuals, and there are no ordinal chronologies, such as yearly or monthly calendars. They don’t exist. What does exist, I will tell you about. So here [slide] is the Amondawa number system. ‘One’ is this term “pe´i”; two is this term “monkõi”; three is expressed alternatively either by monkõiape´i or ape´imonkõi, which are both combinatorials of one and two—I’m not even going to try to pronounce this. That’s the number system. And you know we’ve tried very hard to ensure that this is accurate, and we think it is. How is time expressed in this language? Well, there are various particles, of which in some cases one is dependent on the other, so for example, if we want to talk about events occurring in the future, we have these particles here nehe, poti or poti … nehe. The different usages involve various intensifications of futurity. The same is true for past. In context, for example, the morpheme “ki … ko” could mean something like ‘yesterday’, but it doesn’t mean specifically yesterday, it could be yesterday or the day before yesterday, right? “ko” means now, it could mean today, this day. “Ko´emame” means something like when it is morning, which would be like tomorrow in the morning, etc. So how these terms are interpreted is very much dependent upon the context of situation. So here are some examples, where the particles expressing future or past are highlighted in red, a proximal future or a distal future or a past [Powerpoint slide]. Now, I said that Amondawa doesn’t have a calendric system, so what do they have? Do they have any way of talking about the passage of time on, as it were, a large scale, involving changes in the ecology and vegetation brought out by movement of the earth around the sun, and so on? So the answer is yes, they have a system of naming of seasons. There are two seasons: the first season is the dry season and it’s called Kuaripe, which is derived from the noun “Kuara” which means “sun” and the postposition “pe” which means “in”. So that’s the dry season, and this season has 3 subdivisions, which more or less correspond to the beginning, the middle and the end of the dry season. And there is another season, predictably enough the rainy season, which is just called “Amana”, which is the word for rain. And this also has 3 subdivisions corresponding to the beginning, the middle and the end of the rainy season. These seasons mark changes in the weather, and they are also correlated with planting, because Amondawa is a small scale agricultural society; and has been for a long time. They do hunt, and they do fish, and they do gather in the forest but you can’t call them a hunting-gathering society, because they do cultivate crops as well and that’s a traditional practice. And in fact, linguistic

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KUARIPE

AMANA TUIN AKYN AMANA AKYRIMBA’U AMANA (AMANA EHĀI)

O’AN KUARA

AMANA KUARA TUIN (AKYRIRIN AMANA)

ITYWYRAHIM KUARA

Figure 7.1 The Amondawa Season schema.

reconstructions of proto-Tupi suggest that the time depth for naming agricultural activities and implements goes back around about 2000 years. So we could draw something like a seasonal schema of the Amondawa schemas which would look something like Figure 7.1. Amana, Kuaripe, Amana. One succeeding the other. Is that the way the Amondawa themselves think about it, or is this schematic representation our invention as external analysts of their culture and community? We tried to answer that question. We tried to answer it by doing an investigation, as best as we could, of how the Amondawa people themselves think about the seasonal schema. This slide is not very good, is it [Powerpoint slide]? It’s a video grab from the film of the task we did. What you can see (or not see!) here is one of our language consultants seated here. Here you have got paper plates. What we did was we gave the consultant paper plates, and we asked them to place these plates in such a way that each plate represents one of the subdivisions of the rainy and seasons. And he did that and he produced this kind of structure that you can just see. He just put one after the other, using his right hand, starting on the right and going over to the left and then going back again. What he did was he did it in such a way that was easiest for him to physically accomplish. The final shape is a function of the distance between his shoulder and where he placed these paper plates. He didn’t make any attempt to make a circular schema, and he didn’t try to make it a straight line, either. Although it was linear, he sort of doubles back on himself, so that there was no necessarily left-right or right-left canonical order to this. It was really basically just sequential, and linear, though not rectilinear. What about the day? You know, we segment times of day by clock time, right? By hours, minutes, and even seconds. For Amondawa, the day is divided

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into the morning, the afternoon and the night. It’s also further divided by customary activities such as the times of waking, working, eating, resting and sleeping, each of which has got a name, and names that time of day. And night, of course, is marked by the disappearance of the sun, and darkness. This lexical item for “night” also has the meaning “black”. The interval systems of season and day have sub-intervals, but there is no superordinate year. There is no word in Amondawa for a unit comprising the dry season plus the wet season. There is no year. There is no name for the week or for the lunar month. They are aware of, and are able to name, and do name the phases of the moon in terms of what the moon looks like, but they don’t seem to use that to mark time intervals. There is one application, we think, of the 4-item numeral systems to time intervals, which is enumerating moons, which are probably lunar phases, but we are not even sure about that. That’s something we need to investigate further. But we can really quite reliably say that there is no calendric system; whereby day units are integrated into weeks, and months, or anything like that. There are no names for days, there are no names for weeks, and no names for months; and there is no concept of “year”. Something that particularly interests me about Amondawa culture and society is the way that they conceptualize stages of human life. In a system of naming individuals, what anthropologists call the onomastic system, the Amondawa people change their names several times during their lifetime, so any individual is born with just one name, and then later loses that name and gets another name, and then still later gets another name and so on through the stages of life. And these names are dependent upon facts about life stage and kinship. So from these names we can infer the individual’s rough age, life stage, let’s say, gender, social position and the moiety to which they belong. Here [slide] are some examples of these names. The life stage is on the right. So you have a new-born baby, and depending on whether they are male or female, belonging either to the arara or mutum moiety, they get one of these names. But then when they get older, they get another name, or if another child is born, they sort of move up the stack, as it were, and they get the next name up, because within the same nuclear family, you can’t have two kids with the same name, although there may be two kids with the same name within the moiety as a whole. And even if there is no other child born, eventually they get a new name anyway. This is at least the traditional way in which they do things. There is a problem in relation to this particular social, cultural practice, because the government keeps records of people for purposes like health provision. The government doesn’t like to have people’s names continually .

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changing, so they tend to give them one name and that’s the name that they stay with for the rest of the life. And that’s just a very small, telling example of the way in which contact between traditional cultures and the outside world rapidly gives rise to changes in these cultures, and disappearance of traditional practices. So we really have to go on studying traditional cultures before their diverse and unique cultural practices, as well as their languages, become a thing of the past. Questions about this onomastic system: the inventory in the previous slide is incomplete, but it is true that the inventory of proper names is both restricted and systematic, in other words, you can’t invent your name. The inventory of names is a kind of quasi-closed class. So does this indicate a sort of minimal grammaticalization of the naming system? And if so, that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Because we think of “time” as being something which is constructed in tense and aspects systems. For the Amondawa, the nearest thing they get to grammaticalization of time, outside of these particles they use for time reference, is actually their personal naming system. The structuring of time by events and activities. In our culture, time intervals are structured by cognitive artefacts such as calendars and watches. These artefacts impose a quasi-static cultural model on the schema of Moving Time. In other words, I know, as it were, that one day succeeds another. But if I have a calendar up on my wall, I can see all of these days simultaneously, which is a kind of quasi-static cultural model of this notion we have of Moving Time. In contrast, Amondawa time is structured by events in the natural environment, and in particular seasons; and in what the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called the social habitus of activities, events, kinship and life stage status. We can diagram Amondawa time, but there is always risk of distorting it by imposing “Western” (inverted commas) cultural schemas of cyclicity and/or linearity. Let’s think a little bit about the notion of “events”. By definition, I suppose, events occur in time, not just in the sense of what I have called Time-As-Such, this kind of cultural construct of time as an abstraction, but also in time as a phenomenological or experiential dimension. However, the conceptualization of an event as occurring in a temporal plane, or in a temporal landscape, requires a schematization of motion along a path defined by intervals. So, supposing I say something like the salt is gone, what sort of the utterance is that? Is this an utterance about time? No, I don’t think so. I’m using a verb of motion, of the kind that is often mapped onto temporal relationships, but the expression “gone” in this case has much more the meaning of absence or disappearance: that what was present now is absent. In the same way, little children in English, language-acquiring children will often use the expression all gone to signify the absence of something which was there before. Let’s take another example. The summer is gone. Well, this

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looks a little bit more like a metaphorical construction, using a spatial motion verb to talk about movement in time. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s more analogous with the salt is gone, with the difference that it is an abstract, temporally extended object, the summer, rather than a concrete and spatially extended object, the salt, that is now absent. Another example: next term is coming. Here we are getting much closer, I think, to a genuine metaphorical construction of time as based on spatial motion. The point I am trying to make is that all of these expressions employ motion verbs, but I would suggest they are not all temporal expressions in the true sense. Even the summer is gone is more about disappearance, or can be thought of as being more about disappearance, than as being about events in Time-As-Such. How can we further determine how Amondawa culture and language structures time? What we did was, we conducted another informal field experiment, in which we used small objects which we designated as being seasons (the rainy season or dry season), and we used small human figures as well. And we moved these around, and we tried to get people to talk about the appearance and disappearance of seasons. What results did we get? We got expressions like this: the sun or the dry season goes now, and the sun has crossed. The sun or dry season is coming. This is very interesting. It means there is nothing in Amondawa language or culture that prevents people from using verbs of motion to talk about events which are not actually really physical motion events. (Admittedly, there is a methodological problem here, because we were using this small installation model in the experiment). There was physical motion of the objects, but the point is that they participants used words that denote seasons and time intervals. So there’s nothing, either in the lexical and constructional inventory of space and spatial motion, or in the semantics, which prevents speakers from using motion verbs, or other locatives, together with words signifying temporal entities. The point, however, is that when we looked at what Amondawa speakers do spontaneously, they certainly have not elaborated this into any kind of system, and they don’t talk about time in terms of spatial motion on a regular basis. If we cannot find Moving Time and Moving Ego expressions in Amondawa, is there a positional time based on the intrinsic front-back frame of reference? Well, again we find that we can elicit, using our instillation model, expressions like the rainy season is moving in front of the dry season, or the night is coming up behind the sun. Remember, all of these expressions refer to models in which small objects represented times of day or seasons. Well, so we elicited such expressions. But we never managed to record anything like this occurring in spontaneous speech. In other words, I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Amondawa people are just like anybody else, in that they’re able to use spatial terms to

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talk about temporal intervals, at least when they provoked to do so by circumstances, including the circumstance in which we actually kind of give them models, and small objects, and get them to talk about what’s going on. But they don’t do it as part of their everyday linguistic practices, and they don’t have conceptual systems like calendars which are based on this. And they don’t have terms equivalent to ‘before’ and ‘after’. These things just don’t exist. This research raises a number of questions. Firstly, I think that the claim that space-time metaphors are universal presupposes the idea of Time-As-Such to be a separate, autonomous cognitive domain that is universal in all cultures. The question is whether such a notion of Time-As-Such, as an abstract, reified domain, is possible at all without cognitive artefacts for measuring time; which itself would involve an extended numeric system. Therefore, is it the case in all cultural contexts that time is conceptualized by employing spatial metaphors? We think the answer is no. We think that in Amondawa, time is conceptualized in terms of events in the natural environment, or in the social habitus of activities, events and social structure, including kinship and life stage. And this could also be why time is apparently minimally grammaticalized in Amondawa, as well as not being regularly talked about in metaphoric terms. We are aware that there are a lot of methodological issues involved here. And the first methodological issue is that when we say we haven’t found evidence of something, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Fieldwork methods require long term intensive investigations. And although our team did about ten weeks of field work, extending over about five months, it’s not enough. There are certainly gaps in our data, and perhaps systematicities we have not noticed and analyzed. The second methodological issue, of which we were not really aware when we started this research, is the way in which concepts of time in Amondawa culture, just as in our culture, are bound up with social norms and conventions. For example: here is a little abstract from an interview with one of our consultants. In this interview, the researcher (who was a woman) said to the (male) consultant: “Your wife can’t make lunch at the usual time tomorrow, so she moves it forward”. What the researcher was trying to get at was whether moving forward means bringing it towards the present or pushing it further in the future. And the language consultant replied: “My wife always makes lunch at pyryrym kuara”, which means mid-day, when the sun is the highest. So the researcher then says: “OK, it’s me. I have to move the lunch forward.” And the language consultant said “Then you are a lazy woman”. Because the point is that for these people, an activity or event, and the time of day at which the activity or event conventionally occurs, are so bound together that pulling

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them apart means violating a social norm; and that’s why in some ways it’s quite difficult trying to convey to the consultants the meaning of these metaphoric mappings like “moving forward”. Does this mean that we should conclude that the Amondawa are “a people without time”? Well, they do not have a calendric system. We have found no evidence of spontaneous Moving Ego and Moving Time constructions. We tried to look for spontaneous stative Positional Time constructions involving terms like “before” or “after”, by doing other experiments which I haven’t talked about. We haven’t found any evidence of that either. There is no grammaticalized tense, and there is no lexicon of Time as Such. And, although there is a complex space and motion system, and we have evidence of fictive motion constructions in space, there is no convincing evidence of conventionalized linguistic space-time mapping. Talmy has this notion called fictive motion, which I talked a little bit about in earlier lectures. Fictive motion involves something like, if we say, the mountain range goes from north to south, OK? We use this motion verb go, all right? But in fact, the mountain range is not going anywhere. What we are doing is, we are linguistically conceptualizing the path of mountain range in terms of the direction of motion of a fictive or virtual observer, who might travel along the mountain range. Another example: we could say something like the path goes to the river. Now, we’ve tried to elicit constructions like that in Amondawa, and speakers had no problem in producing such utterances. So it’s not as if Amondawa people are reluctant to take spatial motion verbs and use them in what we might call metaphorical, or analogical, or quasi-metaphorical constructions. In this case, they do it. The point is they don’t do it spontaneously in constructions that conceptualize and express temporal relations. And the reason, we think, that they don’t do that is cultural. It’s not something to do with the language in itself. On the other hand, there is a complex nominal aspect system. The Amondawa, like all human groups, are able to linguistically conceptualize inter-event relationships which are, by definition, temporal. They do talk about future and past, in other words. They lexicalize past and future in temporal deixis. They have at least three event-based time interval systems. That is to say, they have the time interval system of seasons, they have the time interval system of days, and they have the time interval system of life stages. And when I say they conceptualize inter-relationships, they are able to tell narratives in which one thing follows after another. They have cultural narratives of the collective past and mythic narratives. So it would be just wrong to say that the Amondawa are “People without Time”, or that the Amondawa language is a “Language without Time”. What they lack, as it were, is a notion of

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Time-as-Such, as a domain which can receive metaphoric or analogical mapping from space. My conclusions: Claimed universals in temporal cognition and language, and particularly the universality of metaphoric mappings of spatial motion to time, are motivated by compelling inter-domain analogical correlation, because motion occurs in time, and may be facilitated by neural structure. That could be true. However, the linguistic elaboration and entrenchment of space-time mapping is culturally driven. “Time as Such” is not a cognitive universal, but a socio-cultural, historical construction based in social practice, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts, and entrenched in lexico-grammar. Linguistic space-time mapping, and the recruitment of spatial language for structuring “Time as Such”, is consequent on the cultural construction of this cognitive and linguistic domain. We need to re-examine the notion of cultural evolution and its place in language and cognitive variation, without postulating universal pathways of evolution and culture, and by situating cultural practices in social ecology and habitus. And now I will take this one step further, and say that we can now specify this as a particular hypothesis in relationship to the linguistic and cognitive representation of space and time, which we called the Mediated Mapping Hypothesis. The widespread linguistic mapping (lexical and constructional) between space and time, which is often claimed to be universal, is better understood as a “quasi-universal”, conditional not absolute. Though not absolutely universal, linguistic space-time mapping is supported by universal properties of the human cognitive system, which (together with experiential correlations between spatial motion and temporal duration) motivate linguistic space-time mapping in linguistic conceptualization. However, the linguistic elaboration of this mapping is mediated by number concepts and number notation systems, the deployment of which transforms the conceptual representation of time from event-based, to time-based time interval systems; eventually yielding the culturally constructed concept of Time as Such. The conceptual transformation of time interval systems by numeric notations is in large part accomplished by the invention and use of artefactual symbolic cognitive artefacts such as calendric systems. And in the absence of this, we don’t get the notion of Time as Such and we don’t get metaphoric space-time mapping. Thank you very much!

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008667.

