Two Dimensions of Meaning: Similarity and Contiguity in Metaphor and Metonymy, Language, Culture, and Ecology [1 ed.] 9781032258089, 9781003285977, 9781032259888

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Two Dimensions of Meaning

The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print, and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature, and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy, and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture, and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible. Andrew Goatly has had a long academic career in the UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where he remains an Honorary Professor at Lingnan University. His books include The Language of Metaphors (Routledge 1997, 2011), Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Routledge 2000, 2016), Washing the Brain (2007), Explorations in Stylistics (2008), and Meaning and Humour (2012). He is now semi-retired in Canterbury, Kent, UK, an active member of the Green Party, and a keen amateur singer.

Routledge Studies in Linguistics

31 Women in Social Semiotics and SFL Making a Difference Eva Maagerø, Ruth Mulvad, and Elise Seip Tønnessen 32 Linguistic Worldview(s) Approaches and Applications Adam Głaz 33 The Discourse of Protest, Resistance and Social Commentary in Reggae Music A Bakhtinian Analysis of Pacific Reggae Elizabeth Turner 34 Metonymies and Metaphors for Death Around the World Wojciech Wachowski and Karen Sullivan 35 Cross-cultural Genre Analysis Investigating Chinese, Italian and English CSR reports Danni Yu 36 Significance in Language A Theory of Semantics Jim Feist 37 Two Dimensions of Meaning Similarity and Contiguity in Metaphor and Metonymy, Language, Culture, and Ecology Andrew Goatly For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Linguistics/book-series/SE0719

Two Dimensions of Meaning Similarity and Contiguity in Metaphor and Metonymy, Language, Culture, and Ecology Andrew Goatly

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Andrew Goatly The right of Andrew Goatly to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goatly, Andrew, 1950– author. Title: Two dimensions of meaning : similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy, language, culture and ecology / Andrew Goatly. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021060880 | ISBN 9781032258089 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003285977 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Metaphor. | Metonyms. | Semantics. | Cognitive grammar. | Language and languages—Philosophy. Classification: LCC P325.5.M47 G63 2022 | DDC 401/.43—dc23/ eng/20220504 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060880 ISBN: 978-1-032-25808-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25988-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28597-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To those recently departed linguists who have influenced me over the years: Geoffrey Leech, Randolph Quirk, Ron Carter, Michael Halliday, and Michael Hoey. And to my grand-daughter, Alice, just arrived, hoping that understanding the meaning of our interconnectedness will give her a safer future.

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of typographical conventions Acknowledgements Introduction: the similarity/contiguity distinction and an outline of the book 0.1. 0.2. 0.3.

0.4.

Two dimensions of meaning Jakobson: similarity and contiguity and two types of aphasia Wider applications of the contiguity and similarity dimensions 0.3.1. Purposes of this book 0.3.2. A detailed outline of the book To readers of this book

1 The two dimensions: similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

Using similarity and contiguity to define metaphor and metonymy Onomasiological and semasiological unconventionality What do we mean by contiguity? 1.3.1. Intra-frame contiguity 1.3.2. Inter-frame contiguity 1.3.3. Frame-schema contiguity 1.3.4. Intra-schema and inter-schema contiguity 1.3.5. Probability and degrees of contiguity 1.3.6. Metonymy, metaphor, and domains

xiv xv xvii xviii

1 1 4 8 8 10 16

17 17 20 22 23 24 24 24 25 26

viii

Contents 1.3.7.

1.4.

1.5.

Football commentary as a restricted script/genre and contiguity types in metonymies 1.3.8. Textual contiguity and textual metonymy 1.3.9. Macroscopic perspectives and global contiguity Similarity 1.4.1. Literal and metaphorical similarity 1.4.2. Varieties of similarity in semantic relations 1.4.3. Characteristics of entities as similarities or contiguities? Summary

2 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay 2.1.

2.2.

2.3.

The importance and prevalence of metaphor and metonymy 2.1.1. Metaphors 2.1.2. Metonymies 2.1.3. Metonymy, metaphor, and word-formation The interplay between metonymy and metaphor 2.2.1. The metonymic basis of metaphor themes 2.2.2. Situational triggering 2.2.3. Metaphors exploiting syntagmatic contiguity 2.2.4. The role of metonymy in similarity and analogy 2.2.5. Metaphor and metonymy working together 2.2.6. Substitution, combination, and the poetic function Summary

3 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning 3.1.

Language development in the species and in the child 3.1.1. Metonymy and metaphor in primate and human communication 3.1.2. Language development in the child 3.1.3. Genre, shared collaborative activities, and culture 3.1.4. Acquisition of metonymic and metaphoric competence

26 28 29 31 32 33 35 36

37 37 38 40 42 50 51 53 54 55 56 58 59 60 60 61 62 64 69

Contents ix 3.1.5. 3.2.

3.3.

Education: learning to write and grammatical metaphor Oral and literate cultures 3.2.1. Oral cultures’ embeddedness in practical experience 3.2.2. Oral cultures’ indifference to classification, definition, and standardisation 3.2.3. The aggregative languaging of the preliterate child and oral cultures Summary

4 Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming 4.1. 4.2. 4.3.

4.4.

4.5. 4.6.

Collocation, corpus-linguistics, and the new lexicography The theory of lexical priming Jokes and the overriding of lexical priming: some examples 4.3.1. Collocation 4.3.2. Semantic set associations 4.3.3. Pragmatic function 4.3.4. Colligational or grammatical function and semantic set 4.3.5. Grammatical role 4.3.6. Textual semantic association Some caveats about lexical priming 4.4.1. The orthographic word as the primary unit 4.4.2. The relation of text to the world 4.4.3. Generic priming Priming, formulae, metonymy/contiguity (and metaphor) Summary

5 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative 5.1.

The semantics of clausal grammar as a means of analysing metonymies 5.1.1. Interpreting metonymy according to the semantic elements of the clause 5.1.2. Interpreting metonymic compounds according to the semantic elements of the clause

70 76 76 78 80 82 85 86 88 92 93 94 97 98 100 101 102 102 103 104 106 108

110 111 114 118

x

Contents 5.1.3.

5.2. 5.3.

5.4.

The semantics of phrase grammar and metonymies in of-genitives Clause complexes as a framework for analysing inter-schema metonymies Written genres, literature, contiguity, and realism 5.3.1. Narrative, recount, written genres, and abstraction 5.3.2. Literature and abstraction Summary

6 Nouns and noun phrases: the similarity dimension, classification, quantification, and commodification 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4.

6.5.

The conceptual status of verbs contrasted with nouns From nouns to noun phrases: generalisation and definite specific reference Early literate cultures, quantification, accounting, and control Quantification, money, and commodification 6.4.1. Commodification of humanity 6.4.2. The commodification of nature 6.4.3. GDP and human well-being Summary

7 Nouns and the similarity mode: classification, taxonomies, paradigms, and measurement in science and mathematics 7.1.

7.2. 7.3.

7.4.

Classification 7.1.1. Vague, fuzzy concepts and prototypes 7.1.2. Radial categories and family resemblances 7.1.3. Metaphor, elegant variation, and alternative classification Nouns and abstraction Abstraction in science, technology, and mathematics: classification, quantification, and theory development 7.3.1. Categorisation in the natural sciences 7.3.2. Scientific theory: abstraction and paradigms 7.3.3. Nominalisation and scientific theory 7.3.4. Technology, manufacture, time, and standardisation 7.3.5. Quantification and the hegemony of mathematics Summary

121 124 127 127 133 138

139 141 143 146 150 151 152 155 156

157 158 159 161 162 165 168 168 171 174 179 183 187

Contents 8 Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals in sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and poetry 8.1.

8.2.

8.3.

8.4.

Problems of classification and statistics in the social sciences: anthropology and ethnomethodology 8.1.1. The perils of typology 8.1.2. Types as constituted by practice and the case of Agnes 8.1.3. The problem for social statistics: the case of suicide 8.1.4. Is social science then viable? The impossibility of universal laws Linguistics as a “science”: moving from semantics to pragmatics and indexicality 8.2.1. Abstraction and idealisation in linguistics as a science 8.2.2. Computation and logic 8.2.3. The universals of language versus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 8.2.4. Non-conceptual meaning and reinstating context 8.2.5. Systemic Functional Grammar 8.2.6. Pragmatics: beyond the linguistic code 8.2.7. Relevance to genre 8.2.8. Principles not rules 8.2.9. Deixis, indexicality, and reflexivity: language as use and discourse ethnomethodology 8.2.10. The trajectory of applied linguistics and language teaching 8.2.11. Summary of semantic, pragmatic, and contextual factors in discourse meaning Resisting classification and emphasizing process: GM Hopkins, Duns Scotus, Daoism, Buddhism 8.3.1. Hopkins and Duns Scotus 8.3.2. Daoism and Buddhism 8.3.3. Nature as process: Hopkins’ ‘Nature is a Heraclitean fire’, Daoism, and Buddhism Summary

9 Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot, a language without nouns 9.1.

The Canonical Event Model, English clause structure, and quantum physics

xi 189 189 190 192 193 194 196 196 197 199 201 202 205 211 212 212 215 217 218 218 219 221 225

226 227

xii

Contents 9.1.1.

9.2.

9.3.

The Canonical Event versus quantum physics and post quantum science 9.1.2. English clause structure as reflective of the Canonical Event Blackfoot: the language and culture of interconnected process for modern physics 9.2.1. Incorporation and omission of pronouns/“nouns” 9.2.2. Verbalisation of “nouns” 9.2.3. “Nominalisations” 9.2.4. Niitsi’powahsin (Blackfoot) speakers’ perspectives 9.2.5. Interconnectedness of processes as paramount in Blackfoot culture Summary

10 Feyerabend and conquest of abundance: abstraction versus the richness of being 10.1. The move away from knowledge as situated activity 10.1.1. Ancient Greece: process versus being, story-telling versus definitions and numbers, gods versus God 10.1.2. Practical knowledge versus abstract knowledge and their interplay 10.2. Science and abstraction revisited 10.3. The transformations of science and its social situatedness 10.4. The variety of science 10.5. Knowledge: diversity, power, and the hegemony of a unified approach 10.6. Language, ambiguity, and change 10.7. Summary 11 Conclusion (1): evaluating the two dimensions 11.1. Where the book has taken us and the ambivalence of the two dimensions 11.2. Problems with the similarity dimension 11.2.1. Nouns denying process and as elements of grammar 11.2.2. The problems with nouns as classes

227 234 236 238 239 240 241 244 248

250 251

251 255 256 258 262 264 269 273 274 274 280 280 281

Contents 11.2.3. Unified theories or concepts and their consequences 11.3. Problems with the contiguity dimension 11.3.1. Science and escape from the contiguities of context: scientific instruments and statistics 11.3.2. Narratives extending contiguity and the failings of the contemporary novel 11.3.3. Teleology and anthropocentrism 11.4. Pre-literate, literate, and post-literate culture 11.5. Summary 12 Conclusion (2): interplay, synthesis, and the need for diverse metaphors 12.1. The interdependence of similarity and contiguity and their paradoxes 12.2. Synthesising the two dimensions 12.2.1. Transcendent pantheism 12.2.2. The Christian doctrine of incarnation 12.2.3. Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, and systems theory 12.3. Conclusion: the need for diverse and useful metaphors and models 12.4. Postscript and self-critique Appendix 1 Metaphor themes associated with the Canonical Event Schema Appendix 2 Lexical details of the EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION nexus References Subject index Name and author index Metaphor theme and metonymy theme index

xiii 282 289 291 292 295 298 304

305 305 308 308 309 311 313 319

321 343 349 364 379 384

Figures

0.1. Areas associated with language processes in the brain 1.1. Onomasiological and semasiological orientations for conventions of meaning and reference 1.2. A diagram of a hologram 2.1. Sub-themes for EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION 2.2. “Gills kneading” 5.1. A Material Process clause representing the contiguities of context 5.2. Graham Hough’s Allegorical Circle 5.3. An example of emblem literature 7.1. Alternative classifications 7.2. Encyclopaedia entry for Tiger 7.3. A ladder of academic disciplines 8.1. System choices for Material Processes 8.2. Sources of knowledge in discourse processing 9.1. The Canonical Event Model 9.2. Thing as process in a whirlpool 9.3. The sulphur cycle 10.1. Language/cognition and perception mediating world knowledge and interpreting sensations

5 20 31 39 54 110 134 137 158 170 186 204 206 227 228 233 271

Tables

0.1. The similarity and contiguity dimensions in language and culture 0.2. Map of similarity and contiguity contrasts chapter by chapter 1.1. Literal and metaphorical similarities 1.2. “Metaphors” categorised by kinds and degrees of similarity and analogy 2.1. Metonymic categories: part to whole ICMs 2.2. Metonymic categories: parts of an ICM 2.3. Percentage of Macmillan English Dictionary sample involving metonymy and metaphor by derivation type 3.1. Example of “literal” or congruent clause structure 3.2. Example of “metaphorical” or incongruent clause structure 3.3. Percentage of nominalisations in clauses by pupils’ writing by age 4.1. The difference in markers of definiteness for the synonyms consequence and result 4.2. Colligation, collocation, association, and the meanings of consequence 4.3. Word-form, voice, and tense for decline* ‘refuse’ 4.4. Word-sketch data for Subject of drop 4.5. Collocation candidates drop 0 + 2 4.6. Collocation candidates drop + 10 4.7. Word-sketch data for blind as premodifier 5.1. Process types in Systemic Functional Grammar 5.2. Analysing metonymy in compounds in terms of grammatical clause elements 5.3. Complex examples of analysing metonymy in compounds in terms of grammatical clause elements 5.4. Semantic structure of the noun phrase 5.5. The semantics of the of-genitive in relation to metonymy

9 15 32 35 40 41 50 75 75 75 90 90 91 95 96 97 99 112 118 120 121 122

xvi

List of tables

5.6. The semantics of hypotactic clauses in English and their degrees of abstraction 5.7. Some basic written genres and their degree of abstraction 5.8. Evaluative devices in the narrative genre 5.9. Allegorical mappings in Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’ 6.1. Noun and verb concepts 6.2. Types of definite, indefinite, and general deictic reference by articles 7.1. Permitted tolerances in machining 8.1. The operation of yin and yang 9.1. An example of an English clause as incompatible with quantum and Gaia theory 9.2. The Blackfoot equivalent of “that boy brought a chair” 11.1. Linnaeus’s classification of the species Homo sapiens in System Naturae 12.1. Ideological and metaphorical oppositions

126 128 131 135 142 144 181 223 235 245 283 317

Typographical conventions

“Double quotation marks” for quotations and scare quotes ‘Single quotation marks’ for meanings Italics for lexical items as types small caps for metaphor and metonymy themes, e.g. emotion is sense impression, possessor as possession [small caps in brackets] for semantic features Bolding for source-terms of metaphors and metonymies Underlining for target-terms of metaphors and metonymies / and - in poetry for stressed and unstressed syllables respectively / . . . / for phonology.

Acknowledgements

To the five anonymous reviewers, who took the trouble to engage with this long and somewhat rambling typescript. To the departed dedicatees, who inspired me to an interest in grammar, semantics, and linguistics, and taught me, like Randolph Quirk my PhD supervisor, a thing or two. To many students and colleagues over the years, in Chiang Mai, Singapore, and Hong Kong, especially those who gave me feedback and asked intelligent questions. To the editorial team at Routledge, Elysse Preposi, Harry Dixon, Tom Bedford, Christina O’Brien Thornton, and Bex Hume who have been as efficient as could be expected. To Alan Moss, who reminded me that the meaning of life is 42, and who passed on to me his issues of The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, which kept me abreast of contemporary intellectual currents and prompted many of the (fruitful?) digressions in the book. And to Mathanee, who kept me awake with snacks, coffee, and other beverages during my writing. ‘Olympic Drug Shock By Our Olympics Correspondent Anna BolicSteroid’ on pages 104–105 reproduced by kind permission of Private Eye magazine.

Introduction The similarity/contiguity distinction and an outline of the book

As humans we are meaning-making creatures. We long for understanding and purpose. Charles Darwin wrote “as soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence”. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in similar terms: a human is a “symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaningseeking animal”, whose “drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs” (both quoted in Lent 2017: 31–32). If we see meaning as an object, we recognise it will have several dimensions which we employ in its construction. This book discusses two of them.

0.1. Two dimensions of meaning Meaning can develop along the lines of similarity or of contiguity.1 And the hypothesis that these two dimensions are both fundamental to meaning and are manifest with different emphases in cultural production is not so very new. However, this book tries to show the relevance of the two dimensions to a variety of fields to do with language, cognition, culture, ecology, and ideology which have not been brought together before. From a linguistic point of view these include: the study of oral, literate, print, and post-literate cultures; language acquisition; generative and functional linguistic theories; pragmatic theory; dialogism; linguistic classification, abstraction, and quantification; the semantics of grammar; lexicography and lexical priming theory; and, centrally, metaphor and metonymy. Running through the later chapters of the book is the cognitive distinction between nouns and verbs and its non-universality. Nouns are associated with classification by similarity and appear to refer

1. Contiguous originally meant ‘touching’ but contiguity is used here in a wider sense, more or less ‘contextuality’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-1

2

Introduction

to independently existing entities. Verbs are associated with contiguity because they cannot operate independently of nouns. The book also addresses more important cultural issues concerning the role of similarity-based abstraction in science, linguistics, and sociology, and reactions against it. But what would be the use of writing a book in our current political and ecological crises without discussing the ideological aspects of these two dimensions of meaning? They relate fundamentally to (consumer) capitalism, species destruction, and the myth of human control over nature. Obviously enough, over-reliance on the similarity dimension undermines difference and (bio-)diversity. The two dimensions provide a framework for understanding not only economics and ecology, but also the rise of visual and emotional communication in internet culture. A glance at dictionary definitions gives an immediate taste of the two dimensions. The Macmillan English Dictionary (MED) (Macmillan 2002) defined or explained one meaning of dog as follows: An animal kept as a pet, for guarding buildings or for hunting. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) (Onions 1969), by contrast, defned the meaning as follows: A quadruped of the genus canis, of which wild species are found in various parts of the world, and numerous breeds varying greatly in size, shape and colour occur in more or less domesticated state in almost all countries. These are referred by zoologists to a species C. Familiaris, but their common origin is disputed. MED’s defnition is predominantly based on contiguity in experience, how dogs typically feature in human cultural schemas such as keeping a pet, guarding, or hunting. The similarity dimension only operates minimally, where a dog is classifed as a kind of animal (or one kind of animal is a pet); this classifcation means it, a dog, must share the defning features of animals, and I take similarity to entail the sharing of features. Contrastingly, in the SOED defnition the similarity dimension seems paramount. A dog is defned as a quadruped, being similar to other quadrupeds in the possession of four legs, is in turn allocated to the genus canis, making it dissimilar from quadrupeds of other genera, and is further sub-divided into the wild breeds and domesticated breeds, C. Familiaris. Nevertheless, the reference to domestication introduces an element of contiguity in human culture, while the reference to wild breeds “in various parts of the world” and domesticated breeds “in almost all countries” acknowledges location contiguity as a feature of the domestic/wild distinction. Even the category quadruped is parasitic on contiguity, too, as the four legs are literally contiguous with or part of the body of the dog.

Introduction

3

The importance of these two dimensions of meaning has been stressed by Seto, and Nerlich and Clarke: Metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche are three fundamental ways in which language conveys mental representations. They form the three corners of what Seto calls “the cognitive triangle” (Seto 1999). Metaphor is based on “seeing similarities” (e.g. She is the sun of my life), metonymy is based on “exploiting connections” (e.g. I am giving a paper), and synecdoche is based on understanding relations between categories, on “understanding class inclusion” (e.g. Give us our daily bread). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is an urgent need to study metaphor and metonymy as universal mechanisms of semantic structure, semantic change and semantic development. (Nerlich and Clarke 2001: 77–78) I reduce Nerlich and Clarke’s three dimensions to two, subsuming “synecdoche” or class inclusion under similarity; ‘bread’ as a sub-category (hyponym) of ‘food’ inherits all its meaning features, and therefore, as with metaphor, the relationship between the two meanings depends upon similarity. How necessary is the similarity dimension for meaning? In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson point out that communication does not have to rely on codes (Sperber and Wilson 1995). In their example, if you ask me whether I have recovered from my headache and I take out a bottle of aspirin from my handbag and shake it, this can convey the message that I am still suffering. This would rely on a contiguity relationship of cause and effect between suffering a headache and having a bottle of aspirin in my handbag. Coded communication is, however, fundamental to language and meaning. It incorporates the symbols which allow us to transcend the constraints of our immediate context and of working memory. It does so by categorisations and concepts involving similarity. Thinking in symbols allows humans to break through the capacity constraints of working memory and construct the elaborate patterns of meaning that shape our lives. To understand how it can do this, imagine for a moment our working memory as a literal blackboard. Now, imagine a teacher asking twenty-five children to come up and write on the blackboard what they had to eat that morning before they came to school. The blackboard would quickly fill up with words like “cereal” and “eggs”, “pancakes” and “waffles”. Now, suppose that, once the blackboard’s filled up, the teacher erases it all and just writes on the blackboard the word “BREAKFAST”. That one word, by common consent, symbolizes everything that was previously written on the blackboard. And now it’s freed up the rest of the blackboard

4

Introduction for anything else. That’s the powerful effect the use of symbols has on human cognition. But there’s another equally powerful aspect of writing that one word, “BREAKFAST”, on the blackboard. Every schoolchild has her own experience of what she ate that morning, but, by sharing in the symbol BREAKFAST, she can rise above the specifics of her own particular meal and understand that there’s something more abstract being communicated, referring to the meal all the kids had before they came to school, regardless of what it was. (Lent 2017: 50–51)

In this way classifcations allow us to accept abstractions as given and presupposed so we can build on them in future thinking and discourse. The importance and characterisation of these two dimensions has its origin in the work of Roman Jakobson, as described in the next section.

0.2. Jakobson: similarity and contiguity and two types of aphasia The “father” of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1960), made a fundamental distinction between the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis of language. The paradigmatic axis concerns the choices we make in using language, for instance which nouns to put in the slot in “Amanda ate the ______”. By contrast, the syntagmatic axis concerns the way we combine these choices to make text. The choice will be from among the paradigms of words that are similar in word-class and semantics – in our sample sentence all typically being nouns referring to types of food – while the words combined in syntax will be next to each other or contiguous. A common analogy is choosing how to dress: there are at least three paradigms involved – the articles of clothing that cover the body from the waist up, those for covering it from the waist down, and those for covering the feet. Selection has to be made, for example, from tee shirt, blouse, tank top, etc., trousers/pants, shorts, skirt, etc., sandals, trainers, high-heeled shoes, etc. Putting trousers over your head would violate the rules, rather like a grammatical violation, such as *“Amanda ate the compare”. Moreover, a stylish dresser, or one who wants to be perceived as conforming to the norms, will make sure that the choices combine in a fairly predictable way – tee shirt + shorts + sandals is normal, tank top + skirt + high heels is odd, just as “Amanda ate the slate” is semantically odd, though grammatical. In both cases the choices from the paradigm result in contiguity on the body and in the text. Using this distinction, Roman Jakobson, who developed de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, was the first to emphasise the fundamental mental distinction between contiguity/metonymy and similarity/metaphor in language use. Jakobson claimed:

Introduction

5

The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity [paradigmatic] or through their contiguity [syntagmatic]. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. (1987: 10) [my insertions] He found evidence for this distinction in research into two kinds of aphasia, language impairments arising from brain injury, which he discusses in ‘Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’ (1987). These types of aphasia affect two different areas of the brain – one Wernicke’s area (in the temporal lobe) and the other Broca’s area (in the posterior inferior frontal lobe) (Figure 0.1). He identified aphasia caused by Wernicke’s area injury with deficiencies in the paradigmatic selection axis, and aphasia caused by Broca’s area injury with deficiencies in the syntagmatic combination axis; these corresponded, respectively, to metaphoric/similarity and metonymic/contiguity incapacity: Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, of the faculty either for selection and substitution or for combination and contexture . . . The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former [Wernicke’s area], the relation of contiguity

Figure 0.1 Areas associated with language processes in the brain

6

Introduction in the latter type of aphasia [Broca’s area]. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder. (1987: 9–10) [my insertions]

So aphasics who are deficient on the paradigmatic axis in terms of selection and substitution will revert to the syntagmatic axis and metonymy. Phrases like “knife and fork”,“table lamp”,“to smoke a pipe”, induced the metonymies “fork”, “table”, “smoke”; the relation between the use of an object (toast) and the means of its production underlies the metonymy “eat” for “toaster”. (1987: 7) The metonymies here depend upon contiguities in the context of activities like eating a meal, smoking, and preparing toast to eat, and in the frst three examples these are refected in typical textual adjacency or contiguity. Conversely, aphasics deficient on the syntagmatic axis of contiguity and combination will often be reduced to the utterance of one-word sentences, but can still select on the paradigmatic axis, relying on similarity/ metaphor: The patient confined to the substitution set (once contexture is deficient) deals with similarities, and his approximate identifications are of a metaphoric nature, contrary to the metonymic ones familiar to the opposite type of aphasics. “Spyglass” for “microscope” or “fire” for “gaslight” are typical examples of such quasi-metaphoric expressions. (1987: 8) Note, as mentioned earlier, that the hyponymy (‘kind of’) relation or sub-classifcation is identifed with the metaphorical axis – gaslight is a kind of fre – because both metaphor and class-inclusion depend upon similarity. How well has the distinction between two types of aphasia held up in the light of later neuropsychological research? And how might this research help to expand our understanding of the significant contributions to meaning made by these areas of the brain? Ardila (2010) presents evidence that, indeed, the primary types of aphasia affecting the language faculty are associated with, if not confined to, these brain areas. He agrees that Wernicke-type aphasia is linked with impairments to the lexical/semantic system and Broca-type aphasia with impairments to the grammatical system.

Introduction

7

More generally, Broca’s area is associated with verbs and clausal grammar (see Table 0.1). Increased activity is observed in the temporal lobe [the location of Wernicke’s area] while speaking or thinking in nouns, whereas speaking or thinking in verbs activates Broca’s frontal area (Raichle 1994). By the same token, impairments in finding nouns are associated with temporal lobe pathology, whereas impairments in finding verbs are associated with left frontal damage and Broca’s aphasia (Ardila & Rosselli 1994; Damasio & Tranel 1993). (quoted in Ardila 2010: 380–381) [my insertion] In addition, Ardila suggests that Wernicke’s area links with semantic and episodic memory, meanings and events, and Broca’s area with procedural memory, memory of the movements involved in carrying out an action. Not surprisingly, therefore, mirror neurons are located in Broca’s area (Rizzolati and Arbib, 1998), since these are neurons which fre when an action is carried out, but also when a person observes someone else carrying out the same action. The only caveat here is that fMRI scans show that language production and grammar are not confined to these areas of the brain.2 Therefore it might be better to talk of two different systems rather than of particular areas (Tremblay and Dick 2016, Ardila 2021), though still using the shorthand “Broca’s aphasia” and “Wernicke’s aphasia”.3 The degree to which the similarity and contiguity modes of processing are localised in these different specific areas of the brain is, in any case, not crucial to the distinction between the two dimensions of meaning. Other researchers such as Uri (1992) have, with small reservations, shown the validity of Jakobson’s distinction between the two aphasias and

2. Tremblay and Dick maintain that suggesting Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are responsible for language processing is misguided in several ways. 1) These areas are not defined precisely enough. 2) Language is processed using a distributive architecture which includes cortical and subcortical components, “a distributed anatomical connectivity, and, perhaps most importantly, a heavy reliance on domain general neural resources”. 3) There may not be neural tissue dedicated to the specific task of processing and producing language. An alternative view is that language is, at least in part, an overlaid functional system that “gets what service it can out of nervous tissues that have come into being and are maintained for very different ends than its own” (adapted from Sapir 1921) (Tramblay and Dick 2016: 68). 3. Ardila (2021) has made more subtle distinctions in discussing areas of the brain involved in grammar. While verbs as an element of grammar are associated with the left inferior frontal area, confirming Jakobson’s theories and subsequent research, prepositions and grammatical cases are associated with the left posterior parietal area.

8

Introduction

the impairment of contiguity and similarity dimensions of meaning. There is also evidence from psycholinguistic research that access to the mental lexicon proceeds along these two dimensions. Aitchison (1994: 82–97) surveyed the research at the time indicating that the two most important psycholinguistic links between words are co-hyponymy (as in salt and mustard, both condiments, or butterfly and moth, both flying insects), and collocation, i.e. typical co-occurrence in textual proximity (as in blue moon, green fingers, and yellow fever). Co-hyponymy clearly depends upon similarity, since the co-hyponyms share the same superordinate – ‘flying insect’ for ‘butterfly’ and ‘moth’– and therefore belong to the same class. Whereas collocation obviously reflects experience of textual contiguity – our frequent use of green and fingers next to each other in text.

0.3. Wider applications of the contiguity and similarity dimensions This book is not the first attempt to extend the opposition of combination/ contiguity/syntagmatic versus selection/similarity/paradigmatic beyond language and language disorders to human psychology, behaviour, and culture in general. Referring to Table 0.1, the areas that Jakobson (1987) and Lodge (1977) covered are in the first 17 rows. I will not pursue all of their cultural additions in this book, i.e. those in normal type. But I have added the last six rows in the table which I explore in some depth. The items important for me are those which have been bolded. Below I give more details of the purposes and contents of this book, related to these bolded items. 0.3.1. Purposes of this book This books attempts to show how similarity and contiguity are implicated in a wide range of linguistic and cultural practices, and the advantages and disadvantages of making meaning in the two dimensions. The aims of the book are: 1) to explain how the two dimensions work; 2) to demonstrate their relevance for metaphor and metonymy, and for linguistic, literary, scientific, sociological, and philosophical theory; 3) to explore their manifestations in culture, ideology, and ecology; 4) to understand the pitfalls of emphasising one dimension over another; 5) to show how they interrelate and might be synthesised; and finally 6) to argue for a diversity of metaphors, narratives, and models. Generally, the book is an exercise in the meaning dimension of ideology. Ideology has been defined as meaning in the service of power (Thompson 1984). The languages, metaphors, and models we use predispose us to create different meanings and understandings of the world, which give us the power to operate within it. These understandings may differ according to the emphasis we put on the two dimensions and on the contexts in which

Introduction

9

Table 0.1 The similarity and contiguity dimensions in language and culture (after Lodge 1977: 81) SIMILARITY

CONTIGUITY

JAKOBSON AND LODGE METAPHOR Paradigm Similarity Selection Substitution Absence Mapping Contiguity disorder Contexture deficiency Drama Montage Dream symbolism Surrealism Imitative magic Poetry Lyric Romanticism and symbolism

  METONYMY Syntagm Contiguity Combination [deletion] Contexture Presence Recovery Similarity disorder Selection deficiency Film Close-up Dream condensation and displacement Cubism Contagious magic Prose Epic Realism

MY ADDITIONS Literate classification/re-classification Abstractness Science Standardisation and quantification Noun Semantics

  Pre-literate language acquisition Concreteness Technology Diversity and individuality Verb/clause Pragmatics

they are acquired and used. In this respect the book is an exercise in critical linguistics or critical metaphor analysis (CMA) (Charteris-Black 2005: 26–29), though approaching it from a somewhat abstract level. There are several levels at which metaphor/metonymy studies, critical or not, operate. At the bottom level there is the analysis of metaphors/ metonymies as they occur in actual texts, where most of the work in CMA occurs, e.g. the exemplary studies by Musolff (2004) and Charteris-Black (2005), or Goatly (2011, especially Chapter 9). At a slightly higher level of abstraction and generalisation are corpus studies (e.g. Deignan 2005). More general still are studies of lexis and lexical patterns in the dictionary, even though they indirectly depend on corpus-linguistics because they use dictionaries compiled using corpus data (e.g. Goatly 2007, Allan 2008). These overlap with another tradition of cognitive linguistics, which tends to be top-down and, initially, relied on the intuitions of native speakers, rather than on texts and corpora (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Master Metaphor List 1991, and Kövecses 1986, 1990). The top-down approach

10

Introduction

is most clear when cognitivists posit universals such as force dynamics (Talmy 1988) and Event Structure (Langacker 1991) (discussed in this book in 2.1.1 and 9.1, with lexical evidence for it in Appendix 1). The present book, by positing two fundamental dimensions to meaning, aligned to metaphor and metonymy, based on the functioning of different parts of the brain in language processing, takes a similar generalised top-down approach, though I hope it reaches down effectively to the levels below it. 0.3.2. A detailed outline of the book Because Jakobson and Lodge identified similarity with metaphor and contiguity with metonymy these tropes are the obvious topics to begin with. Chapter 1 gives a definition and discussion of these distinctive tropes and how they may be defined in terms of the similarity and contiguity dimensions. Unconventionality of meaning is crucial to both tropes, but can operate in opposite directions; from text to referent, or from referent to text. Definitions of similarity and contiguity are given. Similarity includes literal classification, approximation, symbolism, as well as prototypical metaphors and concretising ones. Contiguity depends upon frames, schemas (action genres), and scripts (discourse genres), and degrees of contiguity can be explained using these concepts. Illustrations of metonymies of these different kinds are given from football commentary. Chapter 2 demonstrates the prevalence and importance of metaphor for understanding the abstract world. This is illustrated though lexical details of the metaphor themes associated with the Event Schema and EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION (included in the appendices). The importance of metonymy and metaphor is also evidenced through examples of wordformation involving the two tropes. Acknowledging that material metaphors for abstract concepts originate in our senses in the contiguities of our experience, the interplay and confusion between the two tropes is discussed in detail. Chapter 3 takes a long historical perspective: firstly on the origins of language, and on the acquisition of meaning in a child’s developmental process, based on the writings of Tomasello; and secondly in the discussion of oral, literate, and print cultures, of which Walter Ong was a pioneer. The general claim will be that the contiguity or metonymic dimension is prominent both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, as it were, that is in pre-literate cultures as well as in the early childhood acquisition of meanings. The chapter shows how, during the educational process, children are inducted into highly nominalised academic writing, which is increasingly abstracted from the contiguities of the speech context. Chapter 4 makes a step from claims of metonymic prominence in language acquisition to the late Michael Hoey’s lexical priming theory, which gives evidence that meanings are acquired in textual context and

Introduction

11

that natural-sounding uses of language rely on the contiguities of these syntagmatic primings. The theory that the contiguity relations of priming diminish potential paradigmatic ambiguities is tested by showing how humour recreates these ambiguities when overriding priming. Priming complicates the paradigmatic/syntagmatic distinction by introducing fuzzy boundaries to linguistic units of the paradigm. It might be critiqued for its attempt to divorce knowledge of language from knowledge of the world. Text and experience mirror each other, so contiguity in text is a reflection of contiguity in experience. Chapter 5 starts with a more limited view by concentrating on grammatical relations, using a combination of frame semantic theory and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Frame semantics and SFG transitivity structures show how contiguity relations are grammatically encoded. For instance, in the dictionary definitions of ‘dog’, above, the semantic relations in a clause reflect the contiguity relations in cultural experience. In the MED entry the noun “dog” is defined in terms of the patient/affected of the verb “keep”, the agent of the verb “guard”, and the instrument of the verb “hunt”. In the SOED entry the contiguity relations may be reflected not only as patient/affected of the verb “found”, but also in the locational adverbials such as “in various parts of the world” and “in almost all countries”. I use the semantic categories of SFG to analyse the metonymic deletions in compounds and genitive constructions. The chapter ends by considering the extensions of the contiguity mode in various prose genres, suggests that the grammatical clause is the nexus from which narrative develops, and contrasts literary and other genres in terms of abstraction. Chapter 6 narrows the grammatical discussion even further to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of the noun-verb, entity-property distinction. Since nouns are, in European languages at least, regarded as relatively independent and self-contained, they can apparently escape a definition by schema contiguity, and therefore participate in multiple levels of classification, based on similarity and dissimilarity. This chapter concentrates on the quantifying potential of the noun phrase. Quantification provides support for monetisation, the ultimate act of capitalist ideology, in which everything can be regarded as similar to something else through its money value. This results in creeping commodification of humans and nature, with adverse effects on equality and biodiversity. Chapter 7 revisits the structure of the noun phrase and how it enables the similarity dimension to operate through classification and sub-classification. It contrasts classical categorisation with theories of prototypes, radial categories, and family resemblances, and suggests how metaphor and elegant variation provide alternative categorisations. The thrust of this chapter is to show the similarity-based abstraction that scientific taxonomies and paradigms impose, through a consideration of Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm. It demonstrates, too, how science depends for its abstractions upon grammatical metaphors like nominalisation (i.e. turning verbs/adjectives into nouns).

12

Introduction

And it describes how industrial processes demand the standardisations of their manufacturing output. Science stands between, on the one hand, the practical action schemas of technology, involving the contiguity dimension, and, on the other, the extremely abstract mathematics, which depends in its relation to science on the standard units of clock time. Mathematics, despite reducing meaning to almost vanishing point by extreme emphasis on similarity for its applications, has nevertheless attempted to take over other sciences. Chapter 8 explores how noun-based classification and quantification have caused problems and provoked resistance in sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and poetry. It begins by examining its critique by ethnologists and ethnomethodologists within sociology, who demonstrated that identity or self-classification is established by participation in action and discourse, making the similarity dimension dependent on the contiguity dimension of situated behaviour. It reviews ethnomethodological critiques of statistical analysis based on doubtful classifications of, for instance, suicide, raising question marks about sociology’s “scientific” status. It continues by discussing some strands of 20th century linguistics. It sketches the highly abstract, idealised, and computational Chomskyan approach to syntax and meaning, with its quest for universals and the claim that at a deep level all languages are similar. This is contrasted, first, with the linguistic relativity hypothesis of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf – languages are unique in the way they generate meanings because they use similarity to analyse the contiguity of experience in a variety of ways. Second, it is contrasted with semantic theories which have attempted to reinstate the affective and interpersonal contiguities of meaning. Third, with Systemic Functional Linguistics, which shares the emphasis on the interpersonal and the social, and reinstates the contiguities of context through genre theory. Fourth, with the pragmatic theories of Grice, Leech, and Sperber and Wilson, who emphasise various aspects of the cognitive and interpersonal environment as crucial to communicative understanding, and the recognition of purpose and intention. This pragmatic approach nevertheless needs a social theory of genre to operationalise the vague notion of relevance. The chapter ends by exploring more overt resistance to noun-based classifications: in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and philosophy of Duns Scotus we find a celebration of uniqueness; in Daoism and Buddhism warnings of baseless differentiation; and in all of these, as in Heraclitus, a recognition that process is fundamental. This paves the way for a consideration in Chapter 9 of quantum theory and the inadequacies of noun-based thinking and the subjectverb-object grammar of European languages to express the primacy of process. European languages construct and reproduce the Canonical Event Model according to which one active relatively permanent participant exerts force on a second entirely passive participant, in a setting and with an external observer which play no part in this event. This model is profoundly unscientific, from a quantum theory point of view, and

Introduction

13

anti-ecological, as it perpetuates the myth of human control over natural processes and separation from the environment. The quantum physicist David Bohm in his last years discovered the Algonquin language, Blackfoot, which better represents the quantum worldview, marginalising nouns and emphasising verbs and processes. The worldview reflected in Blackfoot is closer to the life experience of processes and events, and fundamentally dependent on contiguity, one aspect of which is its bypassing of the noun-addicted classificatory systems of European languages. It presents a worldview consonant with Leibnizian positionality, relational, fractal, and quantum theory, and deep ecology. The last three chapters attempt some kind of tying together of the ideas about the two dimensions of meaning, including their interactions and dependencies. Chapter 10 considers the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, drawn from his unfinished and posthumously published book Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being. Feyerabend delineates the moves, in ancient Greece, away from the processes of situated practical activity, narrative, and commonsense towards abstraction, numbers, and a concept of unchanging reality/God, and explores the interplay between abstract knowledge and practical knowledge. He helps us define more clearly the similarity-based abstraction involved in science, which attempts to eliminate contiguities. Nevertheless, science cannot escape the contiguities of social situatedness, and indeed often proceeds to experiment by creating stage sets or artificial contiguities to shape reality in ways which allow the least resistance to understanding. He catalogues the variety of scientific approaches in different fields and subfields, and the various knowledges of “primitive” cultures. These are just as valid as modern “enlightened” scientific knowledge, since their ideologies give people the power to live sustainable and fulfilled lives. He abhors the quest for grand unifying theories in which particularities and contradictions are ignored. He celebrates the ambiguities inherent in language and in the events and objects to which language refers, seeing in this ambiguity the possibilities of change and of the erosion of fixed monolithic theories. Chapters 11 and 12 summarise the book and extend its arguments. Chapter 11, after a summary, rejects facile value judgments about the dimensions. On the one hand, we can take warnings about an overemphasis on the similarity dimension as spawning monolingualism, monologic discourse, monoculturalism, monolithic reductionist science, monotheism, “moneytheism”, monocultures, and the catastrophic reduction in biodiversity. On the other hand, there are distortions brought about by the commonsense of cultural practice within the specific limited contiguities of physical and temporal contexts. For instance, narratives might seem a manifestation of the contiguity dimension. However, in the contemporary realistic novel, contiguities are so limited in time and space and so wedded to the individual that they cannot deal with the larger time frames

14

Introduction

involved in climate change, nor the webs of interrelation which link us in global contiguities with the biosphere, nor the need for collective action to mitigate ecological crises. Commonsense relates to both dimensions. On the one hand, it is often defined by the inevitable similarity-based abstractions of language, and therefore based on fictions, like race, which are difficult to argue against. And our nouns make it difficult to accept the processual nature of reality. On the other hand, relying on the local contiguities of commonsense experience is also severely restricting. Our perceptions are limited, and only through scientific observing instruments can we understand the microscopic worlds of atomic structure or the worlds of biology which raise our awareness of global contiguities. Abstract mathematics, statistics, and science, by distorting or challenging our commonsense world of local contiguity have, after all, improved our quality of life, by, for instance, helping us eliminate disease. Further still, abstract, disinterested, observational science – with no imperative for technological applications serving human purpose and for human benefit – might be more beneficial than an anthropocentric science. Maybe nature has no purpose, or a purpose beyond the evolution of humans. Orality, emphasising contiguity, and literacy, emphasising similarity, are another area where value judgments are ambiguous. Literacy and writing can be an instrument of control as in the early Mesopotamian cities or can liberate from tyranny as in the Reformation. Our post-literate age increasingly relies on the kinds of formulaic slogans of oral culture, and emotion-provoking images, less abstract than words, both of which make critical thought difficult. Internet communication is seen to share some of the more negative features of speech and writing. Chapter 12 summarises the ways in which the two dimensions are interdependent and interact. Taking this further, it explores the various attempts to synthesise the one with the many, interconnectedness both local and global with abstract forces, and systems with the particulars of their instantiations. Hinduism, Christianity, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism all attempt this in different ways, and the latter two find their modern counterparts in the theory of complex systems. Finally, I reach the conclusion that, since language and the similarity dimension it inevitably involves is intrinsic to humanity, our “patterning instinct” (Lent 2017), the best we can do is welcome a diversity of metaphors, narratives, models, and languages for understanding our human condition and the world of which we are a part. We need to acknowledge these as useful fictions, mere hints and analogies of a reality beyond our complete understanding. The scope of this book is wide ranging and a little complex. Readers may find the map in Table 0.2 provides a useful overview of some of the most important contrasts. Often the alignment of the topics towards contiguity and similarity is simply a tendency, and in some cases, for instance “technology, science, and mathematics” this is reflected in the layout.

Introduction

15

Table 0.2 Map of similarity and contiguity contrasts chapter by chapter Chapter 1 2 3

4

5

Contiguity

Similarity

- metaphor - schemas and frames - word-formation: conversion; suffixation - oral culture - language acquisition in generic context - polyphony and diglossia - aggregation - corpus linguistics and priming - contemporary learner dictionaries - clausal grammar and metonymy - recount

- metonymy - class-inclusion - word-formation: phrasal verbs; idioms - literate culture - de-contextualised academic literacy - monoglossia - analysis - traditional semantics and grammar - traditional dictionaries

- narrative realism in novels 6

- verbs and clauses

7

- hunter-gatherer culture - noun phrases: deictics; definite specific reference - congruent language

8

9

- biology - anthropology and ethnomethodology - linguistic relativity - Systemic Functional Grammar - pragmatics, deixis and social meaning - Hopkins, Duns Scotus, Heraclitus, Buddhism, Daoism - quantum physics - Blackfoot verbs and interrelated processes

- (noun) - information report, discussion, and argument - abstraction in allegory, emblem, and humour literature - noun phrases: things and quantifiers - money and commodification - grain-based city culture - noun phrase: things; classifiers; objective epithets - nominalisation and abstract nouns - standardisation, in print and manufacture - paradigms and theories - mathematics - statistics-based social science - language universals - Chomskyan linguistics - semantics and conceptual meaning - (Aquinas, Plato, and mainstream Western philosophy) - Newtonian physics - English nouns and classes (Continued)

16

Introduction

Table 0.2 Continued Chapter

Contiguity

10

- process/becoming - being - Homeric narrative - definitions and numbers - polytheism - monotheism - technology - science - mathematics - barter - money - varieties of knowledge - unified theory - verbs and process - nouns and permanence - commonsense experience - commonsense categories - contemporary novel, - epics and large-scale natural the individual and forces, climate change anthropocentrism - ecological and social - individualistic freedom interrelatedness - biodiversity - species loss and monoculture - internet communication

11

12

Similarity

- interplay: Experiential Hypothesis; metaphtonomy, poetic function; schema-based categories - synthesis: transcendent pantheism; incarnation; Daoism, Neo-Confucianism; and systems theory - variety of metaphors

Note that the last row of Chapter 11 and the whole of 12 span contiguity and similarity as they concern their synthesis and interplay.

0.4. To readers of this book This book is aimed primarily at postgraduates and researchers whose field is (cognitive) semantics and pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy, critical linguistics/discourse analysis, and/or the philosophy of language. Those specialising in metaphor and metonymy may focus particularly on Chapters 1–5. Those specialising in the ideological analysis of language or critical linguistics/discourse analysis will find Chapters 6–12 the most engaging. The more general educated reader interested in language, and students of literature and cultural studies, should be stimulated by Chapters 3, 4, and 6 to 12. However, even the more specialised linguistic chapters try to explain technical terms as they proceed, and therefore should be accessible to the motivated general reader or undergraduate.

1

The two dimensions Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

Jakobson’s original claim was that metaphor worked on the similarity dimension and that metonymy worked on the contiguity dimension. This first chapter, therefore, defines metaphor/literal categorisation and metonymy in terms of these dimensions (1.1). Both metaphor and metonymy involve unconventional meanings, and I distinguish two directions of unconventionality of reference (1.2). There follows a theoretical exploration-cum-definition of contiguity (1.3). It begins with an in-depth description of degrees and kinds of contiguity, using as theoretical tools the concepts of frame and schema (1.3.1–1.3.4), and degrees of probability (1.3.5); though I question the idea that same domain (frame/schema) is a sufficient condition for identifying metonymy as opposed to metaphor (1.3.6). This framework is illustrated by examples from football commentary (1.3.7), before addressing the question of textual contiguity and textual metonymy (1.3.8). Finally, I distinguish local contiguity from the global contiguities which tie us in ecological and economic relations (1.3.9). Turning to similarity (1.4), I attempt to distinguish literal and metaphorical similarity (1.4.1), and then, in the kernel of this section (1.4.2), explore different degrees and kinds of similarity relations, the literal, the non-prototypical and approximative, those involving general-specific meanings, involving meanings and features of meanings, transfer metaphors, and analogical metaphors. I discuss the vexed theoretical problem of whether relations involving entities and characteristics are metaphorical or metonymical (1.4.3).

1.1. Using similarity and contiguity to define metaphor and metonymy Let’s begin by introducing some terminology for analysing metaphor and metonymy with a couple of examples. Take this metaphor: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. (The Go-Between, Hartley 1973) DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-2

18 Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy The non-literal element ‘a foreign country’ is labelled the source. It is not literal because instead of referring to a land where one does not live or where one was not born it is applied to the past. What it is applied to in the metaphor, the past, is called the target. And the similarities between target and source are the grounds ‘they do things differently there’. Sometimes in this book it will be useful to bold the term referring to the source (the source term), and to underline the term, if any, referring to the target (the target term). Or consider this metonymy: The doorways were screaming with laughter. (Golding 1961: 20) The non-literal element is “doorways”, which is the source. It is not literal because instead of referring to the space between the door-frame it is applied to ‘the people in the doorways’, which is the target. We do not normally talk about the ground of metonymies, but the relationship is one of contiguity, that is the target, the people, are located in the space made by the doorframe. I can now present contrasting definitions of metaphor and metonymy to illustrate the ways in which similarity and contiguity figure in their interpretations. A metaphor occurs when a unit of text (the source term) is used with an unconventional meaning (the target). And when this unconventional meaning is understood on the basis of similarity (grounds) involving the conventional meaning of the unit (the source) and the actual unconventional meaning (the target). (based on Goatly 2011: 109) A metonymy occurs when a unit of text (the source term) is used with an unconventional meaning (the target). And when this unconventional meaning is understood on the basis of contiguity between the conventional meaning of the unit (the source) and the actual unconventional meaning (the target). Let’s work through a couple of examples of each to show the difference between these two tropes, metaphor frst, then metonymy. In the novel Pincher Martin, William Golding refers to a large slab of rock as a suitcase: “He put his back against the suitcase” (p. 61). In this use “suitcase” (the source-term) has an unconventional referential meaning ‘a slab of rock’, the target. This unconventional meaning is understood on the basis of a similarity in shape, size, and weight (the grounds), between a suitcase (the source), the conventional meaning of the unit,

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

19

and the rock being unconventionally referred to (the target). Or consider the following joke as an example of metaphor: Two slugs were slithering along the pavement. Rounding the corner they found themselves behind two snails. “Oh, no!” groaned one of the slugs. “Caravans”. [“Trailers” in US English] (Tibballs 2006: 37) In this use “caravans” (the source-term) has an unconventional referential meaning ‘snails’ (the target). This unconventional meaning is understood on the basis of a relational similarity or analogy (the grounds): this involves caravans/trailers (the source), the conventional meaning of the unit, and the snails being unconventionally referred to (the target). The analogy is as follows: cars are to caravans as slugs are to snails, since caravans and snails have living accommodation attached, while cars and slugs do not. I now turn to examples of metonymy. A restaurant waiter might say “the fish and chips at table 12 needs his bill/check”, using “fish and chips” to refer to the customer who ordered the fish and chips at table 12. In this use “fish and chips” (the source term) has an unconventional referential meaning ‘the customer’ (the target). The unconventional meaning ‘customer’ is understood on the basis of contiguity in experience of the food ordered (the source) and the customer (the target). Or consider the more authentic example from William Golding’s Free Fall: I looked up . . . to the good lady who lived there. She had two rooms upstairs, she was mortared to the pub, she did for nice people, and she had curtains. (Golding 1961: 18) In this use “she” (the source term) probably has an unconventional referential meaning ‘the rooms where she lived’ (the target). This unconventional meaning is understood on the basis of contiguity in experience of “she”, the lady (the source), and the rooms where she lived (the target).1 Metaphors and metonymies often exhibit patterns in the dictionary. In the example “the past is a foreign country” the target, time, is paired with the source, space, a pattern evident in the lexis long/short time, yearly interval, the past, far distant future, etc., etc. When labelling these

1 This is a probable interpretation. Another possible one, pointed out by a reviewer, is metaphorical: she is so much part of the pub it is as though she is mortared to it. I think the larger context implies a metonymy, though both metonymy and metaphor could be operating simultaneously.

20

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

patterns, which I call metaphor/metonymy themes, I use the traditional formula A IS B (e.g. TIME IS SPACE) for metaphors, and the untraditional A AS B for metonymies (e.g. DWELLING AS PERSON), traditionally b FOR a. My formulation for metonymies is more consistent than the traditional one, since a stands for the target and b stands for the source in both tropes. A AS B reads “A as referred to by/conceived as B”. Preserving the same order is also important, since, as explained in 2.2.1, p. 51, metaphor often has its origins in metonymy, so A AS/IS B is sometimes a useful label for patterns of lexis.

1.2. Onomasiological and semasiological unconventionality Conventionality, in the definition above, can be thought of in terms of the meaning that is first recorded in the dictionary or first learnt, the more concrete meaning, and often the most frequent. However “conventional meaning” is still inherently ambiguous. We need to consider the different directions between the term and its referent or meaning: from unit of text to referent; or from object to unit of text. That is, we either identify what the textual unit conventionally means or refers to, which is known as the semasiological perspective. Or we identify what textual unit is conventionally used to refer to a given referent, which is known as the onomasiological perspective (Figure 1.1). Taking an onomasiological perspective on metonymy distinguishes it from a related semantic phenomenon, zone activation. Are the following interpreted metonymically or not? (For discussion see Kövecses and Radden 1998, Paradis 2011, Geeraerts and Peirsman 2011): • • • •

The dog bit the cat I started the car I have lots of papers to grade The car is slow

Kövecses and Radden (1998) claim that “The dog bit the cat” involves metonymy as it is not the whole dog, but the dog’s teeth that literally UNIT OF TEXT + MEANING

OBJECT/PROCESS/QUALITY

ONAMOSIOLOGICAL

conventionally referred to by

SEMASIOLOGICAL

conventionally referring to

Figure 1.1 Onomasiological and semasiological orientations for conventions of meaning and reference

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

21

bit the cat. “I started the car” is metonymic in a similar way, meaning ‘I started the car’s engine’. And “I have lots of papers to grade” refers metonymically to only part of the process, since the papers need to be read before they are graded. But from an onamosiological perspective, surely the most conventional way of referring to an event in which a dog uses its teeth to bite a cat is “The dog bit the cat”. Similarly “I started the car” in neutral contexts is the most conventional way of referring to the starting of the car’s engine, while saying “I have lots of papers to grade” is a normal way of meaning ‘I have lots of papers to read and grade’. We need, therefore, to distinguish metonymy from “zone activation”, a much wider phenomenon. It is always the case that only a certain portion of the use potential of lexical items is in focus in linguistic communication. Zone activation happens within senses and does not involve different senses. For instance, in “slow car”, the function role of ‘performance’ is the relevant aspect, but that does not give rise to a situation in which we are dealing with two different senses of car. Car is the conventional lexical item for both ‘car as artefact’ and ‘car as performance’. (Paradis 2011: 69) Tabossi made a similar point about salience. In these three sentences, 1) “She sat on a tomato”, 2) “She likes tomatoes”, and 3) “Her face was like a tomato” most people would agree that different aspects of what one knows about tomatoes come to mind in the three sentences, namely tomatoes are squashy in 1), they are food in sentence 2), and they are red in sentence 3) . . . The saliency of the different aspects of an unambiguous word is affected by the sentence in which it occurs. (Tabossi 1989: 26) That is to say, the different co-texts or contiguities in the text point to different schemas or scenarios in which different knowledge about tomatoes is salient or most accessible and relevant. Turning to metaphor, taking an onomasiological perspective on my definition, if we use superordinates, the more general terms, rather than hyponyms, the more specific terms, this counts as “metaphorical”. For example, if I refer to your car as “your vehicle”, this is not the conventional term for referring to it. However ‘vehicle’ and ‘car’ are similar, since, being a hyponym, ‘car’ incorporates all the features of ‘vehicle’ in its semantics. Instead of this being problematic, it counts as evidence that superordinate-hyponym or class-member relations and metaphor both belong to the similarity dimension. They might both be regarded as classinclusion phenomena (Glucksberg 2001), metaphor being an ad hoc

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Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

allocation to a class. Hyponymy depends upon conventional categorisations, whereas metaphor is unconventional. Lakoff and Johnson long ago pointed out that “sub-categorisation and metaphor are endpoints on a continuum” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 84–85). Therefore, as well as using an over-general term, using an unusually specific term would also count, onomasiologically, as “metaphor”. The complicating factor is that what is unusually specific and what is unusually general will depend upon the activity in which the discourse takes place. If you are discussing the planting of an arboretum, pine and Buddhist pine may be the more normal terms than tree, for instance. I would suggest that “conventional” will often mean the basic level term (see 7.2, p. 167), the term at the highest level of generalisation that can be imagined, and the term first learnt. This first learning establishes the first conventions for reference. A symptom of the affinity between class inclusion and metaphor, and the problematisation of the boundary through fuzziness, is that some hedges, used to signal approximation, are also used to signal hyponymy and metaphor (Lakoff 1972: 196). Particularly significant are the phrases, a kind of/a sort of. Consider these examples: 1) 2) 3) 4)

A pike is a kind of fish An escalator is a kind of staircase A glove is a kind of sock for the hands A sort of sigh passed through those men crowded together as they looked with strange faces at the murderer (‘The Man with the Scar’, Maugham 1951: 496)

1) is an obvious case of a literal class-inclusion statement, where ‘fsh’ is a superordinate and ‘pike’ a hyponym. 2) is more like an approximation; escalators are not prototypical staircases, which are static. 3) is a metaphor, perhaps an explanatory one for students of English in a tropical country, since a salient functional feature of socks is that they clothe the feet. In 4), it seems irrelevant whether we have approximation, metaphor, or classinclusion, probably because ‘sigh’ is at the bottom of a hyponymic chain; that is, we do not have words for more specifc kinds of sigh (Goatly 2011). All four cases, 1) – 4), express similarity of different kinds and degrees. Since contiguity and similarity are the two dimensions of meaning explored in this book, and which we are using to distinguish metonymy and metaphor, I need to discuss more fully what they mean, and the different kinds and degrees of contiguity and similarity that are found in texts and the lexicon.

1.3. What do we mean by contiguity? In the psycholinguistic literature various terminology is used to refer to stereotypical knowledge stored in long-term memory, the favourites being

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frame, schema, and script (Schank and Abelson 1977, Greene 1995). To avoid confusion I use frame to indicate knowledge of objects/substances (things), schema for knowledge of events, actions, and action sequences (Fairclough 2001), and script for discourse sequences. I shall also extensively use the term genre, which includes both schemas and scripts and their combinations. Discourse sequences or scripts are constitutive of some genres, such as scientific journal articles, while in other genres discourse is ancillary to activity sequences or schemas, for instance dance lessons. A complicating factor is that, following Tomasello’s work on the origins of language (see Chapter 3) and insights of ethnomethodology (Chapter 8), I suggest that frames are usually experientially established by and theoretically subsumed within schemas. This will become clear in the discussion of degrees of contiguity that follows. Peirsman and Geeraerts (2006) attempt to indicate clines of contiguity, in much the same way as I suggested a cline of similarity from literal classification through approximation to metaphor in examples 1) to 3). Building on their insights, though radically revising their approach, I would suggest treating contiguity, as exemplified in metonymy, in terms of frames and schemas: intra-frame contiguity, inter-frame contiguity, frame-schema contiguity, intra-schema contiguity, and inter-schema contiguity. (Most of the examples in what follows are taken from Kövecses and Radden 1998, see Tables 2.1 and 2.2, pp. 40–42.) 1.3.1. Intra-frame contiguity The most prototypical examples of contiguity are cases of part/whole, as in America for ‘the USA’ or WHOLE AS PART as in per head, meaning ‘per person’, or hands ‘people working’, all of which are clearly intra-frame.2 Another particularly intimate case of contiguity is found in OBJECT/SUBSTANCE and OBJECT/SHAPE “metonymies”, such as “please hand me a glass”, or “she plays the triangle”. (Intra-frame contiguity is the greatest degree of contiguity only from a commonsense perspective. From a quantum theory perspective the hologram provides an even greater degree of contiguity, as the smallest part contains within itself the largest part. See 9.1.1, p. 232.) However, I put “metonymies” in inverted commas in the previous paragraph. This is because there is a theoretical issue in distinguishing these two tropes as regards the parts, substances, and shapes of entities, which I discuss in 1.3.6. PART AS WHOLE,

2 These might metaphorically be extended to abstract frames such as time as in “give me a second” meaning ‘give me a short period of time more than a second’, or scales such as age where, in “how old are you?”, “old” seems to imply, if not refer to, the whole scale of age including youth.

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Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

1.3.2. Inter-frame contiguity Slightly less contiguity gives us containment, CONTAINER AS CONTENTS or as in “the milk tipped over”, meaning ‘the milk container tipped over’, or “he drank a whole bottle”, meaning ‘the contents of a whole bottle’. Less contiguously still we have POSSESSOR AS POSSESSION, as in “She married money”, or CONTROLLED AS CONTROLLER, as in “Christopher Wren built St Paul’s”, meaning ‘the workers controlled by Wren . . . ’. Decreasing contact further we arrive at OBJECT/PERSON AS LOCATION metonymies, as in my previous example “The doorways were screaming with laughter” (Golding 1961: 20), meaning ‘the people located in the doorways were screaming with laughter’, and PRODUCT MADE IN a PLACE AS PLACE, for instance, china. A similar level of contiguity applies in ENTITY INOLVED IN MOTION AS TIME OF MOTION, e.g. “The 8.40 has just arrived”, if time can be conceived of as a frame. These inter-frame contiguities may be experientially dependent on schemas, so that, for example, the schema of drinking beverages is the experiential context within which the CONTENTS AS CONTAINER contiguity of “he drank a whole bottle” is established. CONTENTS AS CONTAINER,

1.3.3. Frame-schema contiguity More obviously frames and schemas interact in cases where the whole action schema stands for an object or location involved in the schema, and vice versa. Consider “the flight is waiting to depart” where the action schema of flying stands for the plane which flies in an OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION AS ACTION metonymy. Note that that the verb fly has been nominalised as the noun flight. A reverse example is “I’ve been watching Wimbledon all afternoon”, where the place of action stands for the whole action, ACTIVITY AS PLACE OF ACTIVITY. 1.3.4. Intra-schema and inter-schema contiguity Intra-schema contiguity would correspond to Peirsman and Geeraerts’ metaphorical conception of schemas as containers with contents, or wholes with parts. Here we have COMPLEX EVENT AS SUB-EVENT, e.g. “Jay and Denise are to walk up the aisle”, meaning ‘Jay and Denise are to get married’, or “Mother is cooking dinner” meaning ‘mother is preparing the ingredients for dinner and then cooking them for dinner’ (though this Kövecses and Radden example is better treated as a zone activation). It is quite difficult to know where one schema begins and another ends, however, or what is intra-schema and inter-schema contiguity. Consider “He has gone to the toilet”. This means not only that he has gone to the room we call a toilet, but that he has also gone inside it and is urinating or defecating there. The change of tense from “has gone” to “is urinating/

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

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defecating” might suggest that these are separate events or schemas, though obviously related by contiguity/continuity and the fact that the purpose of approaching the room is to go inside and urinate/defecate. I think we might also include in inter-schema contiguity cases where an action schema triggers a mental/emotional process schema in a cause-effect relationship. If we unpack the meaning of the metonymy “a sad book”, we might arrive at two schemas, reading a book and becoming sad, the first causing the second. Alternatively this could be regarded as a frame-schema contiguity, ‘book’ representing a frame and ‘becoming sad’ a schema. Another candidate for inter-schema contiguity would be EVENT THAT SOUND CAUSED AS SOUND, as in “they booed the players off the field” where the schema of booing and the schema of the players leaving the field are separate, but related in sequence by cause and effect. I include CAUSE-EFFECT relationships within contiguity, but I am aware that by doing so I am probably relying on a lexical pattern or metaphor theme CAUSE IS LINK/CONNECTION; there is no literal physical touching. The theme is realised in vocabulary which includes the following: link and linkage ‘relationship of cause and effect’ there’s a link between poverty and terrorism; chain reaction ‘series of events each of which causes the next’ the bombing of the WTC set off a chain reaction; hinge on ‘depend on’ the election result hinges on the party’s immigration policy. Cause and effect relations are some of the more abstract kinds of contiguity (5.2, p. 125). 1.3.5. Probability and degrees of contiguity If we consider degrees of contiguity we may wish to think in terms of necessary, expected, and possible relationships, or degrees of prototypicality. Intra-frame contiguities which involve part-whole and substance/ shape-object relationships are obviously necessary in that parts cannot exist without a whole, and objects necessarily are made of substances and have shapes. Inter-frame contiguities, as exemplified above, would be very expected, if not necessary, as containers are designed to have contents, possessions do not exist without possessors, and objects/people must occupy a spatial location.3 Intra-schema cause-effect relationships will be predictable because they are deliberate sub-schemas within a single event/process/action schema. Inter-schema contiguities will be the least predictable, since the ways in which one action/event/process impinges on another may be either expected or unexpected. Reading your textbooks carefully may result in passing an exam, as expected. But driving your car across a bridge may cause a bridge to collapse, and you

3 Whether space exists without the objects located within it is a separate philosophical matter (9.1.1, p. 230).

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would not have expected it, or even thought it possible when you drove your car across it. 1.3.6. Metonymy, metaphor, and domains It has become a truism in cognitive linguistics that metaphors operate across domains or schemas, and metonymies operate within the same domain/schema, which might rule out inter-schema metonymies. Both of these assumptions are doubtful. In the metaphor “Thatcher was the UK’s Reagan” the domain/schema is political activity for both target and source, even if these politicians refer to different frames (Taylor 2003). Nevertheless, if we regard contiguity as the kind of cline suggested above, then the most intimate cases of contiguity are likely to give rise to metonymy more easily than the more distant cases. 1.3.7. Football commentary as a restricted script/genre and contiguity types in metonymies We can exemplify the importance of action schemas to metonymy, and show how they correspond to different kinds of contiguity by examining metonymies in football commentary/reports. Football is an action schema, but when it is described or reported in commentary or news reports we have a secondary discourse genre/script. Nevertheless, commentary is more or less structured by the action on the field. Because the structure of the primary action schema is relatively restricted, with only a limited range of frames and sub-schemas, this allows for widespread use of metonymy. I take these examples from Kicktionary.4 I present them in ascending order of metonymic complexity, with my suggested metonymy theme labels. I use the label “PATIENT” for the participant affected by a process (rather than the potentially confusing “GOAL” used in later grammatical analysis in Chapter 5). INTRA-FRAME METONYMIES red “Romania were reduced to ten men with 15 minutes remaining when Barcauan saw red but still extended their lead through Petre”. Metonymic meaning – ‘red card’: entity as (is) characteristic of entity

4 www.kicktionary.de/

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woodwork “Moments later it was Orjan Berg’s turn to rattle Panathinaikos’ woodwork for a second time with a thumping volley, and sustained pressure looked certain to give Rosenborg the lead”. Metonymic meaning – ‘wooden frame of the goal, its posts, and crossbar’: object as substance INTER-FRAME METONYMIES shirt “Four minutes later Gerrard and García passed their way through the Monaco defence to set up Cissé, who hammered in his second goal in a Liverpool shirt”. Metonymic meaning – ‘team’: possessors (team) as possession (equipment) goal kick “Sparta looked to have restored their lead when Jun dribbled around Coupet and slotted home from close range, but the ball was adjudged to have gone out for a goal (kick) earlier in the move”. Metonymic meaning – ‘(kick) away from a location near the goal’: direction as location/place (of process) INTRA-(SUB)SCHEMA METONYMIES chest “Immediately afterwards, however, the deep-lying forward played an instrumental role in the opening goal, chesting a ball into the path of Kalou”. Metonymic meaning – ‘move the ball by using the chest’: process (move) as means back in the dressing room Butt joined the fray but the former Manchester United FC player was soon back in the dressing room after reacting to a late challenge by Abbas Swan on Kluivert. Metonymic meaning – ‘sent off’: process (send off) as resulting location INTER-(SUB-)SCHEMA METONYMIES visit “PSV visit Rosenborg BK on 20 October, with Panathinaikos meeting Arsenal”.

28

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy Metonymic meaning – ‘visit and subsequently play against’: process (playing against) as previous sub-process goal “Veteran midfield player Phillip Cocu scored the first after 38 seconds before a late goal from 18-year-old Ryan Babel” Metonymic meaning – ‘shooting the ball into the goal thereby scoring’: process (resulting score) as direction (target) of patient (ball) of previous process (shot) I assume that the literal goal is the space enclosed by the physical structure with posts, crossbar, and net, as in “Ronaldo burst into the box on three minutes and shot fiercely at goal”.

Because commentating on a fast-action game like football puts time pressure on the commentators, metonymy is an especially useful means of achieving communicative economy. Contiguity, therefore, may have a textual dimension. 1.3.8. Textual contiguity and textual metonymy Jakobson stressed this textuality with his emphasis on the syntagmatic. Firstly, real world contiguities are reflected, and reinforced, by the grammar of their representation. Some actions/schemas in their representation in clauses necessitate one grammatical participant/argument (“she sneezed”), others two (“he killed the snake”), and some necessitate a Location or Direction Circumstance too (“she put the orange in a box”). I explore these textual manifestations of metonymy in Chapters 4 and 5 on priming and grammar. Secondly, Jakobson (1987) pointed out that metonymy involves deletion on the syntagmatic axis, whereas metaphor is substitution on the paradigmatic axis. Metonymies might, therefore, to a greater or lesser degree be regarded as a kind of ellipsis, as an economical means of highlighting the most important or new information. When they are clearly abbreviations or ellipses we can refer to them as textual metonymies. For instance, if a waitress says to another waitress “Can you give the ham sandwich his check”, as a metonymical shorthand for ‘the customer who ordered the ham sandwich’, then the metonymy elides “the customer who ordered”. This elision is possible because, in the context of the restaurant schema, customer is an essential role, the ordering of food by a customer is one of the earlier scenes, and these are therefore assumed, old, or given information. What needs to be highlighted is new information that singles out a specific customer from others, so that the waitress addressed can identify the specific customer (González and Clivillés 2017). In the example that follows, for speakers of British English who, unlike US speakers, have not lexicalised the metonymic meaning of

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“tuition” as ‘tuition fee’, this recent quote from Bernie Sanders seems to have taken the deletion too far. But we can probably supply the missing “fee” because of our knowledge of the schema: It [addressing the structural problems in US society] means making public colleges, universities, trade schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities tuition-free and forcefully addressing the outrageous level of student debt for working families. (Sanders 2021) [my insertion] In this respect textual metonymy resembles the normal ellipsis in conversation “How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?” “Around 20”, ellipting “cigarettes a day”. Additionally, there may be a similarity between metonymy and unexpressed objects, for example “Have you eaten?” versus “have you eaten a meal?”, or “William shaved carelessly”. Metonymic verbs which conflate a process and a participant tend to background the participant in this kind of way. For instance, in “I painted the shed this afternoon”, in which paint has the meaning ‘to apply paint to’, information conflated in the verb (the paint itself) is backgrounded and information expressed by other sentence constituents, such as the shed, are foregrounded (Murphy 2010: 186). Some researchers have even gone as far as to say that ellipsis is constructional metonymy (Barcelona 2009: 386). Thinking of metonymy in relation to form as well as meanings means we can formulate textual metonymy as WHOLE FORM AS SALIENT PART OF FORM (Barcelona 2009: 389). This opens the way to seeing word-formation processes such as abbreviations, truncations, and blends as the result of metonymical processes (Goatly in preparation). Though metonymy and metonymic thinking involves the contiguities of the syntagm, it was perhaps misleading for Jakobson to label the syntagmatic dimension as metonymic, because metonymy actually involves an absence from and a reduction of the syntagm. This deletion suggests that it facilitates the removal of certain features of the context with their rich patterns of contiguity. So although it exploits the contiguity dimension it can also be used for the purposes of abstraction, if by abstraction is meant the diminution of the richness of context. 1.3.9. Macroscopic perspectives and global contiguity Deciding whether more than one schema or more than one frame is involved in contiguity relations might depend upon whether the frame or schema is conceptualised on a smaller scale/locally or macroscopically/ globally. We are connected with the rest of the universe by bonds of contiguity. Therefore the local contiguities of the kind illustrated above, realised in the specific space and time of everyday experience available to our senses, should be distinguished from global contiguities which

30 Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy connect us to the universe beyond. As an instance of the latter, the elements that make up our bodies may have originated in outer space. Or as A.E. Housman (1967a) puts it: From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither; here am I. (‘A Shropshire Lad’ in Collected Works XXXII: lines 1–4) More scientifcally we can consider Gaia theory (see also 9.1.1, pp. 232–233, 11.2.3, pp. 287–288). Gaia, the earth goddess, is the name given by James Lovelock to the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, the earth’s crust, and living things, conceived of as one inclusive self-regulating organism. From this perspective, Gaia is a frame of which the elements are a part, in a web of contiguity. Or, better still, the process of self-regulation to produce homeostasis, the stability necessary for life, can be conceived as a schema involving many interconnected sub-schemas (such as the sulphur cycle with sub-sub-schemas of its own, 9.1.1, p. 233). These sub-schemas work together to maintain stability through the changes they bring about. Alternatively, from a chaos theory perspective, when a system is far from equilibrium, with stability at risk, then a schema may have a causal effect producing another schema apparently non-contiguous with it. The famous example is the idea that a butterfy fapping its wings in Brazil might cause a tornado in Texas, or, at least, help determine its course. Carlo Rovelli (2021), in interpreting quantum theory, claims that objects and processes only exist in relation to each other, and are only manifest through their interactions (9.1.1, pp. 231–232). Similarly, the physicist David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order (Bohm 1980) states that there exists an order at some deep level where everything is interconnected processes of an undivided whole, and that only when it becomes relevant to human consciousness do we separate it out or explicate it into abstractions like space, time, objects, etc. He likened this implicateexplicate distinction to a drop of ink introduced into a cylinder full of glycerine which is then rotated at speed so that the ink drop first resolves into a line and then becomes invisible, entirely implicate. But if the rotation is reversed the ink re-emerges as a line and finally is explicated as the original drop. Or he used the analogy of the hologram, which I already mentioned in the context of intra-frame contiguity. In a hologram, the small part of an entity represents in miniature an image of the whole, though in less detail, as the bottom left hand corner of A, a small part of B, represents the whole of B (Figure 1.2). The interesting point to be made here is the hologram combines metonymy and metaphor, contiguity and

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy (A)

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(B)

Figure 1.2 A diagram of a hologram (personal photograph)

similarity; the part-whole contiguity reflects a similarity relation between the part and the whole. Not only are we implicated in the global contiguities of the biosphere, of which we are often unaware, but more specifcally in the economic contiguities of globalisation. In a modern capitalist globalised economy the goods and services available in the market have relationships to unknown and invisible people in many parts of the planet, relationships of extreme complexity. When we exchange money for these goods and services and consume them these global relationships are generally hidden from us, even if occasional campaigns to enforce labour laws in remote countries and on behalf of child workers, forced labourers, etc. raise awareness of some of the relationships. This operation of global capitalism is one of the ways in which money facilitates de-contextualisation and covers up contiguity (see 6.4, p. 150).

1.4. Similarity I turn now from discussing the kinds and degrees of contiguity to examine the kinds and degrees of similarity. Consider the following examples: 1) 2) 3) 4)

My husband is a policeman My father, being a chauffeur, was a kind of taxi-driver Men on welfare become vegetables I guess that love is a banana peel

I assume that 1) is a literal statement, so that the husband meets all the criteria for being a policeman. 2) is an approximation which, however, is probably not quite literal; though both drive cars for a living, a chauffeur is employed by a single client, whereas taxi drivers tend to have multiple clients. 3) involves much less similarity, because now a human

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is compared with a plant. And in 4) the distance is greater still, since the target is abstract and the source concrete. 1.4.1. Literal and metaphorical similarity Similarity is the principle behind conventional classification and reference, in which the established critical features for inclusion in a class are automatically applied. In metaphor, by contrast, features of similarity ignored by conventional classification are highlighted instead. So let’s take an example of the literal and metaphorical uses of the word chair, to see how similarity applies. If I use the word chair to refer conventionally to a newly encountered chair, say a particular armchair, I would be matching critical features of the concept against the newly encountered object. Let’s assume that the critical features of meaning in my frame concept of ‘chair’ are those found in the frst column of Table 1.1. And that the armchair to which I am literally referring has a number of observable and functional features, as listed in column 2. If I am speaking literally, then all the features [CONCRETE], [INANIMATE], [ARTEFACT], [FURNITURE], [FOR SITTING], [FOR ONE PERSON], [WITH SUPPORT FOR BACK] would be matched to the referent. Suppose, on the other hand, I use “chair” to refer to a boulder that you are sitting on when you get tired climbing a mountain. Assuming that the observed and functional features of the boulder are those in column 3, the similarity, the features shared between our concept of a chair and the boulder, will be fewer: [CONCRETE], [INANIMATE], [FOR SITTING], [FOR ONE PERSON], [SUPPORT FOR BACK]. The unconventionality of meaning in the metaphor is captured by the fact that some features, [ARTEFACT] and [FURNITURE], critical for literal reference, do not apply to the boulder.

Table 1.1 Literal and metaphorical similarities (after Goatly 2011, Table 4.2) ‘chair’

literal (armchair)

non-literal (boulder)

/concrete/ /inanimate/ /artefact/ /furniture/ /for sitting/ /for one person/ /with support for back/

concrete inanimate artefact furniture for sitting for one person with support for back

concrete inanimate - artefact +natural - furniture for sitting for one person support for back

with arms with casters upholstered coffee stained etc.

made of stone covered in moss etc.

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It is necessary, however, to consider the salience of the features. The features shared in metaphor must be psychologically salient or relevant, and, for metaphors these are more likely to be specific rather than general features.5 So “my chair is a fish” will probably not be a successful metaphor, if my chair and a fish are only similar in being concrete rather than abstract entities (Goatly 2011). 1.4.2. Varieties of similarity in semantic relations Having made a rough distinction between literal and metaphorical applications of similarity, let’s discuss some further examples of similarity in semantic relations, detailing different kinds of metaphor, synecdoche, and symbol. 1) “Fishing is a sport” This is borderline literal. The fshing schema is not a prototypical member of the more general sport schema. Sports are prototypically competitive, and fshing generally is not. So if [COMPETITIVE] is a defning feature of sports, this counts as metaphorical. 2) “My mother was as near a whore as makes no matter” This is perhaps slightly more metaphorical. It is a quotation from Sammy, the protagonist in William Golding’s Free Fall (Golding 1961), whose mother slept around, and sometimes got goods in return, but not money. If ‘having sex with multiple partners for money’ is the defnition for being a whore, then it is metaphorical, because his mother did not always receive rewards, and, when she did, they were not for money but for goods. But, like 1), the similarity is very high since the distinction between monetary and non-monetary rewards is minimal. 3) Pill as in “Are you taking the pill?” 4) Hoover as in “This hoover is rather heavy” Slightly less similarity is involved in cases of hyponym-superordinate (specifc-general) “metaphors”. 3) illustrates HYPONYM IS SUPERORDINATE, where the pill means ‘contraceptive pill’, with [TO PREVENT PREGNANCY] added in the “metaphorical” meaning. While 4) illustrates SUPERORDINATE IS HYPONYM, where hoover means ‘vacuum cleaner’, and [HOOVER BRAND] is subtracted from the literal meaning. 5) Black as in “I noticed the black helping the woman cross the road”

5 That is, in traditional technical terms, semantic distinguishers rather than semantic markers (Katz and Fodor 1963)

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This might be called a synecdochal “metaphor”, according to the formula ENTITY IS CHARACTERISTIC, as in blacks, the blind, meaning ‘black people’, ‘blind people’. Here one feature of black or blind people is used to refer to them. This is non-literal similarity, because, although “black” is applied more or less literally, the other critical features of humans are ignored and blackness becomes a defning feature. 6) Hawk as in “The hawks wanted a war with Iraq” 7) Don’t count your chickens before they hatch The semantic pattern in 5) is reversed in 6), a symbolic metaphor, where as in hawk ‘violently inclined person’ or Judas ‘treacherous person’. Apart from [INCLINED TO VIOLENCE] other features of the concepts of hawk such as [BIRD] are ignored. Proverbs like 7) might belong here, though they also resemble SUPERORDINATE IS HYPONYM metaphors, 4), since a hyponym ‘counting chickens before they hatch’ stands for the superordinate, ‘anticipating a favourable outcome before it happens’. CHARACTERISTIC IS ENTITY,

8) “The beach was a thin bowstave” 8) is an example of a transfer metaphor, with concrete source and target. The feature shared is probably [LONG CURVED SHAPE], but the differences involve critical or salient features of two frames. The features ignored for the bowstave frame are [WOODEN], [ARTEFACT], [PART OF a BOW FOR FIRING ARROWS], etc. And for the beach frame the metaphoric similarity excludes the features [BORDERING SEA AND LAND], [MADE OF SAND, PEBBLES OR ROCKS], [INCLINING DOWNWARDS TO THE SEA], etc. In many ways transfers of this kind are prototypical metaphors. 9) “The atom is a solar system” 9), Rutherford’s famous explanatory metaphor (Gentner 1982), is physicalrelational, where the metaphorical interpretation depends upon the relational analogy – electrons : nucleus :: planets : sun. (This reads as “electrons are to the nucleus as planets are to a sun”.) The relational similarities are that both nucleus and sun have greater mass than electrons and planets, and electrons and planets both revolve around the nucleus and the sun. All other non-relational aspects that would defne atoms and solar systems are passed over besides these relational ones. 10) Grasp as in “She failed to grasp my meaning” 10) is a concretising metaphor, i.e. with an abstract target and a more concrete source, in which relational similarities or analogies are essential. On one interpretation there are three elements involved which are

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

35

mapped across the physical and mental schemas and frames (domains): hand, action of grasping, object grasped; mind, understanding, idea. So, a hand grasping an object is analogous to a mind understanding an idea. Because the target is relatively abstract and the source a relatively concrete physical action, the metaphor necessarily demands analogy. Relational similarities tend to involve schemas rather than simply frames. Table 1.2 sums up our discussion of the above examples repeated in column 3. Column 1 labels the kinds of “metaphor”, and column 2 indicates whether similarity or analogy is involved. 1.4.3. Characteristics of entities as similarities or contiguities? Before proceeding, I need to address a theoretical issue brought to light by examples such as 5), black. Many theorists prefer to think of this as an example of metonymy ENTITY AS (not IS) CHARACTERISTIC OF ENTITY. Some use the term “synecdoche”, as I have, to refer to these ambiguous examples. The confusion is compounded by a misguided tendency to think that all the specific features of entities or of meanings are “part of” the meaning, which would make them analogous to metonymies of the kind head or hand meaning or referring to a ‘person’. However, only metaphorically is ‘fur’ “part of” the meaning of a fur ‘a garment made of fur’. So I take the view that referring to a black person as a black or blind people as the blind depends upon the similarity dimension – one feature of the object/concept stands for the object/concept of which it is a feature or to which it conventionally refers. Since similarity involves the sharing of features then the meaning of the noun a black incorporates the Table 1.2 “Metaphors” categorised by kinds and degrees of similarity and analogy Kind of similarity

Similarity or analogy Example

“Literal”

similarity

Non-prototype Approximative Hyponymsuperordinate Superordinate-hyponym Entity is characteristic, synecdochal Characteristic is entity symbolic Transfer metaphor Physical-relational metaphor Concretising-relational metaphor

similarity similarity similarity

Have a chair (referring to an armchair) Fishing is a sport My mother was a whore The pill (‘contraceptive pill’)

similarity similarity

Hoover (‘vacuum cleaner’) Black (‘black person’)

similarity similarity analogy

Hawk (‘violently-inclined person’) The beach was a thin bowstave The atom is a solar system

analogy

Grasp (‘understand’)

36

Similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

feature black (adjective) and is therefore similar. Thus we can distinguish metonymy from similarity by testing whether literal statements predicating the feature of the referent/concept are true, or tautological. “A black is black”, “The blind are blind”. But not literally “a person is a hand”. However, this clarification aside, there are still problems. In some cases a part becomes a crucial feature of the meaning as in ‘quadruped’ or ‘bigfoot’. We also might distinguish the meaning of ‘mug’ from ‘glass’ or ‘beaker’ by its having a handle, which is part of the mug, or distinguish ‘bottle’ from ‘flask’ by its having a neck, which is part of or the shape of the bottle. I’m not sure how to resolve this problem, except by underlining that metonymies give priority to the real world contiguities of referents, whereas similarity gives more weight to meanings divorced from this context. So from a meaning point of view [+HANDLE, +NECK, + 4 LEGS] are similarity features, whereas from an object/referent point of view they are contiguous features.

1.5. Summary This chapter began by defining metonymy and metaphor in terms of similarity and contiguity. Kinds of contiguity were explored using the concepts of frame and schema: intra-frame, inter-frame, frame-schema, and schema-schema/sub-schema, which reflect degrees of necessity or expectedness. A distinction was made between the local contiguities of everyday experience in a place and time open to human experience, and the global contiguities of science, ecology, and history. Different kinds and degrees of similarity relations were then distinguished: “literal”; non-prototypical; approximative; hyponym-superordinate; superordinate-hyponym; entity is characteristic or synecdochal; characteristic is entity or symbolic; transfer metaphor; physical-relational metaphor; and concretising-relational metaphor. But why bother with metaphor and metonymy? The answer is that they are so crucial to the construction of meaning that they are widespread in language use and in the dictionary, as the next chapter demonstrates.

2

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

In Chapter 1 I explained how the two dimensions of meaning, similarity and contiguity, can be used to define metaphor and metonymy respectively. The rest of this book attempts to show the relevance of these two dimensions to meaning and to culture. So in this chapter I demonstrate how widespread metonymy and metaphor are, and their importance in the generation of lexis (2.1). For metaphor I give evidence from the English lexicon, concentrating on activities metaphorised as movements forward, and emotions as sense impressions (2.1.1). For both metonymy and metaphor I concentrate on word-formation processes such as conversion of word forms from one word-class to another, suffixation and compounding (2.1.3). The importance and prevalence of metaphor largely arises from the need to conceptualise abstract targets, and Lakoff’s Experiential Hypothesis (Lakoff 1987) proposed that metaphors are based on our primary physical and bodily experiences as infants (Grady 1997). This experience involves contiguity relationships, such as cause and effect, so such concretising-relational metaphors often have a metonymic basis. For instance, we notice that putting more things on a pile causes it to grow higher, so MORE AS/IS HIGH. This is just one of the ways in which metaphor and metonymy are related, and which I explore in the second part of the chapter (2.2). Metonymy and metaphor processes sometimes provide alternative interpretations of the same text, but, more important, the syntagmatic/metonymy and paradigmatic/metaphor dimensions often operate simultaneously in interpretation. This is especially so in analogical metaphors, or when the two dimensions are exploited to create extra layers of patterning in “poetic” texts.

2.1. The importance and prevalence of metaphor and metonymy It is extremely difficult to conceptualise abstractions except through metaphor. Consequently, metaphor was essential in the human quest for creating meaning through the use of symbols. Using metaphor was “the DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-3

38 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay threshold that human thought had to cross to achieve abstract thought of any kind, including the search for meaning in life and the creation of mythic and religious ideas” (Lent 2017: 65). This importance of metaphor and metonymy to meaning and the generation of new meanings is evidenced in the lexicon, which is overflowing with established metaphors and metonymies. For many readers perhaps this hardly needs stating. Since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) made the case for the prevalence of metaphor in everyday language, there have been numerous studies of conceptual metaphor and its metonymic origins. Particularly important are concretising-relational metaphors and metonymies (as exemplified in 10) in 1.4.2, p. 34), precisely because they give us a handle on abstractions. Data supporting the fundamental metaphorical basis of the abstract lexicon are to be found in Deignan (1995), Wilkinson (2002), MetaNet Wiki1 and my Metalude.2 Lexis provides evidence of the prevalence or entrenchment of certain metaphorical and metonymic patterns. These are often referred to as conceptual metaphors/metonymies, but I will use the terms metaphor themes and metonymy themes. Traditionally the formulae a IS b and b FOR a are used for metaphor and metonymy themes respectively, where a stands for the target schema and b the source schema. But I remind the reader that in order to be consistent I disregard this convention for metonymy theme labelling, and use the formula a AS b to preserve the same order of target and source as metaphor themes. 2.1.1. Metaphors To illustrate the prevalence of metaphor in the dictionary let’s look at some of the most important conceptual metaphor theme clusters in English, to do with activity and emotion. ACTIVITY/PROCESS IS MOVEMENT Our first set of metaphor themes establishes a dominant model of change, cause, effect, and action. One kind of change, movement, becomes the metaphorical source for all change in a similarity relationship of superordinate-hyponym (see Table 1.2.). If CHANGE IS MOVEMENT, then physical force brings about the movement, so CAUSE IS FORCE (and EFFECT IS IMPACT). As a particular example of the change-motion equivalence, ACTIVITY/PROCESS IS MOVEMENT (FORWARD) and DEVELOPING/SUCCEEDING IS MOVING FORWARD, where SUCCESS/EASE IS SPEED. Inherent in this theme are INACTIVITY IS IMMOBILITY, BEGIN IS START MOVING, CONTINUE IS GO ON and CEASE IS STOP.

1. https://metaphor.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/en/ 2. user id , password : www.ln.edu.hk/lle/cwd/project01/web/home.html

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay While

MEANS IS ROAD/TRACK

(path) or

39

TRANSPORT, DIFFICULTY/PREVENTION IS

OBSTACLE, SOLUTION IS WAY ROUND/OVER/THROUGH,

and OPPORTUNITY/POSSIBILschema also connects with the idea that STATE IS A LOCATION/PLACE. This overarching schema is often referred to in the cognitive linguistics literature as the Event Structure metaphor or the Canonical Event Schema, discussed later in 9.1, p. 227. Full lexical details of these metaphor themes are provided in Appendix 1. ITY IS OPENING. This

EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION Another very productive set of metaphor themes revolves around EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION (see Figure 2.1), which radiates out in various ways. DISCOMFORT and PAIN arising from HURT or INJURY become the metaphorical sources for NEGATIVE EMOTION.3 The different senses, TOUCH/ IMPACT, SOUND, SMELL, and LIGHT/COLOUR as the channel for sight, provide more specific sets of lexical source terms for EMOTION. More specifically still, SMELL relates to EMOTION IS FOOD/EATING, LIGHT relates to HAPPINESS, TOUCH to HEAT. TOUCH and HEAT (LIGHT) combine in EMOTION IS EXPLOSION. EMOTION IS HEAT has more specific targets in LOVE IS HEAT, ANGER IS HEAT, and FRIENDLY IS WARM. To give an indication of the sheer quantity of lexis associated with this cluster, details for metaphor themes underlined in Figure 2.1 are given in Appendix 2.

NEGATIVE EMOTION IS DISCOMFORT/PAIN NEGATIVE EMOTION IS HURT/INJURY EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION

TOUCH / IMPACT

HEAT

EXPLOSION

LOVE/ IS HEAT

SOUND

LIGHT/COLOUR

SMELL

HAPPINESS IS LIGHT/SADNESS IS DARK

ANGER IS HEAT

FOOD/EATING

FRIENDLY IS WARM/UNFRIENDLY IS COLD

Figure 2.1 Sub-themes for emotion is sense impression

3. Negative emotion can be defined as an emotion that disturbs homeostasis to the extent that it creates feelings other than well-being (Damasio 2003).

40 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay 2.1.2. Metonymies There is less data on metonymy themes and their lexicalisation, though, as we shall see in the next section, most concretising metaphors and the themes they represent have a metonymic origin. Kövecses and Radden (1998) attempted to list the most common metonymy themes, included in Tables 2.1. and 2.2.4 They divided them in terms of ICMs, idealised cognitive models, which roughly correspond to my frames or schemas. Table 2.1 contains what I termed intra-frame metonymies. They are to do with single entities, or single categories and their parts or materials. Table 2.2 lists metonymy themes that are inter-frame, intra-schema, interschema, or frame-schema, having to do with different entities, processes, or experiences. These common and cognitively entrenched metonymy themes are, apparently, not as numerous as their metaphor equivalents, though this may be due to a comparative lack of research. However the prevalence of metonymy and metaphor in the lexicon is revealed by patterns of wordformation. Indeed several of the examples listed under ACTION and PERCEPTION schemas/ICMs in Table 2.2 illustrate suffxations, and conversions, identical word-forms functioning as different word-classes. I therefore illustrate the importance of metonymy, and also metaphor, to word-formation in the following sections. Table 2.1 Metonymic categories: part to whole ICMs (after Kövecses and Radden 1998, and Littlemore 2015) WHOLE ICM AND ITS PARTS PART OF A THING AS WHOLE THING. America ‘the USA’ A WHOLE THING AS PART OF A THING “The perfect set of

wheels” ‘The perfect vehicle’, farmhand ‘a person who works on a farm’, redbreast ‘the bird with the red breast’ MORE SPECIFICALLY INSTITUTION AS PLACE: Wall St., ‘The financial institutions in Wall St’ AMOUNT + SUBSTANCE AS AMOUNT: “I’ll buy you a pint”, ‘I’ll buy you

a pint of

drink’ CONSTITUTION ICM MATERIAL CONSTITUTING THE OBJECT AS OBJECT “The

chicken was very tasty”,

‘The chicken meat was very tasty’ THE OBJECT AS MATERIAL CONSTITUTING THE OBJECT “We

went into the

wood”, ‘We went into the trees’

4. I have modified Kovecses and Radden’s tables, adding some examples of my own, and from Littlemore (2015: Figure 2.1.), and converting their SOURCE FOR TARGET formula into TARGET AS SOURCE formula. I also exclude “metonymies” involving MEANING AS FORM, as this seems to me to expand the definition too widely. In addition I have excluded CATEGORY AND MEMBER ICMs, which, as explained in section 1.4.3, I regard as dependent on similarity not contiguity.

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

41

Table 2.2 Metonymic categories: parts of an ICM (after Kövecses and Radden 1998, and Littlemore 2015) COMPLEX EVENT ICM

 

COMPLEX EVENT AS SUCCESSIVE SUBEVENTS “Jay and Denise are

COMPLEX EVENTS AS CO-PRESENT SUBEVENTS “I have to grade hundreds

to walk up the aisle” ‘Jay and Denise are to get married’

 

ACTION ICM ACTION AS INSTRUMENT

of papers”. ‘I have to read and grade hundreds of papers’

ski ‘to travel

on skis’ screwdriver ‘instrument for driving screws’ ACTION AS AGENT butcher ‘to act as a butcher’ AGENT AS ACTION writer ‘a person who writes’ INSTRUMENT AS ACTION

ACTION AS OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION blanket ‘to cover with a

blanket’ OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION AS ACTION “The flight is waiting to

depart”, ‘The airplane that flies is waiting to depart’ ACTION AS LOCATION OF ACTION “I’ve been watching Wimbledon all afternoon”, ‘I’ve been watching the action at Wimbledon all afternoon’ ACTION AS RESULT a failure ‘the action that resulted in failure’ RESULT AS ACTION “a deep cut”, ‘a result of cutting deeply’

ACTION AS MEANS “He

sneezed the tissue off the table”, ‘he moved the tissue off the table by sneezing’ ACTION AS MANNER OF ACTION “She tiptoed to bed”, ‘She went to bed on tiptoes’ ACTION AS TIME PERIOD OF ACTION

“The birds winter in Africa”, ‘The birds live in Africa during the winter’ MOTION AS DESTINATION “He porched the newspaper”, ‘He placed the newspaper in the porch’ ENTITY INOLVED IN MOTION AS TIME OF MOTION “The 8.40 has

just arrived”, ‘The bus/train that (should) leave at 8.40 has arrived’

PERCEPTION ICM

 

PERCEPTION AS ORGAN OF PERCEPTION

THING PERCEIVED AS PERCEPTION “He

eye ‘to look at with the eye’ PERCEPTION AS MANNER OF PERCEPTION “She squinted

through the mailbox”, ‘She looked through the mailbox by squinting’

was a gorgeous sight”, ‘He was a gorgeous person to see’ PERCEPTION AS THING PERCEIVED “It’s my stomach, doctor!” ‘It’s the pain in my stomach, doctor’

CAUSATION ICM EFFECT AS CAUSE “AIDS killed him”, ‘The effects of AIDS (diseases caused by AIDS) killed him’ CAUSE AS EFFECT “You live on a fast road”, ‘You live on a road that causes

people to drive fast’ ENTITY THAT CAUSED STATE/EVENT AS EVENT “She

was a disaster”, ‘She caused

a disaster’ STATE AS BEHAVIOUR CAUSED BY IT “People

using the foodbank”, ‘People who do not have enough money to buy food’ (Continued)

42 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay Table 2.2 (Continued) MORE SPECIFICALLY CAUSE OF EMOTION AS EMOTION “You

are my pride and joy”, ‘You are the cause of my pride and joy’ EMOTION AS CAUSE OF EMOTION “The gloom of winter”, ‘The depression caused by the gloom of winter’ OBJECT/PERSON CAUSING MENTAL STATE AS MENTAL STATE “Here comes trouble”, ‘Here comes the cause of trouble’

EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/ BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT “She

looked at me with wide eyes”, ‘She looked at me with surprise’

EVENT THAT SOUND CAUSED AS SOUND

“They booed the players off the field”, ‘They booed which caused the players to leave the field’

PRODUCTION ICM PRODUCT AS PRODUCER “Do

you drive a Ford?” ‘Do you drive a product made

by Ford?’ MORE SPECIFICALLY WORK AS AUTHOR “We

are studying Shakespeare”, ‘We are studying the works of Shakespeare’

PRODUCT MADE IN A PLACE AS PLACE

china ‘the ceramics made in China’

CONTROL ICM USER OF OBJECT AS OBJECT “I

CONTROLLED AS CONTROLLER

“Christopher Wren built St Paul’s”, ‘The workers controlled by Christopher Wren built St Paul’s’ CONTROLLER AS CONTROLLED “The car has arrived”, ‘The controller / driver has arrived’?

had an argument with a motorcycle on the way here”, ‘I had an argument with the user of a motorcycle on my way here’

POSSESSION ICM POSSESSED AS POSSESSOR “This

is Harry”, ‘This is Harry’s possession (drink/coat/ etc.)’

POSSESSOR AS POSSESSED “He

married money”, ‘He married the possessor of money’

CONTAINMENT ICM CONTAINED AS CONTAINER “The

kettle’s boiling”, ‘The contents of the kettle

are boiling’ CONTAINER AS CONTAINED “The

milk tipped over”, ‘The milk container tipped

over’ INHABITANTS AS PLACE “The

town is on the verge of starvation”, ‘The inhabitants of the town are on the verge of starvation’

MODIFICATION ICM ORIGINAL FORM AS MODIFIED FORM LOL

for ‘laughing out loud’

2.1.3. Metonymy, metaphor, and word-formation A sample of different kinds of word-formation taken from the Macmillan English Dictionary (Macmillan 2002) (Goatly in preparation) reveals the

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

43

importance of the metonymic and metaphorical dimensions to expanding the lexicon.5 Conversion Conversion (same word-form, different part of speech) is associated with metonymic operations and meanings. Of the samples of conversions from the dictionary roughly three quarters have only a metonymic lexicalised meaning, or only a metonymic + metaphoric lexicalised meaning (see Word-Formation 1).

WORD-FORMATION 1. METONYMIC CONVERSIONS Adjective to noun conversions regular a regular soldier, converse a converse or opposing statement, express an express train, proletarian a working class person, ultimate best or most perfect example, civic(s) study of government and citizenship, human a human being, individual an individual person, possible someone or something considered an appropriate choice, rich rich people, safe strong lockable metal box for keeping things safe

Noun to verb conversions bail to provide bail, comment to make a comment, slate put on a list of candidates, steam move under the power of steam, arm provide with arms, forage search for food/forage, meander to flow in curves because of a bend in the river, outlaw make illegal, steam cook with steam, bus transport by bus, pile place in a pile, shit excrete shit, label place a label on, track follow the tracks of, boss behave toward someone as though they are your boss, bias to influence so someone behaves with bias

Verb to noun conversions aim ability to hit something you aim at, caulk material used to caulk, quote words quoted, usher person who ushers someone to their seat, delay time period caused by delaying, crumble dessert created by

5. The methodology was as follows: the first example of the specific word-formation type occurring after every 30th page of the dictionary was selected, giving roughly 54 examples of each, and these examples were analysed for metonymic and metaphoric interpretations.

44 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay crumbling pastry on the surface, dislike a thing which you dislike, wash clothes that are to be washed, endeavour an activity/project which you endeavour to carry out, gabble the sound of people gabbling, succour person who succours or helps you

Adverb to noun conversions windward the direction the wind is blowing from, the hereafter life after death, past previous time

Noun to adjective conversions oblong rectangular, navy dark blue

Suffixation Suffixation, too, seems to attract metonymic operations. Just less than two thirds of the sample exhibit metonymy or textual metonymy (see WordFormation 2).

WORD-FORMATION 2. METONYMIC SUFFIXATION Conceptual metonymies civilisation a society that has developed its own culture or institutions/a place such as a large city where modern facilities are available, humanism belief that people can live by using human intelligence or reason instead of religion or God, outage period of time when the electricity supply is suspended, rabid suffering from rabies, special (from species) created for a particular person, purpose or situation, washable able to be washed without being damaged, expression a word or phrase used to express a meaning, half-hourly happening every thirty minutes, knowing showing that you know about something, lovingly with great care and interest, slasher violent and bloody horror movie, steamer container used for cooking food with steam, footage (from foot/ft.) size of an area covered by a building, commencement graduation ceremony (to mark the commencement of a student’s life outside the college?), irrelevance something that is irrelevant to a situation or subject, proliferation a large number of a particular thing caused by it proliferating, regretful sad or sorry or experiencing regret, tracing a copy made by tracing

Textual metonymies There are further examples where the suffixation has, at least, a textual metonymic meaning, where they amount to abbreviations of longer

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

45

phrases: bagger supermarket employee who helps customers bag their purchases, bosomy with a large bosom/breasts, catcher person who stands behind a baseball batter to catch the ball, cruiser a motor boat used for cruising, fielder a player in baseball or cricket who stops and retrieves the ball after it has been hit, gabby talking a lot and annoyingly, hermitage a building where hermits live, licensed with official permission to do or to use, oblivious (oblivion not noticing something) not knowing about something, pilgrimage journey undertaken by a pilgrim, postage the amount of money paid to mail a letter or parcel, shirker (shirk avoid taking responsibility for your duties) person who is too lazy to work or work responsibly, suburbanite someone who lives in a suburb, talented possessing a natural ability, ulcerated covered with ulcers, usherette female employee of cinema or theatre who ushers members of an audience to their seats

Compounds The data from our 54 examples of compounds shows that more than half represent only a metonymic meaning, with textual metonymy extremely frequent (see Word-Formation 3).

WORD-FORMATION 3. METONYMIC COMPOUNDING Obvious metonymies human error, baggage car, tracing paper, isolation period, wash basin, postage stamp, licence plate, commentary box, thirtysomething, knowall, convent school

Less obvious metonymies expressway highway with several lanes for cars to travel at express speed, steamboat boat using steam for propulsion, area code telephone numbers to dial for a particular area, foot and mouth disease infectious disease of sheep and cows which causes blistering on the mouth and feet, aid agency agency that provides aid during natural disasters or to relieve poverty, shipping news radio broadcast informing ships of weather conditions at sea, pilau rice spicy and coloured rice used in cooking pilau, a dish containing meat, vegetables, and sometimes raisins, observation post high position from which soldiers or guards look for enemy soldiers/prisoners, gadabout person who goes from place to place for pleasure, i.e. gads about, bus-boy boy or man who buses,

46 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay i.e. clears away dirty dishes in a restaurant, gob-smacked extremely surprised as though from the effects of being hit on the mouth (also metaphorical), cruise control computerised control in a car to keep it travelling at a steady speed for a long distance (perhaps also metaphorical), takeaway a meal you take away to eat; a restaurant that cooks food for you to take away and eat, halcyon days (halcyon originally a mythical bird that made the sea calm and peaceful, also kingfisher) a happy and peaceful time (i.e. days metaphorically like those caused by the mythical bird), bicycle clips clips worn when cycling for stopping the bottom of your trousers/pants getting caught in the bicycle chain, loving cup large cup with handle(s) passed around for drinking at banquets to express love, promenade concert concert of classical music in which the audience stands instead of sitting (cf. promenade walk around for pleasure or show in a leisurely way), success story someone or something that becomes very successful (which people might talk or tell a story about) (effect as cause), out-and-out showing extreme qualities of a type of person (quality as expression of quality) also metaphoric (expression is out)

While conversion and suffxation appear to mainly favour the incorporation of metonymical meanings, with compounds the metaphorical tendency increases to around a quarter of our sample, though some of them are metonymic as well, and have been repeated (see Word-Formation 4).

WORD-FORMATION 4. METAPHORIC COMPOUNDING (metaphoric elements bolded) ugly duckling, windbag, indirect discourse, disk drive, catch-22, user base, rib cage, spearhead I gloss the following to clarify the metaphor: city slicker person who lives and works in the city and who appears civilised and polite but may be dishonest (cf. slick POLITE IS SMOOTH), halcyon days (halcyon originally a mythical bird that made the sea calm and peaceful, also kingfisher) a happy and peaceful time (also metonymic), rabbit ears indoor TV antenna, field day chance to do something you really enjoy (literally, day when students take part in sports competitions, itself metonymic of field), gob-smacked shocked (also metonymic), cruise control computerised control in a car to keep it travelling at a steady speed for a long distance (also metonymic), out-and-out showing extreme qualities of a type of person (EXPRESSION/CONSCIOUSNESS IS OUT) (also metonymic)

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

47

Phrasal verbs With phrasal verbs, metaphor becomes the predominant trope in creating new meanings. For metaphor two fifths of the examples are listed as only having a metaphorical meaning (see Word-Formation 5).

WORD-FORMATION 5. METAPHORIC PHRASALISATION arrive at, clam up, cook up, drop around, face down, force back, hammer away at, hunt down, monkey around, nibble away at, occur to unexpectedly think about (literally, happen unexpectedly), patch together, pile in, pound into, rain down, ride on, sail through, shit on, suck . . . into, thirst for, usher in, and wink at

As for metonymy, around one quarter are listed as only having a metonymic meaning, even though some of these may simply be the metonymic results of conversion. I have provided a metonymy theme label in parenthesis to justify my interpretation (see Word-Formation 6).

WORD-FORMATION 6. METONYMIC PHRASALISATION bust out escape from prison, i.e. escape as a result of literally or metaphorically breaking/busting the walls or bars of the prison (event as subevent), complain of indicate the cause of your complaining (cause as effect), cry off decide not to do something that you have promised (cause as effect, i.e. as doing it would make you cry), end with have or add something as a final part (cause as effect, i.e. cause something to be the end of), gain on gradually get closer to someone you are trying to catch, cf. gain reach (sub-event as event), goof around spend your time behaving stupidly cf. goof make a stupid mistake (protracted activity as act), knuckle down start working hard (activity as part of instrument for activity, i.e. knuckle for hand or arms used for the activity), luck into find or achieve something by luck (effect as cause), pace out measure by pacing (event as subevent), rein in control (horse etc.) by means of reins (action as instrument) also with a secondary metaphorical meaning, section off divide into sections (effect as cause), sleep around have sex with multiple partners (activity 1 as activity 2 in the same location as activity 1), steam open open by means of steam (activity as subactivity), talk around persuade someone to do something (effect as cause)

48 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay One-phrase idioms One-phrase idioms which are only metaphorical comprise roughly two fifths (see Word-Formation 7).

WORD-FORMATION 7. METAPHORICAL ONEPHRASE IDIOMS with the aim of, in the bosom of, the way the cookie crumbles, your own worst enemy, by extension, not worth a fig, feet of clay, ahead of the game, only human, itching to/for, divided loyalties, for some obscure reason, past it, a race against time, the reins of power, riding high, the way x sees it, full of shit, under X’s own steam, a sucker for, gone on (emotion is movement)

A quarter of the phrases are metonymical in meaning (see WordFormation 8).

WORD-FORMATION 8. METONYMIC ONE-PHRASE IDIOMS a sad comment on a bad aspect of something (cause as effect), for crying out loud it makes me so angry I want to shout (cause as effect), at your disposal available for you to use (action as location), out of here not wanting to continue with an activity (activity as location), not want to know refuse to get involved with something (activity as knowledge of need for activity), promises promises I don’t believe you will do what you promised (?), in safe hands with a safe person (whole as part), on spec without invitation or preparation (textual metonymy for on speculation), meant for designed for something (action as intention), any moment very soon (future time as time), under the influence drunk (textual metonymy for under the influence of alcohol, also metaphorical), at X’s bidding obedient in always doing what X asks (effect as cause), a waste of space useless, waste of an object or person (object as location)

Two-phrase idioms In two-phrase idioms almost half the examples in our sample are indisputably metaphorical (see Word-Formation 9).

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

49

WORD-FORMATION 9. METAPHORICAL TWOPHRASE IDIOMS an arm and a leg, get . . . claws into, fish or cut bait, bury your head in the sand, cook the books, cry over spilt milk, break the mould, not give a fig about, lick someone’s boots, give full rein to, pin your hopes on, play possum, rub salt in a/the/your wound, let off steam, stoop/sink so low, suck it and see, raise its ugly head, come under the wing of, play catch up, here goes (activity is movement forward), commit to memory (mind is a container/building), put obstacles in X’s path/ way (difficulty is obstacle), put the past behind you (time elapsing is movement), push the envelope -- a metaphor from aeronautics, short for flight envelope meaning ‘the set of limiting combinations of speed and altitude, or speed and range, etc., possible for a particular kind of aircraft or aero-engine’ (OED)

One ninth of two-phrase idioms obviously involve metonymy, sometimes combined with metaphor (see Word-Formation 10).6

WORD-FORMATION 10. METONYMIC TWO-PHRASE IDIOMS hit the bottle start drinking a lot of alcohol (CONTENTS AS CONTAINER), catch someone’s eye get someone’s attention (PERCEPTION AS INSTRUMENT), put a human face on associate with a person to make more real (WHOLE AS PART), ride the rails travel on a train without paying (OBJECT AS LOCATION), put on the slate buy something without paying (and originally having what you owed written on a slate) (ACTION AS RESULT), and spend the night with have sex with someone during an overnight stay (ACTIVITY AS PART OF/TIME OF ACTIVITY). Less clear examples: labour the point ‘repeat something excessively’ a textual metonymy for ‘labour making the point’, how the other half lives textual metonymy for ‘how the other half of society lives’, and see things textual metonymy for ‘see imaginary things’ or ‘hallucinate’ (CAUSE AS EFFECT) (it could also be a HYPONYM IS SUPERORDINATE “metaphor”6). Keep your shirt on ‘calm down and stop getting angry’ (?) related to the idea that anger makes one tear one’s clothes off (like an Old Testament prophet) (EMOTION AS RESULT OF EMOTION)

6. This suggests that any textual metonymy which involves the deletion of a sub-classifying modifier can be a manifestation of similarity.

50 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay Table 2.3 Percentage of Macmillan English Dictionary sample involving metonymy and metaphor by derivation type (from Goatly in preparation) Type of derivation

Combined % (#)

% involving metonymy (#)

% involving metaphor (#)

conversions suffixations compounds phrasal verbs one-phrase idioms two-phrase idioms

87 (46) 76 (40) 80 (43) 77 (41) 67 (36) 66 (36)

80 (43) 64 (34) 54 (29) 32 (17) 26 (14) 18 (10)

7 (3) 13 (6) 26 (14) 45 (24) 41 (22) 48 (26)

Table 2.3 sums up this brief sketch of how dependent word-formation types are on metonymy and metaphor, though this is only rough and preliminary data. Columns 3 and 4 give an indication of the relative importance of metaphor and metonymy in the different kinds of derivation. Conversion, suffxation, compounding, phrasal verbs, and idioms rely progressively less on metonymy and more on metaphor for fguration. As suggested earlier, one might want to extend beyond two-phrase idioms into whole sentence proverbs. These, like metaphors, often exhibit similarity relations formulated as SUPERORDINATE IS HYPONYM (ENTITY IS CHARACTERISTIC) ‘don’t anticipate positive outcomes before they have happened’ – “don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”.

2.2. The interplay between metonymy and metaphor In the literature on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy there is some confusion generated by the ambiguity of the terms themselves. Metonymy and metaphor are used to refer to lexical items/linguistic units, i.e. source-terms. (These are designated as count nouns in this book – a/the/ this metaphor/metonymy.) Alternatively they refer to cognitive processes. (These are designated as uncountable nouns – metaphor, metonymy.) The confusion between these two senses has led to an overestimation of the overlap between them. Just because the meaning or interpretation of a particular source-term depends on both metonymic and metaphorical cognitive processes does not mean that these processes are indistinguishable. Moreover, the same linguistic unit can receive either a metonymic or a metaphorical interpretation or both simultaneously. Metonymy and metaphor are not inherent in the text: which we choose or whether we allow both simultaneously is a matter of inferential, pragmatic interpretation or understanding.7 Consider this example: “But at last

7. This may be a drawback of using conventional metaphors and metonymies in the theoretical literature, because there is apparently no choice between the two tropes as only one is found in the lexicalised meaning.

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a taxi, and a very expensive female, in a sort of silver brocade gown and ospreys in her bonnet” (D.H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod). We might give a metonymic interpretation ‘a female who has expensive tastes’ or ‘a female whose lifestyle is expensive’ or ‘a female whose tastes are expensive for her partner to fund’. We could otherwise reach a metaphorical interpretation, a commodification of the woman as though she were something that can be bought and who sells herself. These rival interpretations are quite distinctly metaphoric or metonymic as cognitive processes. 2.2.1. The metonymic basis of metaphor themes Nevertheless it is worth exploring some of the areas where the two processes are difficult to disentangle or work simultaneously. First, according the Experiential Hypothesis (Lakoff 1987), the cognitively important concretising-relational metaphor themes found in everyday discourse and in the dictionary are based on our infant experience. Sources are paired with targets on the basis of the metonymical contiguity of this experience, before being elaborated metaphorically into conceptual metaphor themes. If soldiers fall in a battle, the initial image is metonymical, but if that motivation wanes, falling and dying may be seen as figuratively [metaphorically] related. The violent termination of human life is compared to a falling object: like an object dropping down, the change of state is sudden and unintentional, and the orientational metaphor UP IS GOOD, DOWN IS BAD [sic]8 adequately captures the affective impact of the event. (Geeraerts 2009: 197) [my insertion] By way of illustration of the metonymic origins of metaphorical lexis, let’s consider some of the metaphor themes associated with EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION, diagrammed in Figure 2.1, and whose lexical details I provide in Appendix 2. It does not need much imagination to realise that unpleasant emotions are caused by hurt, injury and discomfort, providing the basis for the metaphorical elaborations under the themes of NEGATIVE EMOTION IS DISCOMFORT, NEGATIVE EMOTION IS HURT/INJURY. More interesting is the possible cause-effect metonymy HAPPINESS/HOPE IS LIGHT and SADNESS/PESSIMISM IS DARK. These metaphor themes may well have their origin in the EMOTION AS CAUSE OF EMOTION metonymy. Evidence comes from the phenomenon

8. Geeraerts seems to have muddled up the target and the source here. Targets are normally less abstract than sources and the formula is generally TARGET IS SOURCE. Since LIFE IS UP falling is a source for dying, based on the metonymy DYING AS FALLING (CAUSE AS EFFECT). UP is therefore a source for the target GOOD, life being better than death.

52 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay of seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, largely associated with winter depression. In winter less serotonin and more melatonin are secreted, which brings on depression, and towards early spring, these amounts are reversed, alleviating it (Rifkin 1987: 42–53). I also gave lexical details of ANGER IS HEAT. The most obvious metonymic basis for this metaphor theme would be the body temperature rise or experience of feeling hot that arises from anger. However, interestingly, as well as the EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT metonymy the EMOTION AS CAUSE OF EMOTION contiguity/metonymy may come into play. Evidently aggression and violence increase in high temperatures. Baseball pitchers have a greater tendency to hit the batter with a ball on hot days, and motorists without air-conditioning honk their horns more. It has even been suggested that if global warming raises temperatures by one degree centigrade in the US this will lead to 24,000 additional murders! (Blumberg 2002: 157). As Benvolio puts it in Romeo and Juliet: I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire, The day is hot, the Capulets are abroad: And if we meet we shall not ‘scape a brawl, For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring. (Act 3, Scene1, ll.1–4) Consider now the pair FRIENDLY IS WARM/UNFRIENDLY IS COLD. Mammals tend to raise or maintain their body heat by huddling or cuddling together. Mammals are noteworthy for the degree to which their social interactions involve close body contact . . . Huddling among littermates is one of the earliest social experiences of altricial infants. Even more fundamental to all mammals is the close body contact that derives from the mammalian way of feeding young . . . Because suckling necessarily entails close physical proximity to the mother, the infant also receives heat from the mother’s chest and abdomen. (Blumberg 2002: 126) This primal experience of body heat shared with siblings and a mother gives a strong metonymic basis for the metaphor theme AFFECTION IS WARMTH. So there is plenty of evidence that many metaphor themes depend originally on the contiguities of metonymy themes, supporting the Experiential Hypothesis. One important claim of this hypothesis is that disembodied objective abstract thought is difficult, if not impossible. Even the Venn diagrams of mathematics depend upon metaphor of a container, which an object is either inside or outside, and this is based initially on our infant experience of the body, where food is moved from outside to inside and excrement

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from inside to outside. The claim makes a nonsense of the Platonist tenet of Socrates: The body intrudes . . . into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth. We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. (cited in Lent 2017: 155–156) Plato’s championing of de-contextualised abstraction, the similarity dimension taken to extremes, is a topic I return to in 10.1.1, pp. 251–252. 2.2.2. Situational triggering A second entanglement of the two dimensions occurs when, sometimes, for humorous or symbolic purposes, a metaphoric source is taken from the literal context or co-text. For example, in this ad for apple pies: “I don’t give two pips what the rest do, we’re using real apples”.9 This phenomenon is known as situational triggering (Semino 2008) or literalisation of sources (Goatly 2011). Its extreme form is when a physical experience acts as a symbolic metaphor. Let’s look at this poem by Edward Thomas. (Literal uses are underlined, metaphorical are bolded.) ‘The Bridge’ I have come a long way today: On a strange bridge alone, Remembering friends, old friends, I rest, without smile or moan, As they remember me without smile or moan. All are behind, the kind And the unkind too, no more Tonight than a dream. The stream Runs softly yet drowns the Past, The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past. No traveller has rest more blest Than this moment brief between Two lives, when the Night’s frst lights And shades hide what has never been, Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been. (Thomas 1949)

9. From Good Housekeeping, May 1987: 48.

54 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay This poem begins with a bridge that is apparently both literal, “I have come a long way today”, and metaphorical, “remembering friends”, who, being in the past, are “behind”. The stream underneath is also both real and a metaphor, though only metaphorically drowning “the Future and the Past”. It turns out that the bridge (source) is metaphorically “this moment brief between two lives” (target). He crosses it literally, too, at the end of the day when the literal frst lights are appearing, but this night metaphorically hides the possibility of a better alternative world. The situational triggering or literalisation of sources in this poem depends upon the contiguity at the literal level associated with metonymy and providing the basis for the extended metaphor. 2.2.3. Metaphors exploiting syntagmatic contiguity Thirdly, and relatedly, if metaphor is a substitution on the paradigmatic axis, and metonymy a deletion/ellipsis on the syntagmatic axis, certain kinds of metaphorical construction conflate the two processes. So, for example, when Ted Hughes describes a pike as “A life subdued to its instrument; The gills kneading quietly” (‘Pike’, Hughes 1972, p.  24), the richest interpretation has to involve supplying syntagmatically the meaning of the conventional collocate of kneading, especially the subject hands. The metaphorical move can then take place by comparing the slatted structure of the fingers and the gills (see Figure 2.2). The Hughes metaphor might, therefore be regarded as involving a metonymical deletion (“the hands of the gills kneading quietly”); but during interpretation what the metonymy deleted is supplied by the conventional syntagmatic subject colligate of the verb, whose referent, hands, can then be imagined. Moreover, metaphors are not always expressed in terms of substitution on the paradigmatic axis: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”; “The treadmill of housework”. The first of these, with

(a) Figure 2.2 “Gills kneading”

(b)

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the copula construction, even enhances the sense of contradiction and thereby metaphorical impact (Goatly 2011). Extended metaphor, too, elaborates the source and target frames/schemas explicitly on the syntagmatic axis or by contiguity. In some of the extensions the sources are distributed syntagmatically within the same clause, e.g. “Your wives and daughters, / Your matrons and your maids could not fill up / The cistern of my lust” (Macbeth Act 4, Scene 3, l.61). Others will involve part-whole metonymies, which elaborate both source and target domains by textual contiguity across clauses or sentences: The model was like a man lying on his back. The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts were his arms outspread. The choir was his body; and the Lady chapel, where now the services were held, was his head. (Golding 1965: 8) The idea that a work of fction is an extended metaphor dependent for its extension on the syntagmatic contiguity axis is explored in 5.3, p. 127. 2.2.4. The role of metonymy in similarity and analogy These are three kinds of interplay between the two dimensions, between similarity/metaphor and contiguity. The fourth and fifth are broader: any attempt to use analogy or relational similarity to justify a metaphorical interpretation, according to the formula a : b : c . . . :: x : y : z . . . , (a is to b is to c, etc. as x is to y is to z etc.) will depend upon the contiguity in experience of a, b, c . . . within one domain or schema, and x, y, z . . . within a another domain/schema. (See physical-relational and concretising-relational metaphors in 1.4.2, Table 1.2, p. 35.) It is not easy to see how abstract targets can share features of non-analogical similarity with concrete sources (except by symbolic CHARACTERISTIC IS ENTITY types). To justify calling these relational patterns metaphorical, analogy or structural similarity has to be invoked, which demands a contiguity-based elaboration of both domains/schemas. Indeed, this is one reason why metaphors with both concrete source and concrete target, transfer metaphors (Table 1.2), are seen as more metaphorical than those with an abstract target (Allan 2008: 144–145, Radden 2000, Dirven 2002). There is also the likelihood that determining the grounds of a metaphorical interpretation actually involves the contiguity dimension. If I refer to someone as “a pig”, meaning ‘dirty’, this metaphorical interpretation depends upon what Max Black (1962) called an “associated commonplace”, a frame or schema for pigs in which pigs and dirt are associated. Nevertheless, the initial reference is metaphoric, and the interpretation relies on similarity, even if the similarities are established by the kinds of association exploited in metonymy.

56 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay 2.2.5. Metaphor and metonymy working together Besides these general overlaps or combinations between metaphorical and metonymic processes, there is the more specific issue of how metaphor and metonymy operate together in word-formation. We saw examples of this in our earlier data with gob-smacked, cruise control, halcyon days etc., which involve both tropes. Goossens (1990) coined the lexical blend metaphtonomy, though he may be guilty of conflating the distinct interpretations simply because a particular lexical item may be interpreted either way (see 2.2 above, p. 50). The most common forms he identified were “metaphor from metonymy” and “metonymy within metaphor”. A couple of examples of metaphor from metonymy are applaud and queue up for. “The public generally applauded the Prime Minister’s announcement of the new policy” is open to a metaphorical interpretation meaning ‘approved of’. Nevertheless, this metaphor originates from a metonymy, because approval and applause are in a metonymic cause-effect relationship. Similarly “students are queuing up for the new course in forensic linguistics” can mean metaphorically ‘students are expressing their desire to obtain a place on the new course in forensic linguistics’, based again on the metonymy of cause and effect: one possible effect of a desire to obtain something is to queue for it. As for metonymy within metaphor, Goossens gives the example “I could bite my tongue off”. Metonymically “tongue” stands for speaking, according to ACTION AS INSTRUMENT. Metaphorically, after the metonym has been applied, the idiom could be interpreted ‘prevent myself speaking in that way again by punishing myself painfully’.10 More convincingly, in practice metaphorical and metonymic interpretations may merge, so that the non-literal meaning includes aspects of both. Consider these examples of metonymy: 1) There was also a mad wooden floor at the top of the tower; and because this was madness which might be understood, it drew Jocelin, who had seen none like it in the shed by the north transept . . . ‘Explain this work to me’ ‘It’s mad’. (Golding 1965: 145) 2) Then the dress and the voice went away through the door. (Golding 1965: 209)

10. Geeraerts (2002) has built on Goossens to demonstrate how metaphor and metonymy may operate in sequence, or in parallel, or interchangeably in the interpretation of composite expressions.