Lecture 8

Participation, Practice and Cultural Learning: Children’s Play as Acts of Meaning My talk today returns to a theme which keeps recurring throughout my work, because I started off as a developmental psychologist. Today my main topic is cognitive and language development in children, with a focus on children’s play. I will be using Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s Conceptual Integration (or blending) theory to examine children’s play, but I will be doing it in a slightly different perspective than they use themselves, in which I view Conceptual Integration as a process which involves collaboration, communication and joint action, to produce blends which are productive; rather than as a process which takes place only within the heads of individuals. So, if you like, I am taking a more dialogical view of the process of blending. My general goals are to integrate the Vygotskian cultural-historical or sociocultural approach with cognitive-functional and cultural linguistics. Within this, I try to adopt a materialist approach to semiotics and cognition, and I will explain what I mean by that. But roughly speaking, it means that I emphasize the importance of the material bearers of meaning, and of the materiality of representation. First I want to remind you of a much-quoted dictum from Vygotsky’s work, in which Vygotsky says: “Every function in the child’s development appears twice: first on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological) … All the higher [psychological] functions [claims Vygotsky] originate as actual relations between human individuals”. I will just recapitulate what this means. By higher psychological functions, Vygotsky means all those cognitive capacities and processes that can be viewed as in some sense unique to the human species, including at least some kinds of memory, including autobiographic memory; many kinds of reasoning; and of course language itself. Vygotsky emphasizes that we learn how to use language, and furthermore that language is transformative of human cognition, within contexts of participation. Participation is defined by Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin, a conversation analyst and an anthropologist, as follows: Participation consists of actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_009

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I put that talk in italics, partly because I think the important thing is, it is not just talk, it is participation in modes of joint action, which include talk. And here is an interesting question, an interesting theoretical question for all of us who are interested in language, which is really: what is language, and what are the boundaries of language? Because, of course within linguistic theory, we tend to think of language as that which is capable of being systematized and formally described as part of what we call the system of language. But there is another way of thinking about language. That is everything that is involved in some kind of practice in which language plays a role, and the key sites of the practices in which language plays a role are contexts of participation in joint action, which involve the intersubjective construction of meaning. Having said that, Goodwin and Goodwin also recognize the need, as they put it, to “expand our notion of human participation in a historically built social and material world” by attending to “material structure in the environment”: and this is precisely the point that I am trying to make. In fact, this is a common thread which runs throughout this lecture and the previous two lectures: the importance of materiality in meaning. So, my purpose is to foreground the semiotic aspect of materiality, and the material basis of meaning, and to analyze its role in participatory learning and development. Materiality is fundamental to understanding semiotic mediation. We owe the notion of semiotic mediation to Vygotsky, whose explanation of its operation in cognition and in cognitive development, focused on the internalization of conventional signs originating in contexts of discursive practice. Although Vygotsky attributed great importance to the formative role of language in the emergence of what he called “inner speech” and “verbal thought”, his employment of the concept of semiotic mediation also encompassed the use of non-systematic signs, including objects-as-signifiers. Here we can recall the famous example, that perhaps I also talked about in an earlier lecture in this series, where Vygotsky talks about the way in which a mother ties a knot in a handkerchief to remind the child to give a note, or to pass on a message, to the child’s teacher. The knot in the handkerchief serves as a sign, and the semiotic mediation of memory assists the child in recalling the message which they have to give to the teacher. As anybody who has children knows, children are incredibly bad at remembering to pass messages onto their teachers, or to give messages from the teachers to the parents and that’s why teachers often give them a little note. The semiotic mediation serves as a mode of what Jerome Bruner calls the social and interpersonal scaffolding of cognition. Now let’s try and situate this issue a little bit more widely in approaches within theories of cognition to the relationship between mind and materiality,

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or matter and mind. The common-sense philosophy of science, and of most scientists, is some kind of materialism. However, the common sense philosophy of many philosophers, logicians and, indeed, many linguists is some kind of idealism. Logicians, and especially formalist linguists, like to talk about mind as consisting of ideas, or structures of ideas or ideal forms. Both materialism and idealism can be, or at least can claim to be, realist, that is, they claim to be talking about real structures: whether these are structures in the material dimension of reality, or structures in some kind of proposed ideal realm of pure forms. The emphasis on embodiment, as advocated by, amongst others, cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson, has to be seen as part of a materialist philosophy of cognitive science. Even so, many cognitive scientists including, I am afraid, Lakoff and Johnson themselves at times, seem to be tempted by a kind of dualism, which seems falsely to offer the best of both worlds. Often this dualism takes the form of a strange entity called the “Mind/Brain”. I will give you a very simple critique of the notion of the Mind/Brain, from the point of view of the Shared Mind. My brain is part of my organism and it belongs irreversibly to that organism—that is to my organism. Nonetheless— and this harks back to my first lecture of this series in which I talked about differing conceptions of the mind—nonetheless, to the extent that my mind is a human mind and a cultural mind, it is also the case that my mind is a shared mind, and that everything that I do as part of my use of cognitive and communication processes involves calling upon shared resources. That is to say, the Shared Mind exists in a Shared World, and the problem with the notion of the Mind/Brain is that it completely ignores this dimension of sharedness in attempting either to reduce the mind to the brain, or to suggest that the mind is somehow located solely in the brain. In contrast to this, I want to offer a perspective which I call the materiality of representation. It seems to me that the notion of representation, which is so central to cognitive science, should be thought of not as a relationship between mind and reality, that is to say, a reality which is somehow entirely external to mind, but rather as a cognitive and semiotic relationship which exists within, and which is actually constitutive of, human ecological reality. Because I am a scientist, I believe that all reality is material, or, let’s say, materially based. Of course we can quibble about what is material, and so on, and the extent to which quantum mechanics, for example, can tell as about the subtleties of matter. I certainly don’t want to suggest, in saying that all of reality is material, that all of reality is like some block of stone. That’s not what I mean at all. What I do mean is that all reality is in some sense susceptible

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to a description in terms of materiality, although that description in terms of materiality does not exhaust all aspects of reality. Some levels and properties of reality are in fact irreducible to their material base. I will mention two examples of this. One is money, and the other is marriage. Let’s take money first, which is an example given by the philosopher John Searle. When I use money as a medium of exchange, to exchange goods, for example, if I buy something from another person, I exchange the commodity which I am buying for a monetary token of some kind. That monetary token may be a coin, or a note, or for that matter it might just be an electronic transfer between two bank accounts, but the point is that the significance of that monetary token is not reducible to the material substance which guarantees its existence, as it were, in the material world. Another example is given by institutional facts such as marriage in human societies. The relationship of marriage, as Searle himself has insisted, comes about as a result of performative speech acts by means of which two people are designated, by some individual who is authorized to do so, as now standing in that particular institutional relationship (of marriage) which is socially and culturally recognized and authorized. If two people get married, there is nothing in the material character of the two individuals which changes, between their unmarried and married states. In fact, the change is a purely semiotic change. It’s not a change in the material substance of the individuals. You cannot examine the organism of a person to determine whether or not they are married. You won’t actually get an answer. And for that matter, you can’t, either, examine the material structure of a coin or a note in order to determine what its monetary value is, because its monetary value is conventional and institutional; and that is why I maintain that some levels or properties of reality are actually irreducible to their material base. Finally, things can be representations; but representations, I want to suggest, are not things. Representations are not, as it were, ideal things existing in the head; and nor are they physical symbols existing in the Mind/Brain, as some philosophers such as Jerry Fodor maintain. In fact, representations are essentially statuses which signs achieve in their usage within some kind of semiotic framework. Any material object, or more widely physical entity, can have the status of a representational sign when appropriately used. Now let’s consider the case of artefacts. This morning I talked about cognitive artefacts, and how cognitive artefacts sustain cognitive functioning within specific domains of meaning such as time: for example, the way in which calendars and clocks sustain both communication and reasoning and reckoning about time (Lecture 7). But actually artefacts have a representational status that goes beyond that subset of artefacts which we designated as being

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cognitive artefacts. Because artefacts, ranging from tools to notations and images, and indeed objects, can be “read” for their meaning; although unless they are textual artefacts, they are not, of course, actually texts. What do I mean by that? I mean, take any simple artefact, like this cup which I am holding right now. Anybody who, as it were, apprehends this cup, can comprehend that the cup is an artefact for supporting practices which involve the containing of one substance or object by another object. Cups are containers, that is their canonical function, and learning to understand those canonical functions is, in a way learning to read the objects which bear those functions. And as we saw in Lecture 6, in the case of containment and its relationship to canonical artefacts, like cups, which have the function of containment, such understanding develops in infancy by the age of about nine months—surprisingly early! So artefacts in some way represent the practices they support, constrain and amplify. They can represent both non-representational and representational practices. And under representational practices, I include symbolic practices. What I mean by this, is that, as I emphasized this morning, a calendar or a clock supports symbolic and representational cognition of the kind that is involved in telling time, or figuring out the number of days between two dates, or something like that. But equally, an artefact like a cup represents non-symbolic practices, simple material practices. We could say the cups represent non-discursive practices, like drinking, or storing, or anything like that. The representational role in each case involves canons or conventions, but neither the meaning nor the conventions need to be identical between different practices, universes of discourse and communities. This is something we know, because many commodities, for example, have particular symbolic values as status commodities; even very simple things which have a clear utility, or use value, such as a mobile phone, can also acquire a symbolic value as a status commodity, such as: “This is the latest, coolest, smartest, smallest, fittest, lightest mobile phone, and I’ve got one.” Figure 8.1 attempts to represent the relationship between culture and artefacts, in an expanded Vygotskian framework. Culture, I am suggesting, can roughly be divided into material culture and symbolic culture. For Vygotsky, of course, the archetypal representative of material culture is some kind of tool, a physical tool; while the archetype of representative of symbolic culture is some kind of sign. Now, Vygotsky himself drew an analogy between tools and sign. It was one of the most important aspects of his functional view of language and cognition, because he said that signs are like tools; they are tools for thought, tools for cognition as well as for communication. Vygotsky said

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CULTURE Symbolic Culture

Material Culture TOOL

Activity/Practice

SIGN

Mind-directed

World-directed ARTEFACT

Culture and Artefacts. Figure 8.1 Culture and Artefacts.

that the difference between them was that, whereas the tool is directed to the transformation of the world outside, the sign is directed to the transformation of the inner world of the mind. Finally, I want to say that we often think of culture as being an essentially ideational entity—something that we carry around both individually and collectively, as a set of ideas, schemas and so on. And undoubtedly this is true, but nonetheless it is also true that culture subsists materially in the form of artefacts, the artefacts which go to make up both the semiotic and the technical potential of the culture. My next topic is “learning how to mean”, and now we get back to children and their development. “Learning how to mean” is a phrase that I’ve borrowed from a very nice book by M.A.K. Halliday, the systemic functional linguist, who wrote a book about language development in his own son, which was published in 1970s. And this is interesting because, in cognitive linguisticss, we make great play of the primacy of meaning in language, unlike in formalist theories, in which in syntax is considered to be autonomous from meaning and to have a formal existence which is analyzable independently of meaning. For all cognitive linguists, meaning is the primary basis of language and for children, acquiring language, as Halliday said, is a matter of learning how to mean. What is “learning how to mean”? Learning how to mean is also learning to be a learner, in a semiotic field constituted by culturally available signs and

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normatively regulated practices. The ontology of subjectivity as it develops in children is that of neither mechanism nor organism. Both mechanism and organism are essential for subjectivity and for the development of meaning. But they are not, actually, the essence of that ontology, because subjectivity is fundamentally social, being dependent upon the elaboration of the intersubjective dimension of meaning. So, in the particular view of human development that I am putting forward, the environment itself represents: in the form of the artefacts that are the enduring result of human practices, and in the practices which are implicated in the use of these artefacts; the environment represents socio-cultural practices and norms in its material symbolic and interactional structure. Furthermore, the environment develops, along with the learner, in the form of activity settings. The contexts of learning are not stable and unchanging. We know this even from looking at very earliest stages of pre-linguistic communication between infants and their caretakers. Infants’ caretakers are sensitive to the developmental achievements of the child, and to what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development (which I talked about in an earlier lecture), and caretakers indeed modulate and change their own communicative behaviours in such a way as both to take account of where the child has already got to, and to set a new agenda for where they are going next. So the environment for developing children is a dynamic environment that is developing along with the learner. This is why I propose that naturalizing and developmentalizing cognition also means socializing cognition. What I mean by that, is that to understand cognitive processes, I believe we need to understand the development of those processes. And by development, I mean both ontogenetic development and phylogenetic development in evolution. And in understanding developmental processes, we are never going to get away from the need to treat this as part of the biological process, but that’s not the end of story, because development is also a fundamentally social process: that’s why I use the term which I introduced in earlier lectures: a socio-naturalistic approach to cognition and human development, an approach which is both social and natural. Now, what I am going to talk about today in this lecture is symbolic play. Symbolic play is also sometimes called pretend play. And it’s also sometimes called imaginative play. Any of those names will do. It was Jean Piaget, actually, who first called it symbolic play, and I am quite willing to go along with that term, although I don’t attach any particular importance to calling it symbolic play, as opposed, for example, to imaginative play; but it certainly has been very much studied by developmental psychologists, of differing theoretical persuasions.

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Symbolic play encompasses play with objects as well as socio-dramatic play. Symbolic play with objects emerges during the second year of life, while sociodramatic play usually emerges at around 3–4 years age. Symbolic play with objects is the kind of thing that children do when they substitute, in their play world, one object for another. The classical examples are things like pretending that a stick is gun, or dressing up a doll with a piece of paper, or something like that. Although the combination of different objects develops later than the appropriation of single objects pretending that they are something else than what they actually are. So, symbolic play is intrinsically about meaning. It’s about the semiotic status of the objects which are involved in the symbolic play. In fact, it might be better, rather than calling it symbolic play, to follow a different terminology of Piaget, when he talked about the emergence of the semiotic function in the second part of the second year of life. Piaget considered this kind of imaginative play as being an instance of that developmental milestone, and it might well be better to call it semiotic play or semiotically-driven play. Socio-dramatic play is a slightly different kind or form of symbolic play which is based in interactions between children. Of course, there is a long developmental story here, and it is relevant that both Piaget and Vygotsky emphasized that very young children don’t really do much in the way of playing together. They tend to play in parallel with each other when very young, rather than, as it were, sharing a play world in which they are engaged in a true joint action. Children of, let’s say, less than two and a half years or three years of age rarely engage in imaginative play with another person in a true joint action format. If they do, that person is more likely to be an older and more competent individual, whether an adult or a child. It’s only after about three years, and in terms of substantial increase in frequency in children’s behaviors, from about 4 years, that we see the emergence of socio-dramatic play, in which children take on roles in which the role they adopted in the play is not their real life identity, as it were. A very typical example is this: when children play as Mummy and Daddy, or play families, you know, when one child says “I am the mummy and you are the child”; or they might play social roles like doctors, or teachers when they play school, when one child adopts the role of the teacher and the other children adopt the role of child. And what they are doing here is something again emphasized by both Piaget and Vygotsky. A large part of what they are doing is that they are exploring the normative universe, embedding their play in the way that people are supposed to behave in certain social contexts. So this is play with a serious epistemic function for the child, a cognitive function. All symbolic play, whether it’s play with objects, or socio-dramatic

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play involving the projection of imagined, or fictive, cognitive and/or symbolic value onto entities or people in the child’s immediate environment. This means that symbolic play is (as Piaget recognized) an instance of what the linguist Charles Hockett called “displacement”, and displacement is one of what Hockett called the “design features” of language. Displacement is, in essence, the imaginative functional power of language as a symbolic system, to transport its users out of the here-and-now into imaginary, or temporally or spatially distant realities. We might say, giving an alternative name for this function, that symbolic play is an instance of virtual cognition. Let’s take a brief tour now through some relevant notions underpinning the notion of virtual cognition, although I suppose much of this we all know. Lakoff and Johnson emphasize that Conceptual Metaphor involves the conceptualization of one, usually more abstract domain, in terms of another, usually more embodied one, which can occur with different levels of scope or specificity. For example, at a general scope or level of grasnularity, TIME IS SPACE; at an intermediate scope LIFE IS A JOURNEY; at a more specific scope again A CAREER or RELATIONSHIP etc. IS A JOURNEY. I think these are notions with which you are very much familiar. A slightly different approach, which I shall be following in this lecture, is that of Conceptual Blending, as theorized by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, in which we see the integration of two different mental mental spaces into a blended space, with emergent properties and/or meanings. Fauconnier and Turner emphasize that, like Conceptual Metaphor, this is not just a linguistic operation, but a resource for conceptualization and creative understanding. What I want to emphasize here is that both language and artefacts can be vehicles for the construction of virtual worlds. Let’s start with very simple example. Basing ourselves to begin with on Talmy’s notion of fictive motion, we could also talk analogously about fictive reference. Here is an example that I have made up. I want you to imagine the scenario of the theme park Disneyland where one of the characters in the theme park of course is Mickey Mouse. Now imagine that somebody says “Mickey Mouse was a pedophile ringleader”. In saying that Mickey Mouse was a pedophile ringleader, the speaker is not, of course, referring to the fictive character. They are referring to the person who plays that character. Fictive reference is quite common actually. For example, if we watch a theater play, if we watch, for example, Romeo and Julia on the stage, and we say something like “Julia made a bit of slow start this evening”, what we mean is that the actress who plays Julia made a slow start. Because we intersubjectively share the fictive world of the play Romeo and Juliet, we can succeed in establishing shared reference by the designation of individuals by means of their fictive identity.