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In 1) not only do we interpret this as metonymy for ‘the work of a mad person’ but we also personify the foor. In 2) not only do we treat this as a metonymy for ‘the person wearing the dress’ ‘the person to whom the voice belongs’ but we simultaneously dis-personify and disembody this person (cf. Biernacka 2013: 124). Acronyms and initialisms can be regarded as examples of textual metonymy. If so, it is interesting to note that some are simultaneously metaphorical and metonymic, or re-motivated metaphorically or metonymically. One example is spam for unwanted emails, usually thought to originate metaphorically with the source as low quality meat, served up repetitively meal after meal (as in a Monty Python sketch (‘Spam stems from Monty Python sketch’ 2021)). However, by textual metonymy it may also be re-motivated as an acronym for Simultaneously Posted Anonymous Mail. Another example is the Spanish high-speed train AVE from Alta Velocidad Espanola, whose logo is a bird. Am I mistaken in thinking the abbreviation yuppy for ‘young upwardly mobile professional’ might have the additional metaphorical dimension as a blend of young and puppy – notorious for jumping up (cf. being jumped up, i.e. getting above their proper station in life)? A further area where metonymy and metaphor interplay is in the use of allusion. One kind of literary allusion involves echoing a small part of a text to metonymically represent the whole text, and thereby set up a metaphorical comparison between the quoting text and the text metonymically alluded to. Common techniques are the use of a memorable phrase from a poem (e.g. the title of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart echoing the phrase in W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’), or of names of characters in a text, or of the title of the text. (Titles themselves are textual metonyms for the whole text of the book they entitle.) So, for example, in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies allusion is made by one of the shipwrecked boys to Ballantyne’s early 20th century adventure novel The Coral Island (1913). Reinforcing this, the names of the main characters are either identical, Ralph and Jack, or similar, Simon/Peterkin (cf. Simon Peter in the gospels). This allusion prompts us to recognise clear and numerous similarities – in both texts boys are stranded on a tropical island, have to survive without adults, hunt pigs, are scared of the dark, ghosts, monsters, and thunderstorms, as well as many other parallels. However, there are also ironic contrasts. The white Christian boys in The Coral Island are depicted as morally superior to the black inhabitants, for the most part “wild, bloodthirsty savages, excepting in those favoured isles where the Gospel of our Saviour had been conveyed” (Ballantyne 1913: 7). And the boys live in harmony: “There was, indeed, no note of discord whatever in the symphony we played together on that sweet Coral Island; and I am now persuaded that this was owing to our having been all tuned to the same key, that of love” (Ballantyne 1913: 125). By contrast, in Lord of the Flies the most Christian of the white

58 The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay boys, the choir, follow Jack into savagery, kill Simon and Piggy, and are on the point of hunting Ralph to death, before they are “rescued” by navy officers from a destroyer. Lord of the Flies might therefore function as a metaphor, partly ironic, for the conventionally imperialistic and Christian The Coral Island, a metaphor achieved by metonymic allusion. Or both novels can be conceived as alternative extended metaphors for the life and nature of man; there are no girls on the islands. 2.2.6. Substitution, combination, and the poetic function Besides his exploration of the metonymic and metaphoric in the context of aphasia, Jakobson is also famous as the pioneer of literary stylistics. Among the functions of language that he identified, the poetic function, with its emphasis on the message, “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson 1960: 358). “Equivalence” here can be re-labelled as paradigmatic similarity, and “combination” as syntagmatic contiguity. For Jakobson, then, the similarity and contiguity dimensions of language inevitably work together in the poetic text, giving an extra layer of patterning, making poetic language distinctive and foregrounding it against “normal” language. You might normally say “I support Eisenhower”, but more poetic is the slogan “I like Ike” (Jakobson 1960). To make this clearer let’s have a look at a concrete example of a threeline poem of mine, an imitation of a similar poem by Ezra Pound (https:// poets.org/poem/station-metro). ‘In an airport of the city’ A recognition of those fgures in the queue; Blossoms on a smooth grey bough. The patterning in the text of this poem caused by the projection from the paradigmatic to syntagmatic axis is obvious on three levels – phonology, grammar, and semantics. Most obviously paradigmatic choices are made to create rhythmic and sound patterns on the syntagmatic axis (I mark stressed syllables /, unstressed -). - - / - - /‘In an airport of the city’ - - - / - / - / The recognition of those figures in the queue; / - - / / / Blossoms on a smooth grey bough. The frst line falls into two identical rhythms: - - / -, the second line into three identical rhythms: - - - /. The last half of line 3 is clearly different

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from the patterns set up in the remainder of the text, because of its concentration of stressed syllables. One might also notice more subtle sound patterns: “recognition” and “queue”, “recognition” and “fgures”, “blossoms” and “bough”, “blossom” and “smooth” display alliterations, while “recognition” and “figure”, and “queue” and “smooth” show assonance. Some of the rhythmic patterns are created by similar grammatical choices, the repeated uses of prepositional phrases, usually following and modifying other nouns. Of the seven noun phrases in the poem five are the noun complements of these phrases, namely “in an airport”, “of the city”, “of those figures”, “in the queue” and “on a smooth grey bough”. Other grammatical choices are the lack of adjectives preceding and modifying the noun, until the final “smooth grey bough”. Note, therefore, that paradigmatic choices may also involve deliberate differences on the syntagmatic axis or internal foregrounding, as in these grammatical premodifications and the stressed syllables at the end of the final line. This difference is also apparent in the semantic patterning of the poem. The nouns in the first line (title) refer to man-made objects, those in the second line to humans, and those in the final line to vegetation (cf. Goatly 2008: 3). In other words, in this poem, and in poetry in general, the choices or selections made on the paradigmatic axis deliberately introduce an extra layer of syntagmatic patterning at the phonological, grammatical, and semantic levels over and above the ordinary patterns of grammar, phonology, semantics, and coherence. This is a further way in which the two dimensions, similarity and contiguity, are often intertwined in discourse, especially literary discourse.

2.3. Summary This chapter was about the importance and prevalence of metaphor, which exploits the similarity dimension, and metonymy, which exploits the contiguity dimension. The prevalence and importance of these tropes were illustrated through lexical details of the Event Schema and of EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION (given in the appendices), a table of common metonymy types, and evidence of these tropes’ participation in the semantics of word-formation. Secondly, I discussed the ways in which metonymy is the experiential basis for concretising metaphors which give us a handle on abstract targets, how metonymy and metaphor operate simultaneously or give alternative interpretations to the same text, and how metaphorical interpretation on the similarity dimension may need to exploit the contiguities in the text and the context, especially in poetry. The intertwining of contiguity (metonymy) and similarity (metaphor) is a recurrent theme in the rest of this book (summarised in 12.1, p. 305) and is captured by the word “dimension” – an object has no substance unless at least two dimensions are present.

3

The development of language in two dimensions of meaning

The last chapter showed how the two dimensions of meaning, similarity and contiguity, are realised in the widespread use of metaphor and metonymy in the lexicon of English. In this chapter I take a more historical perspective and try to establish the relevance of the two dimensions to language development. Language develops in time over longer and shorter periods, and at the level of the species, the child, and the culture. I consider how language may have developed in the human species and in the individual child (3.1) and how it changed through literacy and printing. The perspectives will throw light on the two dimensions of meaning. The general tendency is for the contiguity dimension to reduce and the similarity dimension to increase as language develops in homo sapiens and as a child acquires literacy. The discussion of pre-literate and literate culture and cognition (3.2) will be especially important in Chapters 6 and 7 dealing with classification and quantification by the noun-addicted languages of Western Europe. Discussing language development over these different time spans presupposes a conception of language. Since the advent of writing in literate cultures we have tended to regard language as an object, even more so when it is recorded in grammars and dictionaries (Olson 1994). We also refer to it by a noun. It might be better to refer to it as a verbal noun or gerund, “languaging”, for in essence language is a process, not an object or product. According to Searle (1969) language is a series of social speech acts intentionally directed by one person to another and assuming recognition of this intention (Sperber and Wilson 1995), and this intentionality is observed in primates as well as humans (3.1.1). This shared intentionality evolved to make possible joint participation with others in cultural activities (Tomasello 2008) (3.1.2), the genres which constitute a culture (3.1.3) and which correspond to the schemas on which metonymy, basically (1.3, p. 23), and metaphor developing out of it (2.2.1, p. 51), depend.

3.1. Language development in the species and in the child I consider language development in relation to our two dimensions in five sections. While ape communication relies more on contiguity, both DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-4

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dimensions are important in early human communication (3.1.1). In children, too, the contiguity dimension predominates (3.1.2) as they learn language in the context of the action genres of a culture (3.1.3), and metonymic competence precedes metaphoric competence (3.1.4). The educational process, learning to write and to master academic discourse from age 11 onwards, increasingly favours the similarity dimension (3.1.5). 3.1.1. Metonymy and metaphor in primate and human communication Tomasello points out that the most significant aspect of primate communication, as a precursor to human communication, is not vocalisation but gesture. Unlike vocalisations, gestures are individually learned and are produced flexibly, and show awareness of intentionality. He concludes: ape gestures – in all of their flexibility and sensitivity to the attention of the other – and not ape vocalisations – in all of their inflexibility and ignoring of others – are the original font from which the richness and complexities of human communication and language have flowed. (Tomasello 2008: 54–56) Primate gestures involve two intentions, the referential – that the addressee pays attention to something – and the social, or movement gestures – that this attention is required so that you will do something. Both of these kinds of gestures lend themselves to or are based upon contiguity and metonymic processes. By making a sound or by touching in order to gain the attention of another chimp, the communicating chimp exploits the natural tendency for causes and effects to be related, as in causeeffect metonymies: touching indicates the presence of the chimp that caused the touching. As far as movement gestures are concerned, in order to initiate play chimpanzees might bob and weave or raise an arm towards another chimp. Both these actions are the beginning of a play sequence and thus act as an abbreviated, i.e. metonymic, signal indicating the desire for the whole sequence to operate (EVENT AS SUBEVENT) (cf. Tomasello 2008: 23). Turning to human gestural communication, which, it is hypothesised, preceded human vocal communication, we find both referential pointing gestures and also mimetic or iconic gestures. These latter depict the real thing in its absence, a uniquely human capability known as displacement. Pointing gestures are both attention-getting and indexical, and, since they rely on a shared temporal and spatial context, operate within a contiguity framework. Mimetic or iconic gestures, by contrast, refer to something absent spatially and/or temporally, for example miming an antelope that you saw recently half a kilometre away (Tomasello 2008). Because they

62 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning are mimetic actions they are a performance of similarity and, perhaps, metaphoric in the broad sense (Goatly 2011: 137–139). Tomasello (2008) suggests that, when early humans began to develop vocal communication, pointing, indexical, or deictic gestures were still employed, whereas iconic gestures were largely replaced by spoken language. Just like iconic gestures, both “literal” categorisations and the deliberate unconventional categorisations or class inclusions of metaphor (Glucksberg 2001, Glucksberg and McGlone 1999) depend on similarity, analogy, and matching. The conclusion seems to be that the metonymic impulse, exploiting contiguity, was important for both ape communication and human communication, but that the metaphoric impulse and the similarity dimension were uniquely fundamental to the development of human communication and thought. All members of homo – other than H. sapiens – had domain-specific mentalities, the most advanced appearing in the Neanderthals. Homo sapiens, however, had the capacity to make mental links. Not only could they combine different types of knowledge, but they also had the capacity to think in metaphor – a capacity that underlies the whole of science, art and religion .  .  . With this extraordinary change in mentality came the ability to create new types of material culture . . . replete with symbolic meanings. (Mithen 2003: 40–41) 3.1.2. Language development in the child Tomasello not only considers the development of human language in prehistory, by referring us to research with chimpanzees and other apes, but also the ontogenetic development of language in children. He dismisses the idea of mapping, a basically metaphoric or analogic procedure, as the fundamental process behind language acquisition, because many species of animals associate sounds with experiences as human infants do from a few months of age. But linguistic conventions are only acquired in the interpersonal context of a common ground shared with mature speakers, usually in collaborative activities where intentions, purposes, and attention are aligned and mutually recognised, and this only becomes possible in human ontogeny at around one year (Moll and Tomasello 2007a, 2007b, Tomasello 2008: 155, 164). He illustrates this social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition with the following scenario involving the action genres of fishing and cooking: Suppose that there is a cultural practice in the native’s village of catching small fish for dinner in a certain way: first one must get a bucket (usually found inside a particular hut) and a pole (usually

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found outside the same hut), and one must take these to the stream, and each person must stand on a different side of the stream holding one end of the pole with the bucket in the middle so that water goes in it, and so on. And let us assume that the stranger is in the process of becoming enculturated into this practice through repeated participation. Now one evening when dinnertime comes, and preparations begin, the native picks up the pole from outside the hut and points for the stranger through the door to inside the hut – perhaps saying “gavagai”. To the degree that the stranger understands the practice, she will know that the native wants her to fetch the bucket inside so that they can go fishing – and so the word gavagai almost certainly means either ‘bucket’ or ‘fetch’, or perhaps something more generic like “that” or “there”. But if upon arriving at the stream, the native starts indicating to the stranger that she should fetch other things, also using the word gavagai, and not using this word to point out things when they do not need to be fetched, our stranger can begin to crack into the native language. Much of children’s early language acquisition is like this. (Tomasello 2008: 156–158) The point to emphasise here is that the search for meaning takes place within the context of an action schema, and hypotheses about meaning depend on isolating one action or frame from the schema rather than another. This process demonstrates the operation of metonymy within contiguity. As we saw in Chapter 1, metonymy can depend upon intra-schema meaning relations. Mistaking the meaning of “gavagai” as ‘bucket’ rather than ‘fetch’ is simply an intra-schema metonymic mistake, ACTION AS OBJECT ACTED UPON. Almost all of a child’s earliest language is acquired during participation in such action schemas; for instance, in Western culture, eating in the high chair, going for a ride in the car, changing diapers, feeding ducks at the pond, building a block tower, taking a bath, putting away the toys, feeding the dog, going grocery shopping (Bruner 1983). The infant learns to participate in these action schemas by sharing goals with the mature speaker, developing the ability to understand the purposes of the adult’s actions. This awareness involves understanding what is the most relevant concept at any particular point in the action schema sequence and therefore the focus of joint attention. If the adult utters a novel locution, the relevant focus of attention will narrow down the likely meaning. If the same locution is used during participation in other schema contexts, what is common to the different contexts or schemas will help to narrow the intended referents and messages even further (Tomasello 2008: 156–158). The commonality is where similarity kicks in. So just as we saw with metaphor being dependent on metonymy in Chapter 2, so we notice more generally that the similarity-based classifications inherent

64 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning in vocabulary acquisition are dependent on the participation in action schemas and their contiguities. 3.1.3. Genre, shared collaborative activities, and culture These examples and discussion embrace a socio-pragmatic theory of language acquisition. To understand the socio- part of this theory label we need a developed theory of genres. I briefly mentioned the concept of genre in Chapter 1, as subsuming schemas and scripts, but in order to explore further the acquisition and development of language and the role of contiguity in it I need to explain this concept further. In listing the examples above of the kinds of action schemas in which infants participate, it was pointed out that they are manifest in Western culture. Culture may, in fact, be defined as the collection of genres recognised by a community. Indeed, Jim Martin defines genres as “the staged purposeful social processes through which a culture is realised in language” (Martin, quoted in Swales 1990: 40–41). And Fairclough (2001) shows how culture/society is realised as an order of institutions, themselves realised and operationalised by the discourse types or genres which they validate or recognise (Fairclough 2001: 119–122). What, then, is a genre? According to Swales (1990: 58): A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the genre and influences and constrains choice of content and style .  .  . In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. Both these defnitions apply to speech genres, i.e. discourse schemas or scripts, but it is useful to extend the concept to action schemas, partly because culture is as much a matter of action or praxis as communication, and partly because some genres are hybrid between action and communication, with varying degrees of reliance on language. Ancillary genres are those where language plays a minimal part, e.g. a football match, whereas constitutive genres are those where they cannot operate independent of discourse, for instance lecturing or reading a textbook, or, for that matter, radio football commentary. Genres are a fundamental area of mutual knowledge or common ground. Mutual knowledge of the action genre in which communicators are involved and recognition that this knowledge is shared are important to communication even from an early age. If an adult and a young child are engaged in a clearing up toys and putting them away in a basket,

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and the adult points to a toy, then the child is likely to respond by taking it and putting it in the basket. But if another adult, not involved in the clearing-up game and whom the child believes is ignorant of it, comes in and points to a toy in a similar way, the child is more likely to just interpret the pointing as an invitation to look at the toy, rather than to put it in the basket (Tomasello 2008: 81). A genre, as the previous example reveals, involves positioning the participants in it, a concept known as subject-positioning. Louis Althusser (1984) argues that we become subjects through societal institutions such as the educational system, religious organisations, the family, and the media. The discourse and action genres operating within these institutions map out a role for the subject. Recognising your role allows you to assume participant status, which to some extent empowers you, but also subjects you to authority. For example, in the first few weeks of school pupils are taught and later internalise the rules of classroom interaction. Learning these enables them to act as subjects, for instance knowing how to raise their hand to attract the teacher’s attention and ask for information, but also subjects them to the authority of the teacher and the institution. In the previous example of putting toys in a basket, the child recognises that the adult entering the room is not involved in the action genre, is not adopting a subjectposition in this clearing-up game, and therefore the child interprets their pointing accordingly. Bruner (1983) contends that children have, at base, not a grammarlearning agenda but a socio-interactional one, in which language acquisition is achieved by a process of “pattern detection” in a communicative context rather than by mapping input onto innate grammatical concepts. This means that the child would prioritise analysis only as a means of making the language communicatively flexible (Wray 2002). If this is correct, infants acquire language in generic contexts which highlight likely meanings, messages, and referents. The structure of genres involves fundamental cognitive relationships expressed in a specific time period, such as cause and effect, agent and action, patient and action, place and action, thereby exploiting the contiguity dimension of meaning. It is within such contexts that both grammar and lexis are encountered. What a word means will depend upon how its referent operates and functions in that context. It declares “What I do is me”.1

1. This corresponds to a more widespread phenomenon in childhood, a tendency to a teleological view of objects. Seven- and eight-year-olds explained that ancient rocks were pointed, not because of the way they were formed, but because of the purposes they had “so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them”, or what they could be used for “so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy” (Keleman 2004).

66 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning Thus, when we encounter an object, one of our first (automatic) responses is to think about what that object means to us and what we (or other humans) can do with it. Thus, if we see a chair we perceive of it first and foremost as something that we can sit on; if we see a glass, we understand it first and foremost as something that we can put liquid in, and drink from; if we see a messy high chair, covered in food, we are immediately able to picture the toddler sitting in the high chair, making the mess. This is why we are so readily able to access, for example, OBJECT FOR ACTION, CONTAINER FOR CONTAINED, and EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymic relationships. Work in neurolinguistics is even beginning to indicate that certain clusters of neurons are specifically designed to relate the physical properties of objects to the most suitable cognitive motor programmes that will allow us to interact with them manually in a purposeful way. (Gallese and Lakoff, 2005, cited in Littlemore 2015: 40–41) In this theory, we note, frames are dependent on the schemas in which they feature as participants or props. Jeremy Lent points out how the participation in action-cum-speech genres enculturate and generate meanings for the child, establishing neural networks by strengthening some synaptic connections while pruning others: Every human interaction subtly shapes the neural network of a growing child as she learns to integrate into her culture. The words her parents speak to her, their responses to different behaviours, the games she plays, the rituals she participates in are all continually sculpting her own perception of the world, shaping how she patterns meaning into the universe. (Lent 2017: 78) As a result, cultural knowledge of action genres and discourse genres or scripts provides parameters for understanding metonymy and metaphor. This is true of gestural communication, whether pointing or iconic/ mimetic. If my daughter has forgotten to put on her backpack as she prepares to go to school with me in the car, I may point to her back. And because she recognises the normal sequence of actions established by this action genre (and perhaps the discourse genre of checking on school equipment) she will be able to interpret this, on the principle of metonymy, as a reminder to find and put on her backpack. Or if an airport security guard motions his hand in a circular fashion, providing I am familiar with the action genre of a security check at an airport, I will be able to infer, on the principle of mimetic metaphor, that he wishes me to turn around so he can scan my back (Tomasello 2008: 81).

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The relation between culture, action genres, and metonymy has been an interesting topic of research. In investigating the productivity of metonymy types in 13 different languages, May (2013) found a wide variation. She attributed much of this to socio-economic factors. For instance PRODUCT AS PRODUCER metonymies were much more common in Chinese, since China has a large manufacturing base. Examples included: ‘Lin Ning’ (a famous Chinese sports brand), ‘Wahaha’ and ‘Jiaduobao’ (beverage manufacturers), and ‘Dabao’ (a maker of facial cream). By contrast, this metonymy type was relatively uncommon in Finnish, since Finland, apart from Nokia, has less manufacturing (Littlemore 2015). More general cultural factors that May regarded as influential on metonymy were: the degree of openness to other cultures, the level of international brand presence in a particular culture, the diet and drinking customs of a culture, the landscape and distribution of the population . . . and preferred styles of humour, irony and euphemistic language. Thus the way in which a particular language makes use of these different metonymy types may provide insights into its culture. (Littlemore 2015: 169) The link between metonymy and culture is also observed in specialist sub-cultures. “ICMs [idealised cognitive models, roughly my frames/ schemas/genres] underlie the development of much of the (often metonymic) specialised terminology that is used by experts in various fields” (Littlemore 2015: 12) [my insertion]. For someone not fully initiated into a specialist subculture, trying to understand a board meeting as a new member will often be a frustrating experience, simply because of the plethora of textual metonymies, often acronyms. As a school governor, new to the job, I was bemused by the use of PP on the one hand to mean pupil premium, the extra money allocated to the school for poor pupils, and PPM meaning pupil progress meetings. While, given the contiguity dimensions of genre, I have concentrated on its relationship to metonymy, we might ask how genre is important for metaphor. One aspect concerns the understanding of metaphor. I already mentioned the metonymic origins of conceptual metaphor themes in Chapter 1. If these metaphor themes are generated because recurring embodied experiences pair sources with target concepts, it would be reasonable to assume that many of these experiences are encountered within action genres. One might give even more specific emphasis to the role of action in understanding conceptual metaphors. According to Gibbs, “understanding verbal metaphor involves embodied simulations of what certain actions . . . must be like or feel like” (Gibbs 2021). I would suggest that such simulations often depend upon previous experiences of the hearer of the simulated action within a generic context. Another way in which metaphor is related to genre is through operationalising the

68 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning concept of relevance, as I have described elsewhere (Goatly 1994, 2011). I argue that genre theory in combination with a pragmatic theory, such as Relevance, provides a powerful analytic tool for understanding the generation and interpretation of metaphor. I discuss this further in Chapter 8 (8.2.7, p. 211). Although we have been treating genre as a manifestation of the contiguity or metonymic dimension, obviously the similarity dimension is needed to establish the notion of genre in the first place. Swales (1990: 58) points out in his definition that “exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience” [my emphasis]. Indeed, the word genre is related to genus, which alerts us to the fact that it refers to a class of activities. Genres are types of action/discourse, stereotypical or prototypical. In the alternative label, Idealised Cognitive Model, “idealised” and “model” both point to the similarity dimension. The following summary of Schutz (1962) stresses not only the typology and generalised nature of action genres which the child encounters and participates in, but their resultant anonymity. Genres are often operationalised by putting aside the specific individualities of the participants, ignoring this aspect of the contiguities of context. They refer to typical actions performed under typical circumstances by typical actors. Schutz’s example is of how a child learns that there are people called “ticket collectors”, who stand at the exit from platforms in railway stations and take passengers’ tickets as they pass through. The child may, over time, learn that when a passenger has no ticket the ticket collector will stop him leaving the platform and take further action. Much routine social activity is organised through typified constructs of this kind. Being stereotypical they are taken-for-granted and become an institutionalised standard of behaviour, often with a moral force and involving social control or legal sanction (Schutz 1962: 19). These type constructs are characteristically anonymous in that they make no reference to the other’s personal intentions, goals, hopes or fears, nor even, in many cases, to the “organisational rationale” of his or her actions. In the transaction of handing over and receiving a train ticket, both parties anonymise themselves by “living up to” their institutional roles of passenger and ticket collector and no more than that. (Heritage 1984: 57–58) Written genres may be similarly anonymous. I was once hired by a lawyer in a case of disputed authorship to give evidence that the best-selling True Singapore Ghost Stories was not written by the publisher’s employee, A, but by B. The opposing expert witness (later, alas, my Dean!) compared the newspaper writings of B with the style of the ghost stories in an attempt to show that the style was completely different. My affidavit

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made the point that the generic style of newspapers is quite distinct from that of narratives, so that news articles written by two different authors would have more stylistic features in common than a news article and a narrative by the same author. News article generic style is adopted automatically and anonymously by journalists, so they cannot be attributed to any individual as proof of authorship. So these, like all genres, are cultural constructs that abstract away from the individual, who is part of the contiguity of context. Despite being stereotypical, genres are, however, not fixed, changing dynamically and hybridising, as systems that are under constant pressure from or adapted to (new) practices. For instance, Fairclough (2001) demonstrates how conversation has colonised print advertising, treating a mass audience as though they are individuals being spoken to (synthetic personalisation). And how, in turn, advertising has colonised the discourse of public information and bureaucratic discourse. The changing nature and hybridisation of genres and the arrangement of discourse types or scripts within culture come about through individual practices. An approach to discourse analysis, known as ethnomethodology, and associated with the work of Harold Garfinkel, is of interest in this context because it attempts to reduce the similarity element in the notion of genre and discourse sequences. Anticipating what I have to say about philosophies which reject classification in favour of individuation (8.3.1, p. 218), Garfinkel talks of haeccities, ‘thisnesses’, to point to the infinite contingencies in both situations and practice, where everything done is done for the first time (Garfinkel 1988). Ethnomethodology also stresses the dynamic interaction between speech and genre as mutually defining or reflexive and thereby capable of change. Participation in a genre simultaneously both acknowledges generic context and renews it, that is reinforces it and/or changes it. A speaker’s action is context-shaped in that its contribution to an ongoing sequence of actions cannot adequately be understood except by reference to the context – including, especially, the immediately preceding configuration of actions – in which it participates .  .  . Moreover, each action will . . . function to renew (i.e. maintain, alter or adjust) any more generally prevailing sense of context which is the object of the participants’ orientations and actions. (Heritage 1984: 242) 3.1.4. Acquisition of metonymic and metaphoric competence Predictably, if language is acquired by children embedded in the contiguities of action schemas/genres, metonymic competence develops quicker in childhood and early adulthood than metaphor comprehension (Rundblad and Annaz 2010). Principled research in this area began with Winner,

70 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning Rosenstiel, and Gardner’s study (1976), which distinguished four stages and strategies of interpreting metaphors: the magical, the metonymic, the primitive metaphoric, and the genuine metaphoric. Metonymic and primitive metaphoric interpretations were common for six- and sevenyear-olds, and genuine metaphoric responses were prevalent among 10-, 12-, and 14-year-olds. Interestingly, the six- and seven-year-olds, while rejecting the logical absurdity of magical interpretations, in which the metaphor magically becomes true,2 often resorted to a metonymic interpretation. This is in line with Tomasello’s findings and Schutz’s claims, since, if words are learned in their action genre context, then the meanings are more easily metonymically relatable to other meanings in that context. Nerlich and Clarke (2001) discuss metonymy, especially in child language, as a universal principle of language efficiency or economy of effort: Our hypothesis was that this function of metonymy as an ‘abbreviation device’ (and to some extent a type of cognitive and referential ellipsis) can be detected in child language as well as in adult language .  .  . Metonymy should be seen as a universal strategy of cost-effective communication used by children as well as by adults. (Nerlich and Clarke 2001: 78) When considering creative metonymy in child language, they give an example of Matthew, who refers to himself as “a lunch box”, that is ‘a member of the group of children who bring lunchboxes to school rather than have school dinners’ (POSSESSOR AS POSSESSION). They also cite several cases from the literature of how metonymy is used at an early age both in one-word phrases and proto-sentences. WHOLE AS PART metonymies were apparent in the use of “wheel” for ‘wheelbarrow’ (age 1 year 8 months) and ‘toy wagon’ (1 year 11 months) (Barrett 1982) and CONTENTS AS CONTAINER where “want pocket” means ‘I want what is in the pocket’, and ACTION AS INSTRUMENT with “want more spoon” a shorthand for ‘I want you to give me more food’ (Braine 1976). 3.1.5. Education: learning to write and grammatical metaphor The balance of evidence, therefore, suggests that metonymic or contiguity dimensions of meaning are somehow earlier and more fundamental

2. This magical interpretation operates in a modified form with literary fictions, which have been called “phenomenalistic metaphors” (Levin 1977, Goatly 2011). In “The hen said ‘the sky is falling’” we imagine a world in which hens can speak, suspending our disbelief as though it were magically true. (See 5.3.2, p. 136 for further explanation of phenomenalistic construal.)

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in language acquisition and understanding. This acquisition is achieved by the child in the spoken language. However, once at school, children acquire literacy skills. At primary school they are taught to write, and at secondary school to write in an academic style increasingly removed from the language of speech, distant from the rich interpersonal and physical contexts of the action genres in which they learnt to speak. Before discussing literacy in education and in literate cultures, it is useful to highlight important differences between speech and writing. Speech is a transitory process in time, but written text is a “permanent” object. Because speech is impermanent and transitory, it cannot be revised before it is processed, whereas writing can be revised in multiple drafts before decoding by a reader. The impermanence, evanescence and linearity of speech forces speakers and listeners into encoding and decoding within the same time frame, isosynchronously. In writing, by contrast, the time available for encoding and decoding is more flexible; you can rewrite until you have fashioned this permanent thing. You can reread, look at and examine this permanent object over and over, or alternatively scan and skim it. You can even cut it up into pieces (literally as a blackmailer, metaphorically as a linguist). Speaking takes place in a shared situation, not only of time, but also of place and its material contents, and in an interpersonal, often generic, context. Writing, being relatively permanent, is usually abstracted away from these immediate contexts. This is why treating speech as though it were writing often results in failed communication; de-contextualised transcripts of speech are often incomprehensible because the referents, the material objects in the context, are not available to the reader. In fact speech is like a piece of jigsaw improvised to fill gaps left by the context, or a fluid that takes on the shape of the contextual container. Meaning and coherence or cohesion are functions of this context. In writing they may be seen as functions of the text. Speech’s real world situatedness and its temporal organisation of perceived reality affect linguistic representation which tends to match it, e.g.: They announced the winner and people applauded rather than the written Applause followed the announcement of the winner in which the verbs have been nominalised, changed into nouns. In the spoken version the cause precedes the effect, as it does in actual experience. The interpersonal context of speech is of primary importance. Speech is broadcast and is available to anyone within hearing distance in the physical context, but excludes those beyond, whereas writing is potentially more directional, as when a letter or note or email is addressed to a particular individual. In speech addressees are present, with writing typically not. In a speech situation information about the addressee is available, whereas with writing, and more particularly print, this is less likely. The presence of an addressee facilitates simultaneous non-verbal communicative feedback using the codes of body language, or immediate verbal feedback in dialogue.

72 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning Finally, speech is a far richer code than writing. Any, ultimately futile, attempts to represent in printed form the rich codes of naturally occurring conversation have to resort to a whole range of extra symbols, codes and descriptions: symbols for degrees of stress (Ꞌ, ꞋꞋ, Ꞌ etc.) and varieties of intonation ( /, \ , /\ etc.), for the holding of plosive consonants (like b and p) and drawling of vowels (e.g. ā), for pauses of different lengths (-, --, ---) descriptions of speed (e.g. fast) and variations in speed (e.g. accelerando), loudness (forte, piano) and its variations (e.g. crescendo), different voice qualities (e.g. tense, relaxed, falsetto etc.), paralinguistic noises (sob, chuckle), etc., etc. (cf. Crystal and Davy 1969). Given these differences, for a child to learn to write effectively even in the simplest of tasks will be an exercise in abstraction compared with their previous experience of face-to-face speech. There will be an inevitable abstraction from the contiguities of time, place, physical context, addressee, and the rich codes of speaking, including non-verbal communication. But I wish to concentrate here on the development of academic writing in secondary school, which introduces further levels of abstraction, and demands a widening of pupils’ grammatical repertoire. The difference between speech and writing in this academic style is illustrated by the following passages. A is from an encyclopaedia entry, and B from a conversational discussion between a mother (mw) and her daughter’s boyfriend (tb). They are roughly the same length (88 words). A (1) The great expansion (2) of (3) the use (4) of fertilisers (5) in (6) this century (7) has benefited mankind enormously, (8) but (9) the benefits are (10) not unalloyed. (11) The runoff (12) of chemical fertilisers (13) into rivers, lakes (14) and underground waters creates two important hazards. (15) One is (16) the chemical pollution (17) of drinking water. (18) In certain areas (19) in Illinois (20) and California (21) the nitrate content (22) of well water (23) has risen (24) to (25) a toxic level. Excessive nitrate (26) can cause (27) the physiological disorder methemoglobinemia, (28) which reduces (29) the blood’s oxygen carrying capacity (30) and (31) can be particularly dangerous (32) to children (33) under five. (‘Fertiliser’, Microsoft 1997) B TB:

(1) Everyone else (2) has (3) been talking (4) about marriage (5) but (6) I’m (7) the (8) one (9) that(10)’s (11) getting married. (12) We (13) will (14) get married (15) like (16) you know, (17) we intend (18) to (19) get married (20) and (21) that (22) but (23) not just yet MW: (24, 25) Don’t get (26) me wrong, (27, 28) I’m (29) not interfering (30) I just want (31) to know (32) what TB: Oh (33) no oh (34) no

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MW:

(35) you think (36) about (37) why (38) you (39, 40) don’t want (41) to (42) get married – (43) I mean (44) you’re (45) both (46) over eighteen, nothing (47) I (48) can do, (49) but (50) I (51, 52) don’t like seeing Marion hurt TB: (53) I (54, 55) don’t want (56) to (57) get married just yet (Freeborn, French and Langford 1986: 147, my numbering before words, and my emphases) (nb I treat “get married” as a form of the passive more or less synonymous with “be married”. So get becomes a grammatical word and married a past participle of the verb.) Using the traditional distinction between grammatical and lexical words (grammatical – conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, pronouns, determiners/articles, particles; lexical – nouns, adjectives, full verbs, adverbs), it is noticeable that there are many more grammatical words, bolded, in the conversation, 57, than in the encyclopaedia, 33. Note that in B, many of these grammatical words have the function of anchoring what is said into the temporal and referential context and cotext: pronouns, (1), (6), (9), (12), (17), etc.; tense markers, (2), (10), (13), (28), (39). In addition, and as I follow up in Chapter 7, the most lexical of lexical words, nouns, underlined in the extracts, are far more frequent in A than B: 32 in the encyclopaedia entry, and only 3 in the conversation (marriage, Marion and, possibly, seeing). The opposite is true of verbs, italicised: 19 in passage B, 8 in A. Process is, of course, centred on verbs, and the language found in early childhood reflects these action genres/schemas in clause structure. Education to master adult academic discourse, of the kind exemplified in A, however, begins to give more prominence to nouns. Many of the nouns in A are a repackaging of verbs (and adjectives), that is nominalisations (small caps). This is one kind of grammatical metaphor, a concept which I explain in the next paragraphs. The prototypical “literal” grammar of the clause acquired first by children in speech situations realises or construes semantic concepts according to the following set of correspondences: semantic concept entity(thing) quality of thing process quality of process minor process (in circumstance) relator (in sequence)

→ → → → → →

word-class noun adjective verb adverb preposition conjunction (after Halliday 1998: 208)

74 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning And these words may be combined into phrases, clauses, and sentences to realise and construct a model of experience in the following way: participant process circumstance relator

→ → → →

noun phrase verb phrase adverbial phrase/prepositional phrase conjunction

The example given by Halliday (1998: 190) is in Table 3.1. These kinds of straightforward “literal” correspondences in our earliest acquired grammar are labelled “congruent”. However, educated, written, technical language employs incongruent grammar, “grammatical metaphor”.3 This could result in clauses such as in Table 3.2. Nominalisation is perhaps the most important kind of grammatical metaphor, as Derewianka (2003) discovered when studying the writing of one of her own children during childhood and adolescence (see Table 3.3). Significantly there was no substantial evidence of this transformation before the age of nine, but the figures for nominalisations as a percentage of total number of clauses increases quite steadily with age (Derewianka 2003: 212). Derewianka (2003) also suggests that the unevenness of development, from ages 9–13, with dips at ages 10 and 12, reflected the nature of the classroom writing tasks that happened to be assigned at that age. Less grammatical metaphor will be found or demanded in fields closer to actual experience, experience more directly represented in such writing tasks as recounts, procedures, and narratives. Recounts construct actual past experience by retelling events and incidents in the order in which they occurred, for example a diary of activities. Procedures construct potential experiences by showing how something is accomplished through a series of steps or actions to be taken, for instance a recipe. Narratives create and make sense of (imagined) experiences of actions and speech. Conversely, more grammatical metaphor will be demanded in abstract and technical fields. Writing tasks within these fields include

3. Whether we can justify the label “metaphor” here is debatable. True, one can identify sources and targets: noun phrases conventionally represent participants (sources) but here they are used to represent clauses (targets), a verb phrase to represent a process (source) but here a relator (target). And there is certainly similarity in meaning between the two sentences. Halliday (1998), however, claims they are identical in meaning, even though the grammatical form allows for hiding information. Another aspect of metaphor is that it creates similarities, or can be a way of ascribing properties of the source to the target. By referring to processes by nouns, processes are made to seem more like things, just as referring metaphorically to a rat’s eye as a raindrop, “the raindrop eye”, would make it seem more like a raindrop by highlighting its shape and glistening qualities.

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Table 3.1 Example of “literal” or congruent clause structure The driver drove

the bus

too fast

down the hill so

the brakes failed

NP

NP

Adv. P

Pre.P

NP

VP

Conj.

VP

participant process participant circumstance circumstance relator participant process Abbreviations: noun phrase – NP, verb phrase – VP, adverbial phrase – Adv. P, prepositional phrase – Pre.P, conjunction – Conj.

Table 3.2 Example of “metaphorical” or incongruent clause structure  

The driver’s overrapid downhill driving of the bus

caused

brake failure

clause structure source target

noun phrase participant clause

verb phrase process relator

noun phrase participant clause

Table 3.3 Percentage of nominalisations in clauses by pupils’ writing by age Age 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

2.73% 1.58% 3.82% 2.8% 9.65% 7.9% 15.87% 11.11% 17.39%

explanations, discussions, arguments, and information reports, the latter representing factual information by classifying things and then describing their characteristics, for example encyclopaedia entries like A above (I discuss the degrees of abstraction in these genres in 5.3.1, pp. 127–133). The main argument I want to make here is as follows. In the most frequent kind of grammatical metaphor, developing from ages 9–13, verbs have been replaced by nouns, clauses by noun phrases. Insofar as this disguises process, processes become more like things. Once they are things, they are easier to classify and locate in taxonomies. While verbs as part of clauses explicitly acknowledge contiguity in experience, once nominalised they are abstracted from this experience and are more open to the similarity dimension of meaning on which technical classification and taxonomy depend (see 7.3, p. 168). A further aspect of their potential for abstraction is that when verbs are nominalised the participants, the subjects and objects of the original clause, can be omitted. “The torpedo sank the destroyer at 7.28 pm” can be replaced by “The sinking happened at 7.28 pm”.4

4. As noted before, this ellipsis on the syntagmatic axis might be regarded as metonymical, but this in fact reduces the context, co-text, leading to abstraction.

76 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning During schooling, therefore, there will be a general move away from speech to writing and subsequently from written genres more directly reflective of contiguous experience in time and space towards the more abstract. Acquiring literacy skills within these genres will involve competence in grammatical metaphor, especially nominalisation, and writing with more lexical density, fewer grammatical words and more lexical words, an expansion of the child’s grammatical repertoire beyond the congruent patterns of speech. This nominalised style is highly valued in academia (Tan 1993), and especially in written technical and scientific discourse. Derewianka (2003) has reported detailed research into the changes in students’ writing during school age years which provides evidence of more or less successful approximation to the lexical density of academic scientific and technical writing.

3.2. Oral and literate cultures As infants we belong in a pre-literate world, and the same patterns we observed in the transition from infants to educated adolescents are apparent in the transition from oral to literate cultures. Relying heavily on the pioneering work of Walter Ong (2002), I describe below how oral cultures approach meaning through experiential action schemas (3.2.1), do not participate, at least fully, in literate cultures’ analytic, standardizing, and definitional mindset, associated with the similarity necessary for classification (3.2.2), and how, along with pre-literate children, these cultures tend towards aggregation and formulaic language exploiting the syntagmatic/contiguity axis (3.2.3). 3.2.1. Oral cultures’ embeddedness in practical experience Oral cultures reflect the characteristics of speech which I sketched earlier (3.1.5). Their language, its meanings and forms are not a thing but an event, a process, transitory, like the referents of verbs rather than nouns, and language is a mode of action. And this languaging is always part of a context. The oral word . . . never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifcations of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalisation is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. (Ong 2002: 67) These bodily activities might be non-verbal communicative body language, such as facial expression and gesture, or physical participation in action genres. The “body language” of storytellers within an oral tradition

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is often startling in its richness and impact to observers who associate narrative with written texts: His piercing eyes are on my face, his limbs are trembling, as, immersed in the story, and forgetful of all else, he puts his very soul into the telling. Obviously much affected by his narrative, he uses a great deal of gesticulation, and by the movement of his body, hands, and head, tries to convey hate and anger, fear and humour, like an actor in a play. (Delargy 1945: 190, quoted in Finnegan 2014: location 1629) As for participation in action genres, in oral cultures trades and the action schemas necessary for them are not learnt through studying textbooks or instruction manuals, but through apprenticeships where bodily actions are imitated, in interaction with the master/mistress. I noted earlier that early language acquisition might be similarly regarded as an apprenticeship in languaging while participating in culturally important action genres. This apprenticeship is one instance of a more general method of acquiring knowledge. In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. (Ong 2002: 42) Ong quotes at length the research of Luria into illiterate, semi-literate, and literate subjects in the rural USSR, to show that abstraction away from the contiguities of situated experience is foreign to oral cultures. Illiterate subjects were shown diagrams of circles and squares, but they were reluctant to use these abstract geometric labels. Instead they called a circle a “plate”, “sieve”, “bucket”, or “moon”, and a square a “mirror”, “door”, “house”, or “drying board”. They were not interested in the general qualities of objects divorced from the specific object itself, and, crucially for my argument, relatively immune to the similarity dimension on which the class of circular and square objects depends. In another experiment Luria presented subjects with pictures of four objects, three of them belonging to a category and the fourth to another. They were asked to group those that were similar or could be given a oneword label. In one case the pictures were of a hammer, a saw, a hatchet, and a log. Literate subjects could use the concept of ‘tool’ to include the saw, hammer, and hatchet, and exclude the log. But illiterate subjects resisted using the tool category. Ong comments:

78 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for – in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: “They’re all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet. It doesn’t do as good a job as a saw”. (Luria 1976, p. 56, quoted in Ong 2002: 50–51) In this case contiguity-based thinking is much more important than similarity-based thinking. The peasant relates these objects to an action schema/genre of cutting up timber, in which the peasant is the agent, the log is a patient or affected, and the saw or hatchet is the instrument. This recalls Gallese and Lakoff’s comments, quoted earlier, about the metonymic dimension of (childhood) experience: “Thus, when we encounter an object, one of our frst (automatic) responses is to think about what that object means to us and what we (or other humans) can do with it”. There is interesting evidence of similar differences in the thought patterns between Chinese and American children. They were shown a series of pictures of a cow, a chicken, and grass and were asked to say which two went together. American children, focusing on categorisation and similarity, paired the chicken and cow, explaining that “both are animals”. Chinese children, emphasizing action schemas and contiguity, put the cow and the grass together, because “the cow eats the grass” (Lent 2017: 211–212). 3.2.2. Oral cultures’ indifference to classification, definition, and standardisation Because of their relative immunity to the similarity dimension and their fixation on the contiguity dimension, oral cultures are, therefore, not very interested in definitional categories. Ong suggested this has something to do with the medium of speech, the hearing of speech sounds, as opposed to the medium of writing/print, the vision of written texts. Sound, being broadcast, envelops us and is not analysable into its parts in the way that writing is. Hearing is the unifying sense, while vision is the dissecting and analytical sense par excellence. Oral cultures privilege language uses, not mentions, that is, they tend not to isolate linguistic forms to talk about them, and deal more in individual tokens than types. The meaning of each word is controlled by what Goody and Watt (1968, p. 29) call “direct semantic ratifcation”, that is, by the reallife situations in which the word is used here and now. The oral mind is uninterested in defnitions (Luria 1976, pp. 48–99). Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also

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gestures, vocal infections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs. (Ong 2002: 46–47) Again, “what I do is me”. Luria reports an interview with an illiterate subject as follows: “What will you tell people [a car is]?”“If I go, I’ll tell them that buses have four legs, chairs in front for people to sit on, a roof for shade and an engine. But when you get right down to it, I’d say: ‘If you get in a car and go for a drive, you’ll fnd out’”. (Luria 1976: 87, quoted in Ong 2002: 53) The defning characteristics mentioned here are based on WHOLE – PART contiguity relationships, car – chairs, roof, engine, though with the metaphorical legs for wheels. Two of these parts are described in terms of use, “chairs for people to sit on”, “a roof for shade”. But the subject even rejects this metonymy-type attempt at a defnition divorced from experience as beside the point. Only by participating in the action schema of going for a drive will you really understand what a car is. With the invention of writing, however, de-contextualised thinking became more common. Written culture employs definitions, analytic statements in which words are mentioned in order to define their meanings, rather than used, and in which generalisations and taxonomies become paramount. Mesopotamians, in the first literate cultures, invented dictionaries and codes of law. Dictionaries list items of the paradigm, and rely on classifications, however much the definitions of recent learner dictionaries may rely on the syntagms that reflect contiguities of experience. Codes of law are abstractions that are designed to cover multitudes of individual cases, and ignore their idiosyncrasies. Ong claims that because oral cultures do not employ such techniques their capacity for abstract thought is extremely limited. This may, however, be something of an overstatement. Finnegan points out at least some analytical interest in language itself among the Limba of Sierra Leone, who have developed their own philosophy of language (Finnegan 2014: Chapter 3). The overemphasis on the non-analytical mindset of oral cultures may be a hangover from imperialism. Nevertheless, the revolution brought about by the invention of writing has had profound effects on the course of civilisation. The first literate cultures of Mesopotamia laid the foundations of modern abstract scientific thinking, by their careful measurements of the stars and planets and the moon, and of mathematics with their sexagesimal system, inherited by us in the measurements of the hour, minute, and second, and geometrical degrees. Without writing, these scientific abstractions and measurements would have been impossible.

80 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning 3.2.3. The aggregative languaging of the preliterate child and oral cultures The aggregative nature of linguistic text, or, perhaps, to put it more felicitously, its tendency to process in chunks and disregard word boundaries, has been underestimated. Even in literate cultures, as is well known, phrasal compounds, phrasal verbs, idioms, perhaps even proverbs, can count as lexical units, even though they are made up of more than one orthographic, i.e. written, word. In addition to these there are various kinds of fixed expressions, including catch phrases “what do you think of it so far”, stock phrases “when all is said and done”, quotations/allusions “you’ve never had it so good”, and discourse formulae “how do you do?” “we’re just good friends” (Carter 1998: 67). Both multi-word lexical units and fixed expressions appear as wholes rather than as a product of syntactic processes of composition. You cannot split up the meanings of “spick and span” *“the room was spick but not span”, or reply to “how do you do?” with “I use my little finger”. Moreover there are degrees of combinatory or collocational restrictedness, which blur the boundaries between words. I explore collocation in the next chapter as one aspect of lexical priming. For the moment I end this chapter by comparing the aggregative or formulaic styles of preliterate children and of oral cultures. In the early stages of language learning children identify chunks which are not yet analysed. They use and store complex strings, such as “What’s it” “Cup of tea”. These fused expressions save the child processing effort. So the child will not spontaneously engage in analysis of these larger units into smaller components unless there is a specific reason to do so. For instance, the sequence thank you for having me, merely by its utterance functions as a ritualised token of gratitude in its pre-valedictory context at the end of a visit, and matches its specific form with this specific function and context of use. It need not be broken down, as none of its components are usually substituted when used (Wray 2002). Learning to read and write demands the breakdown of these larger units into smaller ones, as the writer has to make decisions about word boundaries. Pre-literate children may have a very hazy sense of the word as a linguistic unit, concentrating on its meaning rather than form, and therefore not recognise grammatical words as function words, since they have no obvious referential meaning. They will identify phrases like “a big one” as a single word (Garton and Pratt 1998: 166ff). The basic principle is to operate with the largest possible unit .  .  . The child’s introduction to literacy skills may play a major role in identifying and separately storing individual words, though this is a supplement to, and not a replacement for, the store of formulaic sequences. (Wray 2002: location 1859)

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Even adults writing dialogue might write the phrase a bigun or ask for a cuppa showing that the blurring of word boundaries and resistance to analysis sometimes persists beyond childhood. The chunking or aggregative tendencies of the pre-literate child are also a feature of language in oral cultures. Obviously enough, the widely used concept of an orthographic word, a sequence of letters isolated by spaces or punctuation, is non-existent for both preliterate children and oral cultures. Moreover the tendency to use unanalysed chunks of text is partly due to the fact that speech is spontaneous and not revisable before encoding/decoding. This lends itself to formulaic language, since in order to speak spontaneously and fluently one relies on prefabricated and semi-fabricated phrases. And it helps if these are memorable. Memory is, of course, even more important in oral cultures, since knowledge has to be stored in the minds and memories rather than in written texts, records, and books. Formulae are therefore abundant and highly valued: “Traditional expressions in oral cultures must not be dismantled: it has been hard work getting them together over the generations, and there is nowhere outside the mind to store them. So soldiers are brave and princesses beautiful and oaks sturdy forever” (Ong 2002: 39). Even more is this the case with oral poetry and narrative, which require, from our modern highly literate perspective, extreme feats of memory. As discussed in the last chapter, these mnemonic devices rely on the projection from the paradigmatic axis of selection on to the syntagmatic axis of combination as part of the poetic function (see 2.2.6, p. 58). Poetry is basically a spoken genre, even if, in literate cultures, it is written in order to be read aloud. Poetic patterning is of various types: segmental phonetic repetitions such as rhyme or alliteration; suprasegmental patterns or rhythm; syntactic parallelism; and even semantic repetitions/variations. Segmental phonetic repetitions are common as in Old English and Middle English poetry, based on alliteration, and in traditional English poetry from the 15th to 19th centuries, usually based on rhyme and a variety of rhyme schemes. These patterns are also found both in fixed expressions and idioms, e.g. alliteration in spick and span or rhyme in up and down like a whore’s drawers. Rhythm is exploited in the trochaic, iambic, anapaestic and dactylic feet of classical and English verse, arranged and repeated in metrical patterns such as iambic pentameter (- / - / - / - / - /), trochaic tetrameter (/ - / - / - / -), and so on. In oral cultures these metrical patterns were used to store whole repertoires of prefabricated phrases: “The poet had a massive vocabulary of hexameterised phrases. With his hexameterised vocabulary, he could fabricate correct metrical lines without end, so long as he was dealing with traditional materials” (Ong 2002: 58). Moreover, these metrical patterns worked in tandem with grammar and syntax. Consider the ancient Greek verse of Homer. “If you take in the five grammatic cases the singular of all the noun epithet formulae

82 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning used for Achilles, you will find that you have forty-five different formulae of which none has, in the same case, the same metrical value” (Parry 1930: 89, quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 21). In modern Somali oral poetry syntax is deliberately restricted to create grammatical parallelism and aid memory. [T]his poetry has not merely phonological, metrical constraints, but also syntactic constraints. That is to say, only certain specifc syntactic structures occur in the lines of the poems: in instances Antinucci presents, only two types of syntactic structures out of the hundreds possible. (Antinucci 1979: 148, quoted in Ong 2002: 63) In short, memory is helped by the fact that the poet has little or no choice. Whatever grammatical case or declension or meter or syntax is needed and whatever the subject of description, the formula supplies ready-made phrases. In oral cultures long spoken texts predominantly belong to narrative genres, with the exception of genealogies. Narratives might be regarded as one extreme form of metonymic/contiguity extensions. Crucially they preserve the linearity of speech in which the order of events is reproduced in the order of text. A list can be in any order and it is still the same list. And in an expository or argumentative genre one can present arguments in favour of a thesis in any order, while preserving the same thesis. But varying the order of actions and events in a narrative will turn it into a different narrative. “Macbeth killed Duncan and then became king” is a different story from “Macbeth became king and then killed Duncan”. This is not to deny that the plot of oral narratives often begins in medias res, in the middle with flashbacks, but the reader must be able to realise this and reassemble this plot as story narrative, with events in a particular order.

3.3. Summary In this chapter I first considered the development of communication from apes to early humans, whose similarity-dependent iconic gestures paved the way for language and its potential for transcending context. I then turned to language development in the child, pointing out that language is acquired in the context of participation in the contiguities of action schemas or genres that constitute a culture. Children acquire metonymic competence before metaphoric competence. In acquiring literacy children are forced to de-contextualise from the contiguities of the speech situation. And during education, they acquire competence in relatively abstract genres such as argument and discussion, for which the use of nominalisations is essential. I tried to show that, like pre-literate children, members of oral societies experience the world and language in physical,

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temporal, and action genre contexts. They are therefore indifferent to classifications divorced from practical experience. Finally, I focused on the aggregative minimally-analysed features of both pre-literate child language and the language of oral cultures. I have tried to make the case that the axis of combination, the contiguity dimension, is primary in communication. With ape communication there is virtually no similarity dimension. With early humans, whether through iconic and mimetic gestures or language proper, the similarity dimension receives its first impetus. In illiterates the contiguity dimension is still paramount, but, as writing is learnt and developed, abstraction from this dimension fosters similarity, classification, and analysis. We would do well, however, to remember that the primacy of the contiguity dimension of thought and expression in oral cultures does not correlate with the use of textual metonymy, because the latter involves deletion on the syntagmatic axis. In fact, one of the features of speech is that it is more redundant than writing, in order to avoid processing overload, so abbreviations, textual metonymies, risk becoming dysfunctional in speech. Compare, for example the informationally dense encyclopaedia entry A with the more redundant spoken discussion of marriage B in 3.1.5, pp. 72–73. There is, in addition, a caveat about the neat distinction I have tried to make between speech embedded in context and contiguity and writing as abstracted from context. The Russian linguist Bakhtin/Volosinov insisted the interlocutor present in speech is not wholly absent when writing. Echoing what I have claimed in this chapter, he stresses that the meaning of words and grammar cannot be discussed in the abstract, since it is only achieved in the cut and thrust of dialogue, as part of social interaction: Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between listener and speaker . . . It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together . . . Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning. (Bakhtin/Volosinov 1973: 102–103) Bakhtin went even further and claimed that the dialogic nature of languaging carried over into writing, particularly the best literature. In the frst place, every act of writing presupposes a reader, who is, metaphorically, looking over the writer’s shoulder. The writer therefore preserves a kind of dialogism by writing with the reader in mind, especially when the text is reacting to a former specifc text. There is, therefore, if not the real presence of a reader or dialogic partner, at least an imagined one. Secondly, within the same text there will often be a multiplicity of voices, which is something to be valued. He claimed that in

84 The development of language in two dimensions of meaning the best novels, for example Dostoyevsky’s, when the character/author makes an utterance or has an idea s/he is always replying or holding a dialogue, either with an imagined person s/he disagrees with, or with her/ his other self, as well as, obviously, when there is real dialogue between characters. Such diglossic (two-voiced) or heteroglossic (many-voiced) texts are polyphonic and preferable to the monoglossic (single-voiced). Monoglossic texts, which attempt to suppress dialogue, are often authoritarian and employed by totalitarian governments. Features of spoken language, therefore, survive in writing. The aggregative tendencies of language on the textual contiguity dimension, most prominent in speech, are what I explore in the next chapter on priming theory, the data for which is, nevertheless, printed text.

4

Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming

Ong assumed that the mindset of oral cultures and literate cultures are radically different. However, when we learn to language as infants it is an un-segmented stream of speech that we encounter, and this pre-literate experience of language affects our later use and processing of it even after we become literate adults. The idea that we acquire vocabulary in isolation from the surrounding co-text is no more reasonable than assuming that we acquire language in isolation from participatory contexts of schemas or action genres. The analytical tendency of literate cultures has, of course, affected linguistics. Linguistic claims to be a science in the late 19th and early 20th century Western tradition derived most powerfully from studying phonetics/phonology, the sounds/distinctive sounds of a language, which could be described as the science of speech. The study of morphology, meaningful units, and subsequently syntax and sentence semantics also made scientific claims. It was only later that emphasis was put upon the larger units in text-linguistics/discourse analysis. This shifting focus gave a fundamental importance to smaller linguistic units, which were assumed to combine into larger units in a bottom-up fashion: a morpheme consisted of one or more phonemes, a word of one of more morphemes, a phrase of one or more words, a clause of one or more phrases, a sentence of one or more clauses. Consequently, before the systematic study of larger stretches of text in discourse, dictionaries and lexicography tended to treat the word as an isolable unit and define it by relations of similarity and difference with the forms and meanings of other words. However, this bottom-up, analytical, similarity-dimension approach is rather distant from the fundamental experience of learning to language discussed in the previous chapter. Recognition of that experience problematises de Saussure’s basic distinction between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, suggesting, at least, that the boundaries of the paradigmatic units are not necessarily clear-cut. I noted in the Introduction that different dictionaries give relative prominence to the similarity and contiguity dimensions when describing meanings. Learners’ dictionaries, in particular, now give far more information DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-5

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about the real world contiguities of action schemas. They are enabled to do this by the revolution in linguistics and lexicology brought about by corpus linguistics. I begin this chapter by outlining this revolution, showing how it has affected lexicography by a new emphasis on contiguities of experience, as manifest in patterns of collocation and grammar (4.1). I proceed to consider Michael Hoey’s theory of lexical priming, which, growing out of this corpus linguistic tradition, gives due weight to the contiguities of the syntagmatic axis (4.2). The ten priming hypotheses are explained, along with evidence that priming by surrounding text radically reduces ambiguity. Lexical priming is then illustrated through a consideration of jokes (4.3) which achieve their humour by overriding priming and thereby creating unexpected ambiguities. Priming theory is critiqued (4.4), especially by suggesting that the distinction between knowledge of the world and knowledge of language is artificial, since priming reflects, or constructs, the world being described. As priming indirectly depends upon the contiguities of action schemas, it is necessary to give prominence to generic priming. Finally I discuss the relations between priming, metaphor, and metonymy (4.5).

4.1. Collocation, corpus-linguistics, and the new lexicography The late Michael Hoey belongs in the tradition of text-/corpus-linguistics, associated with John Sinclair (cf. Sinclair 1991). In the Chomskyan tradition data consisted of the internal intuitions of idealised native speakers about acceptability as evidence for the rules of syntax. By contrast, the text-linguistic tradition appeals to evidence of actual usage in co-text, based on an authentic corpus of texts, and investigates probabilities more than rules. Corpus data show that introspective intuitions are often unreliable, and reveals patterns we never had intuitions about, for example the fact that afford usually occurs with negative polarity (cannot afford). And that in particular contexts or co-texts grammatical patterns may occur that one’s intuitions would rule out. Chomsky argued that there is an innate language instinct, because such is the poverty of data to which infants are exposed they could never derive from it the grammatical rules of their first language. This theory has been convincingly questioned by demonstrating that infants do not suffer from such a poverty of data (e.g., Sampson 2005). And priming theory, within the text-linguistic tradition, claims, on the contrary, that repeated exposure to collocational and other patterns is precisely what enables us to both learn our grammar (Hunston and Francis 2000) and use it with a proper feel for natural-sounding language. The research in corpus linguistics led to a new trend in lexicography. The Collins CoBUILD English Dictionary, with John Sinclair as editorin-chief, was the first to put a major emphasis on computerised corpus and collocational data, thereby emphasizing the contiguity dimension of meaning as equal to or more important than the similarity dimension.

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The explanations of the meaning, the definitions, and the examples reflect collocational patterns that are typical, and the latter provide a template for natural-sounding usage. Some collocational patterns will simply involve grammar, but others will illustrate what are felt to be normal patterns of usage. Consider this example of a lexical entry from the Collins CoBUILD Dictionary. harness 1. If you harness something such as a natural source of energy you bring it under your control and use it. EG techniques harnessing the energy of the sun are being developed v + o 2. a harness is 2.1. a set of straps which fit under a person’s arms and fasten round their body in order to keep a piece of equipment in place or prevent the person from moving from a place EG Will’s body had been released from the parachute harness and lifted into the ambulance . . . a seat and harness for a child are essential in a family car. N COUNT 2.2. a set of leather straps and metal links fastened round a horse’s head or body so that the horse can have a carriage, cart or plough fastened to it EG . . . a mare in harness N COUNT/UNCOUNT

3. if you harness a horse or other animal you put a harness on it, especially so that it can pull a carriage, cart or plough EG a dog harnessed to a sledge v + o IF + PREP THEN to 4. people who work in harness help each other in their work and co-operate in order to achieve their aim EG ministers work in harness with the civil servants in their ministries PHR: USED AS AN A, IF PREP THEN with Contiguity on the syntagmatic axis is partly a manifestation of the “rules” of grammar, but, over and above that, collocations refect contiguity in cultural experience. In this extract the grammatical information is given in upper case letters. The cultural and action schema/genre information refected in typical collocations is given both in the description of the meaning and reinforced in the choice of typical examples. There is nothing semantically ungrammatical about saying “I harnessed the peacock to the wheelchair”, but the probability of the collocation of peacock as O (object) and wheelchair as noun complement in the prepositional to-phrase is very low. Much more likely are horse, pony, or dog as the object noun phrase, and cart, carriage, plough, or sledge as complements of the preposition. Similarly, one is unlikely to encounter or say “fungi and the roots of trees work in harness”. Another cultural aspect of the description of meaning, especially of verbs, is the choice between when and if, reflecting the likelihood of users

88 Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming of the dictionary participating in the genre. A dictionary targeted at the Amish would, presumably, describe the meaning of harness beginning “when you harness”, in step with their culture, where transport is in animal-drawn vehicles.

4.2. The theory of lexical priming These collocational aspects of the contiguity/syntagmatic dimension are the focus of Michael Hoey’s priming theory. Priming is a psychological phenomenon, much discussed by earlier psycholinguists. Tabossi, for instance, explains the concept as follows: When a word is recognised (i.e. its entry becomes activated), activation automatically spreads to entries close to it .  .  . This phenomenon, often referred to as lexical priming, is reflected in the shorter time required to identify a target (e.g. nurse) when it follows a word (prime) semantically related to it (e.g. doctor). (Tabossi 1989: 27) Highly predictable completions tend to be responded to faster than less predictable ones, so that, for example, the following completions evoke progressively slower responses: “She cleaned the dirt from her shoes/ hands/terms” (Tabossi 1989: 28–29). Hoey’s Lexical Priming (2005: 5) begins with the following examples: (1) In winter Hammerfest is a thirty-hour ride by bus from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there in winter is a question worth considering. (2) Through winter, rides between Oslo and Hammerfest use thirty hours up in a bus, though why travellers would select to ride there then might be pondered. Though both are grammatical and obey semantic rules of combination, only (1) sounds normal, because in (2) the collocations are unusual. He demonstrates that it is the frequency of normal collocations which make (1) more natural than (2) by presenting collocational frequency data from his own newspaper corpus, and concludes that the following collocational sequences are relatively predictable: thirty–hour–ride–by–bus– from; though–why–anyone–would–want–to–go–there (Hoey 2005: 6–7). He claims such collocational patterns can be explained by the fact that every word is mentally primed for collocational use: The notion of priming .  .  . assumes the mind has a mental concordance of every word it has encountered, a concordance which has been richly glossed for social, physical, discoursal, generic and

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interpersonal context. The mental concordance is accessible and can be processed in much the same way that a computer concordance is, so that all kinds of patterns, including collocational patterns, are available for use. (Hoey 2005: 11) Note that priming may be recursive, so that collocational phrases activate their own primings. Thus hour collocates predictably with thirty as a premodifer to form thirty hour, and ride “subsequently” collocates predictably with thirty-hour as its premodifer to form thirty-hour ride. Hoey (2005) advances ten priming hypotheses with examples from his corpus data: 1) Every word is primed to occur with particular other words; these are its collocates, as in the above Hoey examples. 2) Every word is primed to occur with particular semantic sets; these are its semantic associations. For instance, for most speakers of English the word hour is likely to be primed for semantic associations with [NUMBER] and [JOURNEY], e.g. half-hour drive, four-hour flight, two-hour trip, two-hour hop, three-hour slog, three-hour journey. Although priming theory, especially as reflected in dictionaries, has been criticised as anti-creative and prescriptive, Hoey maintains that semantic association allows for creativity and accommodation to changing circumstances or states of the world. The following would therefore be possibilities: 27-hour wander, 27-week flight, 150-lightyear odyssey. 3) Every word is primed to occur in association with particular pragmatic functions; these are its pragmatic associations (the word “pragmatics” is not used here in the wider sense discussed in 8.2.6). For instance, sixty is primed for association with expressions used to indicate vagueness: about, over, around, more than, an average of, some, almost, nearly, fifty to, between fifty and, fifty or, up to, maybe, getting on for, a good, . . . or more, -odd, -some, plus, or so. 4) Every word is primed to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical positions, and to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical functions; these are its colligations. For example, of the 1057 instances of PONDER in the corpus only eight are passive. The form pondered is rare, occurring 22 times as past participle and 142 as past tense. Therefore “though why travellers would select to ride there might be pondered” is unusual grammatically. 5) Co-hyponyms and synonyms differ with respect to their collocations, semantic associations, and colligations. See, for instance, the differing distribution of markers of in/definiteness for result and consequence (used with the synonymous meaning) as presented in Table 4.1.

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Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming Table 4.1 The difference in markers of definiteness for the synonyms consequence and result  

Definite

Indefinite

consequence result

67% 94%

33% 6%

Table 4.2 Colligation, collocation, association, and the meanings of consequence  

Consequence = ‘result’

Consequence = ‘importance’

Collocation with any Collocation with of Colligation with subject and complement Semantic association with LOGIC Semantic association with NEGATIVE EVALUATION Pragmatic association with DENIAL Textual colligation with theme

– – Positive + +

+ + Negative – –

– Positive

+ Negative

(+ and – indicate absolute presence or absence, negative and positive indicate probabilities)

6) When a word is polysemous, the collocations, semantic associations, and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses (see Table 4.2). Ambiguity of language in use is a rarity. For instance, he has a problem drinking invariably means ‘finds it difficult to drink’, while he has a problem with drinking/a drinking problem usually means ‘has a problem with alcoholism’. a) The rarer sense of the word is primed to avoid the collocations, semantic associations and colligations of the more common sense of the word. For example compare the two meanings of consequence ‘result’ and the rarer ‘importance’ in Table 4.2 and how the collocations, colligations, and associations differ. b) Where two senses of a word are as frequent as each other they will both avoid each other’s collocations, semantic associations, and colligations. c) Where a) and b) do not apply, the result will be humour, ambiguity, or a new meaning combining the two senses. 7) Every word is primed for use in one or more grammatical roles; these are its grammatical categories. Blackmail and bully have the grammatical category priming PERSON(s) + BE + blackmailed/bullied + into + v-ing. So other words which fall into the semantic category of ‘putting someone under pressure to do something they were not

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intending to do’ will take the same grammatical frame., e.g. “Their patients have been seduced into thinking that antibiotics can save them” or “Even this mild-mannered diplomat has been goaded into showing exasperation with the US and UK”. 8) Every word is primed to participate in, or avoid, particular types of cohesive relation in a discourse, for instance co-reference; these are its textual collocations. In newspaper writing the following were found to be primed to participate in cohesive chains: army, Blair, gay, planet, political, year. Other words are negatively primed for cohesion: asinine, blink, crossroads, elusive, particularly, wobble. 9) Every word is primed to occur in particular semantic relations in the discourse; these are its textual semantic associations. Sixty is primed for use in contrast relations (41%), and as problem component of a problem-solution structure (37%). 10) Every word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positions within discourse; these are its textual colligations. Of 307 instances of sixty in his data, 208 are in the Theme, the first element in the clause, and of these 200 are the first word of the sentence; 9% of the instances of sixty are the first word in the text. For instance, “Sixty years ago a dying Elgar went to France to make peace with Delius and hear his music interpreted by a prodigy” (Hoey 2005: 13 and passim). Linguists working up from the bottom, the smallest meaningful units, have agonised over problems of ambiguity in language. However, hypothesis 6) points out that most ambiguity is ruled out by co-text, let alone context, with polysemous words automatically “disambiguated” by collocation, semantic association, and colligation. This hypothesis builds on Sinclair’s insight that different meanings of “ambiguous” words correlate with different forms, different grammatical categories and grammatical structures (Sinclair 1991: 44–51). Take the word forms decline, declines, declining, declined. DECLINE can mean ‘refuse’. In this meaning it is transitive in 33% of the tokens in Sinclair’s data (though no passives occur); 43% are followed by infnitives, e.g. to do so. Nine “intransitive” clauses with declined are text-transitive, i.e. have their objects occurring earlier in the text, e.g. she offered him a lift home but he declined; 75% of the tokens have the form declined, and 92% of these are simple past tense, only 8% past participles (see Table 4.3). Table 4.3 Word-form, voice, and tense for decline* ‘refuse’ ‘refuse’ 100% active verb 75% in form declined 92% of uses of declined are simple past

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By contrast, consider DECLINE with the meaning ‘become smaller’ or ‘deteriorate’: 50% of the time it occurs in the present perfect tense as a past participle, e.g. fsh stocks in the North Sea have declined precipitately. Putting this information together, typical instances of DECLINE would be: I declined the invitation. I declined the invitation to spend a holiday with them. She invited me, but I declined. Standards of English have declined over the years. The numbers of students going to Australia have declined. (Sinclair 1991: 44–51) The conclusion Sinclair and Hoey reach is that ambiguity in discourse is a rarity. As Tabossi puts it: One might assume that the dominant meaning of the ambiguity has already achieved activation from context prior to its occurrence, in such a way that, as soon as the word is actually presented, its primed meaning will become available, whereas its subordinate meaning will be inhibited. (Tabossi 1989: 38)

4.3. Jokes and the overriding of lexical priming: some examples When the co-text does not rule out ambiguity, the results may be humorous, as mentioned in hypothesis 6) c). Much verbal humour depends upon ambiguity, creating a tension between the meaning primed for and the meaning switched to at the end of the joke. Many theories of verbal humour rely on the idea of script/schema opposition, for instance Attardo and Raskin’s general theory of verbal humour (Attardo and Raskin 1991, Attardo 2001) and Ritchie’s forced re-interpretation theory of humour (Ritchie 2004). I propose that in humorous texts priming, through textual contiguity, activates one schema, with its corresponding real world contiguity relations, and that later the text activates the switch to an alternative schema, overriding the initial priming (Goatly 2012).1 In this second half of this chapter, therefore, I illustrate priming theory and test the claim that humour often depends upon overriding priming. This will not only show how priming works, by exemplifying different kinds, but also give evidence from a larger and more varied corpus than Hoey’s, namely Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online (2010). His data was only from newspapers and so may not have been entirely representative,

1 The following is an abbreviated and modified version of Goatly (2017) and Goatly (2012: Chapter 11).

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because the time pressure on processing newspaper texts, either as writers or readers, makes them unusually dependent upon formulas and clichés. In the following section I consider six jokes or examples of unintentional humour in relation to the priming apparent in the Wordbanks corpus. 4.3.1. Collocation My mum’s a lollipop lady. By which I mean she has a very long thin body and a big round red sticky head. (‘Harry Hill’, Carr and Greeves 2006: 78)

Collocations of lollipop for the word immediately following it give a T-score2 for lady (first most frequent lexical item) of 8.31, for man (second) 5.15, and for ladies (third) 4.12. The vast majority of these mean ‘children’s road-crossing supervisor’ indicating a fixed phrasal compound. But data reveal some statistical likelihood for sticks, people, and heads. Here are examples of the latter: • • •

But images of these women are often airbrushed beyond belief and those lollipop heads are usually miserable. So come on, girls, let’s stay fit and healthy but ditch our love affair with the lollipop heads. Kate, now 29, has always been a champion of curvy women in a world full of size-six lollipop heads, but now her own her image was becoming more and more muddied.

2 There are two ways of computing statistical correlation in Collins WordbanksOnline. The Mutual Information score expresses the extent to which observed frequency of co-occurrence differs from what we would expect (statistically speaking). In statistically pure terms this is a measure of the strength of association between words x and y. In a given finite corpus MI is calculated on the basis of the number of times you observed the pair together versus the number of times you saw the pair separately. MI does not work well with very low frequencies – the T-score provides a way of getting away from this problem as it also take frequencies into account. The T-score is a measure not of the strength of association but the confidence with which we can assert that there is an association. MI is more likely to give high scores to totally fixed phrases whereas T-score will yield significant collocates that occur relatively frequently. In most cases, T-score is the most reliable measurement. Consider the example: “sour and puss”. In the WordbanksOnline corpus, the word form “sour” occurs 4109 times and there are 254 hits for “puss” . . . “sour” and “puss” only co-occur 3 times, this gives this particular collocation a very high MI score [12.01]: i.e. these two words will be very strongly associated. However, the T-score says “maybe, but we haven’t seen enough evidence to be sure that the MI is right!” . . . [T]he T-score is relatively low: 1.73. (WordbanksOnline statistics, http://0-wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk. innopac.ln.edu.hk/Docs/Help/statistics.html retrieved11/08/2010)

94 Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming So there is a very weak priming for lollipop as a premodifying metaphor whose grounds are the shape of the head and the body, and a much stronger metaphorical interpretation based on metonymies: the shape of the top of the pole held by such ladies helping children cross the road (WHOLE AS PART and POSSESSOR AS POSSESSED). In the joke, the weaker priming overrides the strongest priming.

4.3.2. Semantic set associations As he uttered the last word he dropped his voice, and she didn’t quite catch it. (Goatly 2017: 58)

This joke, or unintended humour, depends upon the ambiguity of both drop and catch. First we can investigate priming by the association with semantic sets of the collocation quite catch. The following evidence identifies these semantic sets as [UTTERANCE/WORD], [IDEA], [PERCEPTION], since in most of the examples it has the abstract metaphorical meaning ‘hear’, though there are a few examples of the association [COMPETITOR]. Since “word” precedes “quite catch” in the joke, then the ‘hear’ [UTTERANCE/ WORD] meaning is reinforced. Utterance/word What he shouted, we couldn’t quite catch. He hisses something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch. She muttered something, and although I didn’t quite catch it, I thought she said, ‘How very interesting’. She added something else, but it was half under her breath and I didn’t quite catch it. I’d like to ask you er I didn’t quite catch what you were saying about the Hans Holbein. I am about to say no when the santero says a few words I don’t quite catch to the woman. He murmured something sympathetic that she didn’t quite catch. Name I didn’t quite catch your name. Before me stood the god Ramalinghaswara . . . and a dark goddess with a name I couldn’t quite catch. He turns to us, but we don’t quite catch his name over the scratchy opening bars.

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Perception The little boy, even standing on his tippy toes, couldn’t quite catch a glimpse of his mum. There was something else, something Kelly didn’t quite catch about her that was disturbing nonetheless . . . a slackness, perhaps. Competitor Utah twice cut a 19-point lead to three, but couldn’t quite catch up. The kids couldn’t quite catch the old-timer in a very fast women’s 400 meters . . . I didn’t quite catch Prilukov and qualified third-fastest. There is only one instance of quite catch with a physical object: I didn’t quite catch that ball, that’s why I came up a little short. It is also necessary to consider the priming of drop. Drop frequently collocates with voice with the meaning ‘decrease the volume of’ either as colligating subject, as in the word-sketch data in Table 4.4, or as following one or two words after drop, as in Table 4.5. However, these semantic set Table 4.4 Word-sketch data for subject of drop Subject

Frequency

T-score

jaw penny temperature mouth index bomb prosecutor rating share wind warplane plane puck helicopter price sale revenue average rate attendance voice

263 171 313 163 166 190 109 97 275 150 36 131 38 71 452 246 99 68 360 35 157

8.57 8.03 7.78 7.0 6.93 6.4 6.34 6.25 6.21 6.18 6.02 5.96 5.92 5.86 5.85 5.69 5.65 5.64 5.57 5.56 5.55

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Frequency

T-score

goal points dead ball bombs percent charges blood shot sharply water zone dramatically shots bombshell cents four three demand prices nearly hints plans anchor significantly case open last oil head sales further straight goals price passes all five leaflets guard hands rain opposition voice

879 494 408 386 346 360 329 329 299 260 278 245 238 220 200 203 253 292 192 194 194 172 191 162 156 191 178 290 160 180 150 158 145 143 152 128 360 163 108 109 125 107 112 116

29.258 21.492 19.679 19.100 18.509 18.264 17.727 17.651 16.532 16.036 15.582 15.507 15.341 14.596 14.129 14.003 13.832 13.828 13.395 13.257 13.178 13.077 12.953 12.683 12.348 12.060 12.057 11.921 11.911 11.481 11.440 11.425 11.385 11.353 11.118 11.075 10.714 10.604 10.360 10.095 10.026 9.997 9.957 9.823

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associations and collocational primings compete with other primings for drop. Table 4.5 already shows that drop often has the literal meaning ‘cause to fall’, as ball and bombs are very common collocates. In Table 4.6 the most frequent collocates up to ten places after the node drop are to do with literal catching, dropping a catch or catches in sports like baseball or cricket, where slip refers to a position on the field where the ball is often caught to dismiss a batter. Thus semantic set priming for the literal meaning of drop and catch is strong enough to create a secondary humorous interpretation. 4.3.3. Pragmatic function I asked my date what she wanted to drink. She said “Oh, I guess I’ll have champagne”. I said, “Guess again”. (‘Slappy White’, Carr and Greeves 2006: 147)

Concordance lines suggest a pragmatic association with either prediction of the speaker’s future action in general or the announcement of an imminent action by the speaker. The predicted state of affairs may be undesirable. Prediction of probability I don’t get to go as much as I’d like, but when I stop playing I guess I’ll be able to go for the full season. “I guess I’ll just have a family”, she said. It’s been four years now, so I guess I’ll never really know the truth of what happened out there. Prediction of undesirable/reluctant action I’d like a good coonhound, but I guess I’ll have to settle for a snottynosed kid instead.

Table 4.6 Collocation candidates drop + 10  

Frequency

T-score

caught catches catch catching slip

104 90 66 12 10

10.196 9.487 8.122 3.463 3.161

98 Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming I guess I’ll have to take my chances on the train. And then they get to the end and they look around and go, “Well, I guess I’ll just go back”. Announcement of imminent action by speaker His wife came back with the coffee and we thanked her and she looked at our faces and said, “I guess I’ll get lunch started”. “Well, then, I guess I’ll love you and leave you”, he said brightly as he put on his coat. I guess I’ll get Angie’s skipping-rope out and work out down the basement. In the context of the joke the ‘imminent action’ is the most likely priming, or at the least ‘prediction of probability’. So, when the retort is “guess again” the less formulaic meaning of guess ‘make an uncertain prediction’ undermines this priming. 4.3.4. Colligational or grammatical function and semantic set Some nuns are renovating a church and getting very hot. The Mother Superior suggests they take off their clothes and work naked. The nuns agree, but bolt the church door as a precaution. They’ve all stripped down when there’s a knock at the door. “Who is it?” says the Mother Superior. A voice replies “It’s the blind man!” The Mother Superior opens the door and the man says, “Nice tits, Sister. Where do you want these blinds?” (Carr and Greeves 2006: 276)

For the phrase the blind man, firstly let’s consider the grammatical function priming – blind occurs after the definite article almost exclusively as a premodifying adjective rather than noun, as in Table 4.7. So when the punch line arrives demanding a retrospective metonymic meaning for “blind man” ‘the man who is delivering the blinds’, this takes us totally by surprise. Table 4.7 also gives us rather general semantic set associations for the noun heads following blind: there is no association with blinds, in the sense of window coverings. Blind either has a metaphorical meaning as in blind date/obedience/faith/adherence/watchmaker or a metonymic meaning as in blind alley/rage/drunk, both based on the literal meaning ‘sightless’; or it has this literal meaning as in blind beggar/sheik/cleric/golfer/ man. It is not surprising, therefore, that concordance data for the collocation blind man never gives an example of the ‘window covering’ meaning. Typical examples are: Even blind men rarely err in pointing out a compass bearing. Maybe there is a blind man who would be happy if you would read the newspaper.

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Table 4.7 Word-sketch data for blind as premodifier Premodifying

Frequency

T-score

alley date eye date spot drunk obedience faith panic beggar trust rage adherence optimism man fury loyalty placebo sheik devotion bend mouse watchmaker width Zimbabwean cleric prejudice golfer person stupidity arrogance

158 58 1157 339 318 54 41 168 65 28 99 40 17 12 569 27 39 21 12 16 10 23 8 11 8 18 13 13 144 7 8

8.8 8.09 7.97 7.42 7.39 7.36 7.35 7.22 6.95 6.75 6.39 6.26 6.23 4.72 4.64 6.23 6.21 6.19 5.8 5.72 5.43 5.35 5.3 5.28 5.13 5.06 4.98 4.93 4.82 4.77 4.76

Well, a blind man on a galloping horse can see there’s summat wrong . . . Hillsden fingered the newspapers in the way a blind man touches the sleeve of a long-lost friend. The grammatical function priming and the semantic set priming therefore both rule out the ‘window covering’ meaning. However, blinds in the plural only ever occurs with this meaning, so this priming for ‘sightless’ is completely overridden by the man’s question, quite apart from the fact that he can obviously see, as his comment on the sister’s breasts indicates.

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4.3.5. Grammatical role I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know. (Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers)

In addition to the unusual collocation of elephant with pyjamas (in the corpus there is no occurrence of pyjamas up to six words after elephant), let’s examine the priming for the phrase in my pyjamas. We note grammatical role priming according to the following syntactic pattern: I + a verb denoting a Material Process of movement + adverbial + in my pyjamas. However when I eventually returned to the bedroom in my pyjamas . . . I wish I’d walked through the night in my pyjamas. I went downstairs in my spotted pyjamas, the legs rolled up above the knee, in a jeu d’esprit. I was ready to go out to them in my pyjamas this morning. In addition, there are several examples of in my pyjamas as complement of the verb to be: “I was in my pyjamas and I left with nothing else”, he says. I’m in my pyjamas and I run into the street and all I can see is smoke. I feel comfortable around the camera and just act natural unless I’m in my pyjamas and then I hide. Or as an adverbial for more or less relational verbs to do with states rather than actions: I have a clear recollection of . . . sitting in my pyjamas watching the Ten O’Clock News. I spent most of my life in my pyjamas or, if I had to go out, old jeans. There are also a number of sentences where in my pyjamas postmodifes me: I were dying to go to the toilet but I didn’t want them to see me in my pyjamas so I didn’t go. The sight of me in my pyjamas should scare anyone off. We went in to meet the hospital directors, me still in my ward pyjamas and dressing-gown. These last three examples highlight an obvious point, applicable to all the examples cited – in my pyjamas almost always modifes the frst-person pronouns, or the frst-person pronoun is always within the scope of the

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modifying phrase, generally the I at the beginning of the clause. There is only one exception to this, where it immediately postmodifes “your dick”. If I wake up with your dick in my pyjamas, Andy-boy, I’ll cut it off. There is, therefore, a more specifc kind of grammatical role priming, involving the scope of modifcation, and it is the overriding of this which is necessary for this Groucho Marx gag. 4.3.6. Textual semantic association “I felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body. Then I was born”. (‘Chris Bliss’, Carr and Greeves 2006: 61)

The textual semantic association of a man/woman trapped in a . . . body is always to express an identity problem as the word trapped suggests. Generally this is to do with sex role or gender identity, either women wishing to be men: You know how some people will say, “I always felt that I was a man trapped in a woman’s body” to think of themselves as Elizabeth I did, as a man trapped in the puny body of a woman? “Effectively she’s been a man trapped in a woman’s body, and she’s had enough of it”. (Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online 2010) “I often feel that I am a gay man trapped in this body”. (Pamela Anderson in Jane magazine) Or men wishing to be women: Jansen had long felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. and then other people might say “I always felt I was a woman trapped in a man’s body” It seems only a matter of time before an England player appears on Esther to announce he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. He said: “I describe myself as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body”. Often, later in the text, the solution is introduced in terms of sex change surgery, here in the same sentence: Hayley said she felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body before the surgery.

102 Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming Sometimes the problem is not to do with sex or gender roles but with weight, age, or ethnicity, and surprisingly in our concordance data these all apply to men Simon Ings is a fat man trapped in the body of an elf. In short, he is a middle-aged man trapped in the body of a 23year-old. an American kid, he’d woken to discover himself trapped in a middle-aged man’s body. Far from feeling like a Chinese man trapped in a Westerner’s body. Again, a solution might be suggested in some cases but less frequently than when the problem is gender role. My husband got a tattoo on his bum because he hates feeling like a young man trapped in an old body. The solution is never, however, to be born, but to change the body in some way. Hence the surprise when these primings do not apply. I think the previous examples have shown the validity of various kinds of priming and the ways in which humour relates to them, usually by overriding the strongest or exploiting the weakest priming. It is obvious that in exploiting the syntagmatic dimension priming emphasises contiguity. But how do these examples of humorous ambiguity relate exactly to the opposite dimension, similarity? Ambiguity is rare because of priming. Perhaps we can say that, when the ambiguity is reinstated by humour, attention is drawn to the similarity of form of two lexical items with two different meanings, or to the paradigmatic substitution/co-presence of two different lexical items. Both similarity and difference operate in this reinstatement of ambiguity, where two forms are similar and two meanings different.

4.4. Some caveats about lexical priming There are three aspects of priming theory worth deliberating on: the status of the word; the relationship between the text and the world; and the neglect of the idea of generic priming. 4.4.1. The orthographic word as the primary unit Priming theory may not be radical enough. Why take the word (i.e. orthographic word-form) as the unit on which to base the theory? One answer is, of course, that the computer technology for corpus linguistics can easily identify orthographic word forms. But only if the orthographic word is

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the unit under consideration need one emphasise priming. Priming theory takes the orthographic word and zooms out, but one might take the stream of relatively undifferentiated chunks of speech and zoom in on the word. The previous chapter suggested that the concept of “word” is a product of literacy (Ong 2002), and that we acquire much of our priming before we learn to read, when words or, at least, their boundaries are unclear. Overlooking my classmate’s diary in primary school I noticed he had written, the smorning I got up late . . . ; and I’m seefing I can do it (modelled on see if [seef] you can do it) is an attested child’s utterance. Perhaps, then, chunks of language larger than the word are often the relevant lexicographical unit, especially in pre-literate situations. This may also be manifest in newspaper texts where word sequences are produced and processed quickly. Words then become more like phonemes (distinctive sounds) in some genres (news reporting, unscripted conversation, unscripted public speaking). Phonemes become more like morphemes (units of meaning) in others (poetry, advertising). This questioning of the orthographic wordform as the invariant unit of lexical analysis, or of the morpheme as the basic unit of meaning, would be far more radical than Hoey’s theory. This gives a different perspective to the idea that ambiguity is far less common when words are encountered in their discoursal co-text (see priming hypothesis 6)). If our experience of language is almost never of isolated words, and there are no clear and distinct edges to lexical units, which to varying degrees and with varying probabilities in different genres extend beyond (orthographic) word boundaries, then talking of ambiguous or synonymous lexis is misguided. Even in poetry, it is not sensible to talk of the ambiguity of phonemes or phoneme clusters, to say that /h/ is ambiguous between meaning ‘dwelling’, as in house, home, hut, hovel, habitation, hermitage, and ‘emotion’, as in hate, horror, hope, happiness, haunting. It may be only marginally less sensible, I have tried to show, to talk about the ambiguity of morphemes/ words such as the verb decline meaning ‘refuse’ or ‘deteriorate/become smaller’. 4.4.2. The relation of text to the world Clearly the state of the world affects linguistic behaviour, as well as vice versa. I already noted that afford is primed to occur with negatives, but this may simply be because the corpus of texts used for computing collocational patterns are made up of newspapers published in times of economic crisis. Or, more generally, no news is good news – negativity is a common news value (Galtung and Ruge 1973). And why is sixty so often primed for contrast and part of the problem in a problem-solution rhetorical structure? Perhaps because the texts are created within the culture in which sixty has been the normal age of retirement.

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The problem of deciding, in semantics, where to draw the line between knowledge of the language system and knowledge of the world has bothered linguists. Such a distinction is felt to exist, but . . . it is not easy for a linguist or philosopher to justify it, or to prescribe how to draw the line in individual cases. Nevertheless practical considerations, if no others, compel us to make such a distinction, as to do otherwise would be to enlarge the domain of semantics into the impossibly vast study of everything that is to be known about the universe in which we live. (Leech 1981: 8) However, cognitive linguists often claim that it is misleading and, in any case, impossible to divide knowledge of the world, encyclopaedic knowledge, from knowledge of language, when describing meaning. “We have to bring to bear our full knowledge of the way the world is, or more accurately, the way we expect the world to be in order to describe the precise meaning of an utterance . . . A word meaning is therefore a perspective on our knowledge of the world”, the access node into the knowledge network (Croft and Cruse 2004: 30). This cognitive approach to lexis still privileges the word as the primary unit of meaning. But it does suggest that language is understood through the interaction of word and world, and allows us to view action genres as the real world context for the acquisition and understanding of meaning. 4.4.3. Generic priming The notion that text is both a reflection of the world and an influence on the world is a somewhat trite observation. But the contention of Chapter 3 is that language is mostly learnt and used in the contexts of action genres. It is therefore worth considering whether patterns of lexical priming are merely a linguistic correlate of familiar action genres. Let’s assume, then, that there is another kind of priming, genre priming, mentioned by Hoey (2005: 11, see 4.2), but not included in his priming hypotheses. Generic priming can be investigated in the same way as other kinds of priming, through the humour generated when it is overturned. Consider this spoof news article from Private Eye. OLYMPIC DRUG SHOCK By Our Olympics Correspondent Anna Bolic-Steroid entire Olympic movement reacted with shock and dismay today after a leading athlete arriving in Sydney was found not to be taking drugs.

THE

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“I stupidly thought I could win by sticking to the rules”, said the disgraced star. “I now accept that training hard and eating sensibly was not the way to win and that I’ve let everyone from my pharmacist to my drug dealer down”. (From Private Eye 1011, September 2000: 22) There are, we note, two genres involved here, the reporting discourse genre of the newspaper column and the reported action genre. The humour arises mainly from the latter. There is an action genre/schema of international sport and athletic competitions. One specifc variation on this is when the rules of that genre are broken by an athlete taking drugs, the offending athlete is caught through blood or urine tests, and has to make a statement, as a script/discourse genre, regretting taking the drugs, apologizing to their team, supporters, friends, and relatives. It is the reported content of this news report which results in the overriding of priming. The collocation of athlete*, take* and drugs is well established, with 13 hits in Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online (2010), e.g.: Bans from two years up to life could be imposed beginning March 1 on managers coaches or doctors helping athletes to take performance enhancing drugs. Athletes take drugs so that they are cleared just before a competition. Last week the head of the US sports drug agency made the claim athletes were taking performance-enhancing drugs “in all sports, in every country in the world”. I replied: “I think, potentially, every athlete is taking drugs”. In addition Olympic, filtered for shock occurring five words before or after it, gives us eight concordance lines. The most relevant extract from the corpus is probably: Games Greek lifter drug shock Weightlifting; Athens Olympic games 2004, 21 August 2004 BRONZE medal weightlifter Leonidas Sampanis has failed a drug test .  .  . Two women – Indian lifter Thingbaijam Sanamacha Chanu and Uzbek shot-putter Olga Shchukina – were thrown out after positive drugs tests.

In the context of these primings the “not” of the parody is highly unexpected. Paradoxically, since drug-taking by athletes appears to be so common, it loses the news value of unexpectedness, and the absence of drug-taking in an athlete then becomes unexpected and newsworthy!

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Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming

As for the last part of the Private Eye report “I’ve let everyone from my pharmacist to my drug dealer down”, one could predict something like this text: He phoned Manly board members yesterday to tell of Walker ‘s drug result . . . Walker said . . . “I would like to have finished my career in a better way. I have let down my family, the Manly fans, my manager Wayne Beavis and the club”. This suggests that, at least in the genre of news reports about athletes/ sportspeople drug-taking, have let down is primed for an association with the semantic set [MANAGER /TRAINER/FAN/FAMILY] as its object colligate, rather than [PHARMACIST/DRUG DEALER]. My contention is that the priming exhibited here, and overridden, is simply a by-product of the various action-cum-discourse genres with which we are familiar. Actions in the world with all their stereotypes, contiguities, and sequences cannot, therefore, be considered as something divorced from the sequence of the words. In the next chapter, following up on the notion of generic priming, I discuss some prominent forms of written genres, for instance narrative, as a further syntagmatic extension beyond the limits of the clause and the chunks of text considered in Hoey’s work. I also discuss grammar. Presumably, if one follows the reasonable arguments of Sampson (2005), grammatical rules, like the collocational probabilities investigated in priming theory, are acquired by exposure to running texts, during participation in action genres. One might even claim that just as senses are acquired through repeated experience of reference, so grammar is acquired through repeated exposure to collocational groupings/routines. This is acknowledged in priming hypotheses 4) and 7).

4.5. Priming, formulae, metonymy/contiguity (and metaphor) My framework for metaphorical and metonymic interpretation relies on the operation of pragmatic principles within a generic context. I have labelled this framework the Genre-Relevance, Graded Risk Approach to Metaphorical Scalarity or 2(gr)ams (Goatly 2011), and I give a very brief sketch in 8.2.7. Obviously this generic context will be reflected in priming. However, there are some further more particular observations about priming, formulaic language, metonymy, and metaphor that I suggest below. The most obvious point about priming is its relation to textual metonymy. When textual metonymy deletes items, the lexical items deleted will be collocations or colligations, including their semantics, which may take the form of their various semantic set or textual semantic priming. When texts are encountered with their collocations intact, their typical collocations will obviously be predictable and therefore relatively low in information content. Both metonymy and metaphor

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can function to increase information content. Textual metonymy does this by deleting the predictable collocation, but which is so predictable it is easily supplied. Priming can give rise to or reflect metonymic meanings. For instance, there is an EFFECT AS CAUSE metonymy operating in these following examples: “He wouldn’t get to page two before the producer laughed him out of the office” (Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online 2010). “They booed him off the stage” (Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online 2010). “He coughed and spluttered a lot and sneezed his lunch all over the place” (Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online 2010). This is achieved by grammatical category priming: PERSON(S) SUBJECT + sneezed/booed/laughed/etc. + PERSON(S) OBJECT + ADVERBIAL of direction. Because these words are used within this particular construction, their meanings are shaped and squeezed into something different from what might be seen as their ‘basic’ senses. The technical term for this process is ‘coercion’, and, as we can see in these examples, it often involves metonymy. (Littlemore 2015: 29–30) The semantic association priming along with the form can be shown to influence metonymic meaning. Littlemore analyses the strings wear + leather and wear + leathers. She discovered that, though both involve an OBJECT/CLOTHES AS MATERIAL metonymy, the first, unlike the second, primes for sexual provocation. For example, “Even the waitresses wear leather and carry whips”, in contrast with “Jennifer was wearing leathers, having arrived as usual on her motorbike” (Littlemore 2015: 27–28). Formulae, including idioms, phrasal verbs, and compounds might be seen as collocation taken to its ultimate, and they tend to be processed as wholes. Sinclair and Renouf (1988: 153) observe: “the more frequent a word is, the less independent meaning it has, because it is likely to be acting in conjunction with other words, making useful structures or contributing to familiar idiomatic phrases”. But there is an interesting relation between these prefabricated items and metaphor and metonymy. I already demonstrated how phrasal verbs and idioms tend to incorporate metaphor and compounds involve metonymy (2.1.3, p. 42). Once lexicalised with meanings listed in the dictionary, the metaphors and metonymies in these multiword units tend to become opaque. It follows that, lacking transparency, they are likely to be processed as wholes, not segmented into their parts, whereas literal uses tend to be segmented because they are transparent. It is the very formulaic sequences that are in most common use in a speech community that are most likely to be irregular in form and/ or to lack transparency of meaning. The correlation probably exists because the more often a string is used and understood as it stands,

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Corpus linguistics, collocation, and lexical priming the less likely it is to be subjected to alteration in order to make it more comprehensible. (Wray 2002: locations 1720–1722)

As a specific example Lamb (1998: 72ff) draws a contrast between the processing of compounds in which dog is used metaphorically or metonymically, and those in which it is used literally. Consider under-dog and hot-dog, in contrast with lap-dog and puppy-dog. The dog elements in under-dog and hot-dog are originally metaphorical and metonymic respectively (hot dog originated in the suggestion that the sausage was made of the meat of stray dogs (Metcalf 2016)). These lexical items are therefore unlikely to undergo segmentation when being processed, whereas lap-dog and puppy-dog, as well as spotted-dog, hunting dog, and show dog are more likely to be segmented. Evidence for this lack of segmentation is that the word dog does not evoke images of sausages or losers, since our understanding of dog is not influenced by hot-dog or under-dog (Wray 2002). It may be of interest to compare the effects of priming with Jakobson’s poetic function (Chapter 2, p. 58). If we still persist with the orthographic word as the basic unit for paradigmatic choice and syntagmatic combination, priming introduces a further layer of patterning over and above grammar and semantics, in much the same way as the poetic function creates extra layers of similarity on the syntagmatic axis. In both cases, the paradigmatic choices are restricted either by collocational probabilities in the case of priming or by the exigencies of sound and semantic patterning in the case of poetry.

4.6. Summary Pursuing the discussion in Chapter 3 of language chunking by pre-literate cultures and children, I began by outlining developments in corpus linguistics as putting a new emphasis on the contiguity dimension. These developments were illustrated in the way learners’ dictionaries now include much more information about typical collocations into which words fit, thus reflecting the typical contiguous relationships within the action schemas which realise culture. I proceeded to delineate Hoey’s priming theory involving typical patterns of collocation, colligation, semantic sets, and associations, grammatical roles and positioning in the clause. The idea that ambiguity is rare because one meaning of a word has different primings was tested by examples of humour: if humour reinstates ambiguities, then it does so by exploiting and overriding the most obviously primed meaning, and I illustrated this phenomenon with several examples. Despite the evidence for the importance of priming from Hoey’s corpus data and my humorous examples, I critiqued priming theory in two main ways. First I suggested that the concentration on the orthographic word, which facilitates computer concordancing, distorts the fact that a great deal of language is processed as chunks. Second I postulated that priming may in fact simply be a reflection or construction of the state of the world,

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so that it is difficult, if not unnecessary, to disentangle linguistic and world knowledge. Generic priming was used as an illustration of this, where the discourse genre and the action genre mirror each other (or deliberately fail to in humour). Finally, I explored the relationship between formulaic language/priming and metonymy/metaphor: the predictability of priming facilitates metonymic deletion, can reflect or give rise to metonymic meanings, and formulaic language is manifest in idioms, which, processed as wholes, bypass metonymic and metaphoric meaning. In brief, corpus linguistics and priming theory have put a new emphasis on the contiguity dimension of meaning, by insisting on the importance of the syntagmatic axis and revealing that the boundaries of paradigmatic units are often blurred. This contiguity dimension of co-text is a reflection of the context of action genres in which language is acquired. Recognition of this role of contiguity is essential in explaining how a feel for the idiomatic language is acquired, as well as for the more restricted acquisition of grammar, the topic of the next chapter. But before proceeding I would like to throw out a suggestion of how priming theory and grammar might provide an analogy for some findings of quantum theory, which I discuss in more detail in Chapters 9 and 11. One interpretation of quantum theory (Rovelli 2021) is that “objects” only exist in relation to observers, measuring instruments and other potential “objects” as nodes in a web of interactions. Rovelli talks about “grammar”, albeit probably in a metaphorical sense: “Quantum mechanics . . . describes the elementary and universal grammar of physical reality underlying not just laboratory observations but every type and instance of interaction” (Rovelli 2021: 69). The “objects” of scientific investigation are ambiguous, existing only as a set of probabilities until they are disambiguated by their relations to observers and each other, as famously in the case of light which is ambiguously particle or wave. Similarly, orthographic words are very often ambiguous and indeterminate, until they are brought in relation to other words through collocational and other kinds of priming. Humour often depends upon reinstating the ambiguity, with a sudden switch between, as it were, wave and particle, or the superposition of more than one meaning. In this way, priming theory might well be related to Derrida’s notion of différance, one meaning of which is ‘deferral’ (Derrida 1982). Because the syntagmatic axis takes place in time, meaning will be deferred until the syntagm is “complete”. (Incidentally contradicting claims that elements of a syntagm are in any absolute sense “present”, in contrast to the paradigm, all but one of whose members are absent, see Table 0.1.) In a sense, therefore, no word can be repeated, because the context will differ every time. Derrida would go even further and claim that even identical sentences when re-read will have a different meaning, because the interpreter of the utterance will have changed, and the original meaning will have been modified by the intervening co-text. We will re-encounter the idea of non-repeatability in discussing ethnomethodology and Heraclitean philosophy in Chapter 8.

5

The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

So far in this book I have, after introducing the two dimensions, shown how they apply in definitions of metonymy and metaphor, can illuminate the contrast between pre-literate and literate mindsets, and relate to developments in corpus linguistics, lexicography, and priming theory. In this chapter I turn to consider grammar. The syntagmatic axis, with its textual contiguity, not only involves collocational and other types of priming, but most obviously, as its label suggests, syntax. The link between co-text and cultural context is just as evident in grammar as in collocational and other primings. Phrases, clauses, and sentences are often representations or constructions of the experiential world, including the action schemas or genres in which we participate as we are inducted into our culture. They may represent (metonymically) whole genres, “I went for dental treatment”. Or they may represent sub-events in a genre, “Chop up the celery”, as part of the action genre of making a stew. The contiguity patterns of text reciprocally reflect and structure our real world experience, and this structuring is extremely powerful in grammar. Different grammars structure our experience differently, sometimes quite radically as we shall see when discussing Blackfoot grammar in Chapter 9. A simple analysis will show how the clause reflects contiguity and contextual relations in its structure as in Figure 5.1. The numbered elements of the clause relate to contiguities of context as follows: Time Circumstance Yesterday

Actor I

Material Process fried

Goal

Place Circumstance

the chicken

on the new gas burner

1 3

4

2

Figure 5.1 A Material Process clause representing the contiguities of context

1) The Material Process verb establishes a relationship between participants, Actor and Goal, a syntagmatic contiguity reflecting the contiguities of a real action genre – cooking. 2) The Place Circumstance fills in another aspect of context. DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-6

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3) The Time Circumstance fills in another aspect of context. 4) The tense also locates the action in a time prior to utterance. If grammar refects contiguity in experience as well as text, and is therefore intimately related to metonymy, with its deletions on the syntagmatic axis, it has the potential to provide a theoretical framework for classifying metonymy. This is the topic of the frst two sections of this chapter. Section 5.1 sketches the grammar of clause analysis in the Systemic Functional tradition, and shows how it may be applied to the analysis of metonymic deletions, especially in the metonymical meanings of compounds and ofgenitives. These clauses and their metonymic abbreviations tend to correlate with schemas, so the metonymies analysed are likely to involve the types that operate within a frame and a schema (1.3.1, p. 36). Section 5.2 moves outwards to consider complex sentences, which are more likely to involve inter-schema relations. Subordinate clauses are differentiated in terms of the closeness of contiguity and degree of abstraction. The more abstract ones are especially prevalent in literate cultures. Compound sentences, with their coordinated clauses, when they imply but leave unstated logical and abstract relations between schemas, can be regarded as examples of metonymy. They have their equivalents in narratives, where many events are presented as happening but with no logical relations between them made explicit. Zooming out further, therefore, section 5.3 considers the contiguities of larger units of discourse, such as narratives and recounts, viewed as expansions of clausal grammar. Because these genres are based on clauses representing material actions, which more or less reflect action genres, their representations are close to the contiguities of lived experience dominant in pre-literate experience and language acquisition. I therefore contrast them with other written genres, such as discussion and argument, along various parameters of abstraction (5.3.1). Literary genres, including narratives of various kinds, may also be classified in terms of degrees of abstraction, for which Graham Hough’s theory of literary typology provides an interesting template (5.3.2).

5.1. The semantics of clausal grammar as a means of analysing metonymies There are various approaches in cognitive grammar, construction grammar, and other grammatical theories that take the semantics of syntax as their major concern. I will be using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) in this chapter (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). It seems to me a more elegant way of addressing the semantics of grammar than other theories, because it begins by classifying the processes referred to by verbs and then assigning semantic roles to participants in the clause, reflecting a contiguity and Broca’s area emphasis. The SFG process types and respective participants are shown in Table 5.1. In the examples the verbs representing the processes are bolded and the (noun) phrases (and clauses) representing the participants underlined and labelled in parenthesis.

112 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative Table 5.1 Process types in Systemic Functional Grammar Process

Meanings

Participants

Examples

Existential

existence

Existent

There are 6 moons of Uranus (Existent)

Relational

states, relationships, possession

Token, Value, specifically

Material

actions, events

Carrier, Attribute

Peter (Carrier) remained a teacher (Attribute)

Carrier, Circumstance

The cat (Carrier) is in the garden (Circumstance)

Identified, Identifier

Boris (Identified) is the Prime Minister (Identifier)

Possessor, Possession

Paula (Possessor) has a ginger cat (Possession)

Actor, Goal,

Snow (Actor) blocked the road (Goal)

Actor, Recipient, Jane (Actor) gave me Goal (Recipient) a waffle (Goal) Actor, Scope

John (Actor) climbed the mountain (Scope)

Actor, Creation

They (Actor) made a snowman (Creation)

Actor, Client, Creation

Barretts (Actor) built me (Client) a house (Creation)

Behavioural behaviour, physical and psychological

Behaver

He (Behaver)’s always laughing Doug (Behaver) yawned

Mental

Senser, Phenomenon

The cat (Senser) saw the bird (Phenomenon)

Verbal

perception, emotion,

Dogs (Phenomenon) always annoyed Mat (Senser)

thought

He (Senser) decided to go home (Phenomenon)

Sayer, speaking, Receiver, writing, communicating Verbiage, Target

Paul (Sayer) told Mindy (Receiver) he would resign (Verbiage) Iran (Sayer) denounces population conference (Target)

Some general observations may be made about these different process types in terms of abstraction and contiguity. The most concrete and the least abstract processes are the Material, as the label suggests. At the other extreme are some of the Relational, especially the attributional,

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that assign to classes or describe features. Identifying clauses, which are reversible because they identify and equate individual entities, are slightly less abstract. Even less abstract are circumstantial relational clauses which may anchor the Carrier to a time or place. Many Verbal and Mental Processes are projections from consciousness – in “Einstein said, ‘E = MC2’” “Einstein said” is the projecting clause, and “E = MC2” is the projected clause. The sentence might involve an extra explicit level of interpretation of material reality, as if I simply said “E = MC2” the projecting consciousness of the speaker remains hidden. The projecting clause also allows scope for interpreting the verbiage in various ways, e.g. “Einstein claimed/showed that E = MC2”. Since behavioural clauses represent a happening that has psychological or bodily causes there is something inherently contiguous about them in terms of cause and effect. We add to these clause types circumstantial adjuncts of various semantic types, including: space – position, direction, and distance; time – point, duration, and frequency; manner – means, quality, instrument, degree, comparison; cause – reason, purpose, behalf; contingency – condition, concession, default (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 262). In many cases the same semantic categories of circumstances can either be realised by an adjunct or as a subordinate adverbial clause, especially cause and contingency, as in many of the later of these examples: Space: Position At George Street turn left and walk to St Andrews Cathedral Direction At George Street turn left and walk to St Andrews Cathedral Distance Clay particles can be carried thousands of miles by gentle currents Time: Point The building was completed in the summer/when it was summer Duration He survived by clinging to a raft for thirty hours Frequency I’ve been to Bangkok over twenty times Manner: Means A kangaroo can hop on its hind legs Instrument He opened the lock with a bent paperclip Quality He spoke about the architecture eloquently but in technical terms

114 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative Degree She worked a great deal on construction grammar because she enjoyed it so much Comparison He walked in like a camel/as if he was a camel Like all Mayans, he learnt the art of warfare from his elders Cause: Reason Colin died of heart failure/because he had heart failure Purpose Trump often tweets just for a headline/so that he can get a headline Behalf For the sake of child refugees/so that we can help child refugees let’s relax our rules a bit Contingency: Condition In the event of a nuclear attack/if there is a nuclear attack Seoul will immediately implement the drills it has rehearsed Concession Despite our objections/although we objected the welfare bill was passed into law Default In the absence of any contrary evidence/since there is no contrary evidence we assume man-made global warming is proven This grammatical framework allows us to explore metonymy from various angles. Firstly, I consider how metonymy themes can be interpreted according to processes, participants, and circumstances, as a reflection of action schemas or sub-schemas (5.1.1). I then consider examples of word-formation, especially compounds, to show what elements of the action schema are deleted (5.1.2). Finally I examine the structure of the noun phrase, focusing on the of-genitive construction and its realisation of different kinds of metonymy (5.1.3). 5.1.1. Interpreting metonymy according to the semantic elements of the clause Let’s consider some of the examples quoted in the literature (see 2.1.2, Table 2.2, pp. 40–41). In the examples below, to make the meaning clear I sometimes provide a sentence context. This is put in parenthesis to avoid confusion, because the clause element analysis is not an analysis of the sentence but of the literal and metonymic meaning of the term. Processes, participants, and circumstances are indicated below after the example and its gloss.

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Some inter-frame metonymies may be understood as having different participants as source and target. They can be categorised according to the type of processes in which the participants are involved, Material or Relational. Material Processes PRODUCT AS PRODUCER:

(I drive) a Ford. (I drive) a car which Ford manufactured. Creation as Actor WORK AS AUTHOR: (We are studying) Shakespeare. (We are studying) works which Shakespeare wrote. Creation as Actor, or Verbiage as Sayer ENTITY THAT CAUSED STATE AS STATE: (The PM is) a disaster. (The PM is) a person who caused/causes disaster. Actor as Creation/Goal CONTROLLED AS CONTROLLER: Christopher Wren (built St Paul’s). The workers Christopher Wren controlled (built St Paul’s). Goal as Actor USER OF THE OBJECT AS OBJECT or CONTROLLER AS CONTROLLED: (On the way here I had an argument with) a motorcycle. (On the way here I had an argument with) the person driving a motorcycle. Actor as Goal Relational Processes POSSESSED AS POSSESSOR: (The blue Honda Jazz is) Harry. (The blue Honda jazz is) the one Harry possesses Possession as Possessor POSSESSOR AS POSSESSED: (He married) money. (He married) the person who possesses money. Possessor as Possession Other metonymies involve participants and processes as targets and sources, a kind of frame-schema metonymy. They may be glossed in terms of processes, but, since verbs are dependent on nouns in English grammar, the process referred to by the verb tends to evoke a whole schema including participants: ACTION AS ACTOR: (My father) was a butcher. (My father) butchered (meat) Material Process (+ Goal) as Actor (nominalised) ACTOR AS ACTION: (She is) a failure. (She is) a person who fails [repeatedly]. Actor + Process as Process (nominalised). (NB Fail like catenative verbs, e.g. stop, is neutral as to process type, which is determined by the verb that follows it.)

116 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative RESULT AS ACTION:

The research (is disturbing). The results of the research (are disturbing). The concentration (will be blue). The liquid resulting from concentration (will be blue). Creation as Material Process (nominalised) THING PERCEIVED AS PERCEPTION: (She was a gorgeous) sight. (She was a gorgeous) person to see. Phenomenon + Mental Process as Mental Process (nominalised) OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION AS ACTION: (Give me) a bite. (Give me) some food (to bite). Goal as Material Process (nominalised) The flight (is waiting). The plane (is waiting) to fly. Actor + Material Process as Material Process (nominalised) CAUSE OF EMOTION AS EMOTION: (You are) my pride and joy. (You are) a person who causes me to be proud and joyful. Phenomenon as Mental Process of Emotion (nominalised) OBJECT/PERSON CAUSING MENTAL STATE AS MENTAL STATE: (Here comes) trouble. (Here comes) something/someone who causes trouble. Phenomenon as Mental Process of Emotion (nominalised), or Actor as Material Process (nominalised) A third kind of metonymy involves one (or more) process as target and another process as source, (sub)-schema-(sub)-schema metonymies: EVENT THAT CAUSED SOUND AS SOUND:

(The car) screeched to a halt. (The car) halted causing a screeching sound. Material Process as Material Process

ACTION AS RESULT

(Dybala) sent Iker Casillas the wrong way (from the spot) (Gomez 2018). (Dybala) scored by sending Iker Casillas the wrong way from the spot. Material Process as Material Process EVENT AS SUB-EVENT (I’ve had my coronavirus) jab. (I’ve had my coronavirus) vaccination. Material Process (nominalised) as Material Process (nominalised) ACTION AND RESULTING ACTION AS ACTION:1 (He) sneezed (the tissue off the table). (He) sneezed which moved (the tissue off the table). Behavioural Process + Material Process as Behavioural Process 2

1 In Kovecses and Radden (1998) this is labelled MEANS AS ACTION.

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EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT: (She) blushed (at her mistake). (She) was embarrassed (at her mistake). Mental Process of Emotion as Behavioural Process

A further semantic class of metonymy involves sources and targets as participants and circumstances. The whole circumstance is not involved, only the noun referent of the circumstantial adjunct. These are interframe metonymies. ENTITY INOLVED IN MOTION AS TIME OF MOTION: The 8.40 (has just arrived). The train scheduled for 8.40 (has arrived). Actor as Time Circumstance PRODUCT MADE IN a PLACE AS PLACE: (Please be careful with) the china. (Please be careful with) the product made in China. Creation as Place Circumstance

And lastly there are metonymies involving processes and circumstances as target and source. Like the previous examples, only the referent of the noun in the circumstantial adjunct is involved. Most of the targets are either conversions, or nouns denoting processes, like tennis. Therefore they are frame-(sub-)schema metonymies. ACTION AS INSTRUMENT: (I didn’t expect him) to knife (me in the back). (I didn’t expect him) to stab me (in the back) with a knife. (He) forked (the earth over). (He) dug (the earth over) with a fork. Process + Instrument Circumstance as Instrument Circumstance (verbalised conversion) INSTRUMENT AS ACTION: (Give me a) screwdriver. (Give me) a tool to drive screws. Actor + Material Process + Goal as Material Process (nominalised) + Goal ACTION AS LOCATION OF ACTION: (I’ve been watching) Wimbledon. (I’ve been watching) the tennis at Wimbledon. Material Process as Location Circumstance ACTION AS OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION: (Come to) table. (Come to) eat at the table. Material Process + Location Circumstance as Location Circumstance MANNER OF ACTION AS ACTION: (She) tiptoed (to the bed). (She) went (to her bed) on tiptoes. Material Process + Manner Circumstance as Manner Circumstance (verbalised conversion) TIME PERIOD OF ACTION AS ACTION: (The birds) winter (in Africa). (The birds) live (in Africa) during winter.

118 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative Material Process + Time Circumstance as Time Circumstance (verbalised conversion) MOTION AS DESTINATION: (He) pocketed (the coins). (He) put (the coins) in his pocket. Material Process + Direction Circumstance as Direction Circumstance (verbalised) PERCEPTION AS THING PERCEIVED: (Doctor, it’s) my stomach. (Doctor, it’s) the pain I feel in my stomach. Mental Process of Perception + Phenomenon + Location Circumstance as Location Circumstance

It seems clear from this analysis that many metonymies can be systematically related to the semantics of clause grammar, underlining the parallelism between action schema, clause structure and (the deletions of) metonymy within the contiguity dimension of experience and meaning. In fact, classifying metonymies according to the semantic elements of clauses may be a more principled method than using the rather ad hoc categories normally employed. We now turn to consider metonymy, especially textual, in relation to syntagmatic relations over smaller units; notably the internal structure of metonymic compounds, and how they too can be related to the process, participant, and circumstantial elements of the clause. Again, this reflects the action schemas the clause represents. 5.1.2. Interpreting metonymic compounds according to the semantic elements of the clause Metonymies, as I noted in Chapter 2 (2.1.3, p. 50) are very prevalent in compounds. In the following examples (Table 5.2) most of the metonymies Table 5.2 Analysing metonymy in compounds in terms of grammatical clause elements Compound

Meaning in dictionary

Semantic clause elements in base 1 and 2

Missing elements

steamboat

large boat that moves by B1-Means Material Process means of steam power Circumstance/ B2-Actor wash basin bathroom sink used for B1-Material process/ Goal washing face and hands B2-Instrument Circumstance baggage car train carriage that carries B1-Goal/B2-Actor Material Process passenger’s baggage

(Continued)

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Table 5.2 Continued Compound

Meaning in dictionary

Semantic clause elements in base 1 and 2

Missing elements

postage stamp isolation period

stamp used to pay postage period of time in which a diseased person is quarantined/quarantines themselves person in the habit of going from place to place for pleasure or social events road on which vehicles can travel at express speed

B1-Goal/B2-Means Circumstance B1-Process (nominalised)/ B2-Time Circumstance B1-Verb/B2-Place Circumstance

Material Process

gadabout

expressway

B1-Manner Circumstance/ B2-Means Circumstance area code series of numbers to dial B1-Place for a telephone call to a Circumstance/ different area B2-Goal foot and disease of cows, sheep, B1-Place mouth pigs which produces Circumstance/ disease blisters on feet and B2-Actor (process mouth noun1) aid agency an organisation that aids B1-Process/B2-Actor (with money or food or other assistance) people/ countries in need tracing transparent paper on B1-Material process paper which an image can be (nominalised)/ traced B2-Place Circumstance shipping radio programme B1-Receiver/ news broadcasting news of B2-Verbiage weather conditions to shipping reign of period in which B1-Process terror government reigns over (nominalised)/ its citizens by terror B2-Instrument Circumstance observation position from which B1-Process post a soldier or guard can (nominalised)/ watch for enemies or B2-Circumstance prisoners (place) 1

Goal or Actor

Actor

Actor, Material Process

Material Process

Goal

Recipient

Goal

Actor, Verbal Process

Actor, Goal

Actor/Senser, Phenomenon

Process nouns are nouns which refer to processes rather than things, like tennis, fire, or in this case disease.

120 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative are clearly textual, as can usually be adduced from seeing what participants/processes/circumstances are omitted in the compound and which have to be supplied in describing the meaning. (The compounds are made up of two bases, B1 followed by B2. The analysis relies on the dictionary description, which may not be the only way of expressing the meaning, but suffices for showing the potential of this approach.) Besides these, there are textual metonymies which additionally are much more complex (Table 5.3). This last example, bicycle clips, indicates two Table 5.3 Complex examples of analysing metonymy in compounds in terms of grammatical clause elements Compound Meaning

Semantic clause elements in base 1 and 2

Missing elements

thirty something loving cup

B1+B2-Value

Token

Person aged between 30 and 39 Large cup which is drunk from in turn by guests at banquets as a sign of love promenade Concert where some concert of the audience stand without seats

know-all

convent school

success story

bicycle clips

B1-Mental Process (nominalised)/ B2-Instrument Circumstance B1-Material Process (nominalised)/ B2-Place Circumstance A person who annoys B1-Mental Process/ by claiming to know B2-Phenomenon everything School in which girls B1-Location are taught by nuns Circumstance/ who live in a convent B2-Place Circumstance +(Material Process) Person or organisation B1-Material that has succeeded Process (nominalised)/ B2-Verbiage (Process noun) Clips worn on cyclist’s B1-Goal or trousers while riding Instrument Circumstance/ a bicycle/travelling by bicycle to prevent B2-Goal or them being caught in Instrument Circumstance the chain

Senser, Actor, Process (drinking)

Actor

Senser

Goal (girls), Process (teach), Actor (nuns), Process (live) Actor, Sayer

Actor, Process (riding), Process (prevent), Process (catch), Goal (trousers), Location Circumstance (in the chain), Possessor (cyclist), Possession (trousers)

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Table 5.4 Semantic structure of the noun phrase Premodifiers

Head Postmodifiers prepositional phrases clauses

deictic numerative epithet classifier thing descriptive/restrictive modifiers those

two

noisy

diesel

trains of Japanese make with dirty carriages

which are arriving at the station

things. Firstly, some cultural practices/schemas are extremely complex or rich. But they are recognised in all their richness by members of the culture so that elements of the schema are felt to be relevant enough to lexicalise, despite the intricacy of the metonymic semantics involved in their interpretation. Another example would be shotgun wedding, originally possibly meaning ‘a wedding that takes place because the father/relative of the bride forces the bridegroom (by threatening him as with a shotgun) to marry her because he has made her pregnant’, though it may now simply mean ‘a wedding hastily arranged because the bride is pregnant’, a practice increasingly outdated in Western societies. The multiple metonymic deletions in lexicalisations like this make them completely opaque to people unfamiliar with the cultural practice (indeed, younger readers may not understand the meaning of bicycle clips). A second point is that some intricate metonymies may be extremely difficult to categorise into metonymy themes, just as transfer metaphors are, though it is easier with concretising metaphors. 5.1.3. The semantics of phrase grammar and metonymies in of-genitives As might be anticipated from the noun-compounds already discussed, the grammar of the noun phrase can also express metonymy, including the intraframe, inter-frame and frame-schema varieties. I discuss elements of noun phrases at greater length in Chapter 6, but here I will simply concentrate on epithets, classifiers, and mainly of-genitive prepositional postmodifiers (see Table 5.4). Epithets, which are adjectives, are either subjective or objective, the objective ones describing some physical quality of the thing. Classifiers, either adjectives or nouns, indicate a sub-class of the thing, and cannot take the comparative, e.g. *the very diesel trains, whereas some epithets can. The thing is the object and the essential element of the phrase, referred to by a noun – proper name, pronoun, or common noun. Postmodifiers occur after the head, and may be phrases or (relative) clauses, and tend to share the specifying or descriptive semantics of classifiers and epithets. As with the problem of finding metonymy themes for the more complex compounds, it may be somewhat fruitless to enumerate the semantic

Type

Semantics

Example

Appositive Descriptive Shape Substance Partitive Measure Possessive Temporal

NP 1 equivalent to NP 2 NP 1 is an NP 2 one NP 2 the shape of NP 1 NP 1 is made out of NP 2 NP 1 is part of NP 2 NP 1 is the amount of NP 2 NP 1 belongs to NP 2 NP 1 is at the time of NP 2

Locational

NP1 is at the place NP 2

Production Cause

NP 2 produces NP 1 NP 2 causes NP 1

Subjective Objective

NP 2 does NP 1 NP 1 is done to NP 2

The city of Dublin A day of summer A circle of stones A necklace of platinum The funnel of the ship A glass of wine The coat of John The buds of May The birdsong of dawn The whales of Alaska The sunshine of Brighton The wings of Airbus UK The wake of the ship The boredom of lockdown The rise of the sun The release of the prisoner

Metonymy relation

Metonymy comparison

NONE MULTIPLE OBJECT–SHAPE OBJECT–SUBSTANCE PART–WHOLE CONTAINER–CONTENTS POSSESSOR–POSSESSION OBJECT–TIME PROCESS–TIME OBJECT–LOCATION PROCESS–LOCATION PRODUCER–PRODUCT CAUSE–EFFECT PROCESS–ACTOR PROCESS–GOAL

She plays the triangle Bring a rubber with you Five pound per head I drank five bottles This beer is John The loft smelt of autumn January was memorable London supports Labour I love watching Wimbledon I drive a Ford A deep bloody cut The flight is due in at 6.30 The concentration is blue

122 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

Table 5.5 The semantics of the of-genitive in relation to metonymy

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123

categories of genitives, though I have attempted to in Table 5.5. One might say that the relationship between the referents of NP1 and NP2 is vague, and can only be understood from context; some value or verb relates the two, but it cannot be specified. However, in fact, attempts to assign genitives to semantic categories may reveal the kind of cognitively entrenched relationships in the contiguity of experience that metonymy exploits. Nevertheless, the vagueness remains particularly true of the descriptive genitive. If we take the traditional view of metonymy theorists, like Kövecses and Radden (1998), (though see 1.4.3, pp. 35–36.), substance, shape, and partitive genitives obviously involve intra-frame metonymic relations, because of the maximum degree of contiguity (1.3.1, p. 23). We can add classifier elements of the phrase to these as examples of the intra-frame type, some of which are equivalent to shape and substance genitives – “a stone circle” equivalent to “a circle of stones”, “a platinum necklace” equivalent to “a necklace of platinum”. Classifiers allow textual metonymies by deletion – material/substance minus thing: “I prefer the limestone” ‘limestone paving blocks’/‘paving blocks of limestone’, “Rooney hit the woodwork” ‘the woodwork goal frame’/‘the woodwork of the goal frame’. Epithets, too, (equivalent to descriptive genitives) have great potential for intra-frame “metonymies” such as THING AS (is) QUALITY or ENTITY AS (IS) CHARACTERISTIC, e.g. “the blind” “blacks” “privates”. Shifting down Table 5.5 we encounter inter-frame metonymies related to measurement and possession, the most contiguous, and to time and place, slightly less so. Because of their contiguity, and since they are on the border with inter-frame metonymies, measure genitives tend to be ambiguous as to which is the head of the whole noun phrase. They may be analysed as numerative + head, rather than head + postmodifier. “Two pints of milk/two glasses of wine bloat me” or “two pints of milk/two glasses of wine bloats me” are both possible. Descending Table 5.5 further, we find inter-frame and frame-schema metonymies. Some temporal and locational genitives have literal “things” in both noun phrases, “the buds of May”, “the whales of Alaska”, and involve only frames. But other locational and temporal genitives have nominalised processes in NP 1, involving schema-frame relations as in “the birdsong of dawn” (birds sing) and “the sunshine of Brighton” (sun shines). So “the buds of May” expresses a frame-frame relation also found in “the loft smelt of autumn” where “autumn” means ‘the fruits/leaves in autumn’, whereas “the birdsong of dawn” expresses a schema-frame relation like in “January was memorable” where “January” could mean ‘the events of January’. Production genitives might be a sub-category of cause genitives, where the NP2 indicates the Actor and NP1 the Creation. And cause is obviously a factor in subjective and objective genitives, the difference being that in these the NP1 is always a nominalised process. So production, cause, and subjective/objective genitives are necessarily related to schema-frame metonymies. The equivalent metonymies also

124 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative often involve nominalisations, e.g. “flight” meaning ‘the plane that is the Actor in the flying process’ and “concentration” meaning the ‘substance resulting from the concentration process’.