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An example of the use of artifacts as vehicles for the construction of virtual worlds is what anthropologist Edwin Hutchins calls Material Anchoring. Here I am referring back to my lecture this morning, in which I looked at cognitive artifacts, such as notational system, calendars, clocks and computing artefacts. Artefacts, just as much as language, can be used in the construction of virtual worlds which are modes of Hockett’s displacement. What I am going to do in a minute is to show you an observed episode of imaginative socio-­ dramatic play by young children, in which an artifact plays a crucial signifying role during social interaction in the construction of a new virtual world. Before I do that, however, I want to look for a moment at the notion of Meaning Construction, a concept that I think is developmentally very important in this process; whether we are talking about development in children, or about the microgenetic process of the development of local, context-bound meanings in particular situations. The developmental process of meaning construction is contextualized by the significations carried by objects, especially artefacts. New meanings emerge through processes of conceptual integration or blending in which material aspects of human ecology are integrated into symbolic acts and structures. This process is inherently, at least initially, social and dialogic. So my claim is basically that Vygotsky’s general proposition—that all processes which at a later stage take place intra-psychologically, start off, developmentally, as essentially dialogical processes taking place inter-psychologically—can also be applied to conceptual integration. So, the capacity for intra-personal meaning construction is based upon interpersonal or intersubjective negotiations of meaning. The episode that I shall now analyze is one that I call “The cowboy, his hat and the girl”. The data is not my own. It’s from a study by my colleague Ana Smolka, which is reported in her and her colleagues’ paper: (In)determinacy and the Semiotic Constitution of Subjectivity.1 I have also written up, at more length, the analysis which I give here in an article in the Journal of Pragmatics, and I want to thank Smolka and her colleagues for permission to use their data. I want to look first at this piece of symbolic play in terms of the constituent aspects that it is made up of, as a play episode. These constituent aspectss I shall call Background, Stage and Enactment. By Background I mean background 1  Smolka, A.L.B., De Gões, M.C.R. & Pino, A. (1997) (In)determinacy and the semiotic constitution of subjectivity. In A. Fogel, M. Lyra & J. Vaalsiner (eds.) Dynamics and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Processes. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, pp. 153–164.

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knowledge: what you need to know to understand what’s going on. In this case, not only the participants, but also you as audience need to know that this episode of symbolic play takes place in a school in Brazil. Further essential background knowledge is that a man called Beto Carrero is the proprietor and the cowboy hero of a popular Brazilian theme park, called Beto Carrero World. Think of it as just like any other theme park except that it is themed around this particular individual, Beto Carrero. Beto Carrero is actually his real name. He is really called that, and he really does own this theme park. But he also plays himself in the theme park, as a cowboy. And the theme park is actually called Beto Carrero World. The Staging of the play by the children takes place in the house corner of a primary school classroom, with props which include a cowboy hat. Now, I know very little about early childhood education in China, I have to say. But it would not in the least surprise me if in classrooms for young children in China you find a little bit of space which is given over to for children to play spontaneously, especially to engage in socio-dramatic play, such as playing “house”, you know, play being at home, with a toy stove and pots and pans, bits of furniture and bits of clothing and so on, because almost every early years school setting throughout the world includes this. So in this particular primary school, that’s the Stage, that’s where this play takes place. And the Enactment, the actual episode of socio-dramatic play, involves three girls aged 5 to 6 years called Alcione, Thaís and Camila. I use the term Play World to designate the world of Enactment in which the following events take place. We, as audience, come into the play in the middle of it. Alcione is in the role of the daughter of Thaís, so Thaís is mum, Alcione is daughter. But so far they haven’t managed to assign a role to the third girl, Camila. Then suddenly—according to the transcript produced by the researchers—suddenly, the cowboy hat falls off a shelf. Alcione picks up the hat and puts it on. Remember, Alcione is the daughter, and Thaís is the mother. Alcione puts on the hat. The transcript (Powerpoint slide) is a translation into English from Portu­ guese. Remember, Thaís is mum, Alcione is daughter, Alcione says this, she says: You were, you were … Do you want to play with this hat? And Alcione puts the hat on Thaís’ head, Thaís takes the hat off again, and puts it aside. Alcione then says: Then give it to me, give it to me, Thaís! And she picks up the hat again. And Thaís says, Thaís says “Dear, mother doesn’t like hats” and then Alcione puts the hat on again and looks at Thaís and Thaís says: You look pretty! And Alcione laughs. Camila, the third girl, then takes the hat from Alcione. And at the same time Thaís starts writing something with a pencil on a piece of paper.

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Thaís says, very slowly: Veronica. In fact she is pronouncing the name Veronica as she is actually writing it down at the time; and Veronica is the name that Thaís gives to herself. She is decided she is going to be called Veronica in the Play World. Thaís then says to Alcione—remember Alcione is her daughter in the play world—Thaís says: “What’s your name?”, asking Alcione to offer her name. Alcione says: My name is … my name is Bete, Bete Carrera and then Camila says: My name is Bete Carrera too. And then Thaís says: Ahn … it can’t be. Then I’m called … Bete. Alcione says: I’m called … I’m called … and Thaís says again: I’m called Bete Carrera! Now, I want to draw your attention to something important here, which is the role of the cowboy hat as a material artifact which is also a signifier of the whole of the children’s background knowledge about Beto Carrero World, the theme park, and this is absolutely crucial. But what’s also significant is the way in which Alcione, when she chooses her name, she takes uses this linguistic form, Beto Carrero, and she transforms it to a familiar name, linguistically familiar name, which is the feminine equivalent of Beto Carrero. She performs a gender transformation, and I mean a linguistic gender transformation, on the expression Beto Carrero, turning it into Bete Carrera, which is absolutely regular as far as the Portuguese language is concerned. So she demonstrates her mastery of the grammatical system of the language, at the same time as she uses the hat as a signifier to underpin and create a new symbolic identity for herself. So, what I want to say is that this is essentially an example of conceptual blending, but conceptual blending which is actually carried out and implemented collaboratively by these children in the process of dialogue. I also want to say something else, and that is that the actual form of the signifying material is of importance here, so I’ve redrawn the standard blending diagram that Fauconnier and Turner use to include a Signifier / Signified structure (Figure 8.2). What I want to emphasize is that this process of Conceptual Blending takes place against the background of an entire Universe of Discourse, which includes the children’s shared knowledge of Beto Carrero World, but also includes the girls’ preoccupation with questions of their own gender and identity as developing human beings. And it is this preoccupation with these issues of the normativity of social roles, in the world, that is highlighted and brought to the foreground in this episode of interaction. In this piece of interaction, you have, it seems to me, two primary SignifierSignified relationships, one being the first person pronoun “I”, which signifies “I am called”, a girl called something, as in the girl’s name “Veronica” which

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Figure 8.2 The Bete Carrera Blend.

Thaís appropriates for the play world. And then you have the cowboy hat, which is part of the setting, part of the staging for the play. The cowboy hat is a signifier for another, different, masculine identity, namely, that of the cowboy called Beto Carrero. These two signifying relationships are blended in the Play World, into a set of terms which succeed each other the the course of the play. First of all, “Veronica”, a girl’s name; and then “Bete Carrera”, a transformation of Beto Carrero, and then, finally, “Bete Carrera” gets reduced to just “Bete”, which is a signifier for an “I” or self in the play world. I want to get back now to an issue which I briefly talked about earlier: the ontological status of the kind of learning that goes on in processes like symbolic play and dialogical conceptual blending. I want to talk about this because I think that it is important for us to bear in mind that learning is a multi-level process, in which none of these different levels can easily be reduced to another. Psychologists are used to thinking about learning as being essentially a change of state, involving some kind of mechanism. Behaviourists, for example, talk about reinforcement learning, while connectionists talk about neural mechanisms and Parallel Distributed Processing.

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Even very simple organisms are capable of learning. Perhaps not every organism, but very many organisms in the animal kingdom, at a very simple level of organization, are able to change their mechanistic state and therefore to learn. However, there is also another, higher level of organization of learning, which the biologist, anthropologist and psychiatrist Gregory Bateson drew attention to. The new concept that he introduced was the notion “learning how to learn”. This is the level at which the entire organism is involved in, and committed to, the learning process. It involves notions which psychologists call, for example, set or strategy; and it also involves notions like generalization and transfer between situations. The generalizability of learning is of course something which is absolutely central to the concerns of many educationists, because we know that when we teach new knowledge or skills to children, we don’t want them to be able to only to deploy that knowledge and those skills in the original contexts in which they acquire them. We also want them to be able to generalize the knowledge and skills to new situations. So, learning to learn is important not only for humans, but also for other complex organisms like many mammals. So rats, for example, are quite capable of adopting strategies for the generalization and transferring of learning. This is, indeed, the process which we often call micro-development. However, for human beings, in addition to learning to learn, I want to propose that there is a third level of learning, which I called learning to be a learner. This is the process by which the person is implicated in learning, and it the level at which questions such as identity, normativity and indeed narrativity enter into to the learning process. And learning to be a learner, I would suggest, is a uniquely human level of learning, involving subjectivity and identity. Subjectivity, selfhood and identity are historically located. If there is a science of the subject, of which the science of language is part, it is not a science in search of timeless truths. Timeless truths, decontextualised scientific facts, may well be found in thinking about learning as a mechanistic process of state change. Timeless truths may even be found at the organismic level of learning to learn. But at the level of learning to be a learner, the level at which identity and true subjectivity are implicated in learning, there are no timeless truths. There are only truths that apply in particular sociocultural situations. We must remember that mind, subjectivity and organism are not coterminous. The important thing about the biology of the human organism is that it is developmentally tasked for acquiring symbolic culture; and for doing so in accordance with the kind of process which I outlined in Lecture 4, which was called From signal to symbol to system: the emergence of symbolization. The human organism not only has a far higher degree of flexibility at the level of learning to learn, at the level of organismic generalization and transfer; the human organism is also—largely through the mediation of

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learning how to learn—set up epigenetically for getting into the acquisition of symbolic culture through the medium of activities such as symbolic play; using language and taking advantage of the artefactual affordances of the cultural world. The symbolic universe, as the child encounters it and enters into it, blends the actual world with virtual worlds. That’s actually how children get into language. They start off with the shared world of the here and now, together with their caretakers. But very rapidly, they start to get into shared worlds which blend the actual and the virtual. By the time they are able to appreciate the kind of imagination that is involved in fictional narrative, for example, they will already have experience of the way in which the actual world can be recruited into little virtual worlds through symbolic play. I just want to conclude by saying a few words about the notions of agency, selfhood and authorship. Human agency is universal; but its construal is culturally and historically specific. Agency, as we have seen in the case of the Brazilian children in their little play world, may be collective and performative, as well as individual and deliberative; and the narratives that go to make up play worlds are typically co-authored, polyphonic and multi-perspectival. This is the context in which we should understand notions in child development like “socialization”, “life stage” and “life choice”. Language, as shall try to show in my next lecture, is a normative institution. Institutions both support and constrain social and communicative practices. We can’t get by in the social world without the support of institutions, including the institution of language; and at the same time it is these institutions which constrain our practices, channeling them towards what is normative and what is culturally prescribed for us. Institutions can be viewed from both external and internal perspectives. The external perspective can be called in some kind of sense “Objectivist”, and the internal perspective can be called in some kind of sense “Situated”. When you view something from inside, it is necessarily situated, because you are there inside, situated within it. Now, in discussing different paradigms in linguistics, we often talk about— and I too have been talking about—the distinction between the cognitive-functional and the formalist perspectives. It’s clear that the formalist perspective adopts very much the external, Objectivist perspective, whereas the perspective that I have adopted throughout these lectures is one in which, as it were, we find ourselves within language as part of our ecology; and that is the situated perspective. However, despite the fact that I favor and adopt the situated perspective, perhaps, in the long term, we should recognize that these perspectives in principle can be complementary, and each maybe represents a moment of dialectical inquiry and in the long run, we should be able to find some kind of synthesis between these two perspectives. Thank you very much!

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008676.

Lecture 9

Language as a Biocultural Niche and Social Institution My title today is “language as a biocultural niche and social institution”. As you all know, a major theme running through my lectures so far has been the importance of integrating a life sciences, or biological, perspective on language with a social perspective on language. In this lecture, I directly address this from the point of view of the nature of language itself, its ontology, its nature as an object of study, and as a part of the human ecological niche. Here are some propositions that I want to convince you of. Firstly, the biology of language needs to be understood in both evolutionary and ecological terms. Secondly, language is a biocultural niche and ecological artefact. Thirdly, grammar is not innate. And fourthly, language is a social, semiotic and normative institution, and can be formally so defined and analyzed. Traditionally, in the human sciences there has been an opposition between culture and nature. In this traditional paradigm, culture, like language, is considered to be uniquely human. And therefore language can be either considered to be part of a unique human nature—as in nativist theories—or part of unique human culture, as in environmentalist theories. Or else it is considered that there is an interaction between the two, in the form of an interaction between genes and environment so that it is part of both. Language learning is viewed as being driven by the “exposure” of an organism to an “input” which the learner must internalize. Language is therefore viewed in some kind of sense as being fundamentally external to the language user and learner. There are some problems with this. The first problem, which I alluded to in an earlier lecture, is that the human genome, as we know since the publication of the results of the human genome project, is not sufficiently unique for nativism, at least in my eyes, to be plausible. There is a 95–98% overlap between human and chimpanzee genomes in terms of their genetic material. There is absolutely no difference of orders of magnitude in genetic material available for coding the language capacity. And I will suggest that this simple quantitative similarity makes it unlikely that the human language capacity is genetically encoded, at least in the sense that we are accustomed to thinking about that from Chomskian generative linguistics. However, if we deem language to be part of culture, we also run into certain problems. The main problem is that culture is actually not uniquely human. © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_010

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Again, in Lecture Four, I tried to give different definitions of what we mean by culture, indicating that given an appropriate account of culture, many species can be considered to be cultural; in the sense of the existence of withinspecies variations in behavioral repertoires, which are not genetically encoded and which are learned and transmitted down the generations through social learning, which suggests of course that the opposition between culture and nature is misleading; that in fact, in some sense, culture is part of nature. So perhaps we need a biological account of culture and perhaps even a cultural account of human biology. You might think that this means that we need to turn to sociobiology, which is the common reductionist account, proposing that cultural patterns themselves are directly due to genetic factors. That’s not what I’m going to argue, although it is worth pointing that one of the early pioneers of socio-biology, Edward O. Wilson, has indeed made a similar point in advancing what he calls the theory of consilience. However, reductionism as advocated by sociobiology is not the only alternative: the theory of epigenesis proposes that, developmentally speaking, the constructivist relationship between biology and culture is a two-way street and not a one-way street in terms of the direction of determination. An ecological approach to the language environment views language, not as an “input” to an information processor, but as a support and constraint on effective organismic action. So the first part of this presentation proposes a theoretical synthesis of epigenetic and ecological approaches, in an extended Darwinian framework. Part One is therefore called “biology of language: ecology and epigenesis”. We have a standard story about evolution which is given by the theoretical synthesis which is called neo-Darwinism. The easiest way to outline this is to present it as series of answers to a series of questions. The first question is: in neo-Darwinism, what is the unit of selection, the unit of natural selection? And the answer to that is the gene, or in contemporary population genetics, populations or sub-populations of interacting genes. The next question is: in the theory of evolution through natural selection, what actually does the selecting? And there are basically two answers to this, two mechanisms are doing the selecting. The first is the environment existing outside the species and the gene pool: that is the environment including the inanimate environment and also the environment as constituted by other species, predator species and prey species. This is the basis of natural selection. The other factor in selection is other genes from the same gene pool, and that is how sexual selection and kin selection work. So, in this theory of natural selection supplemented by sexual and kin selection, the next question is: What actually is selected, or selected for? What gives