5.2. Clause complexes as a framework for analysing inter-schema metonymies Having considered the elements of single clauses and their relationship to metonymies, I now shift to a discussion of clause complexes, sentences involving more than one clause. Walter Ong (2002: 37) exemplifies the difference between oral and literate cultures by quoting the beginning of Genesis in a version close to the original Hebrew and contrasting this with a modern English version. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved over the face of the waters. And God said “Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. God saw how good the light was. The difference in the grammar is what strikes us. In the oral culture tradition there are loosely co-ordinated clauses, technically paratactic, connected by “and”, and no subordinate or hypotactic clauses. In the modern version there are three hypotactic clauses introduced by the subordinating conjunctions “when”, “while”, and “how”, the latter a relative clause. It would seem, if we trust the historical evidence, despite the similarities between the language of oral cultures and the speech of literate cultures (Chapter 3), the use of subordination is a point of divergence. If oral cultures prefer paratactic or co-ordinating clauses, the speech of literate cultures often favours subordination. For instance: so we rang up the breeder and she tried to describe the dog to us which was very hard to do over the phone so we went over to have a look to see what they were like and we bought Sheba because at that stage Bob was away a lot with the army

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and it used to get quite bad with the exercises you’d have prowlers through the married quarters so if we got a dog which we could do because it didn’t matter what sort of dog anyone had it’d bark and they wouldn’t bother us (after Halliday 1989: 85) The subordination is indicated by the rightwards indentation, and sometimes goes to three levels (“so, if we got a dog, which we could do, because it didn’t matter what sort of dog anyone had”). While there are some paratactic clauses here, the passage is made complex by its heavy use of hypotaxis. The major semantic types of hypotactic clauses in English are given in Table 5.6 (with examples in declarative mood to avoid complicating matters of factuality). The hypotactic clauses in the temporal and spatial categories are realis, presupposed as factive, that is, as happening or being true (column 4). We note that those expressing different times are less contiguous than the others. The causal and contingent categories involve logical relations, and are, to that extent, more abstract than the temporal and spatial. Moreover, condition and default are non-factive, that is to say the proposition in the hypotactic clause may or may not be presupposed to be true or actual. Comparison, too, is the application of an abstract process – predictably, since it operates in the similarity dimension – and, at least when expressing a simile, is contrafactive, supposed to have not happened or not be true. Many kinds of subordination in English, therefore, often seem tied to abstract concepts of condition, contingency, and comparison. So, in step with the fact that hypotactic clauses are more common in the speech of literate cultures, we recognise the relations conveyed by some kinds of hypotactic clauses as intrinsically abstract. These include those involving more than one schema linked by cause and effect, and those where one involves the hypotheticality of conditions and contingency. Thus, while this chapter attempts to show the importance of the contiguity dimension to syntax, the kinds of contiguity, as expressed hypotactically, may be more or less abstract. How are these relations between main and hypotactic clauses relevant to metonymy? As one would predict, the semantic relationships between the main and hypotactic clause reflect several of the contiguity relations deleted in the production of metonymy and understood in its interpretation. Most obviously these are causal (reason, result, purpose), spatial, and temporal. Causal find their counterparts in ACTION AS RESULT, RESULT AS ACTION, EFFECT AS CAUSE, CAUSE AS EFFECT, EVENT THAT SOUND CAUSED AS SOUND, EMOTION AS CAUSE OF EMOTION, EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT

(see Table 2.2). Spatial counterparts include ACTION AS LOCATION OF ACTION,

 

Category

Examples

Hypotactic conjunction

Abstraction

temporal

same time

as, while when, as soon as, the moment whenever, every time after, since

Factive/realis and contiguous

causal

cause: reason

Before you bake the bread leave it to rise for three hours We reached the docks, where children were feeding seagulls Because police are short-staffed they ignore minor crimes He fell badly so that he ended up in hospital We took out insurance so that we feel more confident about overseas travel Although they have small brains, birds are quite intelligent If you take the stairs, remember they may be slippery Unless we halt carbon emissions, we face climate disaster He struggled to breathe as if he was drowning

before, until, till

spatial

different time: later different time: earlier same place

As he was climbing the stairs he had a heart attack When we reached Bergen it was raining After he made the decision he regretted it

cause: result cause: purpose contingent

concession condition default

manner

comparison

as far as, where wherever because, as, since, in case, seeing that, considering so that, with the result that

Factive/realis but non-contiguous

Factive/realis and contiguous Factive/realis but logical abstraction

in order that, so that although, despite the fact that if, should

Non-factive and logical abstraction

since . . . not, unless as if, like

Contrafactive/irrealis logical abstraction

126 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

Table 5.6 The semantics of hypotactic clauses in English and their degrees of abstraction (after Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 411–412)

The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

127

and temporal ACTION AS TIME PERIOD OF ACTION. How these can be used to analyse the missing clausal elements in metonymies will not be repeated here, as it was already explored in section 5.1.1, concerning those circumstantial adjuncts equivalent to hypotactic clauses. One notices that several of the conjunctions in the table already encapsulate a metonymic meaning; as, since, and so that, for instance, are ambiguous. So that might represent a RESULT OF ACTION AS INTENTION OF ACTION metonymy, or vice-versa, as REASON FOR EVENT AS TIME PERIOD OF EVENT, and since REASON FOR EVENT AS TIME PREVIOUS TO EVENT. Co-ordinating conjunctions, such as and, are additive (or contrastive), with no specification of causal, temporal, or spatial relationship between them. Therefore they do not explicitly express the kinds of relations on which metonymy depends in the same way as subordinating clauses of time, space, and cause, but they may leave these to be inferred, like in the first version of the beginning of Genesis quoted above. The substitution of an additive and paratactic clause for a hypotactic one of cause and result can therefore be regarded as a kind of metonymy. The literal “I flipped the switch so that the light came on” might become the metonymy “I flipped the switch and the light came on”, where cause or purpose have been deleted. “After she obtained a BA degree she went to Harvard”, could be metonymised as “She obtained a BA and went to Harvard”, ellipting time. This metonymic potential of paratactic clauses is manifest in most narratives, where one thing happens and another happens, implicitly afterwards, and often implicitly the first causing the second event. I explore narrative in its relation to other written genres, more or less reflecting the contiguity axis, in the following section.

5.3. Written genres, literature, contiguity, and realism We have seen how the syntagmatic axis as realised in grammar can represent activities and activity sequences that are more or less reflective of action genres. But textual contiguity obviously does not need to be confined within clause complexes or sentences. It potentially extends to whole texts. One could regard the clause and clause complex as something like a hologram of a whole narrative with its many clauses. In Material/Verbal Processes there will be an Actor/Sayer, equivalent to a character, and a verb, equivalent to the action/speech which is one of a sequence making up the narrative, and, optionally, the Goal/Receiver equivalent to another character affected by the action/speech, along with time and place Circumstances, which correspond to the setting, part of the narrative orientation. 5.3.1. Narrative, recount, written genres, and abstraction Before discussing literary narrative at greater length, it is illuminating to compare it with other discourse genres of extended writing in

Genre

Purposes

To present information and opinions about more than one side of an issue: it may end with a recommendation based on the evidence presented ARGUMENT To advance or justify an argument or put forward a particular point of view INFORMATION To represent factual information about a REPORT class of things usually by first classifying them and then describing their characteristics DESCRIPTION To represent factual information about a particular place, thing, person, or situation by giving their characteristics EXPLANATION To explain why things are as they are or how things work PROCEDURE To show how something can be accomplished through a series or steps of actions to be taken NARRATIVE To tell a story in order to make sense of events and happenings in the world RECOUNT To construct past experience by retelling events and incidents in the order in which they occurred

DISCUSSION

Abstraction Specific Time order

Process oriented Human actor

Realis / factive

X

X

?

?

?

X

X

?

?

?

X

X

X

X





X

X

X



X





X?



X







X



?





X?







?



128 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

Table 5.7 Some basic written genres and their degree of abstraction

The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

129

relation to concrete material experience or degrees of abstraction from it. Table 5.7 lists some typical types of non-fiction texts with indications of five elements of abstraction. By definition any extended text displays textual contiguity, but some reflect experiential contiguity more than others. Which of these text types present ordered activity sequences in ways that reproduce the contiguities of actual lived experience? Discussion and argument concern thoughts and ideas, and are therefore the most abstract. They are not about sequences of actions, and the supporting structures in an argument or on two sides of a discussion do not depend on ordering in time or necessarily in text (though they may be about sequences of statements linked in logical arguments). Information reports and descriptions are about things, not activities, oriented towards nouns, general and specific respectively, and the classes of objects and the details of the objects described do not have to be in any particular order. Explanations may be about events in sequences, but may not involve human actors, for instance how the digestive system or a camera works. This leaves us with procedures, narratives, and recounts, concerned with human activities in a particular order. Which of these three is closer to real experience? Procedures are potential rather than recorded activity sequences and general enough to be carried out in the future by any actor, unlike narratives and recounts with their specific actors and sayers. Narratives may be fictional, literary, and the ordering of events in narratives may not be the sequence in which they actually happened, which is captured by the theoretical distinction between story, the chronological sequence of events, and plot, the order in which they are narrated (perhaps involving flashbacks or beginning in medias res). Therefore the least abstract, the closer to the contiguities of lived experience, have to be recounts, as they represent specific activity sequences that have actually happened in the same time order, with individual, usually human, actors (e.g. the Pepys Diary entry below, p. 133). We can explore in more detail the differences between narratives and recounts. Some of these emerge from the generic structure of narrative, as discovered by William Labov (1972) and explained below. My fabricated examples are based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Abstract The abstract is provided before the narrative begins. It encapsulates the “point” of the story, or what the story exemplifies. For example, the conversation might be about how frightening childhood experiences can give you phobias. To make the transition to narrative you could say “There’s this kid I knew when I was young who had a dreadful experience with bears, and it has still affected her behaviour for years afterwards”.

130 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative Orientation The orientation gives information about the time, place, persons, and situation/activity type they are engaged in. Typically this section includes adverbials of time and place and Relational Process verbs describing states/ relations, for instance the place, time, weather, or characters. When reference is to an action which is going on at the time the narrative commences, the progressive -ing forms of the verb are used. An example would be: relational relational verb verb Her name was Goldilocks and she was very adventurous. time adverbial progressive One June day she was walking

place adverbials to school along the edge of the wood behind her house.

Complicating action The complicating action and the resolution are the essential elements in a narrative. These Material or Verbal Process clauses are in simple present or simple past tense, unlike the progressive forms in the orientation. If the order of clauses is reversed, the interpretation of the sequence of the events changes, and we have a different narrative. For instance, “Goldilocks went into the bears’ house and they chased her away” is a different narrative from “The bears chased Goldilocks away and she went into their house”. Resolution The resolution is provided by the last of the narrative clauses which began with the complicating action, bringing the sequence of actions and events to an end, for example “Goldilocks ran away from the house of the three bears and back home”. Coda The coda is the means by which the narrative is completed and the listener is brought out of the past back into the present time. Often it is changes of tenses and time adverbs that re-orient to the present, as in “So, she still doesn’t eat porridge, play with teddy bears or rock on chairs, and she prefers to sleep on the floor”. Evaluation Although these previous elements should occur in a particular order, evaluation may occur at any point between the abstract and coda. Labov defined evaluation as those clauses which don’t belong to the narrative action, but which delay its forward movement. These comprise the elements in Table 5.8.

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Table 5.8 Evaluative devices in the narrative genre (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016: 25) Evaluative device comments by narrator evaluative comment of character evaluative comments attributed to a third party emotive devices exclamations interjections/swearing emotional vocabulary if clauses comparators comparisons modals (can, shall, might etc.) negatives futures questions

Example At that moment Goldilocks looked like a little Russian doll “Eating my porridge was a horrible thing to do” “Mama said it was naughty not to lock the door” What a soft bed it was! “Oh shit, look at my chair!” “The horrible greedy slut!” If Goldilocks had cried more like a typical girl Baby Bear might have pitied her But she didn’t Will she ever go walking in the woods again?

Elements of this generic structure indicate that a narrative is a story that is an attempt to make sense of events and happenings in the world, rather than simply recounting events from experience in the order in which they occurred. (The Genesis creation myth, for instance, not only tries to make sense of the origins of life on earth, but more particularly explains why there are seven days in the week, why snakes have no legs, why women suffer in childbirth, why we wear clothes, and why there has been a transition from a foraging to an agricultural lifestyle.) The abstract suggests that the story has a point, some topic, theme, principle, or pattern which it illustrates; or to put it the other way around, the abstract makes sense of the story, and is thus an exercise in abstraction. The same role may be fulfilled by the coda, as in the moral at the end of a fable. The resolution also contributes to “making sense” – it gives a feeling of “closure”, a conclusion to the episodes, a neat tying up of the narrative strands, or solution to a problem. Similarly, whereas the clauses of a recounted incident could describe unrelated events or actions, the clauses of the complicating action of narrative are defined as linked in some way, for example by cause or effect, or condition and response (Montgomery et al. 1992: 177–178). Consider, for example, the chain of causal events that leads to the tragedy in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles. The local parson discovers that John Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, is a descendant of the D’Urbeville family, which is an excuse for John to get drunk. Because he is drunk, he cannot get up in the early hours to take produce to market, so a weary Tess has to drive the cart instead. The cart has an accident in the dark and the horse is killed. This puts an extra financial burden on the family. Tess

132 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative is therefore sent to her “relative”, Alex D’Urbeville, to ask for help. This initiates a further series of events that lead to her rape by Alex, the birth and death of her child, her confession of this to her husband Angel Clare on their wedding night, his abandoning her, her poverty that forces her to become Alex’s kept mistress, her murder of Alex, and finally her capture by the police and her hanging. This raises an important point. The contiguity dimension can be viewed as less abstract than the similarity dimension. And I identify metonymy as the trope which par excellence exploits, by deletion, the contiguity dimension. However, CAUSE AS EFFECT and EFFECT AS CAUSE metonymies are extremely frequent, and the relationship between cause and effect is, at least minimally, an abstract one. Similarly, narrative, though realised on the syntagmatic axis, and a matter of contiguity, is, insofar as it relies on relations of cause and effect, more abstract than recount. In fact, one might consider the cause, effect, condition, response relationships, which Montgomery et al. identify as the means of linking events in a narrative, to be expansions of circumstances or clauses of cause (reason, purpose, behalf) and contingency (condition, concession, default). However, although the events form a causal chain, this chain is left largely unstated or implicit, to be inferred by the reader. The narrative presents the events as one thing after another without labouring the logical abstract relationships. The events tend to be presented as more like the equivalent of paratactic or co-ordinated clauses, rather than hypotactic ones, and, as suggested before, therefore a kind of metonymy. Another difference apparent in the generic structure of narrative is the prominence it often gives to evaluation. Notice in Table 5.8 that the comparators used in evaluation involve irrealis structures, an extra layer of fictionality, negativity, or hypotheticality; moods may be interrogative rather than declarative, while modal verbs, negatives, and questions all refer to action schemas which are possible or did not happen. To sum up. Recounts are closer to our lived experience of events and actions and less abstract than narrative for a number of reasons. First, they are real, not fictional; factual recounts such as those found in journalism or diaries are not judged as realistic or not, but rather as true or not, while, by contrast, it would be irrelevant to accuse narrative fiction of being fake or untrue. Second, they often avoid irrealis evaluation. Third, they do not usually demand an abstract, or overt or implied causal or contingency relationships making sense of the event sequence. Fourth, they adhere to the story sequence rather than changing the naturally occurring order of events in plot. Nevertheless narratives and recounts share qualities. In both we have individual human actors. The core of the action is the event sequence making up the record and complicating action/resolution respectively, often the equivalent of co-ordinated or paratactic clauses. And in both there is typically an orientation which involves reference to time and place, and ongoing process before or during which the complicating action begins. These are equivalent to time and location circumstances,

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and to relationships exploited in metonymies involving time, place, and previous (or sub-)events. If narrative is more abstract than recount it is in the drive to make sense of events, partly by the way that sequences of activities and events are more tightly bound by implied causes and effects and conditions and responses, logical relationships also implied in other kinds of metonymy. In contrast to narrative, consider this recount, an extract from Samuel Pepys’ Diary, 9th September 1666, when the fire of London was raging and destroying large parts of the city. Up, and was trimmed, and sent my brother to Woolwich to my wife, to dine with her. I walked to Bethnall Green and there dined well, but a bad venison pasty at Sir W. Rider’s. Good people they are and good discourse; and his daughter, Middleton, a fine woman, discreet. Thence home and to church, and there preached Dean Harding, but, methinks, a bad poor sermon, though proper for the time; nor eloquent in saying at this time that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio. So to my office, and take leave of my brother whom I sent back this afternoon. I was very kind to him and did give him 40s for his pocket. Anon to Sir W. Pen’s to bed, and made my boy Tom to read me asleep. (Morshead 1926: 339) This recount has evaluative elements, as do narratives. But, unlike narrative, the overall impression is of fairly random unconnected events, most without logical connections either stated or implied: having his hair/beard trimmed; sending his brother to Woolwich; walking to Bethnal Green; dining there; going home; going to church; going to his offce; taking leave of his brother; going to W. Pen’s to bed; the boy reading him asleep. Perhaps we infer that he went to Bethnal Green in order to dine; and certainly his going to bed and having Tom read him asleep are connected by circumstances of purpose. But we would be hard put to make sense of the other sequences of actions by providing the logical links that would make it cohere. The fact that narrative is more abstract than recount chimes with the idea that logic is a special form of story-telling, or that proof is a story with special properties (Feyerabend 1999). What they share is their selfvalidation: a logical formula may be purely analytic and have no instantiation, and a narrative constitutes its own world. 5.3.2. Literature and abstraction Fictional narratives come in different shapes and sizes, however, and some may be more “realistic”, a closer match to the world as we think we know it, than others. Realism might be defined as “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experiences in non-literary texts of the same culture” (Lodge 1977: 25), thereby comparing it with recounts. There has been extensive

134 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative discussion of what counts as realism in literature, with a useful summary on types of verisimilitude in Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (2002) and I cannot go into detail here. I shall simply use the approach of Graham Hough (Hough 1961), who gives an overview of the relative abstractness of various literary genres. Abstraction on the similarity dimension is taken up at greater length in the next two chapters. Hough’s scheme for distinguishing literature’s varying emphases on the abstract and the concrete is diagrammed in Figure 5.2. At 12 o’clock is naive allegory, the most abstract, where all the thematic elements are labelled in the text. For instance in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress for each of the characters, and many of the places, the metaphorical targets of the allegory are clearly specified: Worldly-Wiseman, Christian, Obstinate, Pliable, Mercy; Vanity Fair, The Slough of Despond. Going round from 12, at 1 is allegory proper, where the abstract is less explicit. A small scale example could be the poem ‘On Wenlock Edge’ by A.E. Housman (1967): On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest feece the Wrekin heaves; The gale, it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

4

‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger When Uricon the city stood: ‘Tis the old wind in the old anger, But then it threshed another wood.

8

Then, ‘twas before my time, the Roman At yonder heaving hill would stare: The blood that warms an English yeoman, The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

12

Abstract Theme

NAÏVE ALLEGORY EMBLEM

ALLEGORY PROPER HUMOUR LITERATURE Theme complex

Theme simple

SYMBOLISM

IMAGISM

Concrete description

INCARNATION Image simple

Image complex

(multivalency)

(diversification)

REALISM

Figure 5.2 Graham Hough’s Allegorical Circle

FICTIONS (novels)

The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

135

There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I.

16

The gale it plies the saplings double, It blows so hard ‘twill soon be gone: Today the Roman and his trouble Are ashes under Uricon.

20

(NB Wenlock Edge is a steep hill in Shrophire, and The Wrekin is another wooded hill close by. “Plies” means ‘bends’, “holt” a small wood, “hanger” the wood on the side of a hill.) The allegorical potential of this Housman poem becomes apparent in lines 14 and 15, where the tree = man, gale = life equations are made explicit. We can interpret the action of the gale on the wood as an allegory or extended metaphor for the effects of life on man, with correspondences as in Table 5.9. The abstractness, and the fact that allegories can be treated as extended metaphors, shows how abstraction and similarity, in this case relational similarity or analogy, are linked. At 2 on the clock is humour literature of the 17th and 18th century where characters (often in plays) represent abstract character traits or ENTITY IS CHARACTERISTIC symbolic similarities. As Ben Jonson, who established the tradition in England, wrote: Some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confuctions, all to run one way. (Induction to Every Man out of his Humour, Jonson 1599)

Table 5.9 Allegorical mappings in Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’ (Goatly 2011: 283–284) Source The wood’s disturbed The gale plies the saplings double ‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger when Uricon the city stood But then it threshed another wood It blows so hard ‘twill soon be gone

Target Mankind’s in trouble Life bends [young people] double [with age/pain] Life disturbed people in the same way in Roman times, however well established (holt) or precarious (hanger) their existence Life punished other people then Life is so painful it will soon be over

136 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative In Every Man in his Humour (1598), there is George Downright, who insists on frankness, with his name, rather like Bunyan’s characters, indicating this propensity. In his other plays, such as Volpone, the names of the main characters are Italian words for animals/birds/insects: Volpone (fox), a metaphor for cunning, and the others Mosca (fy), Voltore (vulture), Corvino (raven), and Corbaccio (crow), symbolic metaphors for greedy feasting on carrion, since they are waiting to inherit Volpone’s wealth. This tradition persisted into Restoration drama: for instance, in Sheridan’s The Rivals – Lydia Languish and Captain Absolute; and in his School for Scandal – Joseph Surface, Benjamin Backbite, and Lady Sneerwell. At 3 o’clock is what Hough calls “incarnation”, exemplified by Shakespeare, who achieves one kind of balance between the concrete and the abstract. At 4 or 5 lie realistic fictions like the novel, though with distinctions. Dickens’ Bleak House or Lawrence’s Women in Love, for instance, would be near 4, whereas more realistic and “metonymic” novels like Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms might be close to 5 (Lodge 1977). At 7 is imagism, with emphasis still on the concrete object, for example my ‘In an airport of the city’ discussed in 2.2.6, p. 58, or the more authentic ‘In a station of the metro’ by Ezra Pound (https://poets.org/poem/stationmetro). Rather less concrete at 9 is symbolism, hovering between the concrete and abstract, as in Edward Thomas poem ‘The Bridge’, discussed in 2.2.2, p. 53. And, finally, at 10 or 11 is emblem literature where the abstract is only thinly veiled behind a superficially concrete sign. Emblems are combinations of pictures and words that communicate moral, political, or religious values in ways that have to be decoded by the viewer (e.g. Figure 5.3). Narrative literature must surely have something of the abstract about it, as I noted in contrasting it with recount. Even George Orwell’s apparent reportage or recount of a real incident ‘Shooting an elephant’ (2021/f.p.1936) must illustrate a theme if it is to be counted as literature. There is, indeed, a clear theme – the effect of imperialism on its administrators in their relationships with the native population. So that literature cannot really occupy the 6 o’clock space, whereas the Pepys Diary entry above probably can. In fact, because narrative fictions create a world of characters, places, and events which are not literally true, they can be regarded as having a metaphorical relationship with the real world. They have been called extended “phenomenalistic metaphors” (Levin 1977, Goatly 2011), in which, by suspending our disbelief, we, for the duration of reading, inhabit an imaginary metaphorical world. Even when this world is far different from our normal experience, as in fables, we accept the reality of this world, rather than translating it word by word back into literal language by seeking the target. When, for instance, we come across “the lion shouted ‘why do you think you, a mouse, are more powerful than me?’” we entertain this metaphorical world in which lions can speak, and don’t translate “the lion shouted” into the literal “the lion roared”.

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Figure 5.3 An example of emblem literature (Emblems, n.d.)

In Chapter 1 (1.4.2) I delineated several kinds of similarity in semantic relations and they can provide a perspective on Hough’s framework. The main kind of similarity in operation seems to involve SUPERORDINATE-HYPONYM relations. Literary texts are rather like proverbs of the don’t-count-your-chickens-before-they-hatch variety, where the literal meaning acts as a hyponym for the lexicalised metaphorical meaning ‘don’t anticipate positive outcomes before they happen’. The degree of abstraction would depend on the weighting given to the superordinate or to the hyponym. In recounts there is no such relation at all, but in realistic literary narratives such as ‘Shooting an elephant’ there must be at least a hint of a superordinate theme that is being illustrated. At the other extreme are naïve allegories, allegories, emblems, and humour literature, where the superordinate dominates and is labelled. Alternatively many of the latter abstractions might be regarded as manifesting ENTITY-CHARACTERISTIC relations, where a human entity, one of the characters in a play or narrative, is named, with a characteristic feature or behaviour, through conversion nominalisation of an adjective, e.g. “Downright”, “Pliable”,

138 The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative or a verb “Languish”. Allegory, naïve or not, will also rely on concretisingrelational metaphor where A : B : C :: X : Y : Z. Hough distinguishes the right and left half of the circle/clock in terms of complexity of theme and image. On the right the themes are simple but their concrete realisations are complex. On the left, the concrete element is simple but the theme is complex. So, for instance, on the right Shakespeare’s As You Like It might be thought as having a single theme, love in its various manifestations. Or his first tetralogy of history plays Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V seem to illustrate the theme of tensions between personal identity, friendship, family relations, and political role. On the left one could locate certain kinds of symbolism, such as the symbol of the moon in D.H. Lawrence’s novels, where the abstractions it symbolises are diverse and vague. I would relate this distinction to two kinds of metaphorical pattern – constant theme giving us diversification of metaphorical sources for the same target, and complex theme giving us multivalency (or vagueness) of targets for the same sources (Goatly 2011).

5.4. Summary This chapter, pursuing the syntagmatic contiguity axis of text as more or less reflective of schemas, attempted to demonstrate how metonymy can be analysed according to the semantic categories of grammar. It concentrated first on the semantics of the clause, and applied these to metonymic compounds and of-genitive phrases with their missing clausal elements. It proceeded to discuss inter-schema contiguity relations, such as cause and effect, in terms of adverbial/circumstantial clauses and their varying degrees of abstractness. The point was made that paratactic clauses, and their equivalent juxtaposed sentences in narrative, can be seen as metonymic because they omit the relations of cause and effect, purpose and action, and contingency and response, and leave them to be inferred. Consequently, I showed how this small-scale clause semantics is expanded along the contiguity axis in various written genres, in which narratives, and, above all, recounts mirror the contiguities of individual experience most directly. Different kinds of literature were then assessed in terms of abstraction, using Graham Hough’s framework, with one species of novel the least abstract kind of literature, though still presenting a metaphorical world. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 have explored the emphasis on the contiguity dimension in oral cultures and pre-literate cultures, the importance of the syntagmatic/contiguity axis in priming and grammar, with its relationship to metonymy, and its extension in various genres, especially of literature. The next three chapters, 6, 7 and 8, concentrate more on the influence of the similarity dimension and its classificatory and quantitative abstractions, especially in economics, science, semantics, and social science, the problems which these introduce, and various resistances to them.

6

Nouns and noun phrases The similarity dimension, classification, quantification, and commodification

In Hard Times Charles Dickens depicts the classic confrontation between, on the one hand, the hyper-literate “educated” culture of Thomas Gradgrind and his model pupil Bitzer, which we might identify as aligned with the similarity dimension, and, on the other, the world of lived experience of the child Sissy Jupe, which we can associate with the contiguity dimension. “Girl number twenty”, said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, “I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?” “Sissy Jupe, sir”, explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying. “Sissy is not a name”, said Mr Gradgrind. “Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia”. “It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir”, returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey. “Then he has no business to do it”, said Mr Gradgrind. “Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?” “He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir”. Mr Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand. “We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?” “If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir”. “You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?” “Oh yes, sir”. “Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse”. (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.) “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!” said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. “Girl number twenty DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-7

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Nouns and noun phrases possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!” ......................................................................................................... “Bitzer”, said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a horse”. “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth”. Thus (and much more) Bitzer. “Now girl number twenty”, said Mr Gradgrind. You know what a horse is”. (Dickens 1980: 13–14)

I have quoted this at length, because it illustrates several important aspects of the similarity dimension in mindset and culture. Most obviously there is Gradgrind’s obsession with categorisation based on nouns. Though his questions to Sissy about her father involve Material Process clauses – “he breaks horses”, “he doctors horses” – Gradgrind is not satisfied until he reduces these to noun categories in a Relational Process clause – “He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker”. Bitzer’s exemplary horse definition, or information report (5.3.1, p. 129), though it acknowledges certain schemas “sheds coat in spring”, “sheds hoofs too”, “hoofs requiring to be shod with iron”, and “age known by marks in mouth”, gives primacy to allocating the horse to the categories “quadruped” and “graminivorous”. And the teeth of the horse are categorised as “grinders”, “eye-teeth”, and “incisive”. (Note, by the way, that Gradgrind’s and Bitzer’s finite verbs are in simple present tense, the only tense in English to which time deixis (8.2.9) does not apply, as they generalise types of habitual actions, rather than referring to individual tokens of actions.) These teeth, once categorised, can be counted, just as, apparently, the pupils are counted and allocated numbers: “girl number twenty”. Categories necessitate standardisation and are useless if they are multiplied indefinitely, so variations on names will not be allowed – “Cecilia” is acceptable, but not “Sissy”. Elsewhere in the novel, contesting Gradgrind’s worldview, there is suspicion of statistics, which Sissy, with felicitous malapropism, mispronounces as “stutterings”. At one point this takes the form of endorsing Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep, in which 99 just persons are left helpless in the wilderness while the shepherd goes to rescue the lost one, this parable being an affront to a statistical mindset and Bentham’s utilitarian touchstone of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The irony is, of course, that, as a child of the horse-riding circus, Sissy has intimate experience of horses, denied to a boy like Bitzer. However many facts about horses have been poured into him as one of the “little

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pitchers”, unlike Sissy he may never have participated in the action schemas involving horses. This passage provides an introduction to the topics of Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 explores the ways in which nouns and noun phrases facilitate the classification and quantification beloved by Gradgrind, with its temptation to abolish differences. Chapter 7 explores the ways in which classification through nouns and nominalisation is employed for quantification in mathematics with its hegemony over scientific theorizing, and for technological standardisation. The importance of the similarity dimension in literate and contemporary cultures and the possibility of adverse effects from its overemphasis are one theme of these chapters. The present chapter begins with a discussion of the cognitive distinction between nouns and verbs (6.1). It proceeds to show how the noun phrase pulls in two directions, one towards contiguity through deictics of reference and attitudinal epithets, and the other towards similarity in classification and sub-classification (6.2). The use of nouns in early literate cultures of Mesopotamia (6.3) reveals how classification and quantification were used as a means of control. Turning to modern capitalist economies, I argue that reduction of individual diverse qualities by the money equivalence of the capitalist market (6.4) leads to the commodification of both nature (6.4.1) and humanity (6.4.2) and to spurious measures of well-being such as GDP (6.4.3).

6.1. The conceptual status of verbs contrasted with nouns In the Introduction I reported research that different parts of the brain are associated with the processing of nouns and verbs; Wernicke’s area for nouns, and Broca’s area for verbs (and clauses). Therefore nouns and verbs might seem to be fundamental categories. Indeed, many of the world’s languages reflect a distinction between processes and things through this grammatical differentiation, though in Chapter 9 I discuss the Blackfoot language in which the concept of noun seems problematic to native-speaking linguists. So perhaps Langacker’s claims below do not apply universally, however true they are of European languages. We think of our world as being populated by discrete physical objects. These objects are capable of moving about through space and making contact with one another. Motion is driven by energy, which some objects draw from internal resources and others receive from the exterior. When motion results in forceful physical contact, energy is transmitted from the mover to the impacted object, which may thereby be set in motion to participate in further interactions.

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Nouns and noun phrases Let us refer to this way of thinking as the billiard-ball model . . . Our concern here is with its linguistic import, particularly its role in providing the conceptual basis for certain grammatical constructs. Among these constructs are the universal categories of noun and verb. Aspects of the billiard ball model correspond directly to the noun and verb prototypes: discrete physical objects are clearly prototypical for the class of nouns, and their energetic interactions for the class of verbs. (Langacker 1991: 13–14)

Things-Objects and Processes-Energetic Interactions can be distinguished by four criteria: their domain of instantiation, their extension, their autonomy and the word class used to refer to them, as in Table 6.1. Space is the domain of instantiation for typical noun referents and time is the domain of instantiation for typical verb referents. Noun referents do not typically extend infinitely in space and are continuous in their extensions – hence rocks and balls are more typical than ropes or a flock of geese. But they are conceived as of infinite extension in time, i.e. relatively permanent. Also, noun referents are usually conceptualised as autonomous – the billiard ball exists independent of any process it is involved in. By contrast verb referents – interactions or processes – have a temporal domain of instantiation; they are compact and continuous along the temporal axis, but spatially expansive (at least involving the other participants, the billiard balls in contiguity relations). Moreover, processes designated by verbs are dependent on noun referents. The autonomy of nouns can be observed by contrasting what happens semantically when verbs are turned into nouns, nominalisation, with what happens when nouns are turned into verbs, verbalisation. Because nouns are autonomous, nominalisation qua nominalisation (i.e. not accompanied by metonymies such as RESULT AS ACTION) adds comparatively little to the conceptual content of the verb, e.g. explode/explosion. But because verbs are dependent, verbalisation of nouns is generally accompanied by adding conceptual content: ‘add N’ – salt, water, beautify; ‘remove N’ – weed, peel; ‘use N as instrument’ – glue; ‘turn into N’ – coil, liquefy,

Table 6.1 Noun and verb concepts  

Object

Energetic Interactions

Instantiated Extension

In space Spatially compact Temporally unbounded Autonomous Noun

In time Temporally compact Spatially unbounded Dependent Verb

Autonomy/Dependence Word Class

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vaporise (Langacker 1991: 25). I already noted in Chapter 2 (2.1.3, p. 43) the tendency for such conversions to depend on metonymical processes. The autonomy of nouns is important for the thesis sketched in this book. If they are autonomous they are relatively independent of the contiguity dimension, unlike verbs that are inherently relational (though, again, some non-European languages, such as Chinese or Thai, and even European languages like Latin can construct clauses without noun subjects, making verbs in those languages more autonomous). Verbs, in modern European languages at least, necessarily involve the contiguity dimension in their meanings, in ways which nouns do not. Consequently, noun meanings are more easily defined through assignment to a superordinate class, as we saw in the definitions of ‘dog’ in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in our introduction (p. 2). Consider, for example, how the definition of the verb ‘drink’ from the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, despite that dictionary’s rather traditional approach to explaining or defining meanings, has to rely on the typical class of noun referents of the objects/subjects of the verb, in parentheses. drink 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

a. swallow (liquid). b. swallow the contents of (a vessel) take alcohol esp. to excess (of a plant, sponge, etc.) absorb (moisture) bring (oneself etc.) to a specified condition by drinking wish (a person good health) by drinking (drank his health)

A second related aspect of nouns mentioned by Langacker is that typically they refer to discrete objects, things, which are compact with limits to their extension in space. This means they are countable, providing they are assigned to the same class through similarity. Though, by contrast, mass noun referents are by definition uncountable, their referents can be measured, and weighed. So noun referents, whether count or mass, lend themselves more easily to quantification in ways that verb referents do not. In the following sections and chapters I will explore these two similarityoriented aspects of noun referents, classification and quantification. To prepare for this we need first to remind ourselves of the structure of the noun phrase in English.

6.2. From nouns to noun phrases: generalisation and definite specific reference I have already explained (5.1.3), the basic semantic structure of the noun phrase, so please refer back to Table 5.4, p. 121. Different elements before the “thing” orient towards the contiguity and similarity dimensions. Most

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deictics cater to contiguity by anchoring the thing to the specific speech event, and, Halliday claims, this is why they come first. In the nominal group we begin with the Deictic: “first I’ll tell you which I mean”, your, these, any etc. .  .  . [we] start by locating the thing in relation to the here and now – in the space-time context of the ongoing speech event. (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 322–323) [my insertion] Deixis, or pointing, has wider signifcance in pragmatic theory than as used here, and is discussed more fully in Chapter 8 (8.2.9, p. 212). In pragmatics deictic terms are those whose meaning cannot be established unless aspects of the context are known, especially who is speaking, when, and where. The importance of deixis to the contiguity dimension should be obvious, whether the narrow use of the term as the frst element in the noun phrase, or in its wider sense. The deictics which achieve this orientation to the speech situation most effectively are those which are specific. These are demonstratives and possessives: Demonstratives: this, these, that, those, the Possessives: my, his, their, one’s, your, her, our, its Non-specifc deictics are each, every, one, either, both, all, some, neither, no, a(n). The indefinite and definite articles, a(n) and the, are ambiguous in terms of specificity (see Table 6.2). The definite article, the, can be used for definite specific reference, in which case it points out one specific individual thing/person out of the members of the semantic class represented by the noun. The speaker believes that, in context, the hearer is able to identify this specific referent. In cases of unique reference there

Table 6.2 Types of definite, indefinite, and general deictic reference by articles  

Indefinite

Definite

None

Specific

My neighbor has a dog that is half-starved

The lamp on the table is dirty (Unique): He’s gone to the town hall

 

Non-specific Has anyone got a thumb drive? A tiger is the only The whale is a Generic big cat that enjoys mammal swimming

Badgers are the largest wild mammal in south east England

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is only one referent in the context which belongs to the semantic class represented by the noun. The indefinite article a(n) is sometimes used when the speaker has a particular referent in mind but does not believe the hearer has knowledge of it or would be able to identify it, an indefinite specific use. On the other hand, it can be used when the speaker has no particular or specific member of the class in mind, an indefinite non-specific use. These uses of the articles – definite specific, indefinite specific, indefinite non-specific – seem to anchor the thing to the speech event context decreasingly strongly. But other uses of the articles, and zero article with plurals, can refer to the whole class, thereby abstracting completely from any particular speech context. These are the generic uses, the most extreme form of non-specificity. They are used in information reports of the kind that Bitzer exemplifies (5.3.1, p. 129). It has been suggested that classical Greek was the first language to use these generic articles in order to invoke abstract categories like “the Good” (Lent 2017). Besides not anchoring the thing to the speech event so strongly, nonspecific deictics also begin to show concerns for quantification – how many members, if any, of the class designated by the thing are being referred to: each, every, both, some, no, neither. However, the concern with quantification is most obvious in the numerative function, where we have exact or inexact quantifiers: Exact: one, two, three, etc. a couple of, etc. a quarter of, etc. Inexact: few, little, a bit of, etc. several, a number of, etc., many, much, a lot of, etc., fewer, less, more, the same amount of, etc. Next to the right in the noun phrase are epithets of two kinds. The interpersonal express a subjective attitude, which is a further way of recognizing one aspect of the speech event, the speaker. The other kind of epithets is experiential, indicating a more objective quality of the thing. The subjective and the objective always occur in that order, so “an awful black dress” not “a black awful dress”, again, in line with the principle that the beginning of the phrase anchors it to context. The remaining elements of the noun phrase are used for classification. Unlike the subjective, objective epithets are often used to sub-classify the thing. “Which dress are you going to wear?” “The black dress”. Subclassification is also the role of classifiers, as the label suggests. The difference between epithets and classifiers is that the latter cannot take comparatives – e.g. *“the very stone wall”, *“the very electric train”. Classifiers tend, more than epithets, to indicate one of a finite number of sub-classes, e.g. the three subclasses of electric, steam, or diesel trains (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 320). The head of the noun phrase, the thing, will employ a noun, a proper name, pronoun, or common noun. Proper names and pronouns are typically not premodified, except by

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subjective attitudinal epithets (e.g. “poor Polly”) as they have unique reference and are therefore super-specific. Common nouns entail a classification of all the entities in the world which the speakers of the language recognise. Following the thing there may be post-modifying structures, many of which restrict the reference of the noun phrase further, especially defining clauses which indicate a specific sub-class. To sum up, deictics and attitudinal epithets usually reflect the contiguity dimension of meaning in terms of anchoring the phrase to the communicative context. By contrast, most elements of the noun phrase reflect the similarity dimension by classification, through the noun-thing label (the exception being proper names), and sub-classification with the classifiers objective epithets and postmodifiers. Even some deictics, the articles, in particular, may be used generically, aligning them with the similarity dimension. However, we need not view these noun-phrase elements as pulling along conflicting dimensions; we could say that (sub-)classification by similarity-based categories often functions in the service of specificity and thereby aids the anchoring of the phrase to context of speech. Nevertheless this is not the case with generic uses. One consequence of the assignment to categories and sub-categories is that the things can then be quantified, measured and/or counted (if countable nouns), a process carried out most obviously by the numerative element but also by the non-specific deictic elements. Quantification and classification facilitated by noun phrases will be the main focus of the remainder of this and the following chapter.

6.3. Early literate cultures, quantification, accounting, and control In Chapter 3, I contrasted literary culture and mindsets with the preliterate, suggesting that literacy involved a shift from the contiguity dimension to the similarity dimension. We can relate this to the arguments in the fascinating book Against the Grain, where James Scott presents evidence about the radical shift in culture from a hunter-gatherer society to a grain-based agricultural society settled in towns in Mesopotamia from roughly 6,500 BCE to 1,500 BCE (Scott 2017). It is no accident that this was the era in which the first writing systems were developed. Scott advances the thesis that for the development of these early city states “what is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilised” (Scott 2017: 26). Classification and measurability and their relation to noun-heavy writing systems, and how they are used for political, administrative, and military control, are the important themes in Scott’s book summarised below.

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Scott claims that the nomadic hunter-gatherer societies which existed both before and contemporaneously with settled grain-based societies had their own elaborate taxonomies. These were, however, practical taxonomies, based on the contiguity dimension of action genres: “Their taxonomies of plants are not classified in Linnaean categories, but they are both more practical (good to eat, will heal wounds, will make blue dye) and quite as elaborate” (Scott 2017: 89). Concerning eating, the variety of foods and therefore nutritional standards were much higher than those of grain-based societies, with a reduction of 7 inches in height for men and 5 for women after grain-based agriculture was adopted (Lent 2017: 92).1 So, while there was no taste for accounting, the food was tastier. Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a lament for a foraging culture, as they are condemned to “till the ground” and “gain your bread by the sweat of your brow” (Genesis, Chapter 3). One could argue that grain-based societies, settled in early cities, put far more emphasis on classification, standardisation, and quantification than hunter-gatherer nomads, and that writing played an essential role. In fact, writing was not originally used as a way of representing or transcribing speech, as in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and the ideograms of Chinese writing, neither of which represent phonology. Such scripts tend to universality, an extreme form of abstraction, still in evidence in China today, where Chinese characters will not be dialect specific, since they represent ideas rather than sounds. Indeed, in these earlier city states, rather than for transcribing speech in clauses and telling stories, writing was used for making lists, counting, accounting, and taxation. “The earliest administrative tablets from Uruk (Level IV), circa 3,300–3,100 BCE, are lists, lists, and lists – mostly of grain, manpower, and taxes” (Scott 2017: 142). “Writing was used for bookkeeping for more than 500 years before it was used for literature and mythology, genealogies and religious texts” (Scott 2017: 141). Making lists, measuring, and counting items depend upon abstraction by dimension, weight, and classification, and on standardisation, both of these classes and their nomenclature. The nomenclature will be noun-based. The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardisation and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardisation is the very invention of a standard nomenclature, through writing, of all the essential categories – receipts, work orders, labor dues, and so on. (Scott 2017: 144)

1 Apparently, eating 30 different types of plants, fruits, and seeds per week improves the gut fauna, reducing the likelihood of obesity and of serious cases of Covid (Spector 2021).

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This interest in standardised classification and counting/accounting was possible because of the unique advantages of grain-based cultures in terms of measurement and quantification: For purposes of measuring, dividing, and assessing, the simple fact that the cereal harvest consists ultimately of small grains, husked or unhusked, has enormous administrative advantages. Like grains of sugar or sand, cereal grains are almost infinitely divisible, down to smaller and smaller fractions and precisely measurable by weight and volume for accounting purposes. Units of grain served as standards of measurement and value for trade and tribute against which the value of other commodities was calculated – including labor. (Scott 2017: 131–132) Here we note that grain was a kind of proxy for money as a means of exchange and valuation, a theme I take up in section 6.4. We also note the mention of the value of labour. Classifcation, standardisation, and quantifcation in these early societies, as in later capitalist ones, were tools for exerting control and extracting value from territories and their populations: Standards of classification and quality were specified for fish, oil, and textiles – which were differentiated by weight and mesh. Livestock, slaves, and laborers were classified by gender and age. In embryonic form, the vital statistics of an appropriating state aiming to extract as much value as possible from its land and people is already in evidence. (Scott 2017: 144) In contrast with the relatively “free” hunter-gatherer societies: thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control. It is at roughly this time that writing makes its first appearance. (Scott 2017: 140) The emergence of a noun-based literacy for recording, measuring, and accounting went, therefore, hand in hand with exercise of power and control. Indeed, in Sumer culture the symbols of kingship were the measuring tools, the rod and line. Similarly, when these communities in South West Asia transitioned to agriculture their circular dwellings were replaced with rectangular ones, facilitating measurement (Lent 2017: 109). The most extreme form of control was slavery. “Other Uruk documents refer frequently to unfree workers and particularly to female slaves of foreign origin. They were . . . a primary source of workers at the disposal of the Uruk state administration” (Scott 2017: 160). Slavery and all kinds of

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mistreatment of other humans, especially foreigners, have always, even up to the present, been facilitated by classifying them as animals (Santa Ana 1999, Goatly 2007): The scribal summaries of laboring groups (both foreign and native) employ the identical age and sex categories as those used to describe “state-controlled herds of domestic animals”. It would appear, therefore, that in the minds of the Uruk scribes and in the eyes of the institutions that employed them, such laborers were conceptualised as “domesticated” humans, wholly equivalent to domestic animals in status. (Scott 2017: 160) To sum up the kind of control exerted by these early city states, Scott uses as a chapter epigraph this quote from Prudhon: “To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, reformed, corrected, punished” (Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, quoted in Scott 2017: 139). By contrast, hunter-gatherer societies tend to be less controlled and more egalitarian.2 Hunter-gatherer societies did not have the ability to store grain and accumulate possessions and quantify them, a process with a potential to create inequalities (Lent 2017: 105). Agrarian societies did.3,4 A further aspect of control, which links back to the literate-oral distinction, recognises that the literate classes will form an elite with relative power over the illiterate. Writing, in Linear B, disappeared in ancient Greece’s so-called “dark age” between 1,100 and 700 BCE. [T]he oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad . . . date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form

2 The anthropologist Boehm has shown that present day hunter-gatherer societies use a variety of techniques to prevent powerful males becoming too dominant, including ridicule, organised group disobedience, and even assassination (Boehm 1993). 3

Significant hierarchical inequalities emerged over the first few thousand years of agriculture. In a grave site in Sudan dating to 4,000 BCE, most people are buried with nothing, but a few are buried with more than a hundred pots and bracelets of elephant and hippopotamus ivory. A famous cemetery in Varna, Bulgaria, from around the same time has yielded the first known high-prestige gold and copper artifacts, along with other impressive goods. (Lent 2017: 110)

4 Recent research as reported in Graeber and Wengrow (2021) suggests that the distinction between hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies was not always clear, and that some societies (in Europe) alternated between the two. Hunter-gatherer bands may also have congregated with others at times of the year when food was plentiful, at which time they could have had leaders of some kind. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests these societies were still relatively equal compared with the early grain-based cities of Mesopotamia.

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Nouns and noun phrases in which we have come to know them. One might well argue, in fact, that such oral epics that survive by repeated performance and memorisation constitute a far more democratic form of culture than texts that depend less on performance than on a small class of literate elites who can read them. (Scott 2017: 216)

The more complex a writing system is, and the less it represents spoken language with its tendencies to refect contiguity relations and bodily (including phonetic) experience, the more elitist it might be. Hence the introduction by the Chinese communist government of a simplifed form of Chinese, which, however, stopped short of adopting a phonetic pinyin, i.e. roman alphabetic system. In order to preserve national unity across populations speaking mutually incomprehensible “dialects”, the Chinese government continues with an ideographic script, however much that is a barrier to developing Chinese as an international language.

6.4. Quantification, money, and commodification5 During classification objects which are unalike in their particularities are lumped together in an abstract category, so that all members of the class are felt to be somehow equivalent to another and therefore countable. The emphasis on book-keeping in early literate societies prepares us for the idea that we can take a further step beyond classification in creating equivalences, that is, by moving from counting to accounting. This step involves equating objects with each other through the intermediary of their monetary value. Instead of barter, in which weighed, measured, or counted goods are directly exchanged, we put an abstract monetary value on each unit of these goods, as a means of facilitating market exchange. A monetary value, then, say £5, establishes an ultimately abstract category which includes all the goods in their various numbers and quantities that can be bought for £5. That is to say, 2 metres of X, 4 kilos of Y, or 150 Zs now all belong to the abstract category £5. Or to put it another way, these quantities of X, Y and Z belong to the same category because they share an identical value of £5. Money becomes a means of maximizing utility through market mechanisms that determine the rational allocation of resources. As Marx noted, money reduces the use values of the multidimensional ecosystem, human desires and needs, and subjective meanings to a common measurable objective standard which everyone can understand. (Harvey 1996: 150–151)

5 This section sketches and quotes extracts from a more detailed discussion of commodification in Goatly (2007: 90–95).

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Consider the joke: “I think for a relationship to be successful it’s important to have interests in common. I met my wife of 40 years in the queue for an ATM machine”. If our faith in market economics is strong enough, we will seek to maximise its efficiency by commodification, bringing as many objects as possible, belonging to noun-based quantifiable classes, into the money-based markets. Market capitalism has made enormous strides in commodifying humans and nature, with an acceleration of this process from the last quarter of the 20th century onwards. However, it is not without its critics. In the market place, for practical reasons, the innumerable qualitative distinctions which are of vital importance for man and society are suppressed; they are not allowed to surface. Thus the reign of quantity celebrates its greatest triumphs in “The Market”. Everything is equated with everything else. To equate things means to give them a price and make them exchangeable. (Schumacher 1999: 30) 6.4.1. Commodification of humanity6 The extent to which parts or products of the human body are treated as equivalent to money is apparent in the widespread use of the word bank to metaphorically refer to facilities where donations are stored: blood bank, sperm bank, stem-cell bank, organ bank. While these body parts and products are donated free in many countries, in others, because of shortages, they are increasingly sold and bought. One such case was in rural China, where the selling of blood led to HIV-infected blood being used in transfusions, and an epidemic of AIDS. A likely consequence of the commodification of scarce body parts or fluids is that they will be expensive, and therefore available only to the rich, and sold by the poor and desperate. There is already widespread selling of organs such as kidneys by the poor in the Indian subcontinent. A Norwegian newspaper reported that in a village near Manila 150 men had each sold a kidney for less than $2000 to raise money for their families, while The Council of Europe found that young men from Moldova and Romania were paid $2,500 for a kidney that would be transplanted into a patient who was paying between $100,000 and $200,000 (‘Sale of human organs for profit reignites debate on ban’ 2002). On a lighter note, one kind of “bank” to be suggested is a tooth bank (Wilson 2002: 35). This reminds one of the Western custom of exchanging children’s milk teeth, when they fall out, for money, pretending that

6 This and the following section draw on Goatly (2007: 90–100).

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the tooth fairy visits the children at night and trades the tooth from under the pillow. Some of the most disturbing aspects of the commodification of humans are in the area of human reproduction and genetics. There are reports that for some citizens [in the US] procreation has already been commodified to the point at which it is possible and legal to make bids of tens of thousands of dollars on the internet for the eggs and sperm produced by glamour models. “We bid for everything else in this society”, said the owner of the website, “so why not eggs?” (Habgood 2002: 128) [my insertion] John Habgood objects to this practice, because manipulating the characteristics of a child subtly changes the child-parent relationship. A child needs to be loved, accepted, and respected as a gift, regardless of imperfections, an opinion echoed by Tom Shakespeare: “Children should be accepted for themselves, not to the extent that they fulfil our wishes or desires” (Shakespeare 2002: 23). Another area of human commodification is the patenting of DNA and gene sequences. The human genome draft was completed and made public in June 2000, at which point the patenting of DNA material and gene sequences went ahead at frantic speed. By December 2000 there were already 9,364 applications for patents covering 126,672 genes and small sub-gene fragments. Applications were growing at the rate of 34,500 every month. Just one company, Genset of France, had applied for patents on 36,083 human gene sequences (‘Why should I be concerned about human genetics?’ 2000). Turning to the whole person rather than body parts, viewing humans as commodities becomes morally questionable if it leads to the conclusion that some are better or worth more than others. We often hear in the media phrases such as “X’s net worth”, or “X is worth 30 million dollars” – which literally means something different from “X possesses 30 million dollars”. Here the metonymy of POSSESSOR AS POSSESSION threatens to become literal, and to blur the distinction between being and having. In his book To Be or to Have Erich Fromm already noted the idioms to be one’s own person or on one’s own, which suggest an intimate psychological connection between ownership and identity. Significantly, Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor ATTRIBUTES ARE POSSESSIONS (Lakoff 1993: 206) is reinforced by the ambiguity of the English word property, ‘attribute’ and ‘possession’. 6.4.2. The commodification of nature Beyond the human body, commodification through privatisation has increasingly encroached on the natural world – transplanting commonly

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owned utilities and resources into the economic sphere, and subjecting them to market forces: “giant transnational corporations are aiming to control essential human needs – water, education, healthcare, the atmosphere, even the genetic structure of life itself – and sell them back to us” (Ellwood 2003). The idea of ownership of land was alien to native Americans and Africans – land was held in common. For example, when the English arrived in New England the sovereign rights claimed by native American villages were not permanent nor individual. Because they were nomadic, like the hunter-gatherer populations replaced by the early cities where writing was first used, they only claimed the rights of use for a limited period. And there was no attempt to prevent others gathering from their land, or any concept of trespass or rent (Harvey 1996: 223). Water used to be a national asset which the government managed for the sake of the whole community, or which local communities managed for themselves. Despite the claims that marketisation would produce more efficiency, early evidence suggested quite the contrary, that public companies in the Netherlands, Japan, and the US provide better services for less cost than private water companies in France and England (Blokland et al. 1999). Water may be best managed by small communities at the local level, rather than at the government level or, worse still, owned at the multinational level. There have been very successful initiatives in water management in India, in which small-scale dams and ponds – johads – are built by villagers to harvest rainwater. But the villagers do not claim to own the ponds or the water in them, as they recognise water as belonging to nature (Tata 2002: 50). Plants known to, used, or cultivated by indigenous people are increasingly under attack from companies wishing to patent them. US and Japanese companies, bio-pirates, tried to take out eighty patents on the neem tree, used as an antibiotic or insecticide by generations of Indians. In 1999 Larry Proctor, owner of a seed company pod-ners llc, won a US patent on Enola beans of a certain shade of yellow and then began suing Mexican bean exporters to the US for patent infringement (www. etcgroup.org). Monsanto not only patented seeds but developed its Terminator technology, through which plants bear sterile seed. The seeds therefore have to be bought anew from Monsanto every year, while using an alternative source of the patented seed risks prosecution (Anderson 1999 quoted in Godrej 2002: 2). The process of regarding nature as primarily a commodity has already gone a long way. The normal way to characterise “nature” in the media is in terms of its value for humans. In a study of the representation of nature in the BBC World Service, I investigated the common collocations of various classes of natural objects: oil frequently collocates with prices; wheat’s collocation with production, growing, hundred, tons, focuses on its cultivation and economic measurement; forests, collocating with resource, value, output, crops, and products, are commodities for human use; land is seen

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predominantly as a possession, often challenged, with the collocates return, dispute, forced, rights, ownership / owners, claims (Goatly 2002). Given the commodification and money-value orientation of the rampaging market-capitalist system, some environmentalists have taken the view “If you can’t beat them join them”. They argue that the way to save the planet’s ecology is to make it marketable as an asset valued in terms of money, because, unless this can be done, economists will continue to ignore nature and its goods and services leading to further ecological destruction. This is known as the Natural Capital Agenda. Several problems with this agenda have been pointed out by George Monbiot (2014). Firstly, how do you value natural assets? Often the figures put on the value of nature are quite nonsensical. The National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011 said that looking after our parks and green spaces well would be worth £290 per household per year, because they provide solace, a sense of place and social value and supportive personal relationships creating strong and inclusive communities. Isn’t £290 rather cheap, then? The second problem is the irony of entrusting nature to the deregulated growth-obsessed economic system responsible for destroying the environment in the first place. Dieter Helm, the Chairman of the Natural Capital Committee, claims “The environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed” (Helm 2015). The third problem is to do with power relations. Estimates suggest that the value of cutting down a mangrove forest for shrimp farming is $1,200 per hectare per year, much less than the value of leaving it standing, which is $12,000 per hectare per year, because it protects local communities and provides a breeding ground for fish and crustaceans. However, a business man or local politician who wants to turn it into a shrimp farm is still likely to do so because he/she is far more powerful than the community of poor fisherman to whom the existing forest has much greater value. Moreover, more fundamental problems in attempting a monetary valuation of nature have been noted by David Harvey. 1) Money is calculated as the equivalent of the market price of goods and services but many natural “assets” do not directly provide such services or goods; 2) the ecological organic whole of nature cannot be separated into parts that are valued separately; 3) the future benefits of natural goods are impossible to calculate since natural phenomena are often unpredictable – the solace provided by green spaces might well be valued more highly in the time of coronavirus lockdown. And 4) monetary valuation of the environment takes no account of the importance of nature in religious or cultural terms. Harvey concludes “there is something about money valuations that makes them inherently anti-ecological” (Harvey 1996: 152–155, Goatly and Hiradhar 2016)

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Turning nature and knowledge of nature into a commodity for human use brings it within the power of the market and reduces qualitative difference to the quantitative differences of measurement by money, a manifestation of the similarity dimension. Heidegger warns that the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which . . . trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers. (Heidegger 1971: 114–115) This “thingness” is a topic I return to in Chapter 7. 6.4.3. GDP and human well-being I was working at the National University of Singapore at the time of the Kobe earthquake, somewhat concerned about the safety of one of our students on exchange in that city. It caused enormous human suffering: 6,433 people died, nearly 27,000 people were injured, and more than 45,000 homes were destroyed (BBC News 2021). I was shocked not just by the destruction of the earthquake, but equally by the economic pundits, who predicted a welcome increase to Japan’s GDP from the reconstruction following this human catastrophe. At this point I realised that human happiness had been severed from economics. In many ways GDP is a nonsensical measure of human well-being, or of measuring the performance of governments. Even its inventor, Simon Kuznets, warned that it was a “potentially dangerous oversimplification that could be misleading” and subject to “resulting abuse” (Lent 2017: 398). GDP does not necessarily relate to life satisfaction, at least increases beyond a GDP that meets basic needs (Seligman 2002, Goatly 2007). After World War 2 GDP per capita increased markedly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, but their populations recorded no increase in life satisfaction (Lent 2017: 399–400). GDP measures any economic activity and fails to discriminate the beneficial from the harmful. Just like an earthquake and its costly reconstruction, an oil spill and its costly clean-up count positively. If nature is not commodified to become part of the market economy, then it does not count in GDP. Worse still, very often actions which cause disease count while those that help preserve and improve health do not. For instance, driving to work using the fuel you have paid for is positive for GDP, but cycling to work is not. Using GDP as a metric has become increasingly dangerous for the future of our life on this planet due to the obsession with what we can measure, because what we can measure defines our goals (Lent 2017). So

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we might measure differently, or try to measure different things, as with the natural capital agenda, or using a “Gross National Happiness” index, as does the government of Bhutan. However, in both these cases the more vital aspects of our planet, our lives, and our happiness tend to be the least amenable to measurement and quantification.

6.5. Summary This chapter began with a characterisation of the differences between nouns (noun referents) as autonomous and “permanent” and verbs (verb referents) as dependent and transitory within a billiard ball model of actions and events. Re-examining the noun phrase, we saw how its elements are used for anchoring the entity described to the context of contiguity, but also for classification and quantification according to the similarity dimension. The role of nouns in classification, quantification, and control was then explored in the early agrarian societies which invented writing (cf. Chapter 3), drawing on Scott’s book Against the Grain; and in modern capitalist societies which increasingly attempt to commodify humans and nature so as to subject them to market forces. The supreme quantifier abolishing differences is money. In the next chapter I concentrate on a more technical discussion of the equivalent role of mathematical quantification in science.

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Nouns and the similarity mode Classification, taxonomies, paradigms, and measurement in science and mathematics

Chapters 6 and 7 both emphasise the contribution of nouns and noun phrases to the similarity dimension of meaning. Chapter 6 concentrated on the ways in which nouns and noun phrases are exploited for quantification and commodification in a market economy. In this chapter I shift to the classificatory potential of the noun phrase, and nominalisations, which are used to create further levels of abstraction. This abstraction is manifest in science and technology, which increasingly favour standardisation, and themselves depend upon the standardisation of time. And science is often drawn to mathematics, the ultimate means of quantification and abstraction within the similarity dimension. If Chapter 6 demonstrated the reductionism involved in commodifying nature and human life in monetary terms, this chapter attempts to show the reductionist hegemony of a quantifying mathematics over sciences. The chapter begins (7.1) by considering similarity-classification and its relationship to nouns. Besides classical approaches to classification, where there are strict criteria for category membership and an entity is either in or not in a category, more flexible approaches are outlined such as prototypes, radial categories and family resemblances. The flexibility of these latter approaches is necessary because the varieties of everyday experience do not always match strict abstract categories. Metaphor and elegant variation take this flexibility further. I proceed (in 7.2) to discuss the affinity between nouns and abstraction. By establishing categories, nouns obviously tend to abstractness, though the relation is not entirely straightforward: nouns at the basic level of categorisation and at more specific levels can evoke imagery and memories of specific objects and experiences, which is less abstract. Nevertheless, nouns higher up the hyponymic chain above the basic level, and the nouns/nominalisations for theoretical concepts in science and technology, are completely abstracted from specific perceived or remembered experiences. The next section (7.3) explores several aspects of similarity-based abstraction in science, technology, and mathematics. These include a discussion of the role of scientific categorisations (7.3.1) in developing DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-8

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theories and paradigms (7.3.2), and the necessity of nominalisation in this historical process (7.3.3). Then I illustrate the importance of standardisation, that is, interchangeability for a specific purpose, in the technologies of manufacture (7.3.4). Standardisation is an attempt to impose identity on objects which can never be of exactly the same measurements. Clocks facilitated the standardisation and homogenisation of time, essential for science. Finally I present a critique of the dominance of mathematics (7.3.5), with its necessity for quantification, over other sciences.

7.1. Classification Quantification is, obviously enough, dependent upon classification: unless things belong to the same class they cannot be counted or measured. Traditional or classical classification entails identifying all members of a class, naming the class to which these members belong and specifying the basis for classification (Trimble 1985: 86). Clearly, this basis will be a feature or features which are shared by members of the class and therefore establish a similarity (for a discussion of different kinds of linguistic similarity see 1.4.2, p. 32). The converse of such classification is definition, in which a term’s meaning is defined by allocating it to a class and then specifying in what ways it differs from other members of the class. Bear in mind that classification depends upon the abstraction necessary when deciding which features are the criterion for the class. Other features, which could be the criteria for alternative classifications, have to be ignored. For instance, look at the boxes in Figure 7.1. There are several valid ways of grouping these boxes in categories. You could divide them into 1, 3, 6 and 2, 4, 5 on the criterion of containing one letter or two. Or into 1, 2, 6 and 3, 4, 5, because 1, 2, 6 contain only O’s and no X’s. Or into 1, 3, 4, with upper case letters in the centre, and 2, 5, 6 with lower case. Or any number of other alternatives, each of which seems arbitrary. Adopting one criterion for classification means excluding other possible criteria (Goatly 2011). The classical approach to classification finds its equivalent in traditional semantic analysis in which the superordinate refers to the class, e.g. ‘dog’, the hyponym refers to one sub-category of the class, e.g. ‘collie’, and the co-hyponyms refer to all other sub-categories of the class, e.g.