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a gene an advantage over other genes or gene variants, as expressed in phenotypes? And the answer to that is fitness. The next question, then, is: What do we mean by fitness? The answer to that is differential reproductive success. That’s the final criterion, the final basis on which we can judge whether something has been selected for or not. In this neo-Darwinist story, there are actually a number of hidden problems which are not often referred to but which are very important, I think. The main problem is to do with what actually is selected, a problem which I call the problem of the site of selection. Firstly, we must realize that genes do not come singly, but as combinations, known as genotypes, which are “packaged” in organisms known as phenotypes. This is still standard stuff. So at the very least, it is organisms, not genes, which are subject to direct selection pressure. In other words, if we think about the process of reproduction, actually genes do not reproduce directly; only organisms reproduce directly, and it’s only through being packaged in an organism that a gene can achieve differential reproductive success. So to put this technically, we can say the replicator is the organism, not the gene. Now, this is important because in understanding the developmental process we call epigenesis, it is the level of organism that is descriptively and analytically relevant and essential. What are organisms? Organisms can be thought of, at least in most cases, as morphological individuals, that is to say, individuals which have got the shape and structure typical for the species organism; but even here it has to be said that it is not essential that the organism be thought of as the morphological individual, and I will come to the reason why in a moment, but you can think for example of social insects, where it may be more appropriate to think of the entire colony of insects as being the relevant organism which is reproduced. But in any case, morphology itself, the morphological individual, is not the site of selection. That’s not where selection pressure actually exerts itself. In fact, it is the functioning, behaving organism which is the replicator and the site of selection. Even when you think of sexual reproduction, for example, it’s not as it were frozen morphological individuals, but behaving individuals which do the reproducing; and also, in natural selection, it’s the behaving individuals that are more or less likely to survive the pressure of sexual as well as n atural selection. And this is a point which was stressed by Jean Piaget, who emphasized what he called “the leading role of behavior in evolution.” The leading role of behavior in evolution becomes increasingly important the higher we ascend the evolutionary ladder, as it were. But this is something which is often forgotten by theories based entirely on population genetics. So what I want to say, is that to really understand evolution in a way that is relevant to understanding the evolution of language, we need to have a variant of

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Darwinism which actually goes beyond the rather reductionist framework of neo-Darwinism; and such a new synthesis must be based upon integrating ecology into evolution. It might surprise you to know that in fact these two great branches of biology, evolutionary biology and ecology, are not actually theoretically well integrated with each other. It surprised me when I learned this, as a non-biologist by training, but it is the truth. They are not very well integrated together. I will, however, talk later about a theoretical account which I find particularly relevant, which does try to accomplish exactly such an integration. First, however, let’s look at some further criticisms of the neo-Darwinist approach. Neo-Darwinism is based essentially upon population genetics, in its contemporary version anyway. It’s based upon population genetics plus a shaky so-called “central dogma”. The central dogma is the dogma of the unidirectionality of the flow of information from gene to organism in the course of development. The fundamental problem, however, apart from shakiness of some of the standard assumptions, is the problem of what the neo-Darwinist approach doesn’t talk about. In particular, neo-Darwinism neglects the causal role in the shaping of the environment by the organism, because natural selection supposes that the organisms are placed in environments which, as it were, shape the organism by selecting the genes. But it is not as simple as that, and that’s the central point of ecological approaches in biology which emphasizes that actually organisms also shape their environments. Here are some simple examples, which I hope are very easy for a nonbiologist to understand, because they are so intuitive. Let’s take first the example. I call this the example of the path, the prey and the predator. All animals have to drink. Many animals move from one place to another, and when they need to drink, they go to a particular place, for example a water hole, in order to drink. If they repeatedly move between two places, their movement creates a path, because the vegetation gets beaten down. This path then becomes part of the environment, and as a matter of fact it’s a useful part of the environment for the animal which is moving between the watering place and another place; the path canalizes and facilitates the movements of the organism. But imagine now that this species is subject to predation by a predator, imagining the animal is something like an antelope, and the predator is something like a lion or a tiger. What can happen is that the predator can figure out that the path is the place where you find the prey on a regular basis, and can lie in wait along that path. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happens. Predators learn to wait for their prey along such paths. So here we see that the activity of the organism sets up and constructs a new aspect of the environment, which then not only

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becomes part of the effective environment for the organism’s locomotion, but actually becomes part of the circuit of natural selection itself. A second, slightly different, example is given by the hoof of the horse, and the steppe. The great steppes of Northern Asia are grasslands. And, as you know, the horse evolved in these grasslands. That’s where the horse species comes from. And horses’ hoofs are very well adapted to such grasslands. But what you also have to appreciate is that in a way the steppe and the hoof of the horse actually co-evolved. Because over many hundreds of generations, this activity of horses’ hoofs pounding the steppe actually created the environmental conditions for extensive grasslands. Many environments are such that if you take away the species which live in that environment, the actual vegetation of the environment changes. The third example brings us closer to language in a way. It’s an example of what we might call animal artefacts: things that animals actually make in their environment. Two examples: the first is the beaver. Beavers chop down trees to make dams. These dams dam up the water, and in this way beavers create a wetland environment, in which both beavers and some other species exist, and to which they are adapted. But the dams would not exist without the activity of the beavers, so the dams can be thought of as a sort of animal artefact, which then constitutes a part of the beaver’s environment. Another example is Bower birds. Bower birds are species of bird found mainly through Southeast Asia and Austronesia. Like for many bird species, the male of the species produces displays in order to attract the female, in order to mate with the female. In the case of most birds, including for example peacocks, the display that they make is made with their body or some part of their body, so that display behavior is part of the morphology of the animal— as with the tail of the peacock. In the case of the Bower bird, by contrast, the male Bower bird actually makes the thing which they use to display—because it creates a nest and then goes out and finds lots of shiny, pretty things, objects from the environment, stones, leaves, feathers and anything with which the Bower bird can decorate his nest, in order to make it visually attractive to the female, which the male Bower bird then invites to come and live in his nest and mate with him. So the Bower bird is actually like the beaver in, as it were, modulating the process of selection by creating an artefact. The beaver modulates the process of natural selection, for itself and for other species, by building dams. The bowerbird modulates the process of sexual selection by building a nest. My final example is termite mounds and ant heaps, and the notion of the “group organism”. As you know, termites and ants live in colonies, and these colonies live in structures which are made by the insects. The structure is

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made up of the, and is an essential part of the colony: the colony would not exist without this structure. It would be far too vulnerable without the protection of the structure. And of course we know that for, example, chimpanzees are able to use twigs of wood to fish for termites in termite mounds. But of course if there was no mound, the chimpanzee would needn’t to use tools to try and get termites, they would just pick them up off the ground to eat them. And these particular artefacts, which are places to live, are extremely intricate. They support a sort of division of labour between different kinds of specialist variants of the termite or ant: in a way we can say that ants or termites form a sort of group organism, which is partly coextensive with the artefact of the mound or heap. Now, at this point I want to introduce a concept from psychology, in particular from James Gibson’s ecological psychology: the concept of affordance. In Gibson’s ecological psychology, affordances constitute the environment for effective action and perception. That is, the organization of behavior. An affordance is something in the environment with which the animal can do something. So for example, for some animals, branches of trees are climbable, and perhaps swing-on-able. A stone can be something that could be sit-on-able, and for that matter, a stone is something that might be throw-able. So Gibson said that, in terms of animal perception, the environment the animal perceives is, as it were, a set of “invitations” to behave in certain ways, ways which the animal is adapted for. So, the environment for effective action consists of all the relevant affordances for that particular animal species. However, Gibson neglects the fact some affordances may actually be constructed by the animal. That’s why I call this slide ‘constructing your own affordances’. Nests are for nesting in, and burrows are for burrowing and so on. And they are actually constructed by the animal. Now this suggests something about the process of natural selection. Remember that earlier on I said: “look, even if the unit of selection in genetic theory is the gene, we can’t say that the site of selection is also the gene.” The gene is not the site of selection, because selection pressures do not operate directly on the gene. So, following Piaget, I suggested that the site of selection should be thought of as the behaving, functioning organism. However, in the light of our considerations about animal artefacts and self-constructed niches, with self-constructed affordances, we should say that in such cases the site of selection can be considered to be the organism in its self-constructed niche, that is, an organism-niche coupling. A new model has been developed by a group of biologists, Kevin Laland John Odling-Smee and their colleagues. They have constructed a model on the basis of this, in which they come up with the new term phenogenotype. It is a

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horrible word, I agree, but that’s the word they use. A phenogenotype can be considered to be a species-specific organism-niche combination, which is functionally equivalent to an organism. As a matter of fact, and rather interestingly, the author of the book “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins, who represents an extreme variant of Neo-Darwinism, has also suggested something similar himself, although he’s never followed it up in his popular science books. He calls it the “extended phenotype”. However, we shall not go into this further. My definition of the Laland et al. concept of phenogenotype would be: a class of interacting genes in a bound, but not wholly genetically determined, relationship with some aspect of a self-constructed environment. The relationship is not wholly genetically determined, because although some of the behaviors which give rise to the construction of animal artefacts are innate behaviors, nonetheless, there is usually some learned or epigenetically developed component as well. So, the relationship with the self-constructed environment is not wholly genetically determined. Anyway, the important thing is that the site of selection is now: organism plus artefact or organism plus niche. What does this tell us, what kind of things might it suggest to us about human culture and language? I would maintain that from an ecological-evolutionary point of view, culture is phenogenotypic. At the same time, as I have also stressed through many of these lectures, human culture is also unique in the animal kingdom, because human culture is symbolic and linguistic. So what I want to suggest to you is that we should see language as an artefact/ niche, analogous with the dams of beavers for example; and the capacity to use and acquire language involves the evolution and replication of a phenogenotypical “biocultural complex”. To put this succinctly: the human language capacity is phenogenotypic, it is not something that is “inscribed in the genes”. This doesn’t mean that genes have got nothing to with language. It does mean that language does not take the form of some kind of Universal Grammar, determined by what is there in the genes. How, then, do individuals acquire language? The answer is through epigenetic development. The notion of epigenetic development was developed by the biologist C.H. Waddington and the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Epigenetic development is an ontogenetic developmental process, that is a process of development of the individual organism, and it involves the following aspects. It involves, first, the elaboration of a relatively simple initial state, or initial behavioral repertoire, into a more complex one, into a more complex and elaborate state or repertoire. Secondly, epigenetic development is constructive. It is not just the expression of genes, because in epigenesis, the environment is part of the process of construction. The environment plays a

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constructive role in epigenesis, the environment is incorporated into the developmental process. Thirdly, epigenetic development is unidirectional. In this, it’s unlike classical learning; so epigenesis is neither just instinct—the expression of genes— nor just learning. It is a process of development that is irreversible, interactive and constructive. To illustrate the difference between epigenesis and classical learning: If you do a classical learning experiment, the kind of thing that behaviorist psychologists used to do, for example teaching rats to run mazes, or pigeons to peck targets in a particular order, you can teach them to do these kinds of things, but you can also extinguish their response very easily. In epigenesis, in contrast, you cannot extinguish what has been developed, not unless some catastrophe occurs to the organism. And this unidirectionality of development is one reason why biologists recognize that there is a reality to the directionality of what is sometimes called Time’s Arrow. Epigenetic time goes from past to future. You can’t reverse it and run it backwards, you can’t turn the developmental clock back, epigenetic development is irreversible. Here are two examples of epigenetic development. The first one is birdsong. Some of you may know about this. Anyway, songbirds, when they hatch, or very shortly after hatching, already can sing. But what they sing is an incredibly basic song. They sing a sort of unelaborated version of the adult song. As the songbird develops, and on condition that it is actually exposed to the song of adults in its community, (usually it is the males who sing by the way, but not always), anyway, on condition that they are actually exposed to that adult model, they will acquire the full blown song of their community: the birdsong will become elaborated over time, quite rapidly. Another interesting thing is that even within the same species of songbird, different songbird communities of that same species will have different versions of the mature song. So they have a kind of dialect. Or you might say they have different “languages” in the birdsong. That shows that, even though there is genetic basis for birdsong, its final form is not genetically determined. A within-species variation is involved which can rightly be called cultural. If that’s the case, songbirds can be said to have culture. And if that’s true, the process of epigenesis is also a developmental process which is associated with cultural variation. And my other example, obviously enough, is human language. Human languages, I suggest, are acquired by means of an epigenetic process. And I would further say that the importance of this is so, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that in the initial stages of development, everything about the final stage is already there as part of the genetic information. It just isn’t. So we can contrast epigenetic development with the kind of model that Chomsky has

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put forward in his Principles and Parameters model of language acquisition, in which all the environment does is select between one or more predetermined patterns of development. In epigenesis, development is not a matter of predetermination and selection. It’s a matter of co-construction between the organism with its genetic endowment, and the environment. Here is a definition of epigenesis. In epigenesis the developmental trajectory and final form of the developing behavior are a consequence both of the environmental information, and of the genetically encoded information. A genetically specified initial behavioral repertoire is elaborated through experience of a relevant environment, yielding an envelope of potential trajectories and outcomes. The process of elaboration is directional, and once it has taken place, the initial plasticity of the embryonic, or unelaborated repertoire is largely, although not necessarily wholly lost. So epigenesis involves a developmental transition from relative organismic plasticity and informational openness, to relative rigidity and informational closure. What that means is that early in the process of development the organism is highly open to the environmental information which is used in the constructive process. But as this process of construction continues, in order to conserve the developmental advances that have already been made, the organism becomes much more and more specialized in the information which is prepared to take in, and becomes closed to other forms of information. And that’s what makes development irreversible. That’s why, for example, it is the case that young children are better at learning language than older children or adults. In nativist theories this is often explained in terms of a thing called a Critical Period for language acquisition. What I am saying is that it’s not really a matter of critical period: rather, the critical period is a symptom of the general process of epigenetic development. It’s the consequence of the way that epigenesis actually works. Epigenesis is absolutely fundamental for our understanding the role of development in our species, the species which the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon calls the symbolic species. What makes humans unique is not an innate language acquisition device plus a variety of other species-specific innate cognitive modules, but a generalized semiotic or symbolic capacity which is epigenetically developed from a suite of cognitive capacities largely shared with other species, but attaining higher levels of organization in humans. So therefore the theory of epiegenesis is compatible with the fact that such a very large proportion of our genetic material is indeed shared with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Now let us turn to learning and using a language. What implication does this theory I have outlined have for understanding language acquisition? I want

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to make a proposal to you, which from the standpoint of most contemporary theories of language and language acquisition might appear to be radical. My proposal is that, if we ask ourselves where is the grammar of a language, the answer is that the grammar of the language is in the language. Now this goes against a whole lot of assumptions, which we have been, as it were, taught to make by Chomsky and by other generative linguists who have claimed that the external grammars of languages, the grammar, as it were, that we observe in everyday speech around us, is but a sort of degenerated and secondary version of “real” grammar; and real grammar (what Chomsky calls the I-language) is inside people’s heads. I am saying no, this is absolutely wrong, in fact as you’ll see I don’t even think there is an I-language in the Chomskian sense. The grammar of the language is in the language, just as the structure of the bird’s nest is in the nest. The capacity for language is thus a cognitive-behavioral relationship between the language user and the constituents of language, just as the capacity for building a nest is a cognitive-behavioral relationship between the builder and the constituents of the nest; and it’s this relationship between organism and artefact niche that has, in each case, been selected for in evolution. That means there is no need for the organism to possess an internal model of the grammar of a language to account for language acquisition, any more than the building of a nest requires an internal model of the nest. When a Bower bird builds a nest, it doesn’t use, as it were, a genetically encoded “grammar” of the nest. Of course the building by the Bower bird of its nest is under genetic control. Nobody is denying that, nobody is denying that it is an innate capacity in some significant way. But the nature of this innate capacity is not a model, or a plan, or a grammar of the nest. It’s actually a behavioral repertoire, which enables the bowerbird to go out and make use of the constituents to hand in order to build a nest. And I am suggesting that exactly the same is the case for language. We don’t need to have a grammar in the head in order to acquire grammar. We construct grammar on the basis of an initial state which is indeed genetically specified, but then we create and construct, and we co-construct grammar, on the basis of what is made available from the environment, including the utterances of language, and including also the tutorial behaviors of the caretakers interacting with the child. There is a general point about this. I’ve made a lot of the importance of epigenesis. Epigenesis is a process which becomes more and more important as we move from the lower to the higher animals, because it’s particularly advantageous for organisms in which phenogenotypic couplings are both frequent and variable. And that’s a pretty appropriate general description of the human cultural organism. There is a lot of variability in what we construct around us,

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and an awful lot of cultural forms, which we do create. I am not going to go into the biology of this, but is to do with the selection in evolution of regulatory genes augmenting epigenetic openness, and the timing of the opening and closing of developmental windows. These regulatory genes can therefore be expected to be phenogenotypically selected for in the human genome, which in turn permits further adaptive selection for domain-specific learning in the semiotic biocultural complex, and in particular for language. So, please note that, in opposing the nativist account of language acquisition, I am opposing an account which posits or proposes the idea of an innate Universal Grammar. I am not saying that there is nothing innate about our capacity to acquire language, there surely is. But it doesn’t take the form of a sort of plan for language, or a Universal Grammar. So, I am claiming that the class of organisms with the language capacity— that is normally developing humans—is a phenogenotypic replicator; systemically associated with a wider biocultural complex of symbolic and constructive cognitive capacities; and individual language acquisition and use is situated in the contexts of actuation of these inter-related capacities, and is therefore profoundly socially and semiotically contextual. In other words, our capacity to use and acquire language is a cultural phenomenon. Or more precisely, it is a biocultural phenomenon. It is not reducible to something just in the brain. So, the language artefact/niche is culturally and materially situated, that is, dynamically embedded within a semiotic network which includes other symbolic and non-symbolic artefacts, which quite brings me back to the things that I’ve been emphasizing in the last couple of lectures—about the importance of artefacts in human cognitive development and language acquisition. To say that language is a biocultural niche, and part of the total human biocultural niche, I am basically saying that language is part of our extended embodiment, in the sense in which I have used that term in my earlier lectures. This is really very important, and I’ll tell you why: I emphasize this because it’s a different perspective than the usual “embodiment” perspective offered by cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson. You see I’m not saying only that language is, as it were, based in embodiment. Lakoff and Johnson say that language is based in embodiment and by that they mean organic, physical, corporeal embodiment. They say that we have language because we have corporeal embodiment. I’m saying that’s wrong, or at least it’s insufficient. Actually, language is part of extended embodiment, in the same way that our artefactual world, the world we make around us, our cultural world, is in fact extended human embodiment. And extended embodiment is really what it means to be human, to be a human biocultural being So this perspective, although it’s very much within the general traditional of cognitive linguistics and

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cognitive semantics, does actually give quite a different view of the ontology of language. The second part of the title of this lecture is “Language as social fact and social institution”. And, again, what I’m trying to do here is to break down the opposition between the biological and socio-cultural, but in this particular part of the lecture what I’m doing is to go back to an earlier tradition in linguistics very much informed by classical social theory; which involves reflection on the nature of human social life and thereby on the method which is necessary for the study of human social life. The relevant historical reference here is to Émile Durkheim, the pioneering French sociologist. In case you’re interested in the intellectual lineage of my ideas, some of them are based on the most recent developments in biology, but a large part of these ideas otherwise can be found in science from a hundred of years ago or more; including Darwinism, including Marx’s historical materialism as interpreted by Vygotsky, and including Durkheim, who I’m now talking about. And of course Durkheim was extremely influential on the linguistic theory of Saussure, who said specifically that language should be viewed as a social institution, something which almost disappeared from contemporary linguistics when Chomsky came along and insisted on the privacy of I-language. Anyway, here is what Durkheim says about social facts. He says that they are “a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling—[Note that: acting, thinking, and feeling: a whole complex of the cognitive, the behavioral and the affective: Author’s Note]—external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power, by virtue of which they exercise control over him.” So there are ways of doing things, or types of conduct, which are invested with coercive force, because they in some way compel the individual to imitate or emulate that way of doing things. Social facts are coercive, precisely because they are exterior to the individual. The objectivity of social facts thus consists in the fact that they are independent of any single individual’s thoughts or will, so social facts are essentially normative. Social facts are normative because they are prescriptive; they tell you how things ought to be, not just how things are. Social facts are about the “ought” of life as well as just the “is”, but they are also coercive and objective in the sense that they place limitations on the kind of ways you can think, ways you can do and ways you can talk. Social institutions consist of social facts according to Durkheim. Social facts are, according to Durkheim, irreducible to psychological facts, structures or processes though they depend upon these and also influence them. Social

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facts can be objects of shared, mutual, intersubjective knowledge; and language is a social fact or social institution. There are many other social facts and social institutions. A good example of a social institution is the family, and a good example of a social fact is the fact that in many (but not all) cultures, including my own, it is a normative fact that a person cannot be married to more than one other person; and that’s the sense in which the social fact is coercive, because it’s prescriptive. And of course such a social fact can be the object of common knowledge. In fact it’s generally assumed that a social fact is always the object of common knowledge, in the sense that these are things you should know as a member of society, and of course these are also the things which are very strongly impressed upon the developing human being, in the course of development. The important thing for our current purposes, before we digress too much, is that language is a social institution and has a normative character, a point that has been repeatedly emphasized by the Finnish linguist Esa Itkonen. Now, Durkheim might be the person who introduced the terminology of “social facts”, but more recently the American philosopher John Searle has had a lot to say about social facts—without, however, referring to Durkheim, though he must know the provenance of the term. He uses the concept of “social fact” as a way of trying to understand certain facts about the social world which otherwise, he maintains, would be inexplicable: in particular institutions, such as money. This is what Searle says about social or institutional facts. He says they take the general form of “X (something) counts as Y (whatever that is) in (some kind of context) C.” An example from Searle: a twenty dollar bill counts as a monetary token with the particular exchange value of twenty dollars. Now, this is not Searle’s terminology, but I would maintain that actually what he is quite successfully trying to do is to give us a general semiotic ontology of social facts, as distinct from natural facts, because social facts are irreducible to physical structure. There’s nothing in the physical paper of a twenty dollar bill that makes it have the value of twenty dollars—you can get an electronic microscope, and you can go as far down as you like into the atomic structure of that twenty dollar bill, and nowhere will you find an exchange value of twenty dollars. It’s just not there in the physical ontology. The exchange value is a fact of social ontology, and it’s a fact of meaning and therefore of semiotic ontology. But do note something which is important for the rest of what I say. The twenty dollar note does not stand for or represent twenty dollars; it’s not like a linguistic sign, in that sense. In fact the note is twenty dollars. It’s not that the twenty dollar bill is a representation, or a sign, of the twenty dollars. It

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is twenty dollars. It’s self-identical; its value is, to use a philosophical term, subtended by (though irreducible to) its material existence; because if you destroy the note, you destroy the value. If you burn the twenty dollar bill that twenty dollars is gone. This might prompt some interesting reflections on the current financial crisis, and the destruction of monetary value, and how it happens. Now let me return to something I said earlier, I think it was in lecture 3, about the nature of Representation: which I want to distinguish from Searle’s notion of counting as. In lecture 3, I defined Representation in terms of The Conditions on Representation, as follows: “To represent something … is to cause something else to stand for it, in such a way that both the relationship of ‘standing for’, and that which is intended to be represented, can be recognized.” Let’s just give, in the same way that Searle gives a definition of “counting for”, let’s give a definition of the “standing for” relationship, which I would claim is something like this: where a sign stands for a meaning in some kind of context. We can elaborate that to: X (something) counts as a sign S, and that sign Sstands for the meaning M in context C. So Searle’s definition of “counting as” is incorporated into the definition of representation. This simple notation clarifies the old linguistic notion of the “double articulation” of the sign, which is the conventional unity of substance and signification. And the context may now include the entire sign system, and the community of users. The key feature of this analysis, which is elaborated in the Powerpoint slides, and also in Sinha (2009) and Sinha (2015) listed in the Author’s Preface, is that it clearly sets out the implications of a strictly defined, but non-truth functional, theory of semantics. This is really important. The semantics of language does presuppose that we can define a grammar, indeed that we can define a language. That’s all we need. We don’t have to say anything about the relationship between that language and anything outside itself, except that there is some community for whom the language exists as a conventional system. So the semantic theory of meaning need not be truth-functional. It is, however, conventional and normative, as are all the subsystems of language, and that means they are social facts, or configurations of social facts. That means that we can distinguish pragmatics from semantics without necessitating a truth-functional semantics, and that I think it is an important result, because as you know, and as I’ll talk about tomorrow, it’s been an important theoretical claim of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar that meaning cannot be adequately captured within an Objectivist, truth-functional framework. And it’s also been the case that almost all theorists have tried to distinguish semantics from pragmatics by saying that

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semantics is truth-functional whereas pragmatics is not. Pragmatics, in the traditional formulation, is something to do with implicature. In fact Searle himself follows that line. And for that reason cognitive linguists have tended to say we that we cannot distinguish between semantics and pragmatics, that there is no distinction between the two. While I’m saying that we can distinguish between semantics and pragmatics, but we don’t need a truth-functional semantics to do that. And therefore cognitive linguistics, just like other, more traditional linguistic theories, is quite at liberty to distinguish between semantics and pragmatics. You may find it difficult to draw that dividing line at times, but the distinction in principle exists and is clear. However, unlike in Objectivist theories, language from a cognitive-functional perspective is irreducibly context-bound: contextual dependence characterises all subsystems, but this does not erase the distinctions between subsystems. Finally, language as a social object has its own proper structure, subtended by, but irreducible to, human intentionality. It’s irreducible to intentionality because once it becomes a social fact or a social institution, it becomes relatively autonomous from and independent of any single human will or intention. A summary: and I think after I give the summary of this lecture, I’ll leave the rest until the next lecture because it leads on into that material naturally and appropriately. What is special about human culture is not its mere existence, but its symbolic nature. Other animals, too, have cultures; other species have culture; but we have symbolic culture. Language is an artefact/niche, not an “input” to be “internalized” as internal structure. Language is situated by other semiotic artefacts. The human language capacity is not innate, but epigenetically developed and phenogenotypic. There is no mental grammar. Well, I have to be careful here. I do believe we can have “knowledge of grammar”, of course, in the same way that we can have knowledge of any other social institution. You and I share some knowledge about social institutions. So, for example, I have a certain level of knowledge of the rules of football, but there are other people who have better knowledge. I also have knowledge of the rules of language, and probably there are other people who have a better knowledge of those rules than me. It is not the case that my knowledge of language is something which is unlike other kinds of knowledge. So what I mean is there is no sort of pre-existent knowledge of language that is somehow of a different order than other kinds of knowledge. That’s what I mean by saying “there is no mental grammar”. Grammar is a social institution, normatively regulating conduct, and we learn what is necessary to know to be able to to act in it. To conclude this lecture, I will say something about language acquisition which uses a metaphor

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that has been made famous by scholars such as Saussure and Wittgenstein: the metaphor or analogy between using language and playing a game. Well, my little metaphor of language acquisition will go something like this: imagine you’ve got a group of people of different ages playing a football game. And of course some of them are experts, and really know the rules of football well, and they can also play it much better. And others are less expert, but still pretty good at kicking the ball around. And then you’ve got some little novices who are just getting into the game of football for the first time. And they are the ones who are like children in the early stages of language acquisition. However little they know of the rules, still they join in, they join in the game, that’s the point. You can really say that all players are playing football, and in the same way, all the speakers are using language. It’s not as if they haven’t got language. It’s not as if they have yet to acquire the whole thing. Of course there’s also sot of expertise and knowledge they have yet to acquire but they are already using language, and through their participation—to use a term I have also repeatedly emphasized—through that participation, not only through a process of induction of rules, that they actually become competent language users, learning what is necessary to act in that social institution. Thank you very much.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.5008679.

Lecture 10

Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism: Realism, Relativism and Representation Thank you very much to all of you, especially those who have loyally followed me through ten lectures, but thank you to all of you for coming along. As we know, from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, Life is a Journey, Love is a Journey … and also Work is a Journey. And the tenth lecture of this series means coming to the end of really quite a long journey, in terms of the material that we have covered. I do not know whether this lecture will lead us to a final destination, or whether we will be more retrospective, looking again at some of the themes that we have touched on in the course of our journey. It will be a little bit of both, because I will introduce some new material, but I will start by reviewing some of the themes that we have covered and, in particular, a number of the issues to do with language, linguistics, psychology and philosophy of language which Cognitive Linguistics raises; and to try to set out my own position, which is not the same as some of the other well-known positions in Cognitive Linguistics. Let’s start by examining what we might call three fundamental philosophies of mind, not just of language. The first fundamental philosophy of mind is of very ancient provenance, going all the way back to Plato. And that is the notion that mind is autonomous, and exists in its own purely mental realm. Now, by the way, I am basing this exposition on the Western philosophical tradition, but I would be interested if you can tell me whether these philosophical reflections find some kind of parallel in traditional Chinese philosophies of language and mind. This first point of view we can call a kind of formal idealism. The second point of view, we can say, is an essentially materialist view of mind, which views mind as being “in the brain”. Mind is an aspect, maybe mysteriously so, but nonetheless in some kind of way, an aspect of matter, and a property of the brain and the embodied nervous system. We can find precursors of this view going back to philosophers such as Spinoza. It was certainly Darwin’s view. It was also the view of the great 19th century psychophysiologist Helmholtz, of the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, and of course many others. Now, regardless of which view is correct, it seems to me that a serious problem arises when you try to combine ideas which are taken from the first of © Chris Sinha. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2017 | doi ��.��63/9789004349094_011

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these views with ideas which are taken from the second of these views, ending up with a philosophical construct called “the Mind/Brain”, as if these two completely different philosophical positions can actually be combined and reconciled by dint of the typographical device of just calling it “the Mind/Brain”. This is a fundamental problem, I think, with many discussions in cognitive science of the nature of the mind. However, there is also a third notion of mind, which is probably the closest to the one that I have been arguing for in these lectures, although it is not necessarily in contradiction to the second one: and that is that mind is in society, that mind is essentially intersubjective and communal. We can find this view expressed by philosophers ranging from the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico, through Karl Marx, to the later Wittgenstein. So the very notion of “mind”, as we can see, is by no means uncontested, and furthermore I am also aware of the fact that the word mind in English does not have cognates in all languages. So when we talk about philosophy of mind, we’re not necessarily talking about, as it were, the same entity in all languages, let alone in all theories. Now, let’s go back to the title of this lecture. As many of you know, Cognitive Linguistics is in part based upon a critique of what is known as the Objectivist theory of meaning. And what I want to do first is to set out some of the assumptions and propositions of Objectivism in the philosophy of mind and language. In general terms, Objectivism is the metaphysical position that says that complete and objective knowledge of the world is possible, of the third person kind: that is to say, knowledge of the universe, as existing somehow outside of the knower or knowers, is possible; and such knowledge is essentially non-perspectival. It is objective in the sense of being knowledge which approximates a “God’s eye view”, a de-contextualized form of knowledge. In logic and linguistics, Objectivism refers more specifically to a formal theory of meaning based upon the objective correspondence between true linguistic expressions and states of affairs in the world. And these states of affairs, again, are supposed to be objective and not, as it were, cast in respect to any particular perspective, or point of view. In this philosophical tradition, meanings can be viewed as being a kind of ideal object, so Objectivism, in at least its most influential form, is closely related to the first approach that I outlined above, that of formal idealism. Linguistic expressions are considered in Objectivism to have determinate and context-free meanings as ideal symbolic objects. These meanings, sometimes referred to as senses and sometimes referred to as concepts, exist independently of their employment in human communication and practice. There are really only two terms in the Objectivist version of the relationship between language and reality. There is language and there is reality, and there is not

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much room for the users of language. Meanings, in fact, must be “grasped” by subjects whose psychological concepts are imperfect, subjective and derived. And meaning determines reference, according to the classical analysis which was carried out by Frege at the end of the 19th century. Let’s just make this a little bit more specific. Meaning is considered to be a relationship of true reference between symbolic expressions and Objective states of affairs. Truth is correspondence between propositions and states of affairs. And it is this point of view that was formalized by Carnap. The general theory takes the form of a proposition “p” being true if and only if that proposition holds, and the point is that we have a “p” here, in quotation marks, meaning a quotation of the proposition. In other words, the expression “p” (for the proposition) is true if and only if the proposition p, without quotation marks, itself holds. So, to give an example, the notion is something like that this: the expression “Beijing is in China” is true if and only if Beijing is in China. The reference of the expression, according to this theory, is determined by its sense. I am not going to go into this deeply, the important point is that in this theory the sense exists objectively, and independently of any subject that might entertain the proposition. The sense of a complex expression is built up from the senses of its syntactically combined constituents. And, in the current or recent Classical Cognitivist version of this theory which we will be talking about in a minute, this means that compositionality and productivity of the language system are necessary conditions. And furthermore, the senses of expressions at any level whatsoever, whether these are words or phrases or sentences, are supposed to be invariant across the combinatorial contexts. This is the notion which Fodor and others call systematicity. What is the relationship between objective sense and concept? Senses or linguistic concepts, for Frege, exist in a Platonic ideal realm. Frege was an Objective idealist. He believed that senses really exist, but he did not believe that they are part of the perceptible and material world. In order for people to speak, they must grasp the senses, and so senses are non-identical with psychological or subjective concepts. This non-identity was actually insisted upon very strongly by Frege. And that is what is meant in philosophy by saying that this version of Objectivism is “anti-psychologistic”. Now, what happened when we arrived at the first cognitive revolution, inspired by Chomsky’s generative grammar? Philosophers such as Fodor followed Chomsky’s psychologistic move in relation to grammar, and relocated senses in the mind of the individual speaker-hearer, in the form of the concepts of an innate, universal Language of Thought. Now, as I mentioned yesterday, one of the problems with understanding what language is, is trying to decide, as it were, where we can find language.