O

1

o O

X

2

3

O

x x

Figure 7.1 Alternative classifications

4

o O

5

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‘bulldog’, ‘poodle’, ‘dachshund’, ‘labrador’, etc. In formalizing the meaning of a word, some semantic features, markers, will be inherited from the superordinate(s) and some will be distinguishers which indicate the differences from the co-hyponyms, the other members of the superordinate class (Katz and Fodor 1963). Nouns are better for indicating classes and members of classes than verbs. Noun referents, or things, as already noted (6.1, p. 141), tend to be relatively permanent, instantiated in space, not time. Halliday gives the example of leaves falling. Once the falling has taken place, it has disappeared from sight, but the leaves are still visible. They are therefore more likely to be sub-classified, and attract epithets, as there are more classes of leaves than there are of falling. By contrast, verbs provide the anchor point for the whole clause and its configuration of experience (Halliday 1998: 117). Reflecting the (apparent) permanence of their referents, nouns are more stable in meaning than verbs (Murphy 2010). This recognises that nouns are more numerous as types than verbs, while verbs of the same word-form types have more frequent tokens (individual occurrences). Such frequency of token occurrence correlates with polysemy, potential ambiguity, or vagueness of meaning (the extreme point of this correlation is apparent in prepositions and articles, the most grammatical of words). Consequently, when the vocabulary of a language, to enable traditional categorisation, is organised into hyponymic chains, the longer more elaborate chains tend to involve nouns. For example, the hyponymic chain THING – LIVING THING – ANIMAL – VERTEBRATE – MAMMAL – DOG – TERRIER – SCOTTISH TERRIER is longer than MOVE – WALK – STROLL. Notice the tendency for the more general and specific terms to involve adjectival modifiers to indicate a distinguishing feature (LIVING and SCOTTISH), because they refer to permanent qualities of a relatively permanent object. 7.1.1. Vague, fuzzy concepts and prototypes There are, however, alternative approaches to categorisation besides the classical one. These partly arise from the fact that we possess a limited number of words and categories to describe an infinite number of possible objects in the world as we know it. The inherent approximation of the relationship between, for example, the category name ‘bird’ and the range of instances it nominates, or the colour term ‘red’ and the, say, 750,000 discriminable shades it references, may easily be taken for a defect. Viewed in these terms, as approximate, vague or indefinite, human descriptive resources may appear scarcely adequate to the task of depicting specific objects and events with clarity and discrimination. However . . . to bemoan the paucity of human descriptive resources is to tacitly identify the tasks

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In fact, this vagueness or indeterminacy is probably a positive design feature of language. To make communication possible and suffciently economical one cannot possibly have a different word for every shade of red, and, as the quote suggests, relevant levels of specifcity or accuracy will depend upon the different purposes of the generic context. Whatever the positives, this one-to-many relationship between words and their referents may mean semantic classes do not map clearly onto our experience of phenomena in the world. T.S. Eliot laments that the tension and imprecision in matching words to referents means they “slip” and “slide” and refuse to “stay in place” (Eliot 1944: 19). Objects may possess some criteria for membership of classes but lack others. For instance, if we encounter a drinking vessel without a handle made of transparent plastic, can we assign this to the category conveyed by ‘a glass’, even though it is not made of glass? Is “a plastic glass” contradictory or oxymoronic? Because, given the lack of tight fit between experience and categories and thus the inevitable “loose” applications, speakers may be uncertain, or lack unanimity, about the exact features necessary for an object to qualify as a member of a class and so for that reference to be literal. It is no accident that a kind of and a sort of can be used to mark both superordinacy, i.e. class membership, and approximation (as well as metaphor) (see 1.2, p. 22). In well-known research, Adrienne Lehrer investigated speakers’ concepts for various man-made containers, trying to discover whether they had a clear concept of ‘bottle’. The problem was that disregarding all optional components (those considered unnecessary by more than 90% of the informants) resulted in the remaining semantic features being insufficient to distinguish the different meanings, e.g. for distinguishing ‘bottle’ from ‘flask’. However, if all optional features, e.g. [+MADE OF GLASS], were made obligatory then a sentence “Some bottles are not made of glass” would be contradictory (Goatly 2011: 20, quoting Lehrer 1974: 85–86). One solution to Lehrer’s problem was suggested by Eleanor Rosch with her theory of prototypes. Psychologically some members of classes are more central than others, or some referents of a noun phrase more typical than others. For example, balls and dolls are more prototypically toys than are swings and skates; basketball is more prototypically a sport than fishing (Rosch 1975, Lakoff 1972: 184). Swings and fishing are marginal members of the classes ‘toy’ and ‘sport’. Prototype theory suggests that our concepts of objects result from our history of experience with word-forms and their referents, and, I would add, usually in the context of action schemas/genres (see

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3.1.1). Speakers of Ghanaian or Singaporean English, with no experience or need of hot water bottles as part of a schema of heating a bed in winter, are unlikely to allow [+RUBBER] as a possible feature of bottles.

7.1.2. Radial categories and family resemblances Lakoff (1987) suggested a categorisation system developing from prototype theory, which he called radial structure, “one where there is a central [prototypical] case and conventionalised variations on it which cannot be predicted by general rules” (Lakoff 1987: 84) [my insertion]. Because they are conventionalised, and reflect the (changing) state of the world or society, these variations have to be learned. And they differ from classical categories, where the features of the hyponym, the specific term, are inherited from the superordinate, the general term. For a radial structure the central case, unlike a superordinate, has to have a property not shared by the non-central case. While a ‘pine’ inherits all the features of ‘tree’, ‘birth mother’ does not inherit all the features of ‘mother’. Lakoff’s example of a radial structure is, in fact, the category ‘mother’. MOTHER (CENTRAL CASE):

Mother who is and has always been female, who gave birth to the child, supplied her half of the child’s genes, nurtured the child, is married to the father, is one generation older than the child, and is the child’s legal guardian. STEPMOTHER:

Mother who didn’t give birth or supply the genes, but is currently married to the father. ADOPTIVE MOTHER:

Mother who didn’t give birth or supply the genes, but is the legal guardian and has the obligation to provide nurturance. BIRTH MOTHER/NATURAL MOTHER:

A mother defined in opposition to ‘adoptive mother’; given an adoption schema, the mother who gives birth and puts the child up for adoption is the birth mother or natural mother. FOSTER MOTHER:

Mother who did not give birth to the child, but is being paid by the state to provide nurturance. BIOLOGICAL MOTHER:

A mother who gave birth to the child, but is not raising it, while there is someone else who is, and who qualifies to be called a mother of some sort.

162 Nouns and the similarity mode SURROGATE MOTHER:

A mother who has contracted to give birth, and not perform any other role as mother. She may or may not have provided the genes, and she is not married to the father and is not obligated to provide nurturance. And she has contractually given up the right to be legal guardian. UNWED MOTHER:

Mother who is not married at the time she gives birth. (after Lakoff 1987: 83) Because the non-central categories in radial structures will have at least one property not shared with the central category, non-central members of the category may share no properties with other non-central members. For example, an adoptive mother will share no property with a birth mother. Nevertheless they are both mothers of some kind. A similar approach is the suggestion that the overarching category is a matter of family resemblances. Wittgenstein (1953: Vol. 1, 66–71) showed that a category like ‘game’ neither has clear boundaries, nor can it be defined by a set of common properties. Some games are just fun, like ring-a-ring-a-roses, others involve luck, like board games when you throw a dice, others skill, like chess, others, like card games, usually a combination of skill and luck. For Wittgenstein, they could, however, still belong to the same category, just as family members belong to the same family. All that is required for family resemblance is that you should share a few features with some members of the family, even if other members of the family share no features with you. For example, you may share the shape of your nose with your father, your paternal grandmother, and your paternal uncle, and your hair colour with your mother and your sister. But you may share neither of these, or any other distinctive features, with your maternal uncle. Your maternal uncle may, however, share eye-colour with your mother and your sister. Categories involving prototypical and non-prototypical members, radial categories, and family resemblances all still depend upon similarity. However, prototype-based categories weaken the clear lines of demarcation in classical categories, which are an all-or-nothing matter. And radial categories tend to dissolve the lines completely, since one member of a family may share no characteristics with another member of the family. They are non-transitive in the logical sense, i.e. if A is like B and B is like C, it is not necessarily the case that A is like C (see also 8.2.2, pp. 198–199).

7.1.3. Metaphor, elegant variation, and alternative classification Of course, metaphor, also dependent on similarity, goes even further than radial categories and family resemblance in challenging classical

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categorisation, by including in classes objects that share no typical features with the conventional referents of a term. Glucksberg’s theory regards metaphors as unconventional class-inclusion statements, and provides a wealth of experimental evidence to back up his claims (Glucksberg 2001, Glucksberg and Keysar 1993, Glucksberg and McGlone 1999). In fact, literary metaphors often seem designed to bring about reconceptualisation. They invite us to view our experience from a different perspective by using unconventional terms or unfamiliar categories (Kress 1989). Many poetic metaphors undo the strings of our conventional category packages to induce “defamiliarisation”. For instance, Yeats’ lines “arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares” (Yeats 1933) demand a re-conceptualisation of arrogance and hatred: as commodities sufficiently in demand that politicians can make their living by producing and selling them. In a similar way, Romantic poets, notably Coleridge, theorised the poetic project in terms of the secondary imagination, which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” (Coleridge 1962: 246). By force of habit and conventional classification our perception becomes dulled. The task of the poet is to employ the secondary imagination to reawaken that perception so that we see and experience as if for the first time, with the wonder of early childhood. One method for doing this is the use of metaphor to dissolve conventional, habitual, and commonsense categories. As for the lexicalised metaphors found in the dictionary, although they establish concepts through secondary conventionalisation, the same target may be conceptualised by different sources, which I call diversification. In other publications I have discussed, for instance, the diverse metaphorical conceptualisations of education (Goatly 2007): commodity acquisition (“To help students acquire the most up-to-date knowledge and skills”); building construction (“so as to construct knowledge, develop multiple abilities and enhance their personal quality, thereby laying a sound foundation for life, work and life-long learning”); a path or journey of exploration (“students would become more interested in learning and exploration”); growth (“the attitudes, abilities, and knowledge to be cultivated”, cf. kindergarten); and the related catering (“assisting all schools to cater for students’ different needs”, cf. balanced curriculum/ (diet)); with assessment as a mechanical process of quality control (“an external mechanism for the evaluation and quality assurance of early childhood education providers” – one could compare this with the discussion of engineering specifications in 7.3.4 p. 181). Where metaphors are used or read consciously, there are a number of options, suggested by Chilton (1996: 58–59) for resisting and contesting them: 1) The speaker may reject the source currently being used for the target of the discourse, and then use a different source (a different

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ontological model in Kuhn’s terms, see 7.3.2 below). If education were to be metaphorised as a chemical reaction between knowledge and students, the teacher could be constructed as a catalyst setting off interactions without taking part in them or interfering with their outcome, instigating rather than controlling. Knowledge creation could be analogous to the making of new chemical compounds rather than mixtures or accumulation. 2) The speaker may retain the current source but reformulate the target domain. Instead of the teacher providing resources or knowledge, as in the acquisition of commodities metaphor, the teacher could themselves be seen as a resource, available for the students to use for any educational purpose they choose. 3) The speaker may retain the current metaphor, but re-specify the grounds by rewriting the script or schema. The schema of education as a journey following a path could be rewritten as a schema where students find or make their own paths. So that rather than a guide the teacher could act as the leader of a cartography project producing provisional sketch maps, with the implication that the direction of exploration will be freer, and requiring students to revise or add to the map on their return. Poetic uses of metaphor and such diverse sources for conceptualizing the “same” target are comparable to the phenomenon of elegant variation, generally associated with literature. Look, for example, at the different ways of referring to the dog (italics) and the woman (bolded) in this Henry James passage which begins A Portrait of a Lady: While this exchange of pleasantries took place between the two, Ralph Touchett wandered away a little, with his usual slouching gait, his hands in his pockets and his little rowdyish terrier at his heels. His face turned towards the house, but his eyes were bent musingly on the lawn; so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the ample doorway for some moments before he perceived her. His attention was called to her by the conduct of his dog, who had suddenly darted forward with a little volley of shrill barks, in which the note of welcome, however, was more sensible than the note of defiance. The person in question was a young lady, who seemed immediately to interpret the greeting of the small beast. He advanced with great rapidity and stood at her feet, looking up and barking hard; whereupon, without hesitation, she stooped and caught him in her hands, holding him face to face while he continued his quick chatter. His master now had had time to follow and to see that Bunchie’s new friend was a tall girl in a black dress, who at first sight looked pretty. (Portrait of a Lady, James 1963/f.p.1881: 15)

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This passage seems to refect, in its elegant variation, the changing perceptions of Ralph. At frst she is just a person, next appears as a young lady, then as the friend of his dog, and fnally just as a girl in a black dress. The point I am making is that metaphor and elegant variation undermine any tendency to unvaryingly use the same classifying lexical item to refer to the same referent. This tendency is most pronounced in technical and scientific discourse. It would be strange, one hopes, to find much use of novel metaphor and elegant variation in the language of air traffic control. But not in quantum physics where, depending on observation techniques, light can be either particle or wave (see 9.1.1, p. 234). Lexical variation has its counterpart in superordinate variation. “Dog” might be classified as ‘mammal’ or ‘pet’; “apple” as ‘fruit’ or ‘food’; “Wellington boots” as ‘shoes’ or ‘rainwear’. Different schemas demand different classes (see 8.1.1, p. 191).

7.2. Nouns and abstraction This chapter is concerned with the degree to which nouns, representing categories, have the potential to abstract away from the context of speech and action, which is a temporal and physical space, including specific objects and processes and involving specific speakers/actors, and often defined by cultural institutions and genres. Consider the following sentences as an example of the potential of nouns for abstraction and generalisation: 1) 2) 3) 4)

The lecturer bored me The lecturer bores me The lecturer is boring The lecturer is a bore

1) and 4) are extremes. In 1) there is a verb with a past tense marker used to refer to a particular token of the lecturer’s effect on the speaker. At 4) a noun, a nominalisation, is used to label the lecturer, classifying him/her as a bore. 2) and 3) are intermediate cases, which suggest the possibility of a change of behaviour, but 4) sounds permanent and the lecturer irredeemable. More fundamentally, as in the example of the use of the words bird and red, any application of a linguistic label to experiential phenomena involves a degree of abstraction, the backgrounding of some unique features of the referent in the process of assigning to a class, and such abstractions will lead to the need for prototypical and radial approaches to classification. They may even lead to metaphor, but this too can be simply an alternative abstraction. However, the equation between nouns and abstraction is not simple. In fact, that nouns lead to abstraction might well seem counterintuitive.

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Nouns refer prototypically and in early language experience to compact objects with dimensions in space, to concrete things. This means these objects are available to the senses of sight and touch, suggesting that they are the least abstract of entities, often referred to as first-order entities (Lyons 1977). And proper names, indeed, refer to unique individuals with minimum abstraction. One way of viewing abstraction is in terms of the distinctions between actual experience, imagery, and concepts (Goatly 2011). Let’s assume there is a scale with two poles: actual experience, perceived through any of the senses, at one pole, and concepts at the other.1 Imagery is an intermediate category between actual experience and conceptualisation. Images are more individually idiosyncratic and closer to the tokens of actual experience, while concepts will be socially conventionalised and relatively typed. Images are more contextualised and associated with episodic memory, the memory of events, while concepts are relatively de-contextualised and dependent on semantic memory, the memory of word meanings. While imagery can be used for communication between intimates, who share the same experiences and memories, conceptual systems are vital for communication of new information beyond subcultures. Images are more concrete and sensual, concepts abstract and mental. The richness of images depends on their multiple and diverse associations, the clarity of concepts on their sparseness and the relative fixity of their boundaries. This freedom of association in imagery arises partly from the emotional and perceptual processes, and the clarity of concepts from cognitive processes, distinguishing these three subdivisions of Mental Process (as realised in 5.1, Table 5.1, p. 112), and reflecting our nature as both sensual and thinking animals. These characterisations align images more with individual experience and memories of events, aspects of contiguity, while concepts are less individual or particular and more abstract, aligned with similarity. Nouns, referring to things, can more directly evoke images than other parts of speech (MacCormac 1990: 142–143). Metaphor research has shown that, presumably because of nouns’ higher image potential and relative fixity of literal meaning, noun metaphors are more recognisable as metaphors than metaphors in other word classes (Steen 2007: 123, Cameron 2003, Koller 2004). This is not to say that verbs and clauses cannot evoke imagery too. While, at face value, it seems reasonable to assume that you cannot imagine kicking without imagining a foot, Gibbs (1994), as mentioned in Chapter 3, claims “kinetic imagery” or “kinaesthetic simulation”, involving the experience/procedural memory of bodily

1 We should, however, bear in mind that perception will often be affected by the language and concepts of the perceiver of experience, so an absolute dichotomy between experience and concept is questionable (see Figure 10.1, p. 271).

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movements, are of equal importance in the generation of metonymy and metaphor. Gibbs’ views receive support from the mirror hypothesis: when an observer perceives another person performing an action the same neurons are activated in the observer as when the observer performs that action. The same may be true when an action is described rather than simply observed, leading to an embodied simulation. However, if imagery aligns with procedural rather than semantic memory, this imagery would be not only verb-based, but also noun-based, as a procedure demands both processes (verbs) and participants (nouns). The discussion of imagery leads us to consider hyponymic chains from the perspective of basic level categories. We might assume knowledge of the semantics of lexis is stored in some kind of hierarchical taxonomic meaning system involving multiple levels of superordinacy and hyponymy. So ‘collie’ would be near the bottom of this hierarchy: CONCRETE ENTITY – LIVING THING – ANIMAL – VERTEBRATE – MAMMAL – DOG – COLLIE. Note that one cannot imagine the higher members of this hierarchy. The basic level is identified as the one which gives the most information for the least effort (Hudson 1980: 93), the most easily remembered and first acquired and, crucially, “the highest level at which humans have a single, similar mental image of the general shape and traits which can be attributed to this object, pattern, relationship, or event” (‘Basic level category’ 2019). So the basic level term in our hierarchy would here be dog. If the potential for imagery mitigates abstraction, it should be clear that any of the more general categories above the basic level decisively increase it. Whether nouns are abstract or not depends upon different meanings of abstraction. If we assume that basic reality is of the permanent things that we see with our eyes and that remain static enough to view in detail, then nouns referring to concrete entities are not abstract at all. If, however, we regard the basis of reality as process, then things themselves are constructs abstracted from it, like the whirlpool on the surface of a stream. To sum up this somewhat complex picture. There is no simple correlation between nouns and abstractness. Although any type of classification and the concepts on which it depends is abstract, nouns at the basic level and below can evoke imagery and memories of lived experience, which is less abstract. Nouns are not unique in commanding imagery, as verbs can too, but presumably, in English and Western European languages at least, only by relating processes and participants in the kind of procedure or episode represented by a clause. Moreover, nouns higher up the hyponymic chain above the basic level, and the kinds of abstract nouns found in science and technology, such as speed and nominalisations like growth or luminosity, represent concepts much further from (memories) of perceived experience, unless mediated by some kind of scientific measuring instrument, like a speedometer or light-meter. (We

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shall see in 10.3, pp. 258–259 how experimentation and the use of such instruments is related to abstraction.)

7.3. Abstraction in science, technology, and mathematics: classification, quantification, and theory development Science within the Western tradition rode on the classificatory impetus, a prerequisite of theorizing, initiated by ancient Greek philosophers. Abstracting a general rule from an assortment of details is the defining characteristic of Greek thought. The Greeks weren’t content merely to record what happened around them. Instead, they created categories and generated rules for why things happened, with the ultimate objective of explaining them and perhaps even predicting what would happen next. Things made more sense to the Greeks the more they were part of a general theory. (Lent 2017: 147) Finding similarities to build a theory was an obsession for Plato, with his notion of ideal forms, and for the majority of these philosophers, with the notable exception of Heraclitus, whose philosophy I touch on in 8.3.3, p. 221, and who claimed, anecdotally, “It is impossible to step into the same river twice”. Generalisation also found its counterpart in the illusory notion of a panacea (Ball 2021). The following sections discuss classification/categorisation in science (7.3.1), its role in abstraction and the creation of scientific paradigms (7.3.2), how its abstractions are enhanced by the grammar of nominalisation (7.3.3), the standardisations it brings about both in mass industrial production and of time (7.3.4), and the extreme quantifications of its abstractions in mathematics (7.3.5). 7.3.1. Categorisation in the natural sciences Natural sciences and technology, often mutually dependent, strive for classical categorisation, where possible. However, one should note that many of the fundamental noun-based classes in the hard sciences such as chemistry and physics assume some kind of ultimate similarity between entities which distorts the facts of the case. Take, for instance, the notion of atoms of the same element in chemistry/physics. It is very seldom that they are identical, even using the descriptive categories of these two sciences. Copper atoms will be different if the electrons of one are excited and the other is in a ground state; when the atom with the excited electron reverts to the ground state, it will emit light. Two atoms of the same element react differently – an ionised sodium atom will react with water much less vigorously than a neutral sodium atom. Even atoms of the

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same element may be travelling or rotating at different speeds affecting their bonding capabilities; the slower they move the more likely they are to bond. Atoms of the same element do not even necessarily have an equal number of neutrons in their nucleus, giving rise to different isotopes, such as Carbon-12 and Carbon-14, which have to be distinguished when using radioactive decay for carbon dating. Moreover, these neutrons can be at different levels of excitation, and will therefore behave differently in nuclear reactions (Baird 2014). In these examples it is noticeable how the differentiation of elements depends upon how they react in schemas (carbon-dating, nuclear reactions); the schema (contiguity) undermines the class (similarity). Nevertheless, however distorting an abstraction classification introduces, the demands of scientific theory for classification to establish an ontology are overwhelming. Take the following encyclopaedia definition (information report) for tigers: Tiger The largest member of the cat family. It lives in Asia and belongs to the same genus as the lion, leopard, and jaguar. Two major subspecies are the Siberian tiger and the Bengal tiger. The modern tiger is thought to have originated in northern Asia during the Pleistocene epoch (see Quaternary Period) and spread southward thereafter, crossing the Himalayas only about 10,000 years ago. The very rare Siberian tiger measures 1.4 to 2.8 m (4.6 to 9.2 ft) long, not including the tail, which is 69 to 95 cm (27 to 37 in) in length, and weighs 180 to 306 kg (400 to 675 lb.). It has thick yellow fur with dark stripes. The Bengal tiger, which is about 3 m (about 10 ft) long, including the tail, and usually weighs 180 to 258 kg (400 to 569 lb.), is found on the mainland of south-eastern Asia and in central and southern India. Its coat lies flatter than that of the Siberian tiger, the tawny colour is richer, and the stripes are darker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific classification: Tigers belong to the family Felidae. The Siberian tiger is classified as Panthera tigris altaica, and the Bengal tiger as Panthera tigris tigris. (‘Tiger’, Microsoft 1997) ) The classifcation inherent in this entry is diagrammed in Figure 7.2. Figure 7.2 diagrams four levels of classification, three levels of hyponymy, with each inheriting the characteristics of the superordinate. At the lowest level an attempt is made to list the features which distinguish the Bengal from the Siberian tiger in terms of length, weight, fur colour, stripe darkness, and fur flatness. Note that length and weight cannot be

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CAT FAMILY FELIDAE

(PANTHERA)

LION

LEOPARD BENGAL TIGER Panthera tigris tigris LENGTH: 3m WEIGHT: 150–258 kilos FUR: tawny colour, darker stripes, lies flatter

TIGER

JAGUAR SIBERIAN TIGER Panthera tigris altaica LENGTH: 2.9–3.75m WEIGHT: 180–306 kilos FUR: yellow colour, dark stripes, lies less flat

The genus panthera is not mentioned in the main entry, though it appears in the scientific classification

Figure 7.2 Encyclopaedia entry for Tiger

distinguishing features, because there is an overlap in the range of both measurements, and the flatness of the fur is also a gradable rather than a discrete difference. But this is the best attempt to preserve the classical categories. Tiger seems to be the basic-level term in this taxonomy, with panthera and felidae unimaginable. This is only a semi-scientific classification, the main entry being more like a folk taxonomy, and the full biological taxonomy for tigers is as follows: kingdom animalia; phylum chordata (vertebrata); class mammalian; order carnivore; family felidae; genus panther; and species panthera tigris. In terms of abstraction we observe the use of Latin terms unfamiliar to the average English speaker, and therefore inherently more abstract, as avis is more abstract than bird (Halliday 1998), presumably because less likely to evoke imagery and past experience. White (1998) explored the differences between scientific and technological terms for taxonomies, and his analysis suggests that scientific nomenclature tends to the non-vernacular: metabolites, osmoregulation, solutes, whereas the technological text prefers the vernacular: traffic, bridge, disc operating system. When scientific taxonomy or classification employs a vernacular word form, e.g. fruit, the difference in meaning is much further from the vernacular than in the case of technological vocabulary. For instance,

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in botanical science fruit is re-defined as ‘the seed-bearing structure in angiosperms (flowering plants) formed from the ovary after flowering’. In the vernacular prototypical fruits are objects such as apples or oranges, sweet, edible products of plants, in Western culture not normally eaten as part of a main course and often eaten raw. Though, scientifically, they are fruits, pumpkins, cucumbers, and tomatoes are therefore not counted as fruits in popular consciousness, a good example of an action schema, eating food uncooked and as a dessert establishing the everyday taxonomy and trumping the scientific one.2 It is not surprising that technological lexis should be less abstract than scientific, because technology is about practice in the real world in action genre contexts, and such contexts are those in which vernacular words and meanings are acquired in the first place (3.1, p. 63). Technology bridges the gap, therefore, between scientific theory and practices within cultural contexts, practices which take place within and have effects on the real everyday experiential world. The taxonomising potential of noun phrases has already been explained (6.2). Through multiple and iterative premodification by epithets and classifiers, various subclasses of the category denoted by the thing can be established, as in grey-breasted mountain toucan or the more complex message identification field connectionless device. 7.3.2. Scientific theory: abstraction and paradigms The clue, if we needed one, to the interrelationship of the similarity mode and scientific theorising may be found in the notion of a scientific “paradigm”, echoing the paradigmatic axis which Jakobson identified with the similarity dimension. In the scientific sense a paradigm is the background of accepted theory or set of beliefs that scientists hold. Kuhn, who established the term, suggested its four important elements: exemplars; metaphysical, ontological elements and models; symbolic generalisations; and values (Kuhn 1996). Let’s explain these in turn. Exemplars I begin by explaining exemplars, because this is the original meaning of paradigm and the explanation shows what linguistic and scientific paradigms have in common. An exemplar is defined as the best example to illustrate a pattern, one which is prototypical of the class to which it belongs. It is this patterning that can be related to linguistics. If I leave a blank at the end of this sentence “Jenny noticed the _____”, to complete

2 Another example of the ways in which action schemas, such as eating, affect vernacular classification is in the meaning of afternoon, often interpreted not strictly as ‘post 12 noon’, but more loosely ‘the period of the day after eating lunch’.

172 Nouns and the similarity mode the pattern I can use any and all common nouns. The nouns which can fit in the blank form a paradigm, where any one may substitute for another. This is the sense in which Jakobson uses paradigm as the basis for similarity. Nouns are syntactically similar because they fit the pattern. Any common noun could fill the blank to produce a grammatical sentence, but out of the examples, “cat”, “sand”, “commotion”, and “reliability” the first three would be better exemplars than “reliability”, as the latter would not normally end the sentence. Priming theory (Chapter 4) gives us a better sense of exemplars, the typical collocations that operate above the level of grammar: “John harnessed the horse” rather than “John harnessed the peacock”. In science the exemplar, as an element of the paradigm, is a concrete example of a problem solution or an experiment. But not just any example; it is one that best illustrates a scientific concept or theory, a prototype through which a scientist learns that theoretical concept. For instance, as an exemplar of reactive metals one could present science students with the experiment in which hydrochloric acid is added to zinc to produce zinc chloride plus hydrogen. It might be an example of other processes: the neutralisation of acids or alkalis, or exothermic reactions, since heat is generated by the reaction. It is simply an example of these larger patterns of reactions. However, it is an exemplar of the formula acid + metal → salt + hydrogen, and of the class of reactive metals, because zinc (or aluminium) is far more reactive, than, say, iron or copper. Scientific theories and concepts represent patterns which the exemplar illustrates, just as the concept of noun is illustrated by examples/exemplars of nouns filling the slot. The notion of an exemplar illustrating a pattern already takes us into the realm of similarity, whether word class or reactive metal, or the equation “acid + metal → salt + hydrogen”. The exemplar shares all the features of the class which it best represents. We recognise here the same kind of similarity that I illustrated with the word hoover, meaning ‘vacuum cleaner’, in 1.3.3 – SUPERORDINATE IS HYPONYM: acid + metal → salt + hydrogen is 2HCl + Zn → ZnCl2 + H2. Ontological elements and models I shift now to the second aspect of Kuhn’s paradigms, the ontological elements and models. The notion of a model most obviously relates to the similarity dimension through metaphor. Metaphors can provide both explanatory and theoretical models in science. One might, for example, explain electricity to elementary science students in terms of water-flow through pipes: the abstract concept of voltage becomes water pressure; resistance, the width of pipe; and amperage, the rate of flow. The purpose of this metaphor-model is to highlight the analogies between electricity and water flow. The explanatory and model-theoretic uses of metaphors

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are not clearly distinct. I have noted, for instance, that this explanatory model, in reverse, is used for theorising the movement of liquids in the field of plant physiology: “Many flow equations are closely analogous to Ohm’s law which describes the flow of electrons, and which we will use as a model” (Milburn 1979: 16). The target in the explanatory metaphor, electricity, now becomes the source, and the source, liquid flow, now becomes the target (Goatly 2011). So, at a more fundamental level metaphors constitute theories or models (Boyd 1979: 359ff). Consider the once fashionable metaphor of the computer for the human brain (see 7.3.5, Weizenbaum 1976, Goatly 2007). It makes predictions about the grounds of the metaphor, which can be tested by a programme of scientific research attempting to falsify those predictions.3 Certain psychological phenomena will escape explanation in terms of this computer model/metaphor. Scientists may then attempt to propose a new theory-constitutive metaphor which accounts for scientific evidence not captured by the first (at least in an ideal world of disinterested science, unaffected by the economics of research funding, academic politics, and career progression). For example, the wave theory of light was in some ways inadequate and needed complementing by the particle theory.4 The change of metaphorical model would, presumably, constitute some kind of paradigm shift in Kuhn’s terms. The ontological elements are the entities which the paradigm deals with, ranging from the specific, like a piece of zinc, to the more abstract, reactive metal, to the even more abstract, exothermic reaction. The ontologies

3 This is probably a somewhat naïve over-objectivist way of putting it: for “however ruthless, pristine and rigorously ‘objective’ our method of enquiry may be, the framework of interpretation is given in the metaphor rather than the evidence” (Harvey 1996: 163). 4 It is a debatable point whether there is any possibility of a scientific theory which does not depend on metaphors or models. There are two schools of thought here: One can take two views of the activities of scientists like physicists who are seeking things they call the fundamental laws of nature. Either you believe, as they often do, that they are discovering the real thing, and that one day we will hit on the mathematical form of the ultimate laws of nature. Alternatively one may be more modest and regard the scientific enterprise as an editorial process in which we are constantly refining and updating our picture of reality using images and approximations that seem best fitted to the process. (Barrow 1993: 15) In this second view, images and metaphors are indispensible to scientific theory, and are no different in kind from the metaphors or analogies found in popular science, e.g. “The confinement of quarks is like marbles inside a rubber bag”: “superstrings are like elastic bands”; “the quantum wave function is like a crime wave”; “a pulsar is like a lighthouse” (Barrow 1993: 15). The assumption in the first view is that mathematics is a non-analogical, non-metaphorical process. Arguments against this assumption can be found in Lakoff (1987: 353–370), Jones (1982), and Johnson (1987: 39–40).

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are the classes and taxonomies which cover the entities forming the world that is the subject of the science. Symbolic generalisations and values The third element of the Kuhnian paradigm is symbolic generalisations. These are the formulae, often mathematical and algebraic, which reinforce abstraction and represent its highest level, such as the formula F = ma (Force is mass multiplied by acceleration), or the slightly less abstract chemical formulae above used for acid-metal reactions. Algebra and algebraic formulae are more abstract even than arithmetic. Arithmetic deals with certain numbers. But algebra by using variables, x, y, z, etc. states generalised rules or conditions which are true for all numbers, or at least all whole numbers or integers. Algebra is the quest for abstract patterns. The last element is values, what constitutes valid theory – consistency, simplicity, plausibility, explanatory power, and usefulness. There is a problem for science with consistency: according to Gödel (1995) (7.3.5, p. 184) mathematics fails the consistency test. So, the more a scientific theory depends upon mathematics, the less it meets this criterion of value. Simplicity obviously enough favours abstraction, treating the dissimilar as similar, and is a denial of the multifarious complexity of the natural world and the world of human experience within it. It is a value much sought after in, for example, Chomskyan linguistics (Chomsky 1965: 37–40) (8.2, pp. 196 ff). Explanatory power and the power of usefulness, the degree to which science can be realised in technology, are topics that I touch on in 7.3.4 and re-address when presenting the work of Feyerabend (10.5). 7.3.3. Nominalisation and scientific theory In Chapter 3 I discussed the influence of literacy on cognition, pointing out the relative emphasis on similarity and nouns both in literate cultures and literate adults. It is, of course, no accident that it was the early cities of Mesopotamia, where writing was invented, which laid the foundations of mathematics, medicine, chemistry, botany, and zoology (Watson 2005: 76). But the development of science in Western Europe depended on a further emphasis on nouns by nominalisation. I already mentioned this grammatical transformation when discussing pupils’ acquisition of literacy, as, after they come to terms with the differences between speech and writing, they go on to acquire the skills of academic writing (3.1.5, pp. 71–76). In that section we illustrated the telescoping of two clauses into one by the use of de-verbal nominalisation. But it is worth stressing that adjectives can be nominalised too, displaying the kind of abstraction associated with CHARACTERISTIC-ENTITY semantic relations, illustrated in

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Chapter 1 with black (adjective) → black (noun). In science, however, nominalisation is usually through suffixation rather than conversion, e.g. luminous → luminosity. I now return to a discussion of nominalisation because of its centrality for the discourse of scientific theory and its development. Nominalisations expand the potential for abstract scientific theorizing. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, who founded the Western scientific tradition, nominalisation has been used to re-code processes and qualities into things: motion, change, growth; length, distance. Once nominalised as things, they become theoretical abstractions that can, presumably, be measured. They may act as participants in clauses, as in “motion causes turbulence”. And they can themselves be sub-classified into a theoretical taxonomy, e.g. linear motion, parabolic motion, orbital motion, periodic motion. Abstraction through nominalisation is the principle on which scientific theory is based (Halliday 1998: 200). Let’s examine some examples (Halliday 1998: 193–194). In 1) – 5) below at least two more literal or congruent clauses have been telescoped into one, illustrating what Halliday identifies as a favourite pattern for scientific discourse. The actual highly nominalised and grammatically metaphorical version is given first in a), with the grammatical metaphor in bold, and the less metaphorical de-nominalised version is glossed or “unpacked” below in b). Italicised items are explained in parentheses or discussed below. 1) a) Glass crack growth rate is associated with applied stress magnitude. 1) b) Glass cracks more quickly the harder you press on it. 2) a) Rapid changes in the rate of evolution are caused by external events. 2) b) How quickly [organisms] evolve changes rapidly because some things happen outside [the organisms]. (In 1) a) and 2) a) “rate” refers to how quickly something is done.) 3) a) The theoretical programme of devising models of atomic nuclei has been complemented by experimental observations. 3) b) To develop a theory we have devised a series of models of atomic nuclei and, to complete this, experimented and observed [the results]. (“Programme” refers to a series of planned actions, and so in 3b. I have glossed it “to develop . . . a series”. And I have interpreted “complemented” as not only metaphorising the conjunction “and”, as Halliday suggests, but also conveying the sense of making more complete.)

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Nouns and the similarity mode 4) a) The growth of attachment between infant and mother signals the first step in the child’s capacity to discriminate among people. 4) b) As mothers and infants become more attached the child begins to be able to discriminate among people. (“Capacity” is a noun which nominalises a modal adjective of capability/ability, while “first step” refers to beginning to do something) 5) a) The absolute indistinguishability of the electrons in the two atoms gives rise to an ‘extra’ attractive force between them. 5) b) Because electrons in the two atoms are absolutely indistinguishable they are attracted to each other even more strongly.

Various patterns emerge here. Instead of the two (or more) clauses in the congruent b) versions, there is one clause in the actual a) versions. This is achieved by complex noun phrases, with nominalisations, which are then related by verbs. Some of these verbs convey a correlation, “is associated with”, or a causal relationship, “are caused by” and “give rise to”, which are equivalent to the subordinating conjunction “because” in the b) forms. Other verbs include the meaning of the co-ordinating conjunction “and”, as in “complemented”, while others like “signals” convey little more than “is”. The complexity of the noun phrases depends on heavy modification. We notice in 1) a) the repeated piling up of premodifying classifiers and an epithet before the thing head: “glass” premodifying “crack”, “glass crack” premodifying “growth”, and finally “glass crack growth” premodifying “rate”; and then the epithet “applied” premodifying “stress” and “applied stress” premodifying “magnitude”. In example 2) a) “change”, the head, is postmodified by the phrase “in the rate of evolution”, and within that phrase “rate” itself has been postmodified by “of evolution”. Similar levels of multiple postmodification are displayed in 3) a), 4) a), and 5) a). Modification is a method for compacting the information into one relatively short noun phrase, with premodifying structures the most compact, as in 1) a). Besides the nominalisations, several abstract nouns are introduced and have been italicised. In 1a “magnitude” refers to a degree on a scale. It is a very abstract theoretical term which can refer to any scale such as size, either literally, or metaphorically as in “an earthquake of magnitude 7.4 on the Richter scale”. “Growth” is also an abstract label for increases of any kind. “Rate” replaces “how quickly” and in 2) a) the two abstract concepts ‘rate’ and ‘change’ interact into something even more abstract than they would in isolation. While “capacity” in 4) a) reifies human ability, in other contexts it has a wider modal meaning such as ‘potential’ or ‘possibility’. In 5) a) “force” is a fundamental abstract and theoretical concept in physics (F = ma was an example I gave of symbolic

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generalisation, above). Its meaning enshrines the structural expansion of the grammar brought about by nominalisation, which potentially makes abstract concepts into participant actors. An important aspect of these abstract theoretical notions – force, magnitude, growth, and rate – is that they can all be measured and therefore brought into the domain of mathematical quantification; in fact without such concepts mathematics could not be applied at all. Note, incidentally, how metaphor themes operate in some of these examples: “step” instantiates ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT FORWARDS (Appendix 1), as part of the Event Schema or Canonical Event Model (9.1, p. 227); “give rise to”, CAUSE IS DOWN. Perhaps of more significance are “growth” and “magnitude”. Once reification through nominalisation has taken place it serves as the foundation for the application of more specific metaphorical frames and schemas. In the case of magnitude and growth abstract things are given dimensions. But there are other possibilities opened up by nominalisation and reification. Solid things exhibit degrees of strength, so the significance or influence of factors can be strong or weak, and findings/experimental procedures robust and firm or flimsy. As things they can be possessed, transferred, or abandoned: an object can possess a quality or an ability, an experimenter can obtain results, which can lend or give significance to her hypothesis, or alternatively lead her to jettison it. As a solid object a force can have an impact, as can various influences on observations and results. If two abstract entities are concretised then they have positions in space relative to each other, can be separated/grouped, and can replace, interact or combine with each other in various ways. Scientists look for patterns of findings, might explore the interfaces between, say, cognition and sensation, and incorporate findings into a theory. As things are visual objects then they can enter or leave our visual field, so distinctions can dissolve or disappear, correlations can emerge or be displayed (Goatly 2011). Other aspects of the abstractness of nominalisation are that the reworked clause can omit participants and will neutralise time.5 In 2) a) the noun phrase “Rapid changes in the rate of evolution” does not tell us what is evolving. In my example “dissatisfaction with government delay on Covid 19 prevention measures” we no longer have a participant or

5 Semantically there are several kinds of nominalisation. The kind we are largely discussing here is known as “proper” nominalisation, where a process or quality is abstracted from time, and does not refer to a concrete object, for instance “Cooking involves irreversible chemical changes”. On the other hand, if I say “I really enjoyed this evening. John’s cooking was marvellous”, the nominalisation involves the application of a metonymy of EFFECT AS CAUSE, that is, we are talking about the food resulting from John’s cooking, rather than the process, an improper nominalisation. Intermediate between the two is “The cooking took three hours” where we have one specific instance of cooking which need not be abstracted from time.

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tense, so we are not sure who were/are/will be dissatisfied. Nominalisation thereby has the potential to eliminate two aspects of the deixis of everyday situated speech – time and person (8.2.9, p. 213). Thus, as well as involving similarity and abstraction, they also abstract by metonymical deletion. Nominalisations have rhetorical uses as well. Because nominalisations are more textually concise than the clause from which they are nominalised, they are often used to build arguments during a discourse by packaging compactly points that have been made previously in the text. As with the example of the abstraction ‘breakfast’ in the Introduction, this allows more space in working memory. Our sentence number 5), taken in context, illustrates this argument-building potential: If electrons weren’t absolutely indistinguishable, two hydrogen atoms would form a much more weakly bound molecule than they actually do. The absolute indistinguishability of the electrons in the two atoms gives rise to an ‘extra’ attractive force between them (David Layzer, Cosmogenesis). (quoted in Halliday 1998: 201) Complex noun phrases incorporating nominalisation, which refer back to and encapsulate the meanings of previous clauses, will usually be placed in Theme position, that is as the frst element of the clause, as in this case. Theme placement often signals reference to old or given information. In this way scientifc arguments, as an aspect of theorizing, are, in the course of the unfolding text, built up with increasing degrees of abstraction, an abstraction, however, potentially traceable back to something less abstract. Halliday points out that such reworkings of grammatical structures and patterns of use to reflect and create new structures of knowledge take place during times of major change in the human condition, with their new communicative needs. One such period was when humans began to live in settled agricultural communities, and developed writing, which they used for listing by nouns and the counting of their referents in book-keeping practices (see 6.3, pp. 146–147). Halliday mentions the ancient Greeks, one of “the iron age cultures of the Eurasian continent, which evolved the discourse of measurement and calculation and ordered sets of abstract technical terms”. Later, in “the modern period, with the evolution of the discourses of experimental science from Galileo and Newton onwards”, the needs for taxonomising and theorizing were met by the full exploitation of grammatical metaphor, and in particular nominalisation (Halliday 1998: 227). One might also recognise a further crisis for physics created by quantum theory, identified by the physicist David Bohm, or our present ecological crisis, both of which I discuss in 9.1.1, p. 227.

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7.3.4. Technology, manufacture, time, and standardisation As already explained, nouns, their meanings, and their referents tend to be regarded as more stable and unchanging than verbs. Similarly, print is more stable than speech, and more standardised than handwriting. It is no accident that the period of modern science coincided with the rise of printing technology. Ong points to print culture ushering in a “new noetic world opened by exactly repeatable visual statement and correspondingly exact verbal description of physical reality” (Ong 2002: 125). This new culture “encouraged and made possible on a large scale the quantifcation of knowledge .  .  . through the use of mathematical analysis” (Ong 2002: 127). Reminding us of an earlier theme of Chapter 6, print also turned the word and knowledge into a commodity. One of the first mass-produced manufactured products, long before the Industrial Revolution, was the printed text of a book. The word type is no accident, since, once the type has been set, all copies of the same printed text will be identical. (There is something of a paradox here: though each printing of a book will be identical, given the creativity of language, and laws of copyright, different book titles will contain unique texts. Hence the joke: “Shall we buy him a book for Christmas?” “No, I’m pretty sure he has one of those”.) The standardisation of print, replacing the idiosyncrasies of handwriting, thereby introduced the idea that exact repeatability and replication is possible, and in many fields standardisation became desirable. This was also manifest in the notions of other aspects of language standardisations, whether through the imposition of standard spelling in the 17th century in English, doctrines of correctness in the 18th, the dominance of one dialect over another as a standard (Cameron, D. 1995), or the appeal to endo-normative and exo-normative standards in teaching English as a second or foreign language (Parakarama 1995), with their intimations of linguistic imperialism (Phillippson 1992). And, despite Bakhtin’s view of written text as dialogic (see 3.3, p. 82), writing and control of it clearly enhanced opportunities for monologism. Standardisation can be viewed as one of two contrasting tendencies, the so-called centripetal, as against the centrifugal (Bakhtin 1981); centripetal forces, producing standardisation, win out over centrifugal forces which produce variation. (Compare the quest for linguistic universals rather than the recognition of linguistic relativity (8.2.3, p. 199).) The scientific revolution pioneered by Newton facilitated the Industrial Revolution in which the manufacture of relatively identical products began to replace the earlier craft industries. Besides printing, there had been earlier successful multiple productions of near-identical objects, as for instance Bronze Age moulds for spear tips, and ancient Greek moulds for clay figurines, but the development of clocks, machine tools, and dies for

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producing metal and plastic objects in and after the Industrial Revolution far eclipsed these earlier attempts. Machines made of wood, whether looms, millwheels, or windmills, were less stable than metal machines, and their dimensions changed with heat and humidity. Before machine tools were invented metal was worked by craftsmen using hand tools – hammers, files, scrapers, chisels – a laborious process with imprecise results. Using machine tools to mass produce metal objects originated with scientific instrument makers and clock and watchmakers in the 18th century who needed to produce batches of “identical” small (repeater) mechanisms. The connection with scientific development and equipment is worth noting, since, as we have seen, the scientific revolution also drove standardisation. But, as we shall see, the relationship with time is equally significant. The aim of machine tools was to manufacture metal objects with precision. Not only did this make the products more reliable, but, most important for our argument, also sufficiently similar to be interchangeable and standardised. The first large precision machine tool was the boring machine invented by John Wilkinson for the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. This was followed by the invention of the slide rest lathe, perfected by Henry Maudslay, one of industrial history’s most significant inventions as it could cut machine screws of different and precise thread pitches. Maudslay went on to build the machines for making ships’ pulley blocks for the Royal Navy, the first machines to mass produce components with a degree of interchangeability. One of his trainees, Richard Roberts, not only made high-quality machine tools but pioneered the use of jigs and gauges for precision workshop measurement, essential for standardisation. One obvious tool of manufacturing that produces more or less identical objects is the die. This is a pre-shaped tool that works in conjunction with a press to manipulate the material into the desired size and shape. The press forces the material – plastic, metal, or composites – into the die’s cavity, thus creating identical objects of the same size and shape as the die. For example, blanking dies cut a piece of flat metal, typically sheet metal, into the desired size and shape, while coining dies create objects with different designs or characteristics on each side. From its early beginnings we can fast forward to the present and observe standardisation’s development in tandem with increasing degrees of precision in manufacturing engineering. We now have the concept of a standard specification, an explicit set of requirements for an item, material, or component. There are also institutions such as BSI (the British Standards Institution) and ISO (the International Organisation for Standardisation) to maintain standards by certification. The application of standards cannot, however, be absolute. It is acknowledged that no machine is capable of maintaining dimensions to an absolutely exact value, hence the concept of engineering tolerance, the

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permissible limits of variation. These are applied to physical dimensions and properties of manufactured objects. If a part is manufactured, but has dimensions that are out of tolerance, it is not a usable part for the purpose for which it was designed. When no other tolerances are provided, the machining industry uses the standard tolerances in Table 7.1. Incidentally, note the use of inches rather than centimetres here. This may be because of the dominance of the USA, where the imperial system is more common. But it could also be because tolerances are to do with technology. Like technology, non-metrical measuring systems are, or at least were in their origins, closer to the human life world and its contiguities. Evidence for this closeness are the metonymy-derived units of measurement foot, cubit (originally an arm’s length), hand (for the height of horses), and the French pouce, meaning both ‘inch’ and ‘thumb’, all examples of SIZE OF OBJECT AS OBJECT. Perhaps we detect here a parallel with the tendency to use vernacular terms in technology, rather than the more abstract Greek and Latin terms of science (7.3.1, p. 170). Another related example of application of standards and tolerances is the use of dies in die casting. This is a process in which molten metal is forced under high pressure into a mould cavity, used for high-volume production of small- to medium-sized parts. The North American Die Casting Association stipulates the following more specific dimensional tolerances for aluminium and zinc: • •

Standard: +/− 0.010 inch per 1 inch – then +/− 0.001 inch for each additional inch Precision: +/− 0.002 inch per 1 inch – then +/− 0.001 inch for each additional inch

Die casting is excellent for fast high-volume applications because the intricate moulds commonly used yield tighter tolerances. Despite this, the parts it produces may still require fnishing and machining after the part comes out. Machining can now be made extremely precise by computer numerical control in order to produce detailed parts for telecommunications and electrical housing. Table 7.1 Permitted tolerances in machining Specification

Tolerance

1 decimal place (.x): 2 decimal places (.0x): 3 decimal places (.00x): 4 decimal places (.000x):

±0.2” ±0.01” ±0.005” ±0.0005”

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It is no accident that the ancient Roman goddess Moneta, the origin of the word money, also had the meaning ‘die’ in mediaeval Latin. Standardisation by mass production of coins enabled and symbolised the abstraction of money as a means of exchange that I discussed in Chapter 6. Elsewhere I have written about the ways in which the manufacturing process standardised and thereby dehumanised the industrial worker (Goatly 2007). From an efficiency of production point of view the ideal worker would be a standard robotic figure, whose individual needs and capabilities were ignored. Under this system “the worker became an automaton, no different from the machines he interacted with, his humanity left outside the factory gate” (Rifkin 1987: 130). Remember Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (Chaplin 2021). The problem faced by an industrial worker on a production line was the necessity of repeating identical movements according to regular time intervals, like the mechanical automata common to public clocks in Europe who appear and perform on the hour, e.g. the Rathaus-Glockenspiel (2021) in Munich. Indeed, if the invention of print brought about a new mindset in which standardisation and exact repetition are possible, then the clock had an equal noetic effect. As already mentioned the modern standardisation of manufacture began with scientific measuring instruments and watch-making with their repeater mechanisms. Unlike other machines or equipment – chisels, files, microscopes, and perhaps even die casts – which function as extensions of the human body in contiguous relations to them, clocks represent time as an abstract entity remote from human experience (Weizenbaum 1976). Clock time abolished the qualitative differences in the human experience of time, between holidays and working days, day and night, summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Day originally meant ‘period of daylight between dawn and dusk’ but then took on the meaning ‘period of 24 hours’. Metonymic measurement of time, e.g. “in the blink of an eye”, gave way to standard units regarded as repeatable because similar to the point of identity, units that are homogenous, standardised, and therefore measurable and quantifiable (Goatly 2007). Moreover, once clocks had been invented it was theoretically possible to impose standard time, to synchronise clocks within a geographical region or state. Standard time replaced solar time, based on sunrise and sunset, or local mean time where each town or city had its own meridian. Science, mathematics, and abstract time are, in fact, interdependent. Mumford points out that the clock “dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science” (Mumford 1963: 15). Many of the abstract nouns of scientific discourse, such as speed, rate, acceleration, rely on abstract time’s homogeneity, standardisation, and quantifiability. And not only seconds, but other quantifiable standard units such as grams and centimetres, allow physics to be built upon mathematics.

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7.3.5. Quantification and the hegemony of mathematics As explained in Chapter 6, the qualitative differences in nature and commodities are increasingly reduced to quantitative differences expressed in the currency of monetary exchange. We turn now to a parallel trend in science, the ways in which qualitative differences have been eroded by mathematics, imperialistically invading, if you will, other disciplines, which adopt the generalizing symbolic mathematical formulae as part of their paradigm. There is an argument for saying that this reduction of quality to quantity began with Pythagoras. [Pythagorean philosophers] reflected on the fact that the differences between musical notes from a single vibrating string depend on the length of the string. There is a simple mathematical relationship between them; the shorter the string the higher the note. Here then was a difference in quality which could be accounted for by a difference in quantity. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that in this mathematical discovery lay the seeds of all future science. If the ultimate nature of things depends on mathematical relationships, then it follows that the world as perceived by our senses must be logical and intelligible as mathematics. (Habgood 2002: 6–7) [my insertion] Indeed, Plato regarded geometry as a fundamental principle of the created world; the entrance doors to his Academy were inscribed “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here”. Ever since, mathematics has been the benchmark for science. Galileo advocated “measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured”, since the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics (Gaarder 1996: 203). “Descartes in his twenties experienced a life-altering vision in which the Angel of Truth appeared and told him that mathematics was the key to unlocking the secrets of nature” (Lent 2017: 235). Descartes’ belief that only quantitative properties can defne an outer reality was elaborated by Locke with his concept of objective “primary qualities” – extension, weight, motion, and number, and so on. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, the scientist selects “from the whole of experience only those elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to mathematical treatment” (Peat 1996: 239). In fact, however sophisticated our measuring instruments we can never measure completely accurately, so completely exact standardisation is a myth. Measurement is always approximate and therefore borders on the metaphorical (Jones 1982). A classification-dependent mathematics and the Western science which uses it as a foundation have concentrated on

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It may be true that some fields of knowledge are more appropriate for mathematical and numerical treatments than others. In astronomy and particle physics the forces and “objects” under consideration fit mathematical definitions precisely. Some concepts in these fields are simply mathematical constructs, for example, the properties of quark – charm, colour, and strangeness. However, just as money valuations may be impossible for nature, so mathematics is less than useful for complex phenomena, like those found in biology, where each organism is unique and changes irreversibly from moment to moment (Horgan 1998: 203). Although much science has aspired to mathematical quantification, fundamental questions about the validity of mathematics remain. Since Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (Gödel 1931), the scope of mathematical logic has been put in doubt. Mathematicians attempted to give a mathematical proof to every phenomenon that was true, a complete system of correspondences. To satisfy the value element of the paradigm this system would have to be consistent, non-contradictory, i.e. not contain statements that were simultaneously true and false. Such systems are dependent on axioms, statements that are accepted as true without any proof. Gödel said that every non-trivial (interesting) formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent: there will always be questions that cannot be answered, using a certain set of axioms, so the system would be incomplete; and you cannot prove that a system of axioms is consistent, unless you use a different set of axioms. As a simple example, imagine two axioms concerning telling the truth: 1) If I am given a statement and it is false, I cannot say it out loud. 2) If I am given a statement and it is true, I must say it out loud. It seems logical to assert that these axioms can be applied to any possible statement. But some statements show that it is impossible to be both accurate, non-contradictory, and universal, complete. Imagine the sentence G, which equals “‘I can never say G’ is true”. Then If I say G, which is “‘I can never say G’ is true”, then G is false and I have broken the rules. If I do not say G, which is “‘I can never say G’ is true”, then G is true and I have broken the rules.

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Thus, it is impossible to apply these stipulated axioms consistently and completely. There are some statements that you can never say even though they are true (‘Gödel’s incompleteness theorem simply explained’ 2021). Briefy, never believe what you are told. Another and related fundamental weakness with mathematical reductionism is that the only mathematical propositions that are verifiable are those dealing with pure logic and pure mathematics. 2 + 2 = 4 is axiomatic, an analytic statement, true by definition and conventional agreement, not because it matches an external reality. To make a bridge between analytical systems and external reality we need some kind of more or less unreliable and fictional classificatory system: 2 of what? Therefore it is distorting to employ numerical models to measure nature, and ecological crises such as resource depletion and global warming, just as it is distorting to put a monetary value on nature according to the Natural Capital Agenda (6.4.2). “Verification and validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible” since natural systems are always open, making our knowledge of them incomplete, or, at best, approximate, and factoring out the unknown and unmeasurable. These mathematical models might be thought of as “a work of fiction” (Oreskes et al. 1994, quoted in Horgan 1998: 202–203). Prigogine’s chaos theory (Prigogine and Stengers 1985) was a reaction to a mathematical reductionism. In fact Prigogine wanted to take physics in an opposite direction, instead of explaining it in terms of mathematics to change its paradigm to a biological one. “What we have to do is to include evolutionary patterns in our descriptions. What we need is a Darwinian view of physics, a biological view of physics . . . You cannot on the one side believe you are part of an automaton and on the other hand believe in humanism” (Horgan 1998: 218). We might think of a ladder or list of academic disciplines investigating different kinds of reality, though being at the top of the ladder does not indicate relative importance (Figure 7.3). Attempts to explain one level in terms of another are limited and distorting because each level is to some extent independent. “At each stage entirely new laws, concepts and generalisations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one . . . Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry” (Anderson 1972: 393). And none of the disciplines above mathematics is simply applied mathematics. Satirically, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams 1979) the meaning of life is reduced to the number 42. (Useful as a number because divisible by 2, 3, 6, 7, 14, and 21. As I write it is auspiciously 42 years since the book’s first publication.) A good example of the specious reductionism of social sciences to mathematics is related by Clifford Geertz. When he worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies, he encountered mathematicians who had developed models of sociological problems. He complained that their models

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Nouns and the similarity mode religious studies (theology) philosophy arts and humanities social sciences economics psychology biology chemistry physics mathematics

Figure 7.3 A ladder of academic disciplines

and equations were not based on any empirical evidence: “But they don’t know anything about what goes on in the inner cities! . . . They just have a mathematical model . . . if you want to have a general theory of war and peace, all you have to do is sit down and write an equation without having any knowledge of history or people” (Horgan 1998: 157). If we count computation and information science as branches of applied mathematics, we observe a recent trend for them to colonise other disciplines, for instance, biology and genetics. According to Helen Phillips (2002: 40–42), the division between plants and animals/humans is doubtful: “Plants seem to respond in a variety of ways to subtly different sensory inputs. Does this equate to intelligence? A plant’s computational capacity can probably match that of many animals”. On the other hand Melanie Cooper believes that what distinguishes us from more “primitive” creatures is that as humans we have a better “operating system”, touting the idea that RNA is basically a kind of software. The complete genetic operating system that Mattick and Gagen propose regulates both the gene expression and the proteins that carry out structural and functional roles in the cells. Introns provide the additional connections, with each RNA molecule doing different tasks at the same time – an example of parallel processing similar to what happens in your brain or a supercomputer. .............. The operating systems of modern desktop computers have millions of lines of code. Likewise, a genetic operating system capable

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of multitasking and parallel processing must have stacks of control molecules. And these couldn’t just appear out of the blue. Gagen says they are most likely to come from the part of the eukaryotic genome that has grown in size with increasing complexity – in other words the introns. (Cooper 2002: 30–32) [my bolding] In this world computer programs and genetic codes are both governed by the principles of information theory and cybernetics. Genes contain information programmed into specifc sequences. One branch of NeoDarwinian biology proposes that evolution is dependent on the survival of the better informed – being ftter means being more adept at processing greater stores of information in a shorter time, so that successful organisms are simply well-designed programs (Rifkin 1987: 214). The absurdity of using arithmetical yardsticks in genetics to estimate similarity is noticeable in specious arguments about the overlap between human and chimpanzee psychology. Unfortunately it has become fashionable to stress that chimpanzees and humans must have staggeringly similar psychologies because they share 98.4% of their DNA. But this misses the point: genomes are not like cake recipes . . . A creature that shares 98.4% of its DNA with humans is not 98.4% human, any more than a fish that shares, say, 40% of its DNA with us is 40% human. (Marks 2002: 43)

7.4. Summary Classification might be thought intrinsic to cognition and language (Harnad 2005). This chapter discussed classical categorisation and the less strict models of classification necessary due to the mismatch between changing experience and linguistic categories. Elegant variation and metaphor are ways of providing alternative classifications. Nouns, with their relatively stable meanings and participation in hyponymic taxonomic chains, have the potential to be tools for classification and abstraction on the similarity dimension; the conclusion was that abstract nouns and categories above the basic level realised this potential, though the possibility of imagery in more specific nouns diminished it. The third section discussed in more detail the contribution of nouns and nominalisation to abstract categorisation in science and technology and the development of scientific paradigms and theories. Science is often applied in technology with its attempts at standardisation, the maximisation of similarity, and science depends upon the standardisation of abstract clock time. Note, incidentally, that the desirability of standardisation is reinforced by the value-laden meaning of the word standard – ‘moral principle against

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which behaviour is judged’, not simply the technological ‘interchangeability for a purpose’. Finally, combining the themes of Chapters 6 and 7, quantification and the classification on which it depends, I explored the reductionism to mathematics in science and other academic disciplines as an extreme form of the similarity dimension. So extreme that its abstraction may reduce the contiguity dimension to zero where meaning disappears in analytic tautology. In fact we could reverse this tendency of reductionism, as Prigogine suggested: physics, quite close to mathematics in our ladder, could do well to learn from biology. Furthermore, the kind of relational theory emerging from quantum physics (9.1.1 p. 231) could be enhanced by analogies, at least, from ecology, from social theory with its explanations of how identities are relational through subject positioning, and from linguistic priming theory, where the meaning of words is ambiguous and probabilistic until put in relation to their collocations.

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals in sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and poetry

I have already mentioned some of the adverse social and environmental problems created by overemphasis on the similarity dimension in quantification and commodification (Chapter 6), and in the standardisations and abstractions of science-based technology (Chapter 7). This chapter concentrates on explicit resistance to classification, standardisation, and abstraction. I discuss the intrinsic problems when attempting to establish sociology as a discipline (8.1) and linguistics as science (8.2), identified especially by ethnology and pragmatics. And the chapter ends (8.3) with a brief sketch of some philosophical approaches that resist the tendencies of nouns to classify and generalise, and to hide the processual nature of the universe and life within it, namely Duns Scotus, Heraclitus and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Buddhism, and Daoism.