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Do we find language in the utterances and speech acts of actual speakers? Or is language a property of individual knowledge? According to Chomsky, who has become more and more insistent on this as time has gone on, the real object of study of linguistics is something which he calls I-language, the internal language, inside people’s heads. And one of the ways you can picture this is you can say that what Chomsky did was take the traditional view of language, that was the view of structuralist linguistics, the view of Saussure and others that language is objective and, in some sense, exterior to hearers and speakers— that’s the notion of language as a social institution that I was talking about yesterday—what Chomsky does is kind of transpose this to a location inside the head. Everything is inside the head. And what does Fodor do? He carries out a parallel move, with respect to meaning. Whereas Frege believed that meanings were out there in a special Platonic world of their own, Fodor preserves the Objectivity of meanings, but he relocates them in the mind of the individual speaker-hearer, conceived of not as a body but as an individual mind. OK, so meanings for Fodor take the form of the concepts of the innate, universal Language of Thought, which we all have. It’s innate, and it’s to be distinguished from any natural language. And it works in a perfectly systematized way, unlike natural languages, which tend to be kind of messy, and don’t behave very well from a formal point of view. Natural languages are not sufficiently regimented, so you have got this internal language, which really is systematic, productive and totally compositional. And what has Fodor done here? He has followed, absolutely followed the logic of the Chomskian program, and he has turned Objectivism in its original form of Objective idealism, into philosophical rationalism (rationalism in this context is basically the theory of innate ideas). So we’ve got a kind of a formalist, nativist rationalism. But it is also a kind of physicalism, because in contemporary philosophy, philosophers are very unhappy with the idea that there should be anything in the universe that does not actually have some kind of physical realization. So in Classical Cognitivism, Objective meanings exist in the individual Mind/Brain (as it is often called) in the form of a physical symbol system. The Language of Thought, both the symbols and the rules of the Language of Thought, are in there, in my brain and in your brain, as what philosophers call type-identical physical symbol systems. But interestingly, they remain independent of actual contexts of human communication and practice. They are not learned, because they are innate. They are not variable according to context, because they are objective, invariant and determinate. And if you ask where do they come from, and if you reject the idea that God put them there, which is what the 17th century rationalists would have said, then the only answer that you can propose is that somehow biological evolution has put them in there.

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So Evolution replaces God as the guarantor of objectivity. Now I find this is a very bizarre idea, because I really do not know how evolution could have done this, because of the question of the relationship between evolutionary and ecological biology that was the topic of yesterday’s lecture, but let’s not go into that. All I want to do is to say that there are really serious problems with reconciling Objectivism with evolutionary theory. Firstly, it can not guarantee correspondence between meaning and world. The philosopher Hilary Putnam, whose work is referred to and indeed summarized by George Lakoff in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, has produced a formal proof with which he claimed to demonstrate that it is impossible for Objectivism to work in the way which is says it does. But even leaving that aside, Objectivism cannot explain the workings of real languages in the real world, because real languages involve metaphor, indeterminacies and contextualities of meaning, with polysemy on a widespread scale. The only way you can come close to an Objectivist explanation of that is by positing very broad general meanings, and by saying that even though the actual languages that are studied by linguists maybe don’t display the necessary formal properties, nonetheless the Language of Thought does work how it should do according to the theory. For me, as a psychologist, the weirdest aspect of this variety of Objectivism is that it simply does not explain how concepts can get into this entity called the “Mind/Brain”. It just says they do. Furthermore, it does not just say they do. It says they must do. This is a logical argument, which is basically that the only way that we can explain meaning according to this particular research program is to suppose that all concepts are innate. Well, you can believe that or not, but I do not. OK, let’s contrast this with Subjectivism. Up until now, I have, in many ways, been following the critical take on Objectivism which, I think, is shared by most scholars in cognitive and cognitive functional linguistics. But of course, traditionally, if we start talking about Objectivism, there is one obvious philosophical position that is opposed to Objectivism, namely Subjectivism. In terms of the philosophy of mind, Subjectivism is essentially the epistemological claim that the only access we have to reality is through individual sense perceptions. In other words, the only way that I can make any claims about the world is via my perception of the world in vision, in hearing, in touch, and so on. Subjectivism then goes on to claim that concepts are not innate, but are formed through association, and through abstraction from particular perceptions. So through repeated experiences of the same thing, we develop a kind of abstract internal copy of that thing, some kind of representation of all the little bits and pieces which are associated with that thing. That is essentially

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empiricism. Empiricism is inevitably, I am going to claim, a sort of Subjectivism, because it is based upon the notion of the primacy of sense perception. And linguistic semantics is then to be based upon individual mental entities which are similar to concepts, such as image schemas in Lakoff’s version of cognitive semantics, for example. So what I want to claim is that, although Lakoff and Johnson do emphasize in various parts of their writings that the embodied organism is active in the world, nonetheless because of this primacy of experience, and the notion that linguistic meanings build upon some kind of abstraction from experience, experientialism—Experiential Realism, as Lakoff and Johnson called it—is in fact a variant of empiricism, although they never use that term. In fact Cognitive Linguists are very reluctant to concede that the dominant position in Cognitive Linguistics is as a form of empiricism, but I maintain that it is; and that actually the dispute between Cognitive Linguistics and Formalist Linguistics, when we view it in the light of the long view of philosophy down the ages, is in fact a continuation of the great dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism. I have run through some well known problems with Objectivism. What you will find less frequently in the texts of Cognitive Linguistics is an acknowledgement of the serious problems with Subjectivist philosophies. And here are some of these problems. The first problem is: how can we be sure that the sense perceptions of other people are similar to our own? Supposing I derive my concepts from my sense perceptions, and you derive your concepts from your sense perceptions, how can we coordinate them, or bring them into some relationship of identity, or at least close similarity? Well, there are answers to that question of course. In cognitive semantics, the usual answer is that we have common experiences, based in particular on our common human embodiment. Since we all share the same organismic structure in the human body, and the same developmental experiences as we grow from infancy to adulthood, and since we are subject to the same kinds of broad determination of experience in the world (such as a world constituted by objects, a world in which there is gravity, and so on and so forth), then necessarily, according to this view, we end up with more or less the same image schemata and hence more or less the same concepts. Well, that is one answer. Whether it is sufficient or not is a bit of an issue, because it still leaves us all, as it were, stuck with our own sets of perceptions and concepts in the hope that they correlate with those of others. In any case, this still does not solve the second, even more problematic, question that arises with Subjectivism, which is: how can we refer to anything else except our own sense perceptions? We may think we are going around referring our language

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to the world outside, but actually maybe we are really only referring to our own sense perceptions or our image schemas, for example. Now, I absolutely do not believe that. But, interestingly, in the Cognitive Linguistics literature, there has been virtually no disavowal of this solipsistic notion that language only refers to mental entities in some kind of way. And there are some cognitive linguists who actually maintain this point of view. They say: “we do not refer to things in the world; we refer to our linguistic concepts or image schemas and so on”. Well, I take that to be a problem. Of course we could take solipsism one step further, and ask how can we know that the world continues to exist when unperceived? That was a question posed by the radical empiricist Bishop George Berkeley at the end of the 18th century Ironically (and perhaps fittingly), the city of Berkeley, California (and its campus of the University of California) is named after Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley argued “Given that the world, for me, consists of my sense perceptions, how do I know that the world continues to exist, when I am not perceiving it; or that any bit of it continues to exist, when it is not being perceived by me or perhaps by anyone else?” So for example, how do you know that the top of Mount Everest continues to exist when nobody is perceiving it? Berkeley’s answer to that was: well, God perceives everything all the time, and therefore everything does continue to exist. We probably would not accept that kind of argumentation now. We might perhaps say something like “because there are satellites travelling around the world taking pictures all the time, it continues to exist.” But, more likely, we would reject the whole line of reasoning, and we would be right to do so, because it is a kind of a trap. Another question is: if all cognition is based on our sense perceptions, then we have to ask: How can we have concepts for unperceivable things? After all, we go around a lot of the time talking about things that are not directly perceived. You know, whether these are scientific concepts like electrons, or whether they are social concepts like, take the examples I used yesterday, if you say that somebody is the husband of somebody else, you can’t kind of perceive their husband-ness from their physical structure. So how do I actually build up concepts for things, or properties, or attributes which are not directly perceived? And again, Cognitive Linguistics does have an answer to this question, the answer being that we use imaginative metaphoric extensions. We start off with concrete domains like heat or cold which are directly experienced. They are embodied, they are experienced in our bodies and through metaphoric extension we understand other domains as well. And so for example, it is proposed that we understand emotions by metaphoric extension from the bodily experience of temperature; and the concept of time by metaphoric extension from concepts of space and motion. I criticized in detail and with

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empirical evidence the universality of the latter claim in Lecture 7. Although I do agree that cognitive semantics does have answers to these problems, I am dubious about whether these answers are good enough to really give us socially shared language, because in the last analysis they all rest upon the idea that there is some kind of experiential convergence between individual minds; they do not start off from the point of view that there is something shared, primordially and fundamentally shared, about meaning. Meaning is not fundamentally subjective, but intersubjective. And that is why in Lecture 3, and now, I propose a kind of synthetic solution as a way of trying finally to get beyond this kind of opposition between Subjectivism and Objectivism. I am only going to run through this very quickly, because I have talked about it in much more detail in other lectures. My purpose here is to highlight the need to achieve a sort of synthesis between these opposites, in order to have an adequate theory of meaning and language. The synthetic solution is essentially to preserve the distinction which we find in Objectivism between psychological and discursive concepts. In other words, I think that Frege was right to say that the senses of language are not identical with individual psychological concepts; and as I said in lecture three, I think that such senses are actually equivalent to what the philosopher Kant called discursive concepts. Where Frege was wrong was to place them in some kind of strange ideal Platonic realm, so what we actually have to do is to replace the Platonic Ideal Realm with the notion of intersubjective, normative agreement. Meanings are in a very real sense social. They are a matter of convention within a language community, and a language is a system of conventions. Now, this is very important, because although cognitive linguists such as Ronald Langacker do actually use the term convention (he says that language is a conventional system of symbolic assemblies), there is not really much exploration of what this notion of convention actually means. And in fact what we have to say is that conventions can only exist in communities. You cannot have a convention which merely belongs to a single speaker-hearer, as I said in the earlier lecture. That is in essence the Wittgensteinian argument against the possibility of a private language, and if you accept the Wittgensteinian argument against private languages, and if you also accept that conventions are properties of practices in the community, then you are bound to reject the Chomskian notion of the primacy of the internal language. Finally, let us talk about the notion of reference. We owe the distinction between sense and reference to Frege. Reference has more or less disappeared out of Cognitive Linguistics. And the reason is that cognitive linguists like George Lakoff considered that the distinction between sense and reference is one which has its roots in Objectivist, formalist philosophy of language, which

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is correct. My point is that we still need this distinction between sense and reference, and we can get it, if we get rid of the Objective Idealism of the Fregean distinction, and focus instead upon the conventionality in an intersubjective context of the senses which underline reference. And we also have to underline the fact that the reference is not a relationship between abstract symbolic objects and reality, but actually is the achievement of people in communicative situations. So reference is an achievement of people, not an attribute of meanings. And again, if you want an expansion of that, you have to go back to Chapter 4, where I looked at the development in human infancy—and by implication in human evolution—of reference in the intersubjective field. All of this means that I am arguing for a social-cultural variant of Fregean sense, and of the distinction between sense and reference. And I am repeating something here that I said earlier, a quote, because I find it really absolutely great to find in the work of Karl Bühler, more than half century ago, actually getting on for seventy years ago, this quotation: “Plato called objects that manifest similarities to linguistic meanings “Ideas”. That we have transformed the eternal and immutable into intersubjective only needs to be said in order to exclude misunderstandings.” Intersubjectivity, as I argued yesterday, is the fundamental basis of social facts and social institutions as understood by sociologists like Durkheim, and by modern philosophers of mind like John Searle. (I am not sure that Searle actually does believe exactly that, but he does at least refer to social facts and social institutions). OK, so that brings me to the end of my discussion of Subjectivism and Objectivism. The other terms which occur in the title of this lecture are Realism and Relativism, and I just want to talk about what we mean by that. Realism is essentially the proposition that there exists a mind-independent reality, to which at least some of our concepts and utterances refer. Not necessarily all of them, because it is quite clear that some of our concepts and utterances are mind-dependent. In other words, they are dependent on the way that we think. They are, in a strict sense, human constructions. So if I refer, for example, to the winner of a football league championship, OK, then I am talking about an institutional fact, rather than a mind-independent fact of the physical world. But still, realists insist that at least part of the world exists independently of our perceptions and conceptualizations and that we can know it as such. Amongst philosophers, the most common form of Realism is Objectivist Realism: in other words, you can combine Realism with Objectivism, because objectivism suggests that science is all about discovering true propositions about mind-independent, objective reality.