8.1. Problems of classification and statistics in the social sciences: anthropology and ethnomethodology In the ladder of disciplines (Chapter 7, Figure 7.3, p. 186) consider the wide gap between mathematics at the base, and the social sciences halfway up. No branches of sociology have emphasised the potential problems in bridging this gap more than ethnology and ethnomethodology. Traditional anthropological approaches to diverse cultures were transformed in the late years of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries by figures such as Frank Boas and his disciples Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, a fascinating narrative of which has been recently published in Charles King’s The Reinvention of Humanity: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Remade Race, Sex and Gender (2020). And Heritage’s account of ethnomethodology, centring on the figure of Harold Garfinkel, shows how this transformation developed later. This movement recognised the perils of typology (8.1.1), attempted to redefine category-formation and identification with social groups in terms of actions and practice (8.1.2), and demonstrated the operational difficulties of using statistics, in, for instance, studies of suicide (8.1.3). These DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-9

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ethnologists hesitated to claim scientific status for their discipline, being reluctant to make generalisations and propound universal laws (8.1.4). 8.1.1. The perils of typology Franz Boas in his early career had to fight several battles against the classifiers. The anthropologist Otis Mason had argued that the essential foundation for true scientific understanding was classification, prioritising the similarity dimension. “The explorer who goes among a people to study their entire creed and activity will do his work better by having in his mind the determination to bring each industry into comparison with the same activities in other times and places” (Mason 1887: 53–54). To which Boas retorted that in ethnology all is individuality (King 2020: 55–56). Mason had “organised” the National Museum of Washington by taking similar implements or instruments, like drums, and grouping them together in a category abstracted from the contiguities of their cultural contexts. He was hoping to illustrate a theory that societies could be classified as Savage, Barbaric, or Civilised and give evidence of laws governing the transition from one to the other. Boas argued against this de-contextualisation, which emphasised similarity to the point of meaninglessness: “By regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of other inventions of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other phenomena affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its meaning” (Boas 1887: 485, quoted in King 2020: 55). Following Boas, Elsie Parsons, an anthropologist specialising in Native American cultures of the Southwest, claimed: The beginning of social science .  .  . was to learn to recognise the square pegs and the round holes, the disconnect between individuals and their expected social behaviours – in distant, exotic societies as well as in our own. Otherwise, our natural “predisposition to classify . . . may be the source of disastrous failures as well as of great achievements”. (Parsons 1915: 8, quoted in King 2020: 120–121) Hurston, a pupil of Boas, identifed herself as a child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes (King 2020: 247). This scepticism about classification was inherited by the ethnomethodologists. As Heritage reminds us, summarizing Schutz (1970), type constructs abstract from the concrete uniqueness of objects and events, and the relation to the objects they typify or classify will therefore be inherently approximate, adjustable, and “elastic”, reminding us of the need for alternative classifications besides the classic one (7.1, pp. 159 ff). In applying class or type labels the unique specificity of objects and events will be irretrievably lost.

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One specific danger is that categories and principles, ontologies of a paradigm, will be imposed from outside. Benedict insisted there could be no real analysis of human societies without the prior realisation that one’s own way of seeing the world isn’t universal (King 2020: 264). This was the problem of deductivism – beginning with a set of general principles or categories and then applying them to a particular case. Boas believed that any science should be inductive, that researchers should abandon their preconceived notions (King 2020: 56). In fact, anthropology should be a dialogue between the anthropologist’s way of seeing the world and someone else’s. Instead of a classificatory approach, Boas and his students maintained that cultures and cultural objects could only be understood in the context of practice. The only people who could really say whether something that looked like a bow was a weapon, a child’s toy, or an instrument for making fire were the true experts – that is, those who actually used it, in a given place, at a given time. This bone rattle might make music. That one might drive away evil spirits. Yet another might distract a wailing child. (King 2020: 56) As researchers they therefore adopted the role of participant observers, immersing themselves, for months and sometimes years, in the practices, the action genres of the cultures they were investigating. As humans with an instinct to look for patterns, and as members of a culture, we inevitably develop our own category labels. However, as ethnomethodologists like Schutz pointed out, these will be applied differently, and with varying degrees of specificity, depending on their relevance to the practices we are engaged in. Rex can be classified as an animal, vertebrate, mammal, dog, collie, or my best dumb friend and companion. If I am looking in a supermarket for Rex’s food, the category ‘dog’ will be sufficient for me to locate the appropriate cans on the shelves of the pet food aisle, but if I am entering a dog show, then more specific categorisations will be relevant (Schutz 1970, cited in Heritage 1984: 52–53). Categories are employed, as they were acquired, in the context of our practical purposes. That is to say frames and the lexis which classifies them are acquired during the process of participation in action genres/schemas as young children (see 3.1.2, p. 62). Similarity for classification and contiguity for situated action interface with each other and are mutually defining. An object, like meaning, cannot exist in only one dimension. A good example of the ways in which the typical and the particular bump up against each other is in the application of legal rules and precedents. (Remember the early literate societies of Mesopotamia were the

192 Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals first to codify the law as in the Hammurabi code (6.3).) Law specifies categories and rules of what is legal/illegal in order to cover an indefinite range of contingent, specific possibilities, which will never be entirely identical. In specific cases it may be possible to legally drive the wrong way down a one-way street, for instance. Even when a precedent has been established, a magistrate will have to decide whether a subsequent case is sufficiently similar to the case which established it to receive the same judgment. As Garfinkel puts it, laws and rules are always applied “for another first time” (Heritage 1984: 121–122). Nothing is repeatable. Though Einstein, allegedly, defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and this was a disincentive for me to rehearse the same music over and over again at choir practice, I eventually concluded it is impossible to do the same thing twice. 8.1.2. Types as constituted by practice and the case of Agnes Heritage takes up the theme of the interaction between types/classes of things and of practices, aligning to the similarity and contiguity dimensions respectively. We have type constructs of objects, and also “recipe knowledge” about how to carry out practices, to participate in action genres. These type constructs are revisable in practice, but reasonably stable means of making sense of the world in which we have to act (Heritage 1984: 51–52). As evidence for this interaction, Heritage summarises Garfinkel’s research into Agnes. Agnes was born with male genitals, but wished to identify as female. Though, when clothed, she looked female, she nevertheless had to work very hard to establish her gendered identity, particularly, but not only, with those who did not know about her male genitalia. She did this by observing how and on what topics other women talked, expressed their feelings, and engaged in cultural activities. She willingly adopted subject positions (3.1.3 p. 65) in keeping with a female role. She thereby learnt how to participate on repeated occasions in such discoursal and other schemas as a female, including the gendered ways of holding and moving her body. Garfinkel summed up the significance of this research: We learned from Agnes, who treated sexed persons as cultural events that members make happen, that members’ practices alone produce the observable-tellable normal sexuality of persons, and do so only, entirely, exclusively in actual, singular, particular occasions through actual witnessed displays of common talk and conduct . . . (Garfinkel 1967c: 181, quoted in Heritage 1984: 196) Heritage concludes:

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It is surprising to realize the extent to which gender differentiation consists of a filigree of small-scale, socially organised behaviours which are unceasingly iterated. Together these – individually insignificant – behaviours interlock to constitute the great public institution of gender as a morally-organised-as-natural fact of life. (Heritage 1984: 197) The case of Agnes resembles the findings of earlier anthropological research carried out by Ruth Benedict in New Mexico. The Zuñi indulged in a tradition of gender-crossing known as berdache. Biological men could assume the role of social women, putting on women’s clothes, carrying out tasks typically performed by women, and even entering into relationships with non-berdache men (King 2020: 124). In both cases, Agnes and the Zuñi, identity is achieved by actions and participation in culturally defined activities. One might even suggest that the anthropologist pupils of Boas achieved their own, sometimes “unstable”, sexual identities precisely from their participation in the cultures where sexual identity was more fluid than in the early 20th century USA. 8.1.3. The problem for social statistics: the case of suicide Margaret Mead, making notes on Ruth Benedict’s lectures, warned herself that the categories used for statistical analysis may be misleading fictions, prompting us to find social regularities where none existed (King 2020: 132). Even if the categories are real for someone inside a culture, there is a related statistical problem of deciding whether particular cases should be assigned to the category. Applying the categories underlying official statistics was a problem that exercised Garfinkel, and which he famously researched in the case study of suicides. How exactly do investigating officers and coroners decide on this classification of cause of death? The investigating officer looks for evidence or remains. These may be physical and material: the body and its state, medicine bottles, notes, clothing, memorabilia. Or “the remains” may be linguistic evidence: rumours, passing remarks, stories of friends and acquaintances, who, themselves, will apply folk theories to make sense of what happened. The officer then attempts to “formulate a recognizably coherent, standard, typical, cogent, uniform, planful, i.e. a professionally defensible, and .  .  . a recognizably rational account of how the society worked to produce those remains” (Garfinkel, 1967a: 17). All this evidence is gathered in a highly specific physical, discoursal, and cultural context. Whether a death belongs to the category ‘suicide’ or not is established from whatever evidence and interpretations of it are available: the time and place of death, methods of killing, motives, including history of “depression” and the possible grounds for depression, such as debt, separation, isolation, and illness (Atkinson 1978). The investigating

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officer encounters a “gap” between the data and “what the data mean”, which has to be bridged by an interpretation according to precedent and stereotype and what is reasonable and defensible in the circumstances. An experienced officer will be aware that the relatives and the deceased themselves may have a desire to conceal suicidal motives. The officer may well depend upon personal beliefs about reasons for living and dying, and about the character of people who die for good and bad reasons. Given these problems of interpretation, the officer may err on the side of caution and only propose suicide if there is incontrovertible evidence. In court, the coroner, in weighing the evidence presented and in interpreting it, tries to balance the reputation of the court against the distress of the family, the possible outrage of the community, or the criticism of fellow jurists. All these factors may make her/him hesitate to declare suicide. This sketchy account of the problematics of reaching a suicide verdict only begin to scratch the surface of all the contingencies, inferential processes, interpretations, and actual and implied motivations involved (Heritage 1984: 173–174). 8.1.4. Is social science then viable? The impossibility of universal laws The question then arises, if the processes of classification as suicide or homicide or misadventure are so complex and potentially unreliable, how can a social science that depends upon quantification and the use of statistics be viable? We are beginning to side with Sissy Jupe with her felicitous malapropism for statistics – “stutterings” (Chapter 6, p. 139). Ordinary language descriptions, and even scientific categories, tend to gloss or idealise the specifics of what they classify and label. Typology is inherently problematic for sociology. One strategy to produce valid types advocated by Durkheim (1982) was “averaging”. Another, recommended by Weber, was explicit idealisation. But the ethnomethodologist Harvey Sacks (1963) criticised both of these methods on the grounds that they necessarily blur the specific features of the events investigated. As a result, sociological concepts and generalisations can only be applied in a vague and indeterminate way to any specific set of events (Heritage 1984: 234). Even if sociologists are aware of this problem and use sample surveys, measurements of practical actions, statistics, mathematical and computer models of social processes, the data on which they base the analysis are themselves the products of similar tasks of interpretation and demonstration which have already been accomplished by the members of society. This renders the goal of establishing social science investigations on a firm and principled methodological footing extremely

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difficult to achieve. These difficulties may underlie the “pre-paradigmatic” status of many contemporary social science activities. (Garfinkel 1967a: 6–7, quoted in Heritage 1984: 158–159) To say that the social science enterprise may be “pre-paradigmatic”, is to point out that the ontology, the classification systems and technical taxonomies necessary for theory, is not yet sufficiently established to validate it as a science (see our discussion of Kuhnian notions of the paradigm 7.3.2, p. 172). There may be something naïve about this lament, given the fact that all paradigms, even in the hard sciences, are likely to be remote from indexical reality and face, though perhaps to a lesser degree, the same problems. Boas objected to this attempt to ape the physical sciences as misguided. Ethnologists should not even attempt to model themselves after physicists and other students of the natural world. You cannot generalise about a thing that depends fundamentally on the context of a particular time and a particular place (King 2020: 52), though I suggest the contextuality of quantum theory (9.1.1) may weaken his objection. For him, “types” were simply fictional abstractions, whether races or any other social categories. Social science should not aim to search for humanity’s atomic units and assign people to unquestioned categories. People are both individuals and social beings, who absorb and often cling to the sense of reality to which they have been enculturated. We cannot treat the individual as an isolated unit. He must be studied in his social setting, and the question is relevant whether generalisations are possible by which a functional relation between generalised social data and the form and expression of individual life can be discovered; in other words, whether any generally valid laws exist that govern the life of society. (Boas 1886: 15, quoted in King 2020: 178) The extent to which Boas shied away from positing general laws is evident in his remarkable reply when asked by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown to derive just one generalisation from his decades-long anthropological career: “People don’t use anything they haven’t got” (King 2020: 246). Ruth Benedict, too, powerfully proclaimed the doctrine of cultural relativity, which precluded the idea of universal laws and generalisation. All societies are in fact just snippets of a “great arc” of possible ways of behaving. Which particular snippets a society develops depends on a whole host of accidental factors, from “hints” provided by geography, environment, or basic human needs to more or less random

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals borrowings from neighbouring societies . . . At the same time, Benedict continued, cultures are not random assortments of traits .  .  . They make sense to themselves; they have coherence, a sense of integration, that allows for individuals inside that society to find their way from childhood to adulthood. Being a well-adjusted member of a society means understanding its essential patterns of life – its basic “cultural configurations”, or Gestalt, Benedict called it, borrowing a German term from psychology: the whole-ness of a thing, the sum of qualities that make it uniquely itself. (King 2020: 264)

The Boas circle had intimate connections with Edward Sapir, indeed, Margaret Mead was his lover. The concept of cultural relativity was matched by the concept of linguistic relativity, developed by Sapir in collaboration with Benjamin Lee Whorf, and which I discuss in the next section (8.2.3).

8.2. Linguistics as a “science”: moving from semantics to pragmatics and indexicality This, neatly, if somewhat belatedly, brings us to the discussion of linguistics as a would-be science, and the extent to which it relies on the similarity dimension by its classifications and rules, and, crucially, how this has been resisted. This could take up many volumes, so I shall simply make some general points, based upon the linguistic traditions with which I am most familiar. 8.2.1. Abstraction and idealisation in linguistics as a science Modern linguists, working mainly in Europe and the US, such as de Saussure, Bloomfield, Chomsky, and, within semantics, Lyons, felt the need for a degree of abstraction and idealisation if any progress was to be made in establishing linguistics as a “science”. At the most extreme, Chomsky posited an idealised native speaker: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with the ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention or interest, and errors in applying the knowledge of the language in actual performance. (Chomsky 1965: 3) Lyons identifes three kinds of idealisation: regularisation, which copes with the irrelevant conditions Chomsky mentioned; standardisation, which means “discounting all but the major systematic variations in the language behaviour of the community”, ignoring the fact that “everyone we describe as a native speaker of English speaks a different

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English”; and de-contextualisation, which means “the elimination of all the context-dependent features of utterances” (Lyons 1977: 587– 588). Idealizing along the lines of standardisation and de-contextualisation means a concern with types of sentence, rather than tokens of utterances. Fundamental to standardisation was the -etic/-emic distinction. This was applied originally to phonetics and phonology, and explaining these terms makes the distinction clear. The [l]s in bottle and lake, though phonetically different, are phonologically the same. Even if they sound odd, they are interchangeable without a change of meaning, rather like the screw produced by the slide rest lathe (section 7.3.4). The -etic/-emic difference is illustrated most easily in a printed book with the graphetic/graphemic distinction. Standardisation would ignore the different graphetic shapes and fonts in the following letters – g g g G g g – and posit them as instantiations of a more abstract grapheme [g]. Once standardisation has taken place, within a structural linguistic approach (which includes de Saussure, Bloomfield, and arguably Chomsky too), one can posit a paradigm of choices amongst a limited number of phonemes/graphemes. Phonemes/graphemes are taken as the smallest linguistic units. The next level is the morpheme, traditionally the smallest meaningful unit, made up of one or more phonemes, and phonological rules will dictate for a particular language what are the permissible combinations of phonemes in a morpheme. The system is extended syntagmatically into larger and larger units, according to the principle that a higher unit comprises one or more of the unit at the level below it: phoneme–morpheme–word–phrase–clause–sentence. At each level different specific rules are applied to create grammatical sequences acceptable to the ideal speaker-listener. The choices permitted by the rules at each linguistic level will be paradigmatic ones. 8.2.2. Computation and logic Within a generative grammar, like Chomsky’s, who leaves out the clause level, working from the top down, the rules, rather like a computer program, and with the possibility of recursion, should be capable of generating all the possible grammatical sentences in a language. For instance, according to the symbolic formulae of the Chomskyan paradigm (see 7.3.2, p. 174) we can posit generative rules such as the following: S → NP (AUX) VP NP VP

→ (ART) N (S) → VB (NP) (NP)

(S = sentence, NP = noun phrase, AUX = auxiliary verb, VP = verb phrase, ART = article, n = noun, VB = verb. Parentheses indicate optional elements.) Applying these rules generates the sentences and strings below them:

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals S

→

VP

→

NP

AUX

VP

John

has

given Mary the chocolates

VB

NP

NP

given Mary the chocolates s→

NP

VP

The fact that light is both wave and particle confused physicists NP

S

→

→

ART

N

S

The

fact

that light is both wave and particle

NP

VP

Harry told John these ducks can’t fly VP

NP

→ →

VB

NP

told

John

N

S

John

these ducks can’t fly (after Jacobs and Rosenbaum 1968)

these ducks can’t fly

While grammar was viewed as computational in generating this way, meanings were formulated, either by producer or interpreter, in a reductionist paradigm in the mathematical algebraic terms of propositional and predicate logic, the symbolic generalisations of a Kuhnian paradigm. For instance take the formulae for the meaning ‘All men are mortal’, and the syllogism which follows it. All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

∀ x (M(x) → D(x)) M (a) ∴ D (a) (Palmer 1976: 187)

(∀ is the universal quantifer, a stands for Socrates, M stands for ‘is a man’ and D stands for ‘is mortal’) Besides formalising meanings and logical syllogisms, algebra could be used to create formulae for meaning relations. Hyponymy is one. So to explain the hyponymic relationship between the meaning ‘tulip’ and ‘flower’ semanticists could employ the formula ∀x (T(x) → F(x)), which reads “for all entities, if the entity is a tulip this entails that the entity is a flower”. Another was logical transitivity, which involves three (or more) entities. The relation is transitive if, when it holds between the first and the second entities and also between the second and the third entities, it necessarily holds between the first and the third. For example if John is in front of Mary and Mary is in front of Bill, then John is in front of Bill. Transitivity is defined by the formula: ∀x ∀y ∀z (R(x,y) & R(y,z)) → R(x,z). “A relation is transitive if, for all entities x, y, and z, when a relation holds

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between x and y and the same relation holds between y and z, this entails that the same relation holds between x and z”. (Note that logical transitivity is not to be confused with grammatical transitivity.) 8.2.3. The universals of language versus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Chomsky went further than many other linguists in idealisation, generalisation, and de-contextualisation, by suggesting that at some deep structure level languages were universal, if not identical. These universals of language arose because every human being possessed a language faculty or language acquisition device in the brain/mind that made possible the learning of every “different” natural language, but constrained their possible syntactic structures. For decades this highly idealised model of linguistic theory dominated North American linguistics, so much so that researchers, like Deborah Tannen, who wished to investigate real discourse in its social context, were forced into anthropology departments (Tannen 1989). The search for linguistic universals was something like the quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend, which led to the destruction of the Round Table community. The quest for universal grammar is probably over, Tomasello (2009) proclaiming that “Universal Grammar is Dead”. However, there is something of a paradox here. Although universals of language were emphasised in Chomskyan linguistics, seeking the ultimate unifying abstractness, the syntactic and semantic rules were supposed to allow the maximum creativity, the potential to generate an infinite number of totally unique sentences; universality at one end of the theory and uniqueness at the other. Conversely, the more contextualised genre theory and priming theory have been criticised for underplaying the potential for language to be used creatively by insisting on the need for learners of English to take into account patterns above the grammatical level that inhibit creativity. For other, often European, linguists, who reacted to Chomsky, abstract universals were not the most obvious phenomenon in need of explanation. George Steiner (1975), himself multilingual, was struck rather by the diversity and the multiplicity of the world’s languages: How are we to rationalize the fact that human beings of identical ethnic provenance, living on the same terrain, under equal climatic and ecological conditions, often organised in the same types of communal structure, sharing kinship systems and beliefs, speak entirely different languages? (Steiner 1975: 54) Why does homo sapiens, whose digestive tract has evolved and functions in precisely the same complicated ways the world over, whose

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals biochemical fabric and genetic potential are essentially common, the delicate runnels of whose cortex are wholly akin in all peoples and at every stage of social evolution – why does this unified, though individually unique mammalian species not use one common language? (Steiner 1975: 50)

Benjamin Lee Whorf , in contrast with Chomsky and his followers like Steven Pinker (1994), denied any kind of universal semantics, even to the extent of dismissing the possibility of commensurability between meanings in different languages (Whorf 1956: 57–65). I think most linguists would now accept at least a weaker form of his and Edward Sapir’s linguistic relativity hypothesis, i.e. that the vocabulary and grammar of a particular language predispose the users of that language to think in certain ways about themselves, other members of society and the world around them. According to this version, speaking one language makes it difficult, but not impossible, to think like the speakers of another language.1 This possibility allows for commensurability and therefore is a weak version of the hypothesis. It was something of a revelation to me, as a speaker of only English and French, to learn Thai and be confronted with the fact it has no single word for ‘brother’. In Thai the primary criterion for categorising siblings is by seniority, rather than by sex as in English and French. So there are no words equivalent to brother or sister, but only “older sibling”, phì:, or “younger sibling”, nớ:ŋ. This classification has implications for cultural practice. Traditionally Thais’ elder siblings may take the role of substitute parent and can give orders and make demands of younger siblings. Along with this goes the responsibility for their welfare, for example by helping to pay for their education. Moreover, “sibling” seniority transfers beyond the family. Thais use the words phì: or nớ:ŋ as terms of address, rather like second-person pronouns, not only with blood siblings, but also with friends. As a consequence, when you start a conversation with a stranger and want to be friendly, and if you can’t tell if they are older than you, you have to ask them about relative age. This example shows how commonsense categories are actually languagespecific and affect verbal and non-verbal behaviour. They also influence perception, since Thai culture forces new acquaintances to look for features of relative age when initiating friendly discourse. It is evidence for at least a weak form of linguistic relativity. One might put it like Yann Martel: “Isn’t telling about something – using words, English or Japanese –

1 Theorising and evidence for an at least weak form of the hypothesis mounts up. Lakoff (1987), Gumperz and Levinson (1991), Levinson (2009), and Evans and Levinson (2009) include sympathetic treatments. Anthropological evidence can be found in Gordon (2004), Everett (2005), Thierry et al. (2009), etc.

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already something of an invention? Isn’t looking upon this world already something of an invention?” (Martel 2002: 405). Realities are invented or constructed by language and discoursal practice, and the perceptions influenced by them; we do not just refer to a pre-existing reality (see Figure 10.1, p. 271). The Thai example also illustrates a theme running through this book that contiguity of experience and practice and the similarity systems of classification are mutually dependent, as with Agnes. The ways in which language affects perception is clear when we consider how a child acquires the phonology of her language. The language a child hears will depend upon recognising some sound distinctions, and not others. Her brain will therefore be trained to perceive these languagespecific distinctions (phonological/phonemic) and to ignore other sound distinctions which are important in other languages (only phonetic). Famously Japanese and Thai do not perceive the difference between /r/ and /l/, for instance, though it is important in English (Kuhl 2000). These are phonetic contrasts rather than phonological ones for Japanese speakers. One crude distinction made between languages is between those which are relatively context-dependent for their meanings and those which are context-independent. Chinese and Thai belong to the former type, without tense systems, dispensing with articles and inflexions, and allowing verbs to stand as sentences and in answers to questions without grammatical subjects. For a flavour, a literal word by word translation of a Thai two line dialogue would be A: “Eat mango already or not yet” B: “Eat already”, which contrast with the English “Have you eaten the mango/mangoes yet?” “Yes I have”. In Hong Kong commercial contracts are issued in both Chinese and English, but where there is a dispute about their meaning the English version prevails. Presumably this is because English legalese is more successfully context-independent and therefore less potentially ambiguous than the Chinese. It may also suggest that Chinese thought is more attuned to the contiguities of context, English more to abstraction from context (see 3.2.2, p. 78, 12.2.3, pp. 312–313). 8.2.4. Non-conceptual meaning and reinstating context One further problem with the standardised and de-contextualised approach within a Chomskyan universalist paradigm is that it tended to concentrate solely on conceptual meaning, the conveying of ideas or propositions. This is why meaning and meaning relations were thought to be captured by predicate logic. However, this conceptual focus marginalises other aspects of meaning, many of which were detailed by Leech (1981): 1) Connotative meaning, what a word means by virtue of what it refers to; so, for example, the formal definition of ‘a dog’, the semantic criteria

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2)

3)

4)

5)

Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals necessary for literal application, would not include the contingent features we normally associate with its referents, e.g. [+ TAIL], [+ FUR], [+ 4 LEGS], [BARKS]. (But, as I noted in 4.4.2, p. 103, cognitive linguists see no need for the distinction between conceptual and connotative meaning, that is, between knowledge of language and knowledge of the world.) Collocative meaning, the associations with words occurring in the same text environment, discussed in great detail in Chapter 4 on priming, and on which textual metonymy depends. Thematic meaning, the organisation of the message in terms of order and emphasis, including the distribution of given and new information, exemplified in 7.3.3, p. 178 on the development of logical arguments through nominalisation in the Theme. Affective meaning to do with the expression of emotion, as, at its most extreme, in swear words, which are often drained of conceptual meaning, e.g. bloody does not mean ‘covered in blood’. Social meaning, which, following Crystal and Davy (1969), may be elaborated in the form of these questions: does it tell you exactly which individual is speaking (idiosyncrasy), what class the speaker belongs to or what geographical area they come from (dialects), their age, their status and intimacy in relation to their interlocutor, or what occupational genre they are participating in when speaking/writing?

All these kinds of meaning re-instate context. Connotative meaning 1) reinstates the associations built up over experience of the referential context, collocative meaning 2) and thematic meaning 3) refect the textual context or co-text, and the affective 4) and social 5) account for the interpersonal and cultural context of communication. 8.2.5. Systemic Functional Grammar Set up in distinction from Chomskyan paradigms of linguistics were functional grammars, such as Systemic Functional Grammar/Linguistics (SFG/SFL). For SFG the data on which to base grammatical theories are not the intuitions of an ideal speaker-listener but rather the actual manifestations or instantiations of language in text. And crucially, SFL recognises interpersonal and textual meanings as just as important as the logical and conceptual/ideational. In fact, Leech suggested that above all communication fulfils an interpersonal function and that interpersonal meanings are achieved through the conceptual/ideational, and, in turn, the conceptual/ideational are achieved through the textual (Leech 1983). Moreover, by developing theories of genre and register, which recognise the social and cultural context of communication, SFL counters the extreme forms of de-contextualisation in the Chomskyan tradition. One important aspect of the interpersonal aspects of meaning and of genre is that they recognise human purposes and intentions. Purpose is irrelevant

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to more abstract theorizing, whether in linguistics or science in general. In addition, SFL is sympathetic to the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: languages do not just describe, but through their different lexical categories and grammar more or less determine an interpretation and construction of the inner and outer world of experience. Languages recognise distinctions and categories in different ways according to the different needs and purposes of their cultures. One might say that, metaphorically speaking, Chomsky took the engine of language into the laboratory and disassembled it into parts to see how it worked in the abstract, and how any engine depended upon similar fundamental processes and structures of universal dynamics and mechanics. Whereas SFL put the engine in a car to investigate how it operated when driven across country and in different driving conditions, and how the specifics of the engine reflected the terrain.2 The contention of SFG is that the structure of the engine is inexplicable except in terms of performance when driven across country, because the demands made upon it determine its structure and changes to its structure over time. I illustrated this when showing how nominalisation met the needs of scientific theorizing (7.3.3, p. 175). Even so, SFG is Systemic as well as Functional. Within this theory, a whole network of systems operates at different levels with entry conditions followed by a series of interlocking choices, many of them binary. For instance, in Figure 8.1, the transitivity system whose entry condition is the Material Process clause demands these system choices: transitive or ergative; if transitive, middle, pseudo-effective, or effective; and, if effective, goal-directed or goal-achieving. At the end of the system diagram these choices will be realised by participant-process configurations which can be instantiated by the sample sentences given. Other systems of semantic choices in the theory take the grammar all the way to the right where we arrive at lexis, so the project is to make a system map of the whole lexico-grammatical continuum (Hasan 1987, Matthiessen 1995). These systems depend upon an extensive network of classes of paradigmatic choices at the most general and abstract on the left and increasingly more specific as we move to the right. The discrete classes and binary/ ternary system choices are an either/or matter, and the use of the system diagrams persist, despite recognition that these either/or choices among discrete typological classes do not always capture semantic reality (Martin and Matthiessen 1991). In its stress on systems SFG also participates

2 “Dennett is right that if you’re playing against an electronic chess machine, you’ll do better by adopting an intentional stance than by trying to work out its innards. But what if you want to understand how the mechanism works? Here you might want to adopt a different highly idealised model – perhaps along the lines of a network of M-P neurons – rather than drown in the details” (Appiah 2017: 55).

204

Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals + Ambient: ‘it’s raining’ ‘it’s snowing’ (pseudo-) Actor. Process. MIDDLE + superventive: ‘he fell’ ‘he died’ Actor (– control). Process. – Ambient – superventive: ‘the children are running’ Actor (+ control). Process .

TRANSITIVE PSEUDO-EFFECTIVE: ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ ‘they’re running a race’ Actor. Process. Range . Goal-directed: ‘the man hit the child’ ‘the dog chased the pig’ Actor (+ intentional). Process. Goal . EFFECTIVE

Goal-achieving: ‘the arrow hit the target’ Actor (– intentional). Process. Goal.

MIDDLE: ‘the glass broke’ ‘the balloon burst’ Medium. Process .

PSEUDO-EFFECTIVE: ‘the cooling system burst a pipe’ ‘the car broke an axle’ Setting. Process. Medium.

ERGATIVE Instigation-of-process: ‘the cat broke the glass’ Instigator. Process. Medium. EFFECTIVE

Instigation-of action: ‘the mother sat the baby up’ Instigator (+human, +intentional). Process. Medium .

Figure 8.1 System choices for Material Processes (after Davidse 1992)

in the abstracting, classificatory, and taxonomising tendencies of science discussed earlier. A system like this also reflects mathematical computing and information theory. A strong postulate in SFG is that meaning is choice, drawing on early information theory. Information is be quantified as inversely related to probability. So if there is no choice then there is no information, as, for example, in English there is no choice of letter to write after a q except u. 50–50 probability, a choice between two equiprobable units yields one bit of information, or binary digit, the 0 or 1 in computer coding. In SFL language is a social semiotic or complex system of coded meanings with a semantic orientation, unlike Chomsky’s syntactic orientation.

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It takes into account the multifarious codes operating and intersecting in communication in ways ignored by the latter tradition (Halliday 1985: 342–343). For instance stress and intonation, aspects of supra-segmental phonology, are important codes, which function in conjunction with grammatical choice to create complex signifiers (cf. Hasan 1996, Chapter 5 on question tags), or in conjunction with sentence initial particles like well to indicate the kind of speech act about to be performed. In addition, there are the codes of non-verbal body language which, in face-to-face speech interact with other codes (Goatly 1994). It is quite difficult to teach the meanings of intonation codes on particles like well by demonstrating them, without also adopting the facial expressions that complement and reinforce their meaning (try well with a high slightly rising intonation to convey doubt without frowning and narrowing the eyes). 8.2.6. Pragmatics: beyond the linguistic code The fact remains that, however rich our linguistic systems are, and however much they are complemented by priming and interact with other complex coding systems, the meaning communicated cannot be definitively conveyed by semiotic coding. They cannot, for instance, explain how we might go from the surface meaning of “It’s hot in here” to an implied meaning ‘Please open the window’. Therefore even a rich semiotic system needs a theory of how language is used and interpreted in practice, in effect a pragmatic theory, one which reinstates more fully the contiguity dimension. Language does not exist in the abstract. Though we may attempt to describe its syntax in grammar books, or its lexis in dictionaries, it only exists in use. It is not so much an object for dissection as a process for participation. Pragmatics is a theory of linguistic communication between a speaker (writer) and hearer (reader) where the speaker intentionally performs a verbal action on the hearer in a physical and cultural context. It accounts for how the hearer interprets the hearer’s utterance and its implications, including interpreting the kind of intentional action being performed, by reference to the mutually recognised co-text, context, and cultural and background knowledge (Figure 8.2). While semantics is about what lexis and grammar mean, pragmatics is about what a speaker in a specific context means, i.e. intends to effect by what they say. Understanding an utterance is not simply, or even necessarily, a matter of coding and decoding semantics, as illustrated by the example in our introduction of taking a bottle of aspirin out of one’s handbag in “reply” to the question “how is your headache?” The role of context in interpretation is paramount. We do not simply consult our mental lexicon and grammar to choose from the paradigms there to create a syntagm with explicit, precise, unambiguous, and perfectly expressed meanings which can then be decoded by a hearer. Our utterances, if and when decoded, will sometimes be

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1) Background factual knowledge 2) Socio-cultural knowledge, including systems of genres 3) Situational knowledge (specific genre, speakers, physical context, and institutional space) 4) Co-textual knowledge 5) Communicative code knowledge: linguistic/paralinguistic/non-verbal Figure 8.2 Sources of knowledge in discourse processing

inexplicit, vague, ambiguous, and incorporate phrases whose referents need to be identified, and often will not be understood without inferencing processes. Pragmatic meaning, by stressing the speaker’s intentions and the recognition of them by the hearer opens the way to a different shade of meaning for meaning, that is, ‘purpose’; “the meaning of life” might be understood as ‘the purpose of life’. Purpose is also a key aspect of genre theory, since in functional linguistics, like SFG, discourse and language are assumed to be the way they are because they are designed to facilitate purposeful actions. Fairclough (2001: 122), in his diagramming of how society/culture is realised through institutions and how institutions determine discourse types/genres, lists “purposes” as an aspect of situation and the recognition of “what is going on”. (A critique of an anthropocentric view of purpose is presented in 11.3.3, p. 295.) The two earliest theories of pragmatics in the English tradition were those of Grice and Leech. According to Grice, conversation, or any other interactive social behaviour, is guided by the Co-operative Principle (CP), which runs thus: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. More specifically Grice postulated four maxims: a.

The Maxim of Quantity i. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange) ii. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

b. The Maxim of Quality Try to make your contribution one that is true: i. Do not say what you believe is false ii. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence c.

The Maxim of Relation Be relevant

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d. The Maxim of Manner Be perspicuous: i. ii. iii. iv.

Avoid obscurity of expression Avoid ambiguity Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) Be orderly (Grice 1975: 45)

It soon became clear to discourse analysts that floutings or violations of the CP are not random, but depend on the systematic application of other principles to do with social relations. Leech (1983: 132–138), therefore, took up Grice’s hint of the need for a Politeness Principle (PP) to complement, or as a necessary part of, co-operation, with the six following maxims: Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement, Sympathy. Later he incorporated the six maxims into the grand strategy of politeness (Leech, 2005: 12–17), including adding opinion reticence and feeling reticence into the maxims of agreement and sympathy respectively. These maxims apply to the classes of speech acts identified by John Searle (Searle 1969): directives – attempts to make the hearer do something; commissives – committing the speaker to doing something; expressives – the speaker expressing their feelings; assertives – making descriptive statements. Leech’s maxims are as follows: Generosity (in directives and commissives) a) Minimise benefit to self [b) Maximise cost to self] Tact (in directives and commissives) a) Minimise cost to other [b) Maximise benefit to other] Approbation (in expressives and assertives) a) Minimise dispraise of other [b) Maximise praise of other] Modesty (in expressives and assertives) a) Minimise praise of self [b) Maximise dispraise of self] Agreement (in assertives): a) Minimise disagreement between self and other [b) Maximise agreement between self and other] Opinion-reticence (in assertives) Maximise reticence in asserting self’s opinions Sympathy (in assertives and expressives) a) Minimise antipathy between self and other

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals [b) Maximise sympathy between self and other] Feeling-reticence (in expressives): Maximise reticence in expressing self’s feelings

Leech’s theory is important because it emphasises the interpersonal aspects of communication rather than the purely conceptual aspects which Grice and Relevance theory prioritise in the vein of traditional semantics. Politeness theory centres on this important aspect of the contiguities of the speech situation and joint participation in action genres. In using Searle’s speech act categories, it recognises language as action rather than object. Relevance theory, one of the recent developments of pragmatics, builds on Grice’s theory. Sperber and Wilson explore in detail how the result of semantic decoding is inadequate for communication. Often it is not explicit enough to even convey a full proposition. To reach this proposition we need to 1) disambiguate, 2) assign reference to, and 3) enrich (make less vague) the decoded message. Secondly, decoding doesn’t indicate the speaker’s attitude to the proposition. And thirdly, it leaves unstated the implicatures of the utterance. To illustrate the inexplicitness of the propositions conveyed by real utterances, consider the causes of misunderstanding in the following rather tasteless joke: Mr and Mrs Harris were desperate for children, after 10 years of marriage. So, as a last resort, they decided to employ the services of a proxy father whom they had never met. On the morning when the sperm donor was due to call, Mr Harris left for work and wished his rather anxious wife good luck. By chance, that same morning a travelling baby photographer was in the area and called at the Harris’s house. Mrs Harris answered the door. “Good morning, madam’, said the photographer. “You don’t know me, but I’ve come to . . . ” “Yes, I know”, she interrupted, “there’s no need to explain. Come in. I’ve been expecting you”. “Really?” said the photographer, thinking his advertising must have paid off. “I must say I have made a speciality of babies”. “That’s what my husband and I were hoping”, she said, “So where do we start?” [Question] “Well I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch, and perhaps a couple on the bed. If we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the results”. [Reply] “I do hope so”, she said nervously. “Can we get this over quickly?” [Request]

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“In my line of work, I have to take my time”, he replied [Refusal]. “It’s no good rushing these things. I’d love to be in and out in five minutes, but you might be disappointed”. [Account/Statement] “That’s true”, she replied, knowingly. [Agreement] The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of baby pictures. “This was done on top of a bus”, he explained. “Wow!” exclaimed Mrs Harris. “And these twins turned out really well considering their mother was so difficult to work with”. “In what way?” asked Mrs Harris. “She insisted we go outdoors, so I had to take her over to Hyde Park. People were crowding four deep to watch. It took over three hours to do in all”. By now Mrs Harris was looking decidedly worried. “Right”, he said, “I’ll just get my tripod”. “Tripod?” “Yes, I need the tripod to rest my Canon on”. At which point Mrs Harris fainted. (Tibballs 2006: 54) Mrs Harris disambiguates, assigns reference, and enriches the bolded text in ways not intended by the photographer. “Shoot” is three ways ambiguous: the literal meaning, the metaphorical photographic meaning, and the metaphorical sexual meaning. Both metaphorical meanings and the schemas they activate are reinforced by the equally ambiguous homophone “Canon/cannon” /kænən/. The misinterpretation of the reference of “two”, “it”, “this”, and “my Canon” is essential to the humour as well. In this particular joke the lack of clarity that prolongs Mrs Harris’ misunderstanding largely derives from a lack of specifcity of reference or vagueness: “I have made a speciality of babies”, “positions”, “results”, “these things”, “be in and out”, “done”, “to work with”, etc., which she enriches wrongly (Goatly 2012). Crucially, some of this enrichment is attributable to metonymical interpretations which depend upon accessing an action genre/schema context. In some sense understanding often involves accessing a relevant schema. “I like apples” accesses a different schema (eating) from “I like grandma” (affectionate relationship), except in the joke: “I don’t like grandma”. “Then eat up your vegetables instead”. So one could, for example see “I have made a speciality of babies” as an intended textual metonymy for “I have made a speciality of photographing babies”, misinterpreted by Mrs Harris as “producing babies”. Mrs Harris mis-supplies the contextual contiguities. The alert reader will have noticed that I mention disambiguation in the previous paragraph, which might seem to contradict the claim of priming theory that ambiguity is actually rather rare. But remember that this is a contrived joke, and that humour depends upon overriding priming. I do

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in fact believe that Relevance theory overestimates the need for disambiguation in non-humorous texts (Goatly 1994). In addition to disambiguating, assigning reference, and reducing vagueness by enrichment, which Mrs Harris does in ways unintended by the photographer, pragmatics is also concerned with what intentional actions are being performed here, and how they are interpreted. I have suggested some speech act labels in brackets, to illustrate the kinds of actions intended. The paramount concept in Relevance theory is that information in an utterance is relevant to you if it interacts with existing assumptions/ beliefs to strengthen them, eliminate them, or, more importantly, produce new knowledge by contextual implications. These assumptions, as per the description of pragmatics above, will include background general knowledge, cultural knowledge, including the kinds of genres operating in the culture, knowledge of the physical context, of the speaker and hearer, and information from the preceding text (Figure 8.2). So, in this example, the misinterpretations arise because the background knowledge of the action genres in which the participants are involved does not match. The photographer assumes he is about to take part in a photography shoot, and that Mrs Harris understands this, whereas Mrs Harris assumes that he is a surrogate father about to inseminate her and that he understands this. (Whether such a flesh-to-flesh, rather than artificial, insemination is an action genre actually recognised in any culture is beside the point, as it serves the purpose of the joke.) Given the different background assumptions, not only will Mrs Harris explicate the utterance into a full proposition in a way different from that intended by the photographer, but also the contextual implications of what is said will be different. So when Mrs Harris says “There’s no need to explain. Come in. I’ve been expecting you”, the photographer expresses some surprise, “Really?”, because what she says conflicts with the assumption that this is a “cold call” and she cannot be expecting him. However, instead of contesting Mrs Harris’ utterance, he supplies a new implicated contextual assumption which can produce a series of implicated conclusions the last of which aligns with the meaning she has stated: “I have been advertising in this area. Therefore she knows who I am. If I have been advertising therefore she will assume I need work. If she knows who I am and that I need work she might be expecting me”. He thereby eliminates his original assumption that he is unknown to her and that this is a completely cold call. Or one could consider the process of deriving the contextual implication at the very end: “Right”, he said, “I’ll just get my tripod”. “Tripod?” “Yes, I need the tripod to rest my Canon on”. At which point Mrs Harris fainted.

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He has said he needs a tripod to rest his cannon, i.e. penis on. You only need to rest objects on something if they are heavy. Therefore the penis is heavy. If a penis is so heavy as to need support it will also be enormously long and thick. Therefore he has an enormously long and thick penis. 8.2.7. Relevance to genre Though this is an artificial example, the interpretative strategies using context as a resource count as evidence, because the reader uses them and imputes them to the characters. I chose this joke to illustrate the importance of generic context to an understanding of Relevance. Relevance theory was seen as a complement to semantics in the Chomskyan tradition (Deirdre Wilson personal communication), bridging the gap between the semantics of the system and how language is used in context. Given how de-contextualised that tradition was, and how narrowly it interpreted meaning as conceptual/ideational, this gap was huge. It also meant that the concept of Relevance was somewhat vapid and abstract, unless the particular purposes inherent in the situation could be specified. Developing Relevance theory as an add-on to Chomsky was somewhat like the process of producing semi-skimmed milk: removing all the fat first (Chomsky), and later recombining half of it (Relevance theory). Some of the fat is still missing, but the concept of genre can help find a proportion of what is missing. Once the generic context is recognised, then the relevant purposes and a whole set of relevant background assumptions become available to operationalise the principle. This is a further step from the abstract towards the particular, even though genre is also an abstract category. This joke illustrates how metonymic enrichment depends upon accessing a relevant action genre. I have attempted elsewhere to show how genre and Relevance theory might complement each other in the interpretation of metaphors (Goatly 2011: Chapter 10).3 Briefly, the generic context can tell us: whether a unit of text is likely to be metaphorical or not – “eagle” is likely to be metaphorical during a game of golf as the ‘bird’ meaning is irrelevant; what kinds of grounds to look for in the interpretation of the metaphor, that is how they align with the purposes of the genre – when interpreting “the kidney is the sewer of the body” in a biology class, emotional implicatures for “sewer” are not relevant; and whether to spend time exploring the grounds at great length – poetry is (re-)read at a leisurely rate, and this gives scope for detailed exploration of grounds, with no particular cut-off point for generating implicatures.

3 I call the theory 2(GR)AMS, shorthand for Genre-Relevance Graded Risk Approach to Metaphor Scalarity.

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The purposes inherent in genres will also dictate the degree to which the target and grounds are made explicit in the text and thereby reduce the need for inference. So explanatory metaphors in scientific writing will spell out the target and grounds in detail, for instance in comparing electricity with water in a plumbing system the correspondences between resistance and width of pipe, voltage and water pressure, and amperage and rate of flow will be made clear. 8.2.8. Principles not rules The final point I wish to make about pragmatics is that it employs principles rather than rules. That is to say the principle of Relevance, like Grice’s Co-operative Principle which the theory refined and developed, is a background (cultural) assumption providing a mental context for verbal communication. Unlike a rule, which is either observed or broken, it may be adhered to in differing degrees, or abandoned in favour of a competing principle. As when the maxim of quality is abandoned in favour of the maxim of brevity in order to avoid too much prolixity, e.g. in replying to “How much do you earn?” with “30,000”, when in fact you earn £31,724.50. But, in any case, discoursal behaviour will be evaluated with the principle in mind. Communication, being pragmatic and its coded meanings uncertain, is, despite priming, bound to be risky to some extent, and this is reflected both in the guiding principles and in the fact that implied meanings are more or less doubtful. For instance, the photographer in the joke must have some doubts about Mrs Harris’s “I’ve been expecting you”, and under different, normal, circumstances he might have dismissed this as a mistake on her part, and attempted to eliminate the assumption or implicated conclusion which she expressed by this statement. Instead he accesses the somewhat uncertain assumption that his advertising has been so successful she can identify him and expect a call. (The reader of the joke might find this assumption even more doubtful.) So with pragmatics we have escaped from the rigid application of rules and systems found in the “science” of semantics, even the semantics of SFG. 8.2.9. Deixis, indexicality, and reflexivity: language as use and discourse ethnomethodology I have already mentioned ethnomethodology in its insistence on the uniqueness of context, and in the first part of this chapter discussed the problems this raises for sociology as a science. However, ethnomethodology has also been applied to linguistics, in the branch of discourse analysis known as conversational analysis (Sacks et al. 1974, Schegloff et al. 1977, Drew and Heritage 1993, Sacks 1995, Schegloff 2007). Just how far ethnomethodology pushes us from the de-contextualised scientific approach

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to linguistics is apparent in the widening of the use of the term deixis or indexicality. Deixis was acknowledged in a limited way in these “scientific” approaches. For instance, in the analysis of the noun phrase in Chapter 6, I identified the deictic element which anchors the phrase to its context. Deictic meanings, were, however, originally regarded as marginal. To start with, they were only acknowledged to avoid an embarrassment to semantics in the Chomskyan mould, before taking on more and more importance as fundamental in ethnomethodology. What caused the embarrassment? Semanticists, accustomed to the analysis of written language, found it difficult to cope with certain shifts of meaning that were essentially context dependent, and they attempted to isolate this “problem” by gathering them under the label of deictic terms. Deictic meanings were defined as ‘meanings which depend upon who is speaking, where they are speaking, and when they are speaking’. Initially such meanings were regarded as somewhat anomalous, confining them to words such as I, here, and now, but it was already apparent that the deictic category was much wider than anticipated. For a start, all the tenses of English, with the exception of the present simple, involve time deixis. In “I will do it (tomorrow)” the “will” (and “tomorrow”) mean a time (day) after the utterance, “I did it (yesterday)” to a time (day) before the utterance. More complicated tenses refer to other periods or points of time relative to the time of utterance. For instance, in “When he came to work in this firm, he had already done a lot of cataloguing” the past in past “had done” refers to a time twice removed in the past in relation to the time of speaking. In “By next Wednesday I will have completed the painting” the past in future “will have completed” indicates a time period stretching up to the fourth day in the week after the utterance, during which the completion of the painting will take place. As for place deixis, it is obvious that “the post office” in “Can you take this to the post office, please” is likely to refer to the local post office closest to the speaker. Definite reference will often be to objects in the physical context, the here and now. And the same singular noun phrase can be used to refer to an indefinitely large number of different objects, with this reference determined by the context. As for person deixis, a priest saying to John and Paul “I’m willing to marry you on one Saturday in March”, clearly “marry” will have a different meaning from John saying the same to Paul. Aspects of social meaning reinstated by Leech and Crystal and Davy (8.2.4, p. 201) are often deictic, notably age, geographical dialect, class dialect, occupation, and idiosyncrasy. Age relates to time deixis, which is inevitable since meanings change; wireless meant something different in the 1950s from what it does now. Geographical dialect creates place deixis; corn means something different in the US from the UK. Person deixis is realised in the remaining three meaning types. In class dialect;

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supper means something different for upper middle class Brits from what it means for the working class. In occupational genres; internal examination means different things for a head-teacher and a gynaecologist when speaking in their respective institutional contexts. In idiosyncrasy, where individuals give their own unique meanings to words; discussing linguistic relativity and the relation between world and language, I often use my private definition of confer ‘simultaneously construct and refer’. The contiguities of context in spoken face-to-face communication are, however, largely absent in cases of written and printed communication. Some kinds of writing are quite abstracted from the shared deictic contexts of place, person, and time of face-to-face speech. We may not know where they were written, when, or by whom. Writing and print is portable, so it potentially transcends deictic place. The exceptions to this are public notices and signs, which often take on meaning from their location. For instance I used to frequent a pub where, over the rather low door leading to its restaurant was written the phrase “Duck or Grouse” (‘lower your head or complain’/‘this kind of poultry served through here’)! There are notices, however, that, despite relying on place deixis, are rendered more or less useless because they give no indication of the time deixis of writing or posting, for instance “will be back in two hours” on your office door, or “free beer tomorrow” outside a pub. The problem in these cases is that, being permanent, writing potentially transcends time. Finding the title of a book in our internet search, such as Recent Trends in Artificial Neural Networks or the series New Accents, we have no idea how recent or new these trends and accents are unless we look further to discover their publication dates. As for persons, even if we know the name of the author, and they are not using a nom de plume, this may give us very little information about them compared to a speaker with whom we are talking face to face. And at the extreme, Wikipedia entries, often with multiple authors, are anonymous. The fundamentally indexical, deictic, or referential nature of language in use was insisted upon by Wittgenstein and, taking their cue from him, ethnomethodologists expanded the concept of indexicality to the maximum. A good example is “That is a nice one” variously used in three different contexts: a guest looking at the photos in his host’s photo album; a young woman pointing out a ring to her boyfriend in a jeweller’s shop window; or a greengrocer pointing at a particular lettuce to a customer. Meaning here becomes pragmatic in three senses: 1) “that” and “one” refer to different objects; 2) “nice” will have a more specific meaning as a result of the different referents (sometimes called semantic relativity), and different social or generic situations; 3) what the speaker is attempting to do with language, what speech acts are being performed: the first situation suggests a compliment to the person in the photo or the person who took the photo; the second a hint; the third an offer (Heritage 1984: 142–143).

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It is tempting to link the pervasiveness of deixis to relativity theory. Since the earth is a sphere, ‘up’ and ‘down’ are not absolute notions, but relative to where we find ourselves on the earth, i.e. to the deictic centre of place we start from. In his theory of special relativity Einstein discovered that the notion of simultaneity is relative, and we might relate this to time deixis. The discovery of quantum theory is that all the properties (variables) of all objects are relational, just as in the case of speed, where your speed is relative to the speed of the object on which you are moving (Rovelli 2021: 73). Similarly with semantic relativity, the meaning of “big” is different when referring to a mouse or an elephant. Or more fundamentally with Whorf’s linguistic relativity, the world we perceive and act in is constituted relative to the language we speak. The interaction between discourse and context can, from this perspective, be explored a little further. Not only are utterances and descriptions indexical, they are also “‘reflexive’ in maintaining or altering the sense of the activities and unfolding circumstances in which they occur” (Heritage 1984: 140). This suggests that they become part of their own context. So that in the joke above, once Mrs Harris says “Can we get this over quickly?” the request changes the discourse situation from what it was previously. There is a problematic consequence of this reflexivity for a “science” of discourse: an identical utterance in a different position in the discourse will be given a different speech act value. So “I can help you with your baggage” is an offer if it is first in a pair of utterances, but if it follows the indirect request “I’m having a bit of a problem carrying all this stuff”, it counts as a compliance. If there is no way of identifying a speech act independent of its position in a sequence, how can we reliably detect patterns of discourse development or arrive at any rules for it? (Levinson 1983). In speech act theory one class of speech acts, declarations, are held to be unique, because they bring about institutional change simply by being uttered by the ratified speaker in the ratified place, e.g. “I declare the meeting open” or “I now pronounce you husband and wife” (Searle 1969). The reflexivity recognised by Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists suggests that there is an aspect of declarations about many other speech acts. Taken further this might also be a recognition of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language constructs realities, rather than just representing them. As I would say they “confer” a reality, meaning, idiosyncratically, both constructing and referring to it. 8.2.10. The trajectory of applied linguistics and language teaching I do not have the space here for an account of the ways in which language teaching methods developed historically in relation to our two dimensions of meanings, but some brief comments may be of interest. One could begin with the grammar-translation method, fashionable in the

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19th century when literature was predominant and reading and translating a foreign language was the aim. This typically put a great deal of emphasis on the paradigms of grammar. For instance, in the learning of Latin students would be expected to be able to conjugate verbs and decline nouns, i.e. learn the paradigms for different word (sub-)classes. Famously they would be conjugating the verb amo: amo ‘I love’, amas ‘you (singular) love’, amat ‘he, she, it loves’, amamus ‘we love’, amatis ‘you (plural) love, amant ‘they love’; amabo ‘I will love’, amabis ‘you will love’, etc. Or declining the noun mensa: mensa (nominative or subject case), mensam (accusative or direct object case), mensae (genitive ‘of a table’), mensae (dative ‘to or for a table’), mensa (ablative ‘by with or from a table’), etc. Later methods, including situational language teaching, the direct and audiolingual methods (Richards and Rogers 1986), put much more emphasis on the context, by using real objects/situations to convey meaning, and crucially relied heavily on sentences illustrating grammatical patterns, syntagms, in which paradigmatic substitutions were inserted. Typically a teacher would model sentences such as “this is a book”, while pointing to the book, then “this is a tin”, then “this is a cup”, and then ask students to repeat the appropriate sentences when the objects were pointed to. They might subsequently be asked to use other vocabulary for objects to create their own sentences by substituting the noun in the slot. So the paradigms were presented in syntagmatic contexts. Total physical response was a teaching method which involved physical actions in response to language, and might be supposed to exploit the action genres in which language is first acquired. Students would initially be asked to carry out the physical actions commanded by the teacher, and then learn to give similar commands to fellow students. Communicative language teaching was not as narrow as total physical response but, like it, put much more emphasis on how language was used to get things done, that is in the context of a genre, and the purposes and intentions of these communicative activities. Typically a situation would be created in the classroom which necessitated the exchange of information between students in a collaborative task, and the criterion for success would not necessarily be grammatical accuracy but the completion of this task. Sometimes the tasks were somewhat artificial, e.g. two students would be given different sets of information and would have to communicate it to each other in order to solve a problem. Clearly this method embeds language in the interpersonal aspects of the context, and highlights intentionality and pragmatics. There were various attempts to write grammars organised along the lines of communicative needs, e.g. Leech and Svartvik’s A Communicative Grammar of English (1975), in order to provide a framework for the grammatical structures necessary for different kinds of communicative tasks and actions.

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Even in the days when grammar-translation focusing on reading and written translation was the most prevalent method, there was still the need for travellers to communicate orally in a foreign language. Hence the use of phrasebooks, which relied on the contiguity dimension to such an extent that they furnished whole phrases or sentences which could be used without any paradigmatic substitutions, providing they matched the communicative needs of an exact and very specific situation, e.g. “Could you please phone for a doctor”. Such prefabricated phrases are useful when only a small range of communicative moves are necessary, so they may be related to the notion of restricted genres within genre theory. For occupational genres, such as service encounters and air traffic control, where speakers function effectively if they perform a limited range of specific and well-defined moves and routines, communicative formulae can be taught for each of these moves. This gave rise to functional and notional syllabuses in language teaching. In a crude simplification, we could perhaps see various moves away from the grammar-translation method of language teaching as a reinstatement of the contiguity dimension, on situated oral language use, for interpersonal and pragmatic purposes according to generic contexts. We have noted a similar trend in learners’ dictionaries (4.1), where naturalsounding collocational and other primings are factored into the examples and definitions. Grammar in the grammar-translation method will often be inadequate for producing natural-sounding language. Creating a word-by-word translation by substitution of words of equivalent meaning while observing the grammar of the target language would be likely to produce sentences of the kind Hoey constructed: “Through winter, rides between Oslo and Hammerfest use thirty hours up in a bus, though why travellers would select to ride there then might be pondered”. 8.2.11. Summary of semantic, pragmatic, and contextual factors in discourse meaning By way of summary I suggest that the production and interpretation of utterances depends upon the kinds of knowledge in Figure 8.2 (p. 206): 1) Background factual knowledge. 2) Sociocultural knowledge, including of systems of genres. 3) Situational knowledge: specific genre, hearers, physical context, and institutional space. 4) Co-textual knowledge. 5) Communicative code knowledge: linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal. All of these are exploited in systems of inference guided by pragmatic principles, such as Relevance. We note that the “scientific” approach to meaning initially only concerned itself with the first part of 5), the linguistic code, and more recently 4). And that scientific approaches to 2) and 3), (let alone 1)) have inherent problems of providing useful paradigms. And that the reflexive and indexical nature of 4) and 5) also raise problems for a scientific approach dependent upon classification and standardisation.

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Nevertheless, linguistics has increasingly emphasised the contiguities of communication in 2), 3), and 4) as ways of resisting the abstractions of 5). And this has been reflected in changing methods and fashions of language teaching.

8.3. Resisting classification and emphasizing process: GM Hopkins, Duns Scotus, Daoism, Buddhism Arithmetic quantification depends upon classification and classification depends upon ignoring differences and highlighting those similarities on which the classification is based. Only by ignoring difference by idealisation are the paradigmatic taxonomies of science established. We have seen how this creates problems in social science (8.1), and how developments in (socio-)linguistics and pragmatics have countered the de-contextualisation inherent in classification (8.2). The imposition of the similarity dimension also runs counter to philosophical trends which celebrate diversity and individual distinctiveness. Here I will briefly explore the ideas of Duns Scotus and his disciple the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the Western tradition, and Taoism and Buddhism, from the Eastern. 8.3.1. Hopkins and Duns Scotus Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19th century Jesuit priest and poet, was not the only 19th century poet to resist the worldview which believed in quantification and universal laws. William Blake saw “infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour”, and famously pleaded “May God us keep from Single vision and Newton’s sleep” (Lent 2017: 361). His engraving of Newton shows him measuring with dividers or compasses (‘Blake’s Newton’ 2021). But Hopkins is especially significant for his emphasis on individuality and process philosophy, important to the themes of this book. Hopkins developed the concepts of inscape and instress. Inscape is the uniqueness of all natural phenomena, whether leaf, snowflake, or fingerprint. Every individual, including humans, the most fully individuated, actively expresses its identity – “selves”. Instress is the reciprocal interaction between selving and the human response to it, the reaching out in love to this uniqueness. As a priest, Hopkins believed that instress was a response to the divine, since the individuation of inscape derives from God as creator. These ideas are most clearly expressed in the poem ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’. As kingfshers catch fre, dragonfies draw fame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung fnds tongue to fing out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

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Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Chríst – for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins 1967: 90) It is diffcult to express individuation using words, as their senses inevitably refect categories, but in this poem by stressing the “each” Hopkins is attempting to point to the individual uniqueness of every member of the category. Each different plucked string, swung bell, indeed every mortal, impermanent, transitory thing expresses its individuated essence, selves its inscape, thereby fulflling its divine purpose. Recognising Christ in these selving objects and in the ten thousand different faces or unique features of every human face is our instress response to the divine dynamic creativity. Hopkins’ inscape derived from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus’ concept of haeccitas or ‘thisness’. (I noted earlier the significant use of “haeccities” as a term in ethnomethodology (3.1.3).) Haeccitas is defined as the features in a particular object that make it different from other members of its class, for instance the difference between the general features of humans and a specific person like Donald Trump or Jacinda Ardern. Haeccitas inhered in every created thing, inanimate, animal or human. It was the mark of its Creation by God, and it was active. So it was lived out in action and in movement: each thing veered towards a particular destiny or purpose. This process involved the will, the expression of individuality. (‘Inscape and Instress’ 2020) Thomas Aquinas thought natural laws were the work of a stable and reliable God, and statements of these laws were objectively true. In contrast, Duns Scotus emphasised the immense power but the unfathomable will of God which was manifest in individual events: these could be observed but one could not state general laws (Feyerabend 1999). 8.3.2. Daoism and Buddhism There are some obvious parallels between Hopkins/Duns Scotus and Daoism, between the concepts of divine instress and the Dao on the one hand, and haeccitas and ziran on the other. Dao is the force which lies at the root of creation and the cycles of nature, the mother of all that keeps

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nature and society in harmony. It may be imagined as two concentric circles: the inner Dao is the unknowable force which drives creation; the outer Dao is this force as it appears in the world, the patterned cycle of life and visible nature. As humans we need to live in harmony with the Dao, by adopting wu-wei. Wu-wei might be explained as going along with the grain of the outer Dao in spontaneous non-action thus aligning oneself with the inner Dao (Kohn 2001). Or it can be conceived as effortless activity, the practice of not doing anything extra or unnecessary, non-interference as allowing space for existential freedom. Wu-wei allows each being to unfold according to its own nature and connection with the Dao, so as to realise its ziran (Konjathy 2014). “Ziran is best understood as ‘suchness’ or ‘being-so-in-itself’ .  .  . it is simultaneously one’s natural condition and the manifestation of the Dao through one’s being” (Konjathy 2014: 85). Wu-wei seems rather more passive than the human reaction side of instress, the active response to the divine as manifest in haeccitas/inscape. But the inner and outer Dao manifest in ziran parallel the transcendent and the immanent aspects of the divine which are mediated through inscape. In other respects, however, the rejection of classification in Daoism/ Buddhism differs from that in Hopkins and Duns Scotus. The former religious philosophies propose the notion of an undifferentiated whole, and in the case of Buddhism even regard sensory experience as an illusion. What the Eastern mystics are concerned with is a direct experience of reality which transcends not only intellectual thinking but also sensory perception . . . Knowledge that comes from such an experience is called “absolute knowledge” by Buddhists because it does not rely on the discriminations, abstractions and classifications of the intellect . . . It can never be adequately described by words, because it lies beyond the realms of the senses and the intellect from which our words and concepts are derived . . . “The Dao that can be expressed is not the eternal Dao” (opening line of Daodejing). (Capra 1982: 36–37) This quote indicates that Daoism and Buddhism reject classifcation and abstractions of the intellect. But Buddhism’s rejection of sensory experience is antithetical to Hopkins’ concepts of inscape and instress, with its recognition of the immanence of the divine in nature. Daoism/Buddhism’s emphasis on the undifferentiated wholeness of the created world attacks classification from the opposite end to Scotus and Hopkins who espouse the ultimate differentiation of individuation. The follower of the Dao or Buddha should avoid illusions arising from differentiation and ordinary unreal categories, in order to reach a state of universal mind above limitations of existence, Buddha’s universal and impartial perception, the ultimate wisdom.

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More interesting from the viewpoint of this book’s thesis is the idea of the interrelatedness of the elements of the whole. The Dao is “the ongoing flux of life in which everything is relative and related to everything else” (Kohn 2001: 21). This might be described as a holographic quantum universe, where the whole is enfolded and manifest in the smallest part. Everything is interrelated. “The heavens and earth were seen as resonating with each other, creating a kind of universal web in which the slightest movement of one part could cause undulations throughout the entire network. Everything was related dynamically to everything else” (Lent 2017: 183). Surely such an interdependent system, prefiguring Gaia theory and quantum relational theory (9.1.1), is the ultimate web of global contiguity. 8.3.3. Nature as process: Hopkins’ ‘Nature is a Heraclitean fire’, Daoism, and Buddhism I have already discussed the differences between nouns and verbs: the affinities between nouns and the similarity dimension, and verbs and the contiguity dimension. Besides rejecting the similarity-based classifications facilitated by nouns, Hopkins and Daoism/Buddhism recognise the processual nature of reality facilitated by verbs, “the ongoing flux of life” of the previous quote from Kohn. In ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ we noticed the concentration on what objects and humans do, the processes by which they selve: “catch fire”, “draw flame”, “ring”, “fling out broad [their] name” even to the extent of coining the denominal verb “justices”. But notice that the uniqueness of things is not just defined by their actions, but by purpose. Not just “what I do is me” but also “for that I came”. This is an antidote to the purposelessness of much abstract science. Another philosopher of interest to Hopkins was Heraclitus. This philosopher was almost unique in the ancient Greek-based Western tradition before Descartes, Kant, Lessing, and Hegel in emphasizing process and becoming, rather than being (Küng 1987: 434). It is worth analysing in full Hopkins’ poem ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire and of the comfort of the resurrection’ because the parallels with Daoism are striking. Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows Ꞌ faunt forth, then chevy on an airbuilt thoroughfare; heaven-roysterers, in gay gangs Ꞌ they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, Ꞌ wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle in long Ꞌ lashes lace, lance, and pair. Delightfully the bright wind boisterous Ꞌ ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare Of yestertempest’s creases; Ꞌ in pool and rutpeel parches Squandering ooze to squeezed Ꞌ dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals Squadroned masks and manmarks Ꞌ treadmire toil there Footfretted in it. Million-fuelled, Ꞌ nature’s bonfre burns on. But quench her bonniest, dearest Ꞌ to her, her clearest-selved spark Man, how fast his fredint, Ꞌ his mark on mind, is gone! Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig Ꞌ nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral, a star, Ꞌ death blots black out; nor mark Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time Ꞌ beats level. Enough! The Resurrection, Heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, Ꞌ joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. Ꞌ Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; Ꞌ world’s wildfre, leave but ash: In a fash, at a trumpet crash I am all at once what Christ is, Ꞌ since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, Ꞌ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond Is immortal diamond.

For readers who fnd this poem diffcult, i.e. most of us, we can resort to W.H. Gardner’s paraphrase: Everything in nature is in a perpetual state of flux: air, earth, and water make a constant cycle of integration and disintegration – a motion which creates the dynamic beauty of the visible world. In fact the inexhaustible energy of being throughout all creation is like a huge self-fuelling, non-consumed bonfire. And even man, the most clearly individuated being, higher and apart from all others on earth – he too dies and is quickly forgotten, swallowed up in the general flux. This thought fills us with horror, until we remember that through Christ’s promise the disintegration of the physical body is (or should be) the immediate beginning of a richer life for the immortal spirit. Strong in this faith, we take heart, we exult etc. (Gardner 1948: 161) Gardner’s commentary following this paraphrase is of particular interest in pointing out that the poem and the philosophy behind it does not limit itself to fre, but involves transformations also involving water, earth, and air, with the transformations and differentiations being achieved by opposing forces in strife with each other. Air and water give us the “Cloud-puffball etc.” of the opening lines. Clouds turn to rain, so that water and earth give us “pool and rut” – the mud which is parched, peeled, squeezed and then dust-blown by the boisterous wind; moreover the principle of change through strife

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is clearly suggested in the words “ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare”. The obliteration of man’s footprints in the mud affords a natural transition to the more vital symbol – the fourth element, fire. In the general flux, the mental image [the inscape, “nature’s clearest-selved spark”] of the dead man fades from the mind of the living as surely as the diversely active, adventurous body [“world’s wildfire”] is reduced, as in cremation, to a handful of ash. (Gardner 1948: 162–163) [my insertions] To draw parallels with Daoism, the Dao and ziran are manifest in patterns of processes: “Dao is also order – clearly manifest in the rhythmic changes and patterned processes of the natural world . . . Its patterns are what the Chinese call ‘self-so’ or ‘nature’ [zi-ran], the spontaneous and observable way things are naturally” (Kohn 2009: 23). The cosmic transforming energy of the Dao or qi can take creative or destructive forms. In a creative sequence wood produces fire, fire produces earth, earth produces metal, metal produces water, and water produces wood. In the destructive sequence wood is cut by metal, metal is melted by fire, fire is extinguished by water, water is dammed by earth, and earth is ploughed by wood (Kohn 2001). These creative and destructive, but nevertheless purposeful, sequences are balanced through yin and yang. “[T]he Dao is understood as the universe as cosmological process, specifically as expressed in the constant patterns of oscillation between yin and yang. In this sense the Dao is the universe, but it is a universe of constant change and transformation” (Konjathy 2014: 98). Yin and yang in their creative and destructive processes can be understood by referring to Table 8.1. There are remarkable similarities between the sequences here and Heraclitean process philosophy. Heraclitus’ description of logos is almost identical to the concept of the Dao as the principle of maintaining the balance and harmony of natural processes: All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) bound opposites together in a unified tension, which is Table 8.1 The operation of yin and yang (Kohn 2001: 44). Yin/yang

phase

season

Lesser yang Greater yang Yin-yang Lesser yin Greater yin

Wood Fire Earth Metal Water

Spring Summer Fall Winter

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Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string. (Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies, Heraclitus 2022)

Also prominent in Heraclitus are the transformations of elements by their interaction, as in yin and yang (Table 8.1), though in his system wood disappears and metal is replaced by air as an element. A relevant quote is “Fire lives in the death of earth, air lives in the death of fire, water lives in the death of air, and earth lives in the death of water”. In ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire and the comfort of the resurrection’ there are similar sequences but different in detail: water creates air in clouds, air in the form of wind dries up the water and the earth, water quenches fire, and fire destroys wood in the form of matchwood, while it also creates earth in the form of ash and diamond. In all three sequences, in Heraclitus, Daoism and the poem, there is the sense of change through the conflict or balance of opposing forces. Buddhism, too, is famously a process philosophy, emphasising impermanence. “By ignorance the being fails to view the true impermanent and substanceless nature of existence. He relishes the things of the world, taking them to be real and lasting and creates a craving for them” (Kashyap 1954: 212). Buddhist doctrine demands that ultimately one should transcend sense-based illusion of the material universe, rather than, with Hopkins, celebrating immanence. However, the workings of samsara, the flux of change and dependent origination in the material universe, are often symbolised as the moving rim of the dharma wheel whose eight spokes, the eightfold path, lead us to its unmoving centre, “the still point of the turning world”, as T.S. Eliot puts it (Eliot 1944: 15). And, after all, despite his celebration of inscape in its changing and dynamic manifestations, Hopkins’ poem ends with the immortality of the diamond, transcending the impermanence of process and created out of it. Hopkins tries to navigate the contradictoriness of process and identity. Is this possible? This still point of the turning world, beyond change and process is, after all, like all points, imaginary and dimensionless, no thing. According to Buddhism, and in conflict with haeccitas and the radical individuality of inscape and the soul, identity is a dangerous illusion: Men cling hardest of all to the illusion that at the core of their being there is an indestructible, unitary, coherent soul. Men fabricate this supposititious self and use it disastrously as the living centre of their behaviour. (Jacobson 1966: 82–83) But if a point is dimensionless, does it have any meaning at all?

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8.4. Summary This chapter explored how classification and quantification, based on nouns and noun phrases, and with their de-contextualisations, have caused problems and provoked resistance in sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and poetry. Within sociology I examined the critique of anthropologists in the Boas school and later ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel and Heritage, showing that identity or self-classification is established by participation in action and discourse, making the similarity dimension dependent on the contiguity dimension of situated behaviour. I reviewed ethnomethodological critiques of statistical analysis based on doubtful classifications of, for instance, suicide, raising question marks about sociology’s “scientific” status. I then discussed similar problems in linguistics. I sketched the highly abstract, idealised, computational Chomskyan approach to syntax and de-contextualised meaning, with its quest for universals and claim that at a deep level all languages are similar. This was contrasted, first, with the linguistic relativity of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir – languages are unique in the way they generate meanings because they analyse the continuous flux of experience in a variety of ways. Second, it was contrasted with semantic theories which have attempted to reinstate the affective and interpersonal aspects of meaning, one aspect of context. Third, with Systemic Functional Linguistics, which shares the emphasis on the interpersonal and the social, and reinstates the contiguities of context through genre theory. Fourth, with the pragmatic theories of Grice, Leech, and Sperber and Wilson, who emphasise various aspects of the cognitive and interpersonal environment as crucial to communicative understanding, and the recognition of purpose and intention. This pragmatic approach nevertheless needs a social theory of genre to operationalise the vague notion of relevance. The chapter ended by exploring more overt resistance to noun-based classifications. The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the philosophy of Duns Scotus and Daoism celebrate uniqueness (haeccitas-ziran); though Daoism and Buddhism warn of baseless differentiation. And all of these, like Heraclitus, recognise that process is fundamental. It is this processual nature of quantum reality that I examine in the next chapter.

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot, a language without nouns

Chapters 6 and 7 concentrated on the affinity between nouns and the similarity dimension, and the affordances provided by classification for quantification, monetisation, and scientific and mathematical abstraction. Nouns facilitated the classification and typology in sociology and linguistics (Chapter 8), as well as science and mathematics (Chapter 7), which create problems for these disciplines, and for society or the environment (Chapter 6). Chapter 8 discussed the difficulties with and resistances to classification and quantification in social science, linguistics, poetry/philosophy, and Daoism/Buddhism, and the latter’s emphasis on process and interrelatedness. Emphasis on process and interrelatedness, the web of contiguity, are precisely the trends brought about by quantum physics. And so this chapter discusses the even more extreme theoretical problem as regards quantum theory: even when contiguity is extended from nouns to verbs in clauses (Chapter 5), the clausal grammar of English is almost totally inadequate for representing the quantum world (9.1). Revolutionary insights of quantum and Gaia theory – primacy of process, spontaneity, interrelatedness, and the observer effect (9.1.1) – conflict with the construction of reality in the Material Process clauses of English grammar (9.1.2). As remarked earlier, Halliday believed the demands of science at critical stages of its development are often met by changes to the grammar. A case in point is the demands put on the grammar of English and other European languages by the radical needs of quantum physics, which test it to breaking point. But there are already languages centred on verbs and the processes they represent, and in which nouns are more or less absent, and I will discuss one of these, Blackfoot/Niitsi’powahsin (9.2). Its grammatical emphasis on verbs and process is achieved by omission or incorporation of “nouns” (9.2.1), their transformation into verbs (9.2.2), and the use of free relative clauses instead of nouns (9.2.3). When we analyse the grammar from the point of view of native speaker linguists (9.2.4), nouns are almost non-existent in the language, and the same “object” may be referred to in various ways depending on the process it manifests, defying the Western desire for consistent categories. Moreover, Blackfoot DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-10

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culture recognises interrelatedness across time and space, and between nature and humans (9.2.5) consistent with quantum and Gaia theory (and Daoism/Buddhism).

9.1. The Canonical Event Model, English clause structure, and quantum physics Commonsense views of prototypical actions are represented by the Canonical Event (CE) model (Langacker 1991; Figure 9.1). In an event/ action one discrete object (“a billiard ball”), an Agent/Actor, transmits energy by forceful physical contact to another (“a second billiard ball”), a Patient or Goal, resulting in a change of state (the squiggly arrow). This takes place within a setting, and a viewer observes it from an external standpoint. I already mentioned this model in 2.1.1, pp. 38–39, and Appendix 1 gave details of the metaphorical lexis underpinning Event Structure. And I also approached it in discussing the difference between verb and noun referents in 7.1, p. 159. Indeed, it is reinforced by congruent grammar (7.3.3, p. 175). It is a model appropriate to Newtonian dynamics (Goatly 2007), but radically rejected by quantum theory. It follows that the congruent grammar of European languages is inadequate for the representation of quantum theory. 9.1.1. The Canonical Event versus quantum physics and post quantum science There are four ways, at least, in which quantum physics and other postquantum theories of matter and ecology challenge the Canonical Event,

Agent/Actor

Patient/Goal SETTING

Viewer

Figure 9.1 The Canonical Event Model

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the model in Figure 9.1: physical reality as process; the spontaneity of physical change; the interrelatedness of the natural world; and the effect of the observer on the nature of what is observed. Concentrating on processes, represented by verbs, moves us away from the static world of things represented by nouns and from abstractions represented by nominalisations, which support similarity-based classification. The spontaneity of change hints at the propensity of nature to self-organisation in more and more complex and interrelated systems. The interrelatedness of matter and life and of observer and observed demonstrate the fundamental forces of global contiguity. Physical reality as process The CE model depends upon the absolute distinction between things and energetic interactions, undermined by relativity theory, which necessitated the notion of process or event as primary: “It is not possible in relativity to obtain a consistent definition of an extended rigid body . . . [N]either the point particles nor the quasi-rigid body can be taken as primary concepts. Rather these have to be expressed in terms of events and processes” (Bohm 1980: 123–124). Bohm suggests that the best image of things is the vortex or whirlpool in a flowing stream (Figure 9.2). Its substance is never the same but it gives the illusion of

Figure 9.2 Thing as process in a whirlpool

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existence and permanence. It is “abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow” (Bohm 1980: 48). Capra notes the inherent dynamic properties of “structures”, from the molecular, to the atomic, to the subatomic. Molecules are not rigid and motionless, but their atoms oscillate according to their temperature and in harmony with the thermal vibrations of their environment. Within the vibrating atoms, the electrons are bound to the nuclei by electric forces which keep them as close as possible, and they respond to this confinement by whirling around extremely fast. And in the nuclei, the protons and neutrons are squeezed into a minute volume by the strong nuclear forces, and consequently race about at unimaginable speeds (Capra 1982). Modern physics, then, pictures matter not at all as passive and inert, but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular, atomic and nuclear structures. This is also the way in which the eastern mystics see the material world. They all emphasise the universe has to be grasped dynamically, as it moves, vibrates and dances; that nature is not in a static, but in a dynamic equilibrium. (Capra 1982: 215–216) Spontaneity of change The inherent dynamism of this molecular, atomic, and subatomic universe points to our next challenge. In the Canonical Event Model the affected participant, the second “billiard ball” which is hit, is passive and controllable. But thermodynamics and the theory of entropy undermine this, allowing for the dissipation of energy: Thus the “negative” property of dissipation shows that, unlike dynamic objects [i.e. in the Newtonian system of dynamics], thermodynamic objects can only be partially controlled. Occasionally they “break loose” into spontaneous change. (Prigogine and Stengers 1985: 120) [my insertion] Such spontaneity has even been suggested as the force behind evolutionary change, the saltations, the jumps in the evolutionary record. When a system of simple chemicals reaches a certain level of complexity, it undergoes a dramatic transition, akin to the phase change . . . when liquid water freezes. The molecules begin spontaneously combining to create larger molecules of increasing complexity . . . Kauffman argued that this process of self-organisation . . . led to life . . . Much of the order displayed by biological systems results “not from

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot . . . natural selection” but from these pervasive order-generating effects. “The whole point of it is that it’s spontaneous order”. (Horgan 1998: 133)

As Kaufmann notes, this evolutionary spontaneity leads to increased complexity, that is, entities become more differentiated and interdependent within larger “structures”. Increases in interdependence lead to the understanding that nature is a whole, interconnected in global contiguities. The wholeness and interrelatedness of matter in (global) contiguity However, the Canonical Event Model separates setting (environment), participants, and their energetic interactions. This is challenged by relational theory, the notion of the implicate order or holographic universe, and Gaia theory. Relationalism is a theory in physics and philosophy which predates quantum physics, but I devote a little space to it here, given its clear significance for the contiguity dimension, especially in its global form. It contends that the properties of objects and their positions only have meaning relative to other objects. Moreover, space does not exist independently without the presence of “objects”, and time does not exist without the presence of change in the form of events and processes. Relationalism not only begins to undermine the Canonical Event Model, but clearly challenges classical Newtonian physics. In fact this relational doctrine advocated by Leibniz was rejected by Newton with his abstract notions of space and time. The ways in which the properties of objects are determined by their relations to other objects is manifest in the concept of emergence. An object, such as a rock, taken as a differentiated detachable whole and regarded in isolation, would appear to be lacking in freedom of action and inert. But in a dam it could impede water flow. In a wind tunnel it could cause turbulence. In a riot it could be used to smash windows. All these properties are emergent as they depend on the relationships with water, air, hands, and glass. As Peter Corning puts it, “Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be codetermined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)” (Corning 2002, quoted in ‘Relational theory’ 2020). Incidentally, the blending theory of metaphor (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) suggests that original metaphors, by relating target and source in original ways, make manifest emergent properties, not apparent in the source or target taken in isolation. Whitehead also developed a philosophy of space and time which recognised the importance of the primacy of process and interaction. Arguing

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against the Canonical Event entities, he proposed that we should not see physical bodies as if they are first in space and then act upon each other. Bodies are in space only because they interact so that space is the expression of their interaction (Harvey 1996: 256). Not only might the properties of the interacting processes that we call objects change in relation to the contiguous objects, the differential properties might emerge when they are placed in proximity. This recalls Heraclitus’ explanation of Logos: But Logos does not originally mean ‘discourse, saying’. The word means nothing that is immediately related to language. Lego, legein, in Latin legere, is the same word as our collecting; “reading”, as lecture, is only a sort of collecting. That word means: putting one thing next to another, bringing them together, nay: gathering; in such an operation things are all at once distinguished from one another. (Heraclitus 2020: 132) In a recent book Carlo Rovelli has developed a relational theory of life and matter as an interpretation of the findings of quantum theory. We think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities (in physics, we call them ‘physical systems’): a photon, a cat, a stone, a clock, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies . . . These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects. A cat listens to the ticking of a clock; a boy throws a stone; the stone moves the air through which it flies, hits another stone and moves that, presses into the ground where it lands; a tree absorbs energy from the sun’s rays, produces the oxygen that the villagers breathe while watching the stars, and the stars run through the galaxies, pulled by the gravity of other stars . . . The world that we observe is continuously interacting. It is a dense web of interactions. Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell . . . it would be as good as non-existent. (Rovelli 2021: 67–68) For Rovelli, the best description of nature available is the quantum theory of how things influence each other, and the recognition that the properties of objects cannot be separated from the interactions by which they become apparent. “The unambiguous description of any phenomenon requires the inclusion of all the objects involved in the interaction in which the phenomenon manifests itself” (Rovelli 2021:

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119). This “contextuality” indicates that isolated objects do not exist in any particular state. They simply have a probabilistic disposition to manifest themselves in different ways in relation to and interaction with other objects. Even far distant objects maintain a connection beyond local contiguity, or, in the terms of quantum theory, demonstrate entanglement. In the terms of this book, we might conclude that contiguity is a fundamental basis of existence. Bohm and Hiley proposed that the quantum world displays not only an interconnected universe but also a holographic one. “[I]nseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and . . . relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole” (Bohm and Hiley 1975). The hologram is a metaphor for a particular kind of interconnectedness: that is the smallest parts mirror the dynamic structures of the whole (see 1.3.1, p. 23, Figure 1.2). The whole of the universe is enfolded or “implicated” in each of its parts. Each part contains the whole. Similarly, if any part of the hologram is illuminated the entire image will be reconstructed (Bohm 1980). Fractal theory relates to the notion of holography. Fractal geometry helped instigate a deeper understanding of patterns in nature. One profound insight was that the same design tends to repeat itself at larger or smaller scales. Coastlines, cloudscapes, sand dunes, and rivers all demonstrate what is known as scale independency, creating similar patterns both close up and from a distance. Biologists began to recognise these fractal patterns in all kinds of living systems: leaf veins, tree branches, blood vessels, lung brachia, and neurons. (Lent 2017: 365) I now take an apparent detour from quantum physics to the ecological theory known as Gaia. This is the hypothesis that the world, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the biota, the rocks and minerals of the crust, functions as one large self-regulating organism. Specifically the temperature, oxidation state, acidity . . . are at any time kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota . . . Life and its environment are so closely coupled that evolution concerns Gaia, not the organisms or the environment taken separately. (Lovelock 1988: 19) Gaia manifests persistent instability or, as the poet Spenser put it, is “eterne in mutability”. For example the oxygen and methane in the atmosphere

Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot flow SULPHUR IN RIVERS precipitaton

produce SEA/ALGAE

convecton (CH3)2S

cloud formaton RAIN

233

oxidaton H2SO4 NUCLEI

ATMOSPHERE

Figure 9.3 The sulphur cycle

should react in sunlight to produce carbon dioxide and water vapour. But the amounts of methane and oxygen remain more or less constant. The only explanation is the infuence of a control system, Gaia in dynamic equilibrium (Lovelock 1988: 31). Weather’s role in the dynamic equilibrium of the Gaia organism is observable in the various cycles: water, nitrogen, sulphur, etc. Let’s illustrate the sulphur cycle (Figure 9.3). Sulphur is washed by rivers into the sea. Algal seaweed produces dimethyl-sulphide. The sulphur element rises through convection into the atmosphere, where it is oxidised into sulphuric acid. This provides the condensation nuclei, the seeds, for cloud formation and consequently the rain, which then washes it back to earth. The weather functions as part of a larger organism, of which only one part, the algae, are traditionally viewed as living (Lovelock 1989: 40). As an endorsement of Gaia theory, in July 2001, at a meeting of the European and American Geophysical Unions in Amsterdam, roughly a thousand scientists made the following declaration: The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability. The understanding of the natural dynamics of the Earth System has advanced greatly in recent years and provides a sound basis for evaluating the effects and consequences of human-driven change. (quoted in Ryan 2002: 186–187) This whole embraces human bodies too, and consequently creates problems for the notion of a detached observer in a Canonical Event. The observer effect In the Canonical Event (Figure 9.1) the viewer is outside the setting within which the participants interact. However, modern physics not only undermines the illusion that humankind is outside the world it acts on, but also that it is outside the world it observes.

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A general point to make is that all scientific experimentation depends on an experimenter/observer who is alive and is time-based. And the resulting laws and formulae often involve time, too, for instance the acceleration, a, in F = ma, or the speed of light, C, in E = MC2. But time depends upon entropy within the far-from-equilibrium system in which life is manifest. Consequently, the time-based measurements/laws and the living observer who makes them are inescapably part of the system being observed and not external to it (Prigogine and Stengers 1985). One specific finding of quantum mechanics is that the observed object and observing instrument can no longer be regarded as separate (Heisenberg 1930). Bohr, during the 1920s, developed the idea that subatomic entities such as electrons have no real independent existence. They exist in a probabilistic indeterminate state until they are forced into a single state by the act of observation. These electrons or photons sometimes act like waves, sometimes like particles, depending on how they are observed during the experimental process (Bohr 1996). Building on Bohr’s insights, Wheeler popularised “the Anthropic Principle”. Reality might not be wholly physical; our cosmos might be a participatory phenomenon, and observers necessary to bring the universe into being. Moreover, the universe was precisely designed to generate and sustain these “observers”. The laws of nature and their fundamental physical constants were set to allow intelligent life to develop within it at some stage in its history (‘Anthropic Principle’ 2021). Wheeler produced evidence for this hypothesis in his delayed choice experiment, a variation on a previous two-slit experiment. This had shown that when electrons were aimed at a barrier incorporating two slits, the electrons acted like waves: they went through both slits at once and, when they struck a detector on the far side of the barrier, formed an “interference pattern”, created by the overlapping of the “waves”. But when the experimenter closed one slit, the electrons travelled through the other open slit like simple particles and the interference pattern disappeared. The findings were evidence for Bohr’s theory of complementarity. In the delayed choice experiment the physicist decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier – with the same results. The electrons seem to “know” in advance how the physicists will choose to observe them. This experiment was carried out in the early 1990s and confirmed Wheeler’s prediction (Horgan 1998: 81–82). 9.1.2. English clause structure as reflective of the Canonical Event We have seen how, in four respects, the Canonical Event Model is incompatible with quantum theory and Gaia theory (as well as with the process philosophies discussed in the previous chapter). The problem is that the Canonical Event structure is difficult to escape, because it is represented

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Table 9.1 An example of an English clause as incompatible with quantum and Gaia theory Traditionally

fishermen

caught

100,000 tons of fish

a year

in the North Sea

Circumstance (time setting) Adverbial

Actor

Process

Goal

Nominal subject

Verbal group

Nominal object

Circumstance (time setting) Adverbial

Circumstance (place setting) Adverbial

by and reinforced by the typical structure of the English clause (as well as the metaphor themes in Appendix 1). Consider the sentence in Table 9.1. From the point of view of modern physical and ecological theory this is inadequate, for the following reasons. 1) A division into agentive participants (fishermen), affected participants (fish) and circumstances (North Sea), which is not consonant with quantum and Gaia theory, with their emphasis on interconnectedness and contiguity, undivided and implicate wholeness. 2) The particular division into (volitional) agent or Actor and (passive) affected or Goal, which conflicts with the notion of matter being active and spontaneous or with feedback within Gaia. The fish are not represented as affecting the fisherman. However this is a false unidirectionality of cause and effect, because their presence and market value cause the fishermen to catch them. As Ghosh puts it, a propos of air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, for the inhabitants of New Delhi or Beijing, “inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference . . . between using and being used” (Ghosh 2016: 5). This Actor-Goal division has imposed upon it the empathy hierarchy, which states that the probability of types of thing taking subject/Actor position in the clause is as follows: speaker > hearer > human > animal > physical object > abstract entity (Langacker 1991: 307).This means that, typically, grammar has humans acting on a relatively passive inanimate nature. Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia (Lovelock 2006) demolishes this grammar-enforced myth. 3) The division into agent/affected participants, on the one hand, and location circumstances on the other, misguidedly suggesting that the environment, the circumstance, is either powerless, or is not affected. For example “The North Sea” is seen as part of the setting, rather than involved in or affected by the process, as inevitably it is from an environmental point of view. 4) The categorisation of events into processes and things, which is doubtful given the primacy of process in modern physics (and Buddhism/Daoism, Heraclitus). The catching is seen as a process, but the

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot fishermen and the tons of fish and the North Sea as relatively permanent things or substances. (Goatly 2007)

Given the inadequacy of the English Material Process clause in this typical congruent form for representing the worldview of post-quantum modern science and ecology, what can be done about it? I have suggested elsewhere (Goatly 2007, Goatly and Hiradhar 2016) tinkering with the grammar by promoting the following atypical structures, a) to f) (for explanation of the processes and participants see 5.1., pp. 111–112): a) Reciprocal verbs: John hit the rock → John and the boulder collided b) Tokens → Actors: The mountain was high above the lake → The mountain rose above the lake c) Phenomena → Actors: I gazed fixedly at the tree → The tree arrested my gaze Reciprocal verbs, a) counter 2). And activation structures, b) and c), suggest the power to act of “inanimate” objects, an implication of 2). d) Circumstances → Actors: Ants are crawling all over the bed → The bed is crawling with ants. This undermines the division into the setting and other participants, countering 3). e) f)

Ambient it (meteorological expressions): on the model of “it’s raining” it’s Johnning instead of here is John Nominalisation: The sun shines and this affects the way air is polluted → Pollution and sunshine interact

The two structures f) and the restricted and largely hypothetical e) privilege process and counter 4). This seems counterintuitive as regards nominalisations, which I have earlier discussed as a reifying device. But it might be argued that it is ambiguous: removing participants by simply nominalising the verb in some sense preserves the process. Yet, however much we tinker, we are never going to escape from the tyranny of nouns, the illusion of permanence, the disguising of process, or the divisions into settings, active participants (often human) and inactive participants (often non-human) when speaking a European language.

9.2. Blackfoot: the language and culture of interconnected process for modern physics I have shown that the typical finite clauses of European languages construct and reproduce a Canonical Event Model of physical

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processes, and that this tends to conflict with modern scientific theory and process philosophies. This inadequacy of language to reflect the active process of matter, or the inseparability of life and its environment, was pointed out quite eloquently by the physicist David Bohm (1980) in Wholeness and the Implicate Order. After unsuccessfully attempting to create an artificial language which he called the rheomode, Bohm eventually believed he had found what he was looking for in the Blackfoot language. He met several Algonquin speakers shortly before his death and discovered a correspondence between their language/worldview and his own philosophy: “What to Bohm had been a major breakthrough in human thought – quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj” (Peat 1996: 237–238). According to David Peat, the Blackfoot language reflects a worldview remarkably similar to that of the quantum world. Using the familiar metaphor, he points out: “In modern physics the essential stuff of the universe cannot be reduced to billiard-ball atoms, but exists as relationships and fluctuations at the boundary of what we call matter and energy”. This flux of processes includes thoughts, feelings, and emotions unfolding within the brain and the body, with the objective outer world and the subjective inner world aspects of one underlying movement. Recognising nature and matter as a flux of interacting internal and external processes is also fundamental to the “scientific” worldview of Algonquin-speaking peoples, such as Blackfoot: “Indigenous science teaches that all that exists is an expression of relationships, alliances, and balances between what, for lack of better words, we could call energies, powers or spirits” (Peat 1996: 7). If Blackfoot was the language of quantum physics that Bohm had been longing for, what are the major aspects of the language that so impressed him?1 Basically, the representation of nature as a complex of interacting and interdependent processes. The fundamental point is that nouns are rare or non-existent, and verbs predominate. Sa’ke’j Henderson has said that he can go for a whole day without ever speaking a noun, just dealing in the rhythms and vibrations of process. Nouns do exist within the language but, like the vortex that forms in a fast flowing river, the nouns are not primary in themselves but are temporary aspects of the ever-flowing process. (Peat 1996: 237)

1 My description below is a shortened version of Goatly (2007: 315–326).

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The domination of verbs refects the world-view of speakers who “are concerned with the animation of all things within their process-vision of the cosmos” (Peat 1996: 222). Unfortunately, the most comprehensive grammar of Blackfoot was written by a Chomskyan, Donald Frantz. He imposed Chomsky’s grammatical template which distorts the nature of the language, since Chomsky advocated a model in which the noun phrase is an essential element (8.2.2). Frantz refers to nouns and nominalisation in ways that native speakers dispute. So when I use his analysis below I employ scare quotes from time to time to indicate this imposition. Nevertheless, Frantz recognises the importance of verbs and the highly developed affixational systems operating on them: It is certainly true that “verbs“ are extremely important in the language. Prefixes and suffixes, and other formal variations of “verb stems” are numerous, reflecting distinctions such as: transitive-intransitive; “animate-inanimate”; independent-conjunctive-subjunctive-imperativeunreal; “singular-plural”; “first – first + second – second – third – fourth person”; “present – future – past tense”; and durative – perfective “aspect”, giving well over a hundred possible inflexions. (Frantz 1991: 84) Let’s consider in more detail the verbiness of the language. 9.2.1. Incorporation and omission of pronouns/“nouns” In Niitsi’powahsin when speaker or addressee is subject there is usually no separate word to indicate that fact, e.g. Nitáakahkayi. Nit -áak -ahkayi I -will -go^home ‘I’m going home’. (Frantz 1991: 21) English meteorological verbs, “ambient” structures, such as “it’s raining, it’s snowing”, where it is impossible to say to what the “it” refers (*“What’s raining?”), have their counterparts in Niitsi’powahsin. According to Frantz, the pronoun is incorporated in the verb by use of “the third person singular suffix –wa: Áísootawa ‘It’s raining’” (p. 23). Leroy and Ryan, Blackfoot-speaking linguists, point out that –wa is actually used to indicate the relative importance of a human-related event, rather than a third-person marker. So, pace Frantz, “there is no objectification in this Blackfoot utterance, no noun or verb – just an observance of event manifestation” (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 38).

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Indeed, according to these native speakers, there is often no need to mention a participant subject. A whole sentence translation like ‘he will run very fast’ becomes áaksiiksikkamokska’siwa, ‘expected-very^fast-running’. (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 38) Similarly, where nominal objects would have to be mentioned in a European language, they are often left unspecifed in Blackfoot: “Nítohpommaa ‘I purchased (something unspecifed)’” (Frantz 1991: 41). 9.2.2. Verbalisation of “nouns” According to Frantz another way of incorporating “nouns” into “verbs” is called verbalisation, which is achieved by adding suffixes. For instance, by adding –wa’si one can convey the meaning of ‘turning into’: nítohkiáayowa’si nít -ohkiáayo -wa’si I - bear - became ‘I became enraged’. (Frantz 1991: 108) The suffx hkaa/-ihkaa carries the meaning ‘acquire’: iimííhkaayaawa iimíí –hkaa past:fish -acquire(AI) ‘they fished’.

-yi -3p

- aawa -PRO

And -hko/-ihko adds the meaning ‘provide for’: Nitsináánsskoayaawa Nit -inaan -ihko I -possession -provide(TA) ‘I got something for them’.

-a: -dir

-yi -3p

- aawa - PRO

Again, however, Niitsi’powahsin speaker-linguists, like Ryan Heavy Head, dispute Frantz’s analytical categories. It’s apparent to me that there were never any ‘nouns’ here to begin with. Ohkiaayo is not literally a “bear”, nor mamii a “fish”, nor inaan a “possession” – each of these supposed nouns are really just describing characteristics, events, processes, and such. (personal communication)

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot

Other examples he gave me were the word for ‘otter’ aimmoniisi, which just means ‘sliding’ (referring to its movement). Or there’s ksisskstaki, the “noun” for beaver, which just means ‘grating’ (referring to how it eats) . . . Ohkiaayo is not verbalised with the addition of -wa’si, instead, -wa’si just describes the state of its manifestation, the early stage of transformation toward ohkiaayo-ness (which includes rage, the practice of violently seizing, gestures of intimidation, etc.) .  .  . There really are no nouns that I can find in Niitsi’powahsin [Blackfoot] to verbalise. (Ryan Heavy Head personal communication) [my insertion] 9.2.3. “Nominalisations” The verbiness or processual aspect of Niitsi’powahsin is, paradoxically, what Frantz calls “nominalisation”. Given native speakers’ reluctance to recognise nouns in the language, these are not true nominalisations, in the cognitive sense of turning a process into a thing. Rather what Western languages might refer to with nouns Niitsi’powahsin refers to with verbs or clauses. Frantz admits that these “nominalisations” are the functional equivalent of English relative clauses (Frantz 1991: 116). “Clauses which modify a noun are relatively rare in Blackfoot. It is perhaps a typological characteristic of the language that free relatives are used to the near exclusion of relative clauses which modify a noun” (Frantz 1991: 129). First there are conversions with an “intransitive verb used as a noun stem referring to the subject of the underlying verb” (Frantz 1991: 116ff). For example, Áyo’kaa ‘sleep’→ omiksi áyo’kaiksi om -iksi á - Iyo’ka -iksi that -3p dur -sleep -3p ‘who sleep’ ‘those sleepers’. In instrument nominalisations a’tsiS is added to “animate” intransitive stems, for instance: Sináákia’tsisi Sinááki -a’tsiS -yi Make^image -instr -in.s ‘which makes an image’ or ‘book’.

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Further examples show how widespread these free relative clauses are in everyday vocabulary: ‘cut in strips-instrument’– ‘which cut in strips’ or ‘scissors’; ‘cover instrument’ – ‘which covers’ or ‘lid’. Other instrumental “nominals” use the prefix: omoht-/iiht-/oht-, e.g. iihtáóoyo’pa iiht -á -ooyi -o’p -wa instr -dur -eat -2l:nom -3s ‘that one eats with’ or ‘fork’. Consider also ‘that one speaks with’ or ‘telephone’, ‘that one buys with’ or ‘money’, ‘that one sees afar with’ or ‘telescope’. Locational nominals are formed with the prefix it-/iit (‘there’), e.g. iitáóoyo’pi iit -á -ooyi -o’p -yi there -dur -eat -21:nom -in.s ‘where one eats’ or ‘restaurant’. Other examples are ‘that one eats on/table’, ‘where one washes clothes/ laundry’, ‘where one washes dishes/sink’. In all these free relative clauses Blackfoot grammar, instead of resorting to nouns, insists on the contiguities of a context which involves participants in action schemas or the places where such practices take place. Unlike typical European languages, there is more of a tendency to make the “verb” the compulsory autonomous element, with any socalled “nouns” that might occur dependent upon the “verb”. In contrast to English, it is not true to say that “nominalisation adds nothing to the conceptual content of the verb, because nouns are autonomous, e.g. explode/explosion” (Langacker 1991: 25). Nouns seem to be verbalised out of existence, or what we would refer to as things are referred to by one-word clauses, misleadingly called nominalisations. All these are no doubt factors in the emphasis that Blackfoot culture puts upon process and flux. 9.2.4. Niitsi’powahsin (Blackfoot) speakers’ perspectives In the fascinating article ‘A conceptual anatomy of the Blackfoot word’ (2004), Leroy and Ryan abandon analytical systems based on European grammars and posit three levels of analysis. 1) the smallest meaningful unit áóhtakoistsi, or “sounding”, like a bound morpheme, a meaningful part of a word, equivalent to the –ing of English. These units “suggest only a potential to contribute to transitional meaning, to mark a temporary aspect of a view, quality, process or

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essence associated with an event not yet delineated” (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 33). 2) aanissin or “the completed saying”, in which áóhtakoistsi can be joined together “marking a perceptible happening that issues from a more all-encompassing dimension of reality as constant flux” (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 33). This is a particularly important category for the topic of this book. Instead of using noun-based classes which enter into hyponymic chains, Niitsi’powahsin, often by using free relative clauses, describes as different events what English might label with the same noun or its hyponyms. For instance, an English speaker’s vocabulary includes the generic word book and a small group of terms for specific kinds, like text, novel, journal etc. The Blackfoot speaker, on the other hand, might talk of sinaakia’tsisi (‘facilitates the generation of images’), iihtáísinaakio’pi (‘means of generating images’), okstakia’tsisi (‘facilitates recording’), áípá’sókinnihpi (‘held wide open and flat’). The Blackfoot aanissin is not conceptually organised as an abstract or generic word, nor is it a specific type-term, inferring its taxonomic membership in a wider category. It is, rather, constructed on the basis of the event that is manifesting and being referenced. Thus it is at this transition from áóhtakoistsi to aanissin, that the conceptual divide between the English and Blackfoot language structures becomes most apparent. (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 32–33) This observation chimes with earlier arguments I have proposed. We have seen that categories of identity, in the case of Agnes (8.1.2, p. 192), and the classificatory meanings of nouns (7.3, pp. 168–169) are acquired in practice. In other words “what I do is me”, and the similarity dimension is dependent on the contiguity dimension of practices, often within action genres. However, Blackfoot takes this dependence to new lengths by suggesting there are no noun-based categories which can be abstracted or established apart from practice and process, no word for book independent of the process of generating images, or the practice of recording, or opening wide and flat, etc. Leroy and Ryan continue: If positioned alongside the traditional Western taxonomy of the utterance, aanissin bridges the space between lexeme and sentence. Of course, presented here as its own grammatical category, it is neither. But if one attempts to translate the English lexeme or sentence into Blackfoot, he will inevitably arrive at aanissin . . . The referent of aanissin is not understood as descriptive of either a subject or an object. Nor is the aanissin suggestive of a relationship between such agents

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and those acted upon. Rather aanissin is action alone, or the manifestation of form, where anything that might – in another language – be portrayed as actor or recipient is here inseparable from, arising within, or the essence of the event. It can therefore be seen that the distinction between noun and verb entirely dissolves in the Blackfoot language, as one cannot exist without the other. (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 33) Notice how explicitly these linguists point out the avoidance of Actor and the affected Goal, in the subject and object of the clause. No Canonical Event appears here. As an example we can contrast the English noun chair with one Niitsi’powahsin translation equivalent aanissin. In English chair is both a morpheme and a word and a lexical item, and can be the subject or object of a sentence, in which case it can either be an Actor or Goal or Circumstance (“The chair squashed the cat’s tail”, “I pushed the chair away”, “I sat on the chair”). One equivalent of chair in Blackfoot is asóópa’tsisi, a compound of four áóhtakoyi, which might be glossed as become-sit-facilitate-ing. There is nothing in this breakdown which could be equated with the static quality of the ‘chair’ as known to the English speaker, and no indication of its concrete existence in a real world outside of human experience. It is not a noun (thing) nor a verb (an interaction between a subject and either himself or an object). Instead what we register in “asóópa’tsisi” is a facilitating event, logically interrelated and dependent upon a human event, that is in fact cited as an aspect of “asóópa’tsisi” as a happening. (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 34) Again, note situatedness within human experience as the essential feature of what would be translated as noun referents in English. It is noticeable that Blackfoot grammar represents a chair in a way that a quantum physicist like Rovelli struggles to convey in English, even when in the quote below he emphasises the primacy of processes in which it is involved, and by which it is perceived, and its existence as part of an inherent web of relations. The notion of a chair is defined by its function: a piece of furniture designed for us to sit on. It presupposes human beings who sit down. It’s about the way we conceive of it. This does not affect the fact that the chair exists right here, objectively. The object is still here, with its obvious physical characteristics of colour, hardness, and so on. But even these characteristics exist only in relation to us. Colour comes

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot from the encounter between the frequencies of light reflected from the surfaces of the chair and the particular receptors in human retinas. It is not about the chair: it is a story between light, retina and reflection. Most other animal species do not see colours as we do. The frequencies themselves emitted by the chair emerge only from the interaction between the dynamics of its atoms and the light that illuminates them . . . If we look for the chair in itself, independently of external relations, and especially of its relations to us, we struggle to find it. (Rovelli 2021: 123–124)

3) áíkia’pii. Unlike in English where ‘chair’ cannot be a complete idea and has to combine with something else to make a clause or sentence, the event conveyed by an aanissin is already in a sense complete. We saw this in our analysis of asóópa’tsisi, and from Frantz’s free relative clauses. But aanissins may be combined into more complex áíkia’pii structures, when multiple happenings occur simultaneously or when one event is dependent upon another. Leroy and Ryan’s example (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 38) is the Niitsi’powahsin equivalent of that boy brought a chair (Table 9.2). There could not be a better example of the process emphasis of Niitsi’powahsin grammar and thought, where three or more manifesting events interrelate. The authors have certainly illustrated that not all cultures generate a perception of reality as comprised of a fragmented landscape of solids within solids, acting as agents of change in the world, but that some – like Blackfoot culture – produce experiences of fluid event manifestation, arising and returning into a holistic state of constant flux. (Peat 1996: 38) 9.2.5. Interconnectedness of processes as paramount in Blackfoot culture Moving the emphasis from language to culture, I would like to single out three aspects of interconnectedness in Blackfoot: the interpenetration of past, present, and future; the interrelatedness of nature and humans; the resistance to Western analytic categories and their deleterious effects. In the Blackfoot worldview, time is conceived as both cyclical and simultaneous: Within this metaphysics of time and reality the buffalo are still present. It is as if, to use images from our own western view of science, other places and other times interpenetrate and coexist with our own. To traditional people this is no mere metaphor or poetic image

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Table 9.2 The Blackfoot equivalent of “that boy brought a chair” iihpommaatooma iih

anna

pommaat oom

by way of transfer

wa ann

wa

move ing that familiar ing Continued...

saahkómaapiwa

amoyi

asóópa’tsisi

saahk

oma

a’pii

wa

amo

yi

a’s

young

yet

state of

ing

this near

ing

bec-ome sit

opii

a’tsis

yi

facil-itate ing

but the reality in which they live, and since to The People time is a great circle, the time of the buffalo will return again. (Peat 1996: 26) Leroy and Ryan (2004) relate the attitude to time as simultaneous and present to the conceptualisation of the grammar. The Blackfoot view of time and events is as unbounded flux rather than discrete areas of past, present, and future. From the Blackfoot perspective, no whole is bounded. Thus there are no words, only an infinite range of aanissiistsi [including free “relative” clauses]. A single saying is understood as complete when it follows the quadripartite formula . . . but even then it is subject to further transformation. And aóhtakoisti [bound morphemes] are not separable from the context of these aanissiistsi, they are not atomistic individuals which build into greater wholes, but are rather aspects of these unbounded aanissiistsi, where the latter signifies the notation of perceptible happenings of the source flux. From this world view, one can very easily rationalise that only the present is of any significance, because this present is no less than the sum of all events passed, those in various stages of becoming, and those expected or hoped. (Leroy and Ryan 2004: 35) [my insertions] Time, then is not some abstract category to be divided into past, present, and future. Immediate present experience contains within it what we would call the past and the future. The past, which for Europeans is no longer real, and future, which for us is as yet unrealised, cannot, in the Blackfoot worldview, be abstracted from the reality of the present.

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The interpenetration of time is realised in dynamic patterns of change involving humans and animals and the rest of nature. [I]t has always seemed to me that the Blackfoot did not so much “chase” or “follow” the buffalo as that they were partners in a mutual movement, one aspect of a relationship of time and motion in which the transformations of life and death, increase and depletion, light and dark, and the cycle of the seasons all had their part to play . . . so it is that humans and animals are locked together in a cooperative movement, in a complex dance of time and season. (Peat 1996: 27) Even in Europe, before the invention of modern time-measuring instruments, those watches and clocks with their standardised parts (7.3.4, pp. 180–182) and “repeater” mechanisms, humans were necessarily more attuned to the rhythms and vibrations of the external natural world. These rhythms could be calibrated with the internal bodily circadian and metabolic pulses of our biological clocks. “Beneath the material surface life is animated and structured by an elaborate set of intricately synchronised rhythms that parallel the frequencies of the larger universe . . . all the separate movements pulse in unison to create a single organic whole” (Rifkin 1987: 53). But this is still a reality in North American indigenous peoples’ practice and ritual. They emphasise, as does Gaia theory, the physical and temporal interconnectedness of nature. For example, in their traditional Thanksgiving address the Iroquois people acknowledge the wholeness inherent within all of life. Moreover, whenever arriving at a decision they consider its implications right down to the seventh generation of their descendants (Peat 1996: 7). This sense of interconnectedness is found in the myths of the creator Napi: Napi created this land, his body is to be found imprinted upon it, and his name is found in its many features – here is his belly, over there his chin, elsewhere his elbow, and flowing through the land are his rivers. The Old Man River is a contemporary geographer’s corruption of the Old Man’s river, for Napi is also called the Old Man. (Peat 1996: 24) For Ryan Heavy Head (personal communication) the landscape is not only Napi’s body, but Napi’s body, the landscape, is also the social body, the body-politic. Land is said to be Napi’s body. As one hears the story of Napi and his various actions, one begins to realise that Napi is also the people,

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and Napi’s body is The People’s body. The land is the body of the People, and the land is contained within the body of each Blackfoot man, woman and child. (Peat 1996: 107) Note here the interpenetration between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the landscape, in a holographic relationship. The sense of interconnectedness is common to other indigenous huntergatherer peoples: “Probably the most pervasive underlying pattern in the hunter-gatherer worldview is the belief that all aspects of the world – humans, animals, ancestors, spirits, trees, rocks, and rivers – are related parts of a dynamic, integrated whole” (Lent 2017: 84–85). In the words of an Aboriginal storyteller Daisy Utemorrah: All these things, the plants and the trees, the mountains and the hills and the stars and the clouds, we represent them. You see these trees over there? We represent them. I might represent that tree there. Might be my name there, in that tree. Yes, and the reeds, too, in the waters . . . the frogs and the tadpoles and the fish . . . even the crickets . . . all kinds of things . . . we represent them. (quoted in Lent 2017: 85–86) There is, therefore, in Blackfoot and other indigenous hunter-gatherer societies no division between animate and inanimate nature, or between society, flora, fauna, and landscape. “The fundamental premise of Niitsitapi ways of knowing is that all forms of creation possess consciousness” (Bastien 2004: 80). This distinction between animate and inanimate is one of the analytical divisions insisted upon in European culture and language, based on the de-contextualised nature of the linguistic symbols of print culture. It also makes possible the empathy hierarchy (9.1.2, p. 235) and the construction of humans dominating nature. This demarcation creates completely distinct paradigms of reality, truth, and knowing. For example, a symbol in the Indigenous paradigm is not an abstraction or a representation of reality, but rather a medium for communicating with the cosmic forces of the universe, a spirit, and it is alive with consciousness. (Bastien 2004: 80) Unfortunately such detachment, division, and analysis has had catastrophic consequences for the Blackfoot and other indigenous peoples. The concrete relationships of Niitsitapi [the Blackfoot people] are to the land, animals, time, stars, sun, and to each other, but hundreds

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Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot of years of Europeanizing history have colonised these relationships and they have become abstractions. Detachment and disassociation are evident in the dispiritualisation of these concepts and relationships. They make genocide possible and allow denial afterward. Similarly, the abstracted definition of “culture” fails to perceive the culture of concrete relationships among Niitsitapi and thus negates it. Abstracted definitions as used in laws, policies, schools, and social science theories legitimize the dispiritualised perception of the natural world. (Bastien 2004: 31–32) [my insertion]

We end then with the sad scenario in which the noun-based, decontextualised, analytic “scientific” Enlightenment has destroyed the wholeness of indigenous cultures. Similarity and classification have triumphed, in a Pyrrhic victory, over local and global contiguity, or, even more radically, over wholeness. Paradoxically, though, the inadequacy of this noun-based ideology has been revealed through advances in scientific post-relativity quantum theory. We are not totally imprisoned by our linguistic structures, however much they militate against being made whole. But another irony, a tragic one, is that the very languages which are suffering from attrition and language death are those we need to promote a healthier relationship with our environment, and to escape from the consequences of an outdated science and a reactionary technology that threatens human existence. Linguistic diversity and biodiversity seem to be dying together.

9.3. Summary After introducing the Canonical Event Model, I showed how it conflicted with insights of quantum physics in four respects: physical reality as process; the interrelatedness of the natural world; the effect of the observer on the nature of what is observed; and the spontaneity of physical change. The model also conflicts with Gaia theory. I then demonstrated that the Canonical Event Model was constructed and reinforced by the grammar of European languages, and how the physicist David Bohm discovered in Blackfoot a language and culture which was, by contrast, ideally suited to representing the quantum world. I described some aspects of Blackfoot grammar, especially its paucity of nouns and emphasis on interacting processes, and how entities were defined as and by situated process rather than categories. Other aspects of the culture challenged Western concepts such as the divisibility of humans from nature and conceptions of past, present, and future. We may recognise in these local and global contiguous interactions a similar worldview to Daoism (8.3.2, p. 219) – interrelatedness of all elements of the natural and human world, and emphasis on process.

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Moreover, just as the Blackfoot language might reflect quantum physics, so Chinese might reflect Daoist process philosophy; some scholars have pointed out that in Chinese verbs can stand on their own as sentences without subjects and as answers to questions, suggesting a primacy to process (Bloom 1981).2 Perhaps this is a good point to summarise the trajectory of Chapters 4 to 9 of this book. Chapters 4 and 5 explored the syntagmatic contiguity axis in collocation and grammar/narrative. Chapters 6 and 7 homed in on the noun and noun phrase as the basis for classification and quantification as demanded by the similarity dimension for capitalist economics, science, and technology. Chapter 8 explored the problems in applying the scientific de-contextualised classificatory approach to sociology and linguistics and introduced poetry and philosophies which challenged it more radically. This chapter has taken up the process orientation of these philosophies by describing a language which emphasises verbs, and almost escapes nouns.

2 We should, however, point out that verbs on their own, without participants in a clause or the interaction with other verbs, do not realise contiguity. After all, nominalisation of verbs, despite abstraction from time, still represents a verb to some extent.

10 Feyerabend and conquest of abundance Abstraction versus the richness of being

These final three chapters extend the scope of our explorations and summarise the sometimes paradoxical and conflicting costs and benefits of exploiting the similarity and contiguity dimensions of meaning. To move towards some kind of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in the argument of the book, Chapter 10 discusses the work of Paul Feyerabend. He was a philosopher who emphasised the interplay between the similarity and contiguity dimensions, who championed diversity over uniformity, and whose interests ranged, as does this book, across literature, science, language, and culture. Feyerabend was one of the strongest opponents of monolithic and grand unifying theories. Though he didn’t live long enough to finish the book he started, entitled The Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, he hoped to show that all human enterprise, in an attempt to make sense of reality, reduces its abundance. For purposes of survival our perceptual systems cut down abundance, but so do religion, politics, technology, and academic disciplines such as science and philosophy. Any sculpting, construction or representation of reality may be partially successful for the communities in which it is situated, but will ultimately be inadequate, not to say presumptuous, if it attempts to grasp the full reality of existence. I discuss his ideas in this book under six headings: in 10.1, the ways in which – beginning in ancient Greece, which was foundational for the Western scientific enterprise – knowledge as situated practical activity and story-telling was replaced by scientific and mathematical abstractions; in 10.2, his deep analysis of science as abstraction; in 10.3, particularly the ways in which science, nevertheless, can never escape its social and historical situatedness and its contiguities, and how it creates new and artificial situations and stage set-ups for experimentation; in 10.4, the variety of sciences and the variety of approaches within each scientific field; in 10.5, the diversity of knowledge and its relation to ideology and social cohesion, and the dangers of seeking a unified theory; and finally, in 10.6, the role of language, semantic ambiguity, and metaphor in changing theories, paradigms, and ontologies and their stagings. DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-11

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10.1. The move away from knowledge as situated activity Feyerabend takes a historical perspective stretching back to ancient Greece. He documents the movement away from the experience of action genres and of change towards abstract philosophy, and explores the divisions and interrelations between practical knowledge and theory.

10.1.1. Ancient Greece: process versus being, story-telling versus definitions and numbers, gods versus God A dichotomy developed between the worldview of Aristotle and Homeric epics on the one hand and Parmenides and Plato on the other. Aristotle stressed the action genres of everyday life and culture in which our quest for knowledge takes place: “The task of thought, he seems to say, is to comprehend and perhaps to improve what we perceive and do when engaged in our everyday affairs; it is not to wander off into a no-man’s land of abstract and empirically inaccessible concepts” (Feyerabend 1999: 218). By contrast, for Plato and Parmenides the world of everyday sensory experience and of change was only an apparent world, not a real world. For them, “[t]he perceived world in which we make plans, love, hate, suffer, and the arts that try to deal with the world are on a lower plane of reality than the abstract constructions of .  .  . philosophy and the sciences” (Feyerabend 1999: 16). Or, as Lent puts it, “Parmenides renounces the world of sense in favour of the principles of logic; Heraclitus renounces the principles of logic in favour of the world of sense” (Lent 2017: 152). The attitude to change and process as experienced by our bodies and senses is seminal here. We have seen in 8.3.3 how Heraclitus acknowledged the fluidity of matter and the primacy of process. But Parmenides insisted on the illusoriness of becoming/process and on the reality of being; despite appearances, being exists, and is unmoveable and unchangeable. This emphasis on being continued with the philosophers of nature (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus), with their conception of unchangeable substance, whether made up of elements or atoms, and it gained new impetus from Plato’s ontology and theory of ideas, which devalued a changing world of appearance (Küng 1987). This was especially important for Western philosophy and science. Later European science, up to the early 20th century, inherited aspects of the philosophy of being. For instance, it preserved the idea of the conservation of matter, the notion that any apparent change was reversible, and that physical laws existed outside of time. However, these are illusions. The splitting of the atom demonstrated that matter can be transformed into energy. While in Newton’s world of dynamics there is certainly reversibility, which seems to undermine the effects of time and change, this is less true for chemistry and obviously untrue for biology.

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Such ideas as the permanence of being were alien to the Homeric epics where permanence simply means “a state or action or an event occurs repeatedly”. It is actions, not character, which constitute the personae: “‘Your heart is relentless, like an axe-blade driven by a man’s strength through the timber’ (Paris to Hector) – means accordingly that having met Hector, a person, any person, feels like having been hit by an axe” (Feyerabend 1999: 23). This reminds us of the way Agnes learnt to behave and talk so that anyone meeting her felt they were meeting a woman (Chapter 8). In Chapter 5 I explored the extension of the contiguity dimension in narrative literature. Feyerabend points out that the concepts introduced though story-telling are not Platonic entities, they are not “objective” i.e. separated from things and traditions. Concepts of this kind [from story-telling] are on the same level as colour, swiftness, beauty of motion, expertise in the handling of weapons and words. They are affected by the circumstances in which they arise, by dreams, emotions, wishes; they are not subjected to rigid rules. The best way of explaining such concepts is to immerse the questioner in the practice that contains the concepts and ask him/her to act. The second best way is to give an open list of particular instances. (Feyerabend 1999: 271) [my insertion] This is an excellent description of the contiguity dimension of meaning as narrative (5.3, pp. 127 ff), and how the concepts it gives rise to are based on particular examples of practice. Remember that Homeric epics were oral literature, and during the “dark age” of their composition writing disappeared. Literate cultures began to lose the diversity of action-based knowledge with its acknowledgement of all the contingencies of context, and their standardising proto-science initiated this loss. “But while the arts, taken together, preserved at least part of the diversity of knowledge, the information inside each techne became increasingly standardised: you do not find personal features in the Babylonian-Assyrian word lists, which may be regarded as the first very elementary form of science” (Feyerabend 1999: 254). (See 6.3, p. 146.) The story-telling and commonsense of Athenians were antithetical to Platonic definitions, which depend on finding similarities for classinclusion, just as they were to the numbers of mathematics. “Those concepts which the epic, tragedy, comedy and fourth-century Athenian common sense had explained by stories, lists, examples, and not by giving definitions” were an obstacle for Plato in defining virtue. Numbers may be simple things – the same for Greeks, barbarians, Athenians, Persians, Spartans; it may be possible to characterize them with the help of general definitions. But customs, virtues, information

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change from one city to the next and even more so from one nation to another . . . Searching here for a common property seems hopeless. (Feyerabend 1999: 260) Mathematical numbers represent the ultimate similarity-based abstraction from the unique action-based situated experience of narrative and cultural practice. According to the tradition (which in the West goes back to the Pythagoreans and especially Plato), reality resides in quantitative structures and laws. But this presents us with the first of several paradoxes involving our two dimensions. Championing similarity, Platonists assumed the existence of numbers independent of humans. But many people, championing social practice, think numbers arose as a result of human activity, and they only seem timeless because they are enshrined in language. Nevertheless, number theory was tremendously successful, not only in mathematical terms, but in terms of technology with its impact on social practices, and “a large amount of modern mathematics . . . was created by their [Platonists’] efforts” (Feyerabend 1999: 235) [my insertion]. Feyerabend touches on two further developments in ancient Greece, barter being replaced by money, and polytheism tending towards monotheism, both examples of the ways in which delicate ideas were compared with crude ideas and found not to be crude enough. Money and abstract notions of value replaced barter with its attention to context and detail. Gifts and bartered goods are personal and concrete compared with money. Buying and selling started as an exchange of gifts: an object that was not only useful but had personal memories attached to it was exchanged for another object of a similarly complex nature. Aesthetics, family history and practical value were closely connected. Then intermediate objects, a “currency” entered the process. At first these objects were intrinsically valuable (iron rods or silver coins); later they received value from the mode of circulation. Again a property of things – their “value” – got detached from personal elements and became more abstract. (Feyerabend 1999: 226) I am tempted to compare this with the de-contextualisation of agricultural product exchange brought about by the railways in 19th century Europe. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Tess, delivering milk to the station, is struck by the new anonymity of production for consumers: “Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won’t they?” she asked. “Strange people that we have never seen . . . who don’t know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how we two

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Increased mobility influenced ancient Greek religion, too. Belief in local gods changed when, through wars and travels, the Greeks came into contact with other gods. They then emphasised the similarities between their gods and foreign gods. “This extended the power of the gods but diminished their humanity” (Feyerabend 1999: 53). Gods became less human and less diverse until ultimately Xenophanes espoused the concept of monotheism. One God, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought. Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind. All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears. (Lent 2017: 149) Note how Xenophanes’ God is de-contextualised, never appearing in particular places and times, and abstracted from bodily experience. Monotheism won out against contiguity and diversity. There are two other effects of monotheism worth mentioning. Firstly, it tends to bring about a separation between the created world and humans, undoing the kinds of relationship we noted in Blackfoot and other indigenous cultures (9.2.5, pp. 247–248). These shamanistic religions regarded nature, and particularly animals, as divine. And secondly, in contrast with polytheism, it expresses a belief in a systematic worldview, a unified version of the truth. In a traditional polytheistic cosmology, there’s no need for a worldview to be systematic. Each god may have unique powers that are not necessarily consistent with those of another god. However, once we conceive of a sole creative power in the universe, the gods that previously represented natural forces and creatures are no longer the source of divinity. They become mere recipients of the creative force of the one god . . . The patterning instinct [similarity dimension] compels an attempt to understand the system this creator has bestowed: if the universe, which seems so variegated, is really a unified entity, then isn’t this unity the true wellspring of meaning? (Lent 2017: 124) [my insertion] Plato, as a foremost influence in the city states of ancient Greece, not only bequeathed us the idea of universal abstract laws, but the divine counterpart – an eternal God infinite and not limited in time or space. Mathematics was seen as the key to unlocking this divine order for the

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centuries to come, which partly explains the hegemony it exerts over other disciplines (7.3.5, p. 183). 10.1.2. Practical knowledge versus abstract knowledge and their interplay A strong related theme in Feyerabend is the tension and interplay between practical knowledge and abstract theory. Artisans and engineers (like herbalists) acquire enough practical knowledge about materials and how they can be used to get things done in a variety of physical contexts, but this knowledge has often been ignored or marginalised by scientists (like doctors). Artisans at all times possessed detailed information about the properties of material and of their behaviours under the most varied of circumstances, whereas theories of matter from Democritus to Dalton were considerably less specific and their connection with evidence much more tenuous. Yet questions of reality and of suitable methods of discovery were often formulated in their terms, not in artisan terms. The information of artisans did not even count as knowledge. (Feyerabend 1999: 138) In some cases engineers achieved technical prowess quite independent of scientific theory. This could lead to a split between technological applied science and hard theoretical science. For instance, they established the practical science of hydraulics, which increasingly diverged from the idealised theoretical hydrodynamics. The multitudinous problems of practice could not be answered by the hydrodynamics of Euler; they could not even be discussed. This was chiefly because, starting from Euler’s equations of motion, the science had become more and more a purely academic analysis of the hypothetical frictionless “ideal fluid”. (Prandtl and Tietjens 1957: 3, cited in Feyerabend 1999: 150) One might compare the “ideal fuid” with Chomsky’s “idealised native speaker” (see 8.2.1, p. 196). In other cases there was less of a divergence between the contingencies of experiential practice and theory, but, rather, a somewhat paradoxical interplay. While the theoretical won out, the research which it initiated had many practical applications. This distinction between abstract theory which provides understanding and practical subjects which are never entirely transparent played an important role in the rise of modern science. It replaced the rich

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Developments in some sciences seem first to move away from the concrete towards the generalisations of mathematical formulae and quantification, but later to reinstate the concrete and abandon quantification. Consider the whole sweep of development in geometry/algebra, beginning with artisanal knowledge, which then led to the relatively abstract geometry of Euclid in ancient Greece and up to Newton, which could still be visualised, and then on to the ultra-abstract unvisualisable algebraic formulations, before leaving quantification behind and investigating topology