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But it is not necessary that Objectivism and Realism should be always combined in that way. Lakoff and Johnson are quite right in insisting that their particular approach can be called Experiential Realism. Now, it is true that there may be some tension between what I identified as the Subjectivist roots of Lakoff and Johnson’s philosophy, and its Realism; but none the less, even on the basis of an essentially empiricist philosophy of mind, you can still actually believe, you can still posit, as it were, that the world that causes the perceptions is the real world. The only thing is you can not prove it, but then I am not sure that anyone can prove it. However, I also think that there is very important twist here; and there is an important way in which cognitive semantics can give us a different take on Realism, which goes beyond Experiential Realism, and which draws a clear distinction between the cognitive-functional version of Realism, and Objectivist Realism. In Objectivism, as you know from earlier lectures and slides, the relationship of reference is one between expressions and what are called “states of affairs” in the world; and the state of affairs is supposed to be something completely Objective, from this kind of God’s eye view, with no perspective whatsoever. My point, however, is that actually people—remember I said that it is people that do the referring, it is human communicators that do the referring, and not the words on their own—people do not actually refer to Objective states of affairs in their ordinary discourse. In fact, what they do is they refer to linguistically construed situations, and here we kind of join up with the fundamental proposition of cognitive semantics: that language is all about conceptualization and construal. And it is essentially perspectival. Point of view is essential to it; subjectivity is essential to it, not in the Subjectivist sense, but in the sense that we are subjects in the world. So to express this a little bit more elaborately: linguistic reference is reference to linguistically conceptualized referential situations, not to “states of affairs” in the Objectivist sense. The position I have taken in these lectures, if you want a simple summary of it, is realist, but it is a kind of ecological, intersubjective and perspectival realism, as opposed to Objectivist Realism; and also, perhaps, as opposed to Lakoff and Johnson’s empiricist version of experiential realism. Now, before I move on to Relativism, I just want to come back to this notion of the Mind/Brain, which is so beloved of Fodor and some other philosophers. I think this concept is a conundrum. I think it is an insoluble puzzle. And I actually think that just by using this notion of the Mind/Brain, many philosophers of mind have actually basically done nothing more than increase the general confusion about the nature of mind. And I will tell you what part of

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the problem is. This brain that I have is my brain, this one here [pointing to head]. That brain you’ve got out there, every single individual one of you, is your brain. I ca not share your brain and you can not share my brain. OK? For the life of me, I cannot imagine any technology which would enable us to really share brains. What a nightmare that would be anyway, because the brain is actually part of the individual organism. On the other hand, however, I can share your thoughts, most obviously through the medium of language, and how would we be able to communicate if we were not able to share thoughts, share feelings, share experiences? Mind is actually shared, and mind is social, in a very fundamental sense. And the point about the brain is that it’s a bit of biology, which is there to support the social mind. And again, you know, there is an awful lot we could say here. One of the things that we could say is that it is a fundamental property of human cognition, that it is fundamentally intersubjective. And I do think that the majority of other species are highly limited in the extent to which they can socially share mind. Other species—to the extent that we can talk about them having minds, which I think we can— those minds really are manifestations of the individual organismic brain, but we humans have actually evolved to be essentially intersubjective beings, and of course our biology supports this intersubjectivity. Of course, the primary vehicle in adults for sharing thoughts is language. What do we mean by language being the vehicle for sharing of mind? Well, there are two views of this. One is very traditional. It certainly goes all the way back to Aristotle, but we find it in empiricist philosophers like Locke as well, and we can call it the transmission view, that language is a means of transportation of thoughts from one thinker to another. The philosopher Reddy talked about the “conduit metaphor” for language, in a famous paper cited by Gorge Lakoff in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Before I criticize this conduit metaphor, what actually is interesting is that if you go back and you look at the philosophical writings of Locke in the 17th century, you find the conduit metaphor absolutely explicitly stated. He said something like: “Language is the Great Conduit for the conveying of thoughts from one person to another.” I think this view is wrong, because it kind of suggests we have to transfer individual mental contents from one head to another, rather than starting from the point of view that actually language is a sort of collaborative and coordinative action in an intersubjective field. There is another metaphor which is also quite ancient, which is what we might called the “toolkit metaphor”: and this underlines why I prefer to talk about a cognitive-functional approach to linguistics, in which language is

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seen as a means for coordinating and transforming the shared intersubjective Universe of Discourse of interlocutors and, as a consequence of this, also the intra-subjective cognitive states, processes and capacities of individual speaker-hearers, in a Vygotskian fashion. I don’t know how much time I have to get through to the end, but I did say that I would address the issue of Relativism. I do not know what kind of general view there is of Relativism in China, or whether even it is a term that pops up in popular discourse in China. But where I come from, Relativism has become almost a term of abuse, and it is seen by some as a sort of “disease of the modern world”. You know, it is almost as if we are unable to have any values anymore, because we all have become relativists. Here are some quotes from somebody influential: “Relativism appears to be the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards … The dictatorship of relativism [which] does not recognize anything as definitive, and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” That is Pope Benedict XVI, making, as so many defenders of religion do, an impassioned speech against everything modern, as part of which he counts Relativism. So what is the target of papal wrath and anger? Relativism, according to the Pope, is identified with an attitude of “anything goes”, the notion that there is no truth of knowledge or ethics that is superior to any other. And the idea is that Relativism therefore leads inevitably to the rule of self-interest, hedonism, libertinism and amorality, and is therefore devoid of both sense and meaning and morality. Is this reasonable? Well, some philosophers have also criticized Relativism for being paradoxical. Relativism, it is said, denies the possibility of all truth claims. If everything is relative, nothing can be true. Relativism is therefore a claim about the nature of truth. Therefore Relativism, if true, cannot be true. This is a nice logical argument. But unfortunately I think it is wrong, because this criticism identifies relativism with what we might call deep scepticism, deep scepticism being a sort of solipsism actually, the idea that it is impossible to have any secure knowledge whatsoever. So given this restricted choice of views, for many philosophers, it seems that you have got to either accept Objectivism, or you get chaos. Many philosophers really believe, then, that if you let go of Objectivism, you are going to end up in a kind of deep, sceptical, negative relativism, which leaves you completely floundering in matters both of knowledge and of ethics. And I think this is quite wrong and I will try explaining why. Anyway, this criticism, I am saying, has as its target “negative relativism”, which I think has some more manifestations as well as scepticism.

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Some more manifestations of negative relativism include what I would call romantic multi-culturalism, which consists of the assertion that it is not permissible to condemn the customs of cultural groups on the basis of external judgements of value. Now I do not know what you think about this, I do think personally that there is a kind of relativism under which we can understand the contextuality of all judgements of value, and withhold generalized condemnations. But the idea that it is not permissible ever, under any circumstances, to condemn the customs of any cultural group on the basis of external judgements of value is itself a kind of total ethical scepticism. The denial of universal human rights is also a kind of negative relativism. It is often said that freedom of expression, democracy and so forth are inconsistent with this or that cultural tradition. I do know that this is an issue which has particular resonance in China, but I think that the assertion of the incompatibility of any particular ethical value with a certain tradition is a form of negative relativism. It is a negative relativism which says you simply can not make a judgement at all. I disagree with this. Judgment is possible. There is another form of negative relativism which says that scientific theories are no more valid than folk beliefs. In other words, it is sometimes said that science is just the form that our own local folk belief system takes, and it is no different from many other folk beliefs. Again, I think this is wrong. I do not have time to unpack the reasons in detail why I find all these forms of negative relativism wrong. The point that I am trying to make is essentially that these manifestations of what I call negative relativism are attitudes which are often taken to be the whole story about relativism. I do not think this, in fact I think they can be contrasted with what I will call positive relativism, which I am going to go on and recommend. I do not think that all relativist positions equate to negative relativist ideas, that have in common that they cannot be tested scientifically. They are a-priori judgements, and they are essentially negative judgements. Before going any further, let us now undertake a brief history of relativism. I think the earliest statement of something like relativism that I know of is by the Greek philosopher Protagoras. He said “Man is the measure of all things”. In making this statement, he was opposing the Platonic view, in which there are eternal and immutable forms, meanings and values. But for Protagoras, it is human reality that provides the criteria against which things should be judged. It is we humans that make meaning and value. This anti-Platonic claim suggests also that relativism in some ways is a variety of pragmatism: what is true is what works, in some context or another, what is true is what enables us to carry on some kind of productive practice. And if contexts vary, so does

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truth-in-context. And this leads us to what I would call the positive relativist proposition, which is that the judgements, beliefs and actions of individuals are comprehensible and intelligible only against the background of their own culture and language. That is what I mean by positive relativism. It is to be distinguished from negative relativism, because negative relativism says we should withhold having any judgments of our own about other people’s judgements, beliefs and actions. We do not have to withhold our own judgements. We do not have to, as it were, deny the possibility that we have another perspective as well. It just means that we cannot use our own context as the sole criterion for understanding or judging what other individuals or groups from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds are doing. And furthermore, the last of these claims— that the judgements, beliefs and actions of individuals are comprehensible only against the background of their own culture and language—is a hypothesis which can be investigated scientifically, at least to some extent, perhaps not in every respect, but at least to some extent. Relativism in modern thought emerged in anthropology and linguistics as a reaction against 19th century Social Darwinism. And, more generally, as a reaction against the theoretical assumption of a universal pattern of cultural evolution, which 19th century anthropologists believed to involve a universal progression from savagery to civilization, and from irrationality to scientific rationality. 19th Century thinkers identified a way of thinking which they called “primitive” thought, and they believed that primitive thought characterized primitive people (or savages), but also they thought that primitive thought was characteristic of children, and they also thought that it was a characteristic of mad people, of the insane. And I call this whole notion that there is sort of phylogenetic and ontogenetic progression, from madness and irrationality to rational sanity, the Phylocultural Complex. It seems very odd from our standpoint, but people really did believe this. I do assure you that it is the case, and even the early writings of, for example, Vygotsky, we find this identification between, for example, autistic thought and the thought of children. The most amusing example of the Phylocultural Complex that I’ve come across is the version held to by the philosopher Auguste Comte, who was a French philosopher, often regarded as the father of Positivism. And this poor man, he himself suffered from psychiatric illness, probably bipolar disorder or what used to called Manic-Depressive Disorder. It was reported that when he had episodes of mental instability, “he felt himself regress through various stages of metaphysics, monotheism and polytheism,

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to fetishism, and then, in the process of recuperation, watched himself mount again through the progressive changes of human consciousness, at once historical and individual, to positivism and health.” So, I do not know what you make of that, but what I can tell you is that part of this Phylocultural Complex was the notion that different forms of religious thought could be ordered in terms of their evolutionary primitiveness or progressiveness. So that fetishism was the most primitive form of religion, and you have monotheism as the most advanced form, to be followed by scientific positivism. This Phylocultural Complex had an enormous legacy in psychological and linguistic and anthropological thinking and on social science as well. Karl Marx, who is usually thought of as being a progressive thinker, nonetheless hung on to the idea that all non-Western civilizations had some kind of degree of primitivity, of the kind that he called oriental despotism; and when he talked about Greek philosophy, he talked about Greek thought as representing “the childhood of humanity”. Sigmund Freud also absolutely believed in this Phylocultural Complex, dating the birth of monotheism to the historical figure of Moses, and also believing, as he did, that the Oedipus complex was a relic of the actual historical murder by sons of the primitive and all-powerful Father. The anthropologist Levy-Bruhl had a theory that primitive thought consisted of what he called “participation”. He believed that primitive people were unable to make a distinction between their subjective ideas and the world around them, and they therefore invested the whole world with animacy, and he called this “participation”. I also use the term “participation” by the way, but in a quite different sense. Levy-Bruhl later abandoned this theory, to his credit, and decided that it was wrong. Both Piaget and Vygotsky, in their early work, accepted the hypothesis of a generalized child-primitive mentality, but again both of them later abandoned this notion. So modern relativism, in what I will call the scientific sense, actually developed as a reaction against the Phylocultural Complex, which included within it the assumption that Western civilization was the pinnacle of rationality which could be achieved by human thought. Then at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century along came people like Franz Boas, who was the father, I think in a very real sense, of linguistic anthropology as is practiced today. Boas builds upon the theories of Wilhelm von Humboldt, believing that languages express cultural and psychological diversity. He documents North American indigenous languages and he does so without making the assumption that they were just mere primitive dialects. Boas concludes that there is no such thing as “primitive language”. Edward Sapir, who was of course Boas’s student, expressed this in the following terms:

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“The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness”. Boas also, very interestingly, situates linguistics in a sort of interdisciplinary “cognitive science”. Of course he would never have used that term, because the term did not exist in those days, but it is sobering to know that nearly a hundred years ago Boas could write: “The purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world”. And note here the plural in peoples. He is recognising diversity, and he is also recognising the principled equality between all peoples in terms of their psychology, and the forms of their language. Comparative anthropological psychology was also pioneered in Britain by figures such as W.H. Rivers and Sir Frederick Bartlett. But the lessons of Boas, with his more relativistic approach and his break with Phyloculturalism, took a long time to filter through, especially to psychology. As late as 1965, we find an author, Tylor, writing this: “Between our clearness of separation of what is in the mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the lowest savage of our own day, there is a vast interval”. That is, you know, Levy-Bruhl’s theory of participation, still actually being expressed as recently as fifty years ago. And it was that kind of approach that led George Miller, who was one of the great pioneers of cognitive psychology, to say “most psychologists are poorly prepared, by education or acculturation, to understand the mental processes of people living in traditional cultures; or to grasp the fact that such people’s experiences have not required them to develop and use many of the cognitive strategies that our Western experience has instilled in us.” Here is an example, from the work of a cultural psychologist, Michael Cole. He is interviewing language consultants (or research participants if you prefer the term) in Liberia, in West Africa. These people are farmers, and he sets them this problem. He sets them a problem, using names in the culture, trying to assess their use of verbal logic, or syllogistic reasoning. The experimenter says: “Flumo and Yakpalo always drink rum together. Flumo is drinking rum. Is Yakpalo drinking rum?” And the consultant says “Flumo and Yakpalo drink rum together, but the time Flumo was drinking, the first one Yakpalo was not there on that day.” The experimenter repeats the question and gets the same answer again. Then the experiment asks “What is the reason that Yakpalo was not there on that day?” And the consultant says “The reason is that Yakpalo went to his farm on that day and Flumo remained in town on that day.” That dialogue was recorded by Cole and colleagues in 1971. Now, the question at stake is why is it that the language consultants, or participants, are not giving the same kind of answer that Western educated participants give to this kind of question, which involves a simple logical syllogism. That syllogism

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being that Flumo and Yakpalo always drink rum together, Flumo is drinking rum, therefore logically Yakpalo should be drinking rum too—but the consultant does not say that. In fact the consultant goes out of this way to make, as it were, a statement which is the opposite of what you would derive from syllogistic reasoning. Why? Well, what the consultant has done is to construct sort of hypothetical scenario. And now if you just think this through a little bit more, why would anybody be asking that kind of question? I mean if it is always the case that these two guys drink rum together, why would you be asking whether on a particular occasion they are drinking rum together or not? The reason must surely be something special about that occasion, which leads you to ask the question. And then, that leads the consultant to construct a hypothetical scenario in which one of the guys went to his farm, the other guy staying in town, and therefore they could not be drinking rum together. In other words, what we can say about this is that the discursive construction of possible reasons for why the usual ordinary state of affairs does not hold, takes precedence over decontextualized reasoning: and that is essentially Cole’s answer. He says: “Decontextualized reasoning is a particular socialized skill which is largely acquired through education of a particular form.” That is also incidentally the answer that, in the end, Vygotsky came to accept as well. All of this emphasizes the huge importance of context. Cole et al’s research, which involved categorization, memory and learning, demonstrated that the choice of materials according to familiarity/unfamiliarity of objects and categories, and also the verbal formulation of the task (whether categories are explicitly named; whether instructions or questions are given) could differentially disadvantage either nonliterate Liberian or literate American groups. The great thing about this research was that he showed that if you present tasks in certain ways, which actually get at the everyday skills of the nonliterate peoples, you will find that they perform better than literate, college-educated Western participants. Many developmental psychologists reached similar conclusions in researching children’s reasoning during the 1970s and thereafter. Context plays a role both in cultural variability and in universality. I am going to quote Cole again: “Cultural differences in cognition reside more in the situations to which particular cognitive processes are applied than in the existence of a process in one cultural group and its absence in another.” So it is not as if reasoning is something that Western subjects can do, and that nonliterate African farmers cannot do. It has also to do with the situation in which particular strategies are evolved, and in that context, it is very interesting to compare what Cole writes with what Boas said.

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Long ago, Boas wrote: “the existence of a mind absolutely independent of conditions of life is unthinkable”. Well, it was unthinkable for him, but of course for some Objectivist, rationalist philosophers that is not unthinkable at all. They actually do think that the mind is absolutely independent of conditions of life in some kind of way. Boas then goes on to say “the functions of the human mind are common to all humanity”. And that is exactly the same distinction that Cole made between the difference made by the situations in which particular cognitive processes are applied—what Boas refers to as conditions of life—as opposed to the existence a of process in one cultural group and its absence in another; which Cole does not believe in, and neither does Boas, because, as he says, the functions of the human mind are common to all humanity. And this brings us now to the question of Linguistic Relativity. I really need to be drawing to a close, I think. This is something that Benjamin Lee Whorf said. It is a quote from 1940, on the hypothesis of linguistic relativity: “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations, and hence different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.” But also, I will emphasize again, Whorf also says: “Gestalt psychology gives us a canon of reference for all observers, irrespective of their languages or scientific jargons, by which to break down and describe all visually observable situations, and many other situations also.” Now, in my second lecture I paid particular attention to the origins in Gestalt psychology of many of the concepts of Cognitive Linguistics, or cognitive-functional linguistics. And I find it very interesting that Whorf also refers to this. The interesting thing is that Whorf, who is well known or best known for his principle of linguistic relativity, also believed in a kind of universality as well: Gestalt psychology as a canon of reference. Thus Whorf also believed that in some fundamental way, the functions of human mind are universal, but that their particular situational, contextual application is variable; and in this case the situational application includes the actual language that you speak, the specific way in which that language semiotically and symbolically mediates cognition in the world. Is there a truth about Relativism? I think so. I think that a major failing of most 20th Century psychological theories was their restriction to studies of the Euro-American mind, language and culture. I think that if we are interested in understanding what is universal in the human mind, we cannot be satisfied with studying just one language and culture. We have to conduct comparative studies, and psychologists, linguists and anthropologists all have to learn from

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each other. That is the reason why I have emphasized the interdisciplinarity of cognitive-functional linguistics throughout these lectures. But we also have to learn from the diverse peoples that we work with, in the way in which Boas suggested. Positive Relativism rests on the recognition of the importance of contexuality, and represents a methodological necessity, as well as a testable hypothesis about cognitive variation and the constraints upon it. Finally: each of the world’s 7,000 or so remaining languages represents a unique source of evidence, and a resource for human identity as well as cognition. This imposes ethical responsibilities upon us as researchers regarding the treatment of the cultural and linguistic diversity of our own species. I think I am going to finish here, because I have been talking for quite a long time, and this is a good moment to finish these ten lectures. Maybe I should close by just saying one other thing. The title of the first lecture was “Language, Culture and Mind: Independent or Interdependent?” I hope by now that you have actually got my main message in all of this, that I think that Language, Culture and Mind are deeply interwoven with each other, and in that sense are absolutely interdependent phenomena which require interdisciplinary investigation. With that I will say thank you very much!

Important Resources for Cognitive Linguistics 1. http://www.cogling.org/ Website for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, ICLA 2. http://cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/ Website for China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (CIFCL), CIFCL is one of the most important international events in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. It is supported by international Cognitive Linguistics community and attended by a large number of researchers. Organizer: Thomas Li thomasli@ buaa.edu.cn Book Series: Eminent Linguists Lecture Series (with DVD) 3. http://ijcl.buaa.edu.cn/ Website for the International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by CIFCL 4. http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/16078?rskey=fw6Q2O&result=1&q=CLR Website for the Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR], edited by Dirk Geeraerts and John R. Taylor. Honorary editors: René Dirven, Ronald W. Langacker 5. http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/20568?rskey=dddL3r&result=1&q=ACL Website for Application of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL], edited by Gitte Kristiansen and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 6. http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/clscc/main Website for book series in Cognitive Linguistics Studies in Cultural Contexts 7. http://refworks.reference-global.com/ Website for online resources for Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography 8. http://benjamins.com/online/met/ Website for Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy 9. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/research/cognitive/ Website for Language and Cognition in Berkeley 10. https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/ Website for Framenet

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Important Resources for Cognitive Linguistics Founding fathers of Cognitive Linguistics

Leonard Talmy http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/talmy/talmyweb/index.html Ronald W. Langacker http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rwl/ George Lakoff http://georgelakoff.com/

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Lecture 7

Space, Time, Semiosis and Cognitive Artefacts Evidence from an Amazonian culture and language

A Mayan riddle   Q: What is a man on the road?  TIME

Outline  The hypothesized universality of space – time analogy   Cognitive Artefacts and Time   The Amondawa people – who are they?   Time in Amondawa   How Time is expressed   Parts of the day and seasons   Is there Time-as-Such in Amondawa?   Issues and Conclusions

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The conceptual mapping of space and motion to time: linguistic evidence  The recruitment of locative words and constructions to express temporal relationships in language is widespread  The following examples are from English but are typical of Indo-European languages   The weekend is coming   The summer has gone by   He worked through the night   The party is on Friday   He is coming up to retirement   I am going to get up early tomorrow

Conceptual schemas proposed to organize space-time analogies  Experiencer moving through a time-landscape (Moving Ego)  Events moving past the experiencer in a timelandscape (Moving Time)  The future located in front of the experiencer, the past behind the experiencer in English; converse schema in Aymara (Nuñez & Sweetser) – and Ancient Greek?  Positional Time: time as a spatialized sequence of events like beads on a string (before/after constructions, grammaticalized time)

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Can this be upheld as universal?   The recruitment of spatial lexical and

grammatical resources for conceptualizing time is widespread. However:   Research into for space-time analogies in language has only investigated a limited sample of languages and cultures   Time is presupposed to be a distinct cognitive (hence linguistic) domain in all languages and cultures (“Time-as-Such”)   Are space-time analogies a fact of language, or of cognition, or of culture (or all of these)?

Cognitive artefacts and cultural schemas   Cognitive artefacts can be defined as those

artefacts which support conceptual and symbolic processes in specific meaning domains   Examples: notational systems, dials, calendars, compasses   Cultural and cognitive schemas organizing e.g. time and number can be considered as dependent on, not just expressed by, cognitive artefacts   Cognitive artefacts have a history: does the concept of “Time as Such” (Reified Time) also have a history?

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Extended Embodiment   The body is our general medium for having a

world … Sometimes the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. Merleau-Ponty 1962: 146.

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The Calendar  Calendric systems can be considered as instruments dividing the “substance” of Time-as-Such into quantitative units  Calendric systems have a recursive structure in which different time interval units are embedded within each other  Calendar systems are cyclic and depend upon numeric systems

The Amondawa – who are they?   Amondawa: Indigenous Group of 115 people living in the State of Rondonia (Greater Amazonia). Community was first contacted in 1986   Language: Tupi Kawahib language – sub-branch of Tupi. Language description and ethnography have been conducted for more than 10 years (Sampaio and Silva Sinha)   Education: All speakers are bilingual (Amondawa and Portuguese) except the 2 oldest people. The primary education is based on State Education Laws for indigenous peoples and the language of instruction is Amondawa; the school is located in the village. (Sampaio & Silva Sinha)

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Indigenous lands in Brazil

Amondawa – social organization  The social organization is based on exogamous marriage and division into two “clans” (moitiés): Mutum and Arara (kanidea). This kinship structure determines the onomastic (naming) practices of the group.

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Cognitive typology of spatial motion: satellite and verb framed mapping patterns (Talmy)

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Space and motion in Amondawa  Tupi languages such as Amondawa employ a variety of form classes (verbs, postpositions, adverbs) to express locative relations and motion in space O-ho kuñaguera hea 3s-go woman she “The woman went out” O-xi kuñanguera hea tapyia pe 3s-enter woman she house POSTP.into “The woman went into the house” Wiña ura wi jawara i-hem hua That ADV.inside POSTP.out of dog 3s-exit Adv. Coming v. ? “The dog came out of that [ell. House]”

Complex constructions  Verbs of manner and motion can be combined with and without gerundivisation, but always with obligatory postposition if Ground is specified O-hem hea tapyia wi 3s-exit she house POSTP.out of “She ran out of the house”

o-ñan hua 3s-run ADV.coming

Jawara o-hem o-ñan hua tapyia wi Dog 3s-exit 3s-run ADV.coming house POSTP.out of “The dog came running out of the house” O-mbaraka hea o-xi-awo tapyia pe 3s-sing she 3s-enter-GER house into “She went into the house singing” (Lit. “she sang entering the house”)

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Form classes expressing motion, path, location   Path conflating motion verbs -ho go -hem exit -xi enter -jupin ascend/climb -jym descend

Form classes expressing motion, path, location  Obligatory locative postpositions – pe – pupe / pype – wi – re – katy – aramo – urumõ / urymõ – pywõ – rupi

at, to in, inside, into, to the inside from, out of up, up in, up on, up into, up onto nearby (stative) over, above under, below, beneath by, past (path, dynamic) along (a path)

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Form classes expressing motion, path, location  3. Optional directional and deictic adverbs, which can be considered as quasi-verbs, including: ura inside the Ground hua coming (towards speaker) awowo going (away from speaker)

The Amondawa space and motion system Sampaio, Sinha and Silva Sinha (in press)

 Amondawa regularly employs path conflating motion verbs in a wide range of construction types, and is “basically” verb-framed (Talmy)  But it is not well characterized as a typical verb framed language, having some features of equipollent languages (Slobin, Zlatev) (serial and multi-verb constructions) and a strong preference for Landmark specification  Amondawa has a profile of highly distributed spatial semantics (Sinha and Kuteva) with high Path specification  This Tupi language tells us much about the adequacy of existing cognitive typologies, but there is nothing truly “exotic”, and certainly nothing impoverished, about the conceptuali­ zation and expression in Amondawa of motion in space

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Amondawa grammar and lexicon of time



 There is no abstract word meaning “time”  Past and future are not expressed in verbal morphology (no verbal tense system)  There exists a complex nominal aspect system  There are only four numerals (see below)  There are no cardinal chronologies such as:   ages of individuals

 There are no ordinal chronologies such as:   yearly or monthly calendars

Amondawa number system   One: pe´i   Two: monkõi   Three: monkõiape´i orape´imonkõi   Four: monkõiuturaipei ormonkõimeme

How time is expressed

 Dependent morphemes or particles:

 future nehe, poti, poti … nehe;  past: ki … ko, ki … i´i, emo, ramo.  these morphemes also express modal, aspectual and evidential notions (intention, desire, perfectivity, continuous action, event witnessed by speaker etc.)  We have not fully investigated these polysemous items

 In context:

  Ki … ko [yesterday], ko, koro [today], ko´emame

[when it is morning] tomorrow, ko now.

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How time is expressed 2  Proximal Future

 T-aho koro ´i ga nehe Rel-3s-go now intens. he FUT   he will go out (from here) just now.

 Distal Future

 kuaripe taian ´i ga nehe dry season arrive.intens he FUT   He will arrive in the summer (dry season) [spoken during rainy season]

 Past

 Da-o-ur-i ki ga ko neg-3s-come-neg PAST he PAST He did not come (some minutes ago/yesterday)

Time intervals: seasons  There are 2 seasons:

1-Kuaripe – “in the sun”: the dry season, time of the sun

SUBDIVISIONS:



  O´an Kuara - the sun is jumping up (beginning of the time of the sun, also sunrise)   Itywyrahim Kuara - very hot sun; strong sun.   Kuara Tuin or Akyririn Amana - Small sun (ending of the time of the sun) / The time of falling rain is near

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Time intervals: seasons 2-Amana – “Rain”: the wet season or rainy season

SUBDIVISION



  Akyn Amana - falling rain (Beginning of the time of rain)   Akyrimba´u Amana or Amana Ehãi - very heavy rain or Great rain   Amana Tuin - small rain (ending of the time of rain)

Seasonal “schema”

Our invention or that of the community?

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Investigating the seasonal schema in Amondawa

Time intervals: day The day is divided into:   Ko´ema (morning)   karoete (afternoon)   iputunahim (night). The day is further divided by customary activities such as :  time of waking  working  eating  resting  sleeping Night is marked by the disappearance of the sun

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The absence of a calendar   The interval systems of Season and Day have sub-intervals   There is no superordinate year   There is no name for the week or lunar month   There are four names for lunar phases   There is one application of the 4-item numeral system to time intervals: enumerating moons (probably lunar phases)   There is no calendric system

Life Stages in Amondawa: time in the onomastic system

  Time through the lifespan:

  The Amondawa people change their names several times during their life time. From these names we can infer the individual’s:   age   gender   social position   moiety which they belong to

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Time intervals: life stage

The onomastic system: questions   The inventory in the previous slide is incomplete   However, the inventory of proper names is both restricted and systematic   Is it a quasi-closed class, indicating a (minimal) grammaticalization?

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The structuring of time by events and activities   Time intervals in our culture are structured by cognitive artefacts such as calendars and watches   These artefacts impose a quasi-static cultural model on Moving Time   In contrast, Amondawa time is structured by events in the natural environment (seasons) and the social habitus (Bourdieu) of activities, events, kinship and life stage status   We can diagram Amondawa time, but there is a risk of distorting it by imposing “Western” cultural schemas of cyclicity and / or linearity

Events   Events by definition occur IN TIME   However, the conceptualization of an event as occurring in a temporal plane requires a schematization of motion in a path defined by intervals.   “the salt is gone”   “the summer is gone”   “next term is coming”   All of these employ motion verbs, but they are not all temporal expressions   How can we further determine how Amondawa culture and language structures time?

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Events moving on a path, or “happenings” (appearance and disappearance)? Elicited expressions   Oho kuara tiro 3s-go sun now The sun/dry season goes   akuam kuara Cross sun The sun/dry season has passed across   uhum kuara Coming sun The sun/dry season is coming

Is there a “positional time” in Amondawa based on an intrinsic front-back frame of reference? (elicited expressions)   Amana ako kuara renande Rain be-moving sun in front of The rainy season is (moving) in front of the dry season   Kuara o’an amana renande sun born rain in front of The dry season [is] born in front of the rainy season   Iputuna´iwa owun ewire night/dark coming up behind The night is coming behind (the sun) All these expressions involve animacy and movement

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Questions raised by the research  The claim that space-time analogies are universal presupposes time-as-such as a separate, autonomous domain  Is this possible without cognitive artefacts, for measuring time, and is it the case in all cultural contexts?  In Amondawa, time is conceptualized in terms of events in the natural environment or the social habitus of activities, events and social structure  Is this why time is apparently minimally grammaticalized in Amondawa?

Methodological Issue 1 Absence of evidence

  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence   Fieldwork methods require long term intensive investigation   There are certainly gaps in our data and perhaps systematicities we have not noticed and analyzed

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Methodological Issue 2

Time, norms and conventions  “Your wife can’t make lunch at the usual time tomorrow, so she moves it forward”  “My wife always makes lunch at pyryrym kuara”  “OK, it’s me… I have to move the lunch forward.”  “Then you are a lazy woman”

A people without time?  The Amondawa do not have a calendric system  There is no evidence of spontaneous Moving Ego and Moving Time constructions  There is no evidence of spontaneous stative Positional Time constructions  There is no grammaticalized time, no lexicon of Time as Such  Although there is a complex space and motion system, and we have evidence of fictive motion in space (Talmy), there is no convincing evidence of conventionalized linguistic spacetime mapping

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On the other hand …  There is a complex nominal aspect system  The Amondawa, like all human groups, are able to linguistically conceptualize inter-event relationships which are, by definition, temporal  They lexicalize past and future in temporal deixis  They have at least three event-based time interval systems  They have cultural narratives of the collective past and mythic narratives  They are not a “People without Time”, Amondawa is not a “language without time”

Conclusions   Claimed universals in temporal cognition and language are motivated by compelling inter-domain analogic correlation, and perhaps facilitated by neural structure   However, the linguistic elaboration and entrenchment of space-time mapping is culturally driven   “Time as Such” is not a Cognitive Universal, but a sociocultural, historical construction based in social practice, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts and entrenched in lexico-grammar   Linguistic space-time mapping and recruitment of spatial language for structuring “Time as Such” is consequent on the cultural construction of this cognitive and linguistic domain   We need to re-examine the notion of cultural evolution and its place in language and cognitive variation, without postulating universal pathways of evolution, and by situating cultural practices in social ecology and habitus.

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The Mediated Mapping Hypothesis   The widespread linguistic mapping (lexical and constructional) between space and time, which is often claimed to be universal, is better understood as a “quasi-universal”, conditional not absolute.   Though not absolutely universal, linguistic space-time mapping is supported by universal properties of the human cognitive system, which (together with experiential correlations between spatial motion and temporal duration) motivate linguistic space-time mapping in linguistic conceptualization.   The linguistic elaboration of this mapping is mediated by number concepts and number notation systems, the deployment of which transforms the conceptual representation of time from event based to time based time interval systems; yielding the culturally constructed concept of Time as Such.   The conceptual transformation of time interval systems by numeric notations is in part accomplished by the invention and use of artefactual symbolic cognitive artefacts such as calendric systems.

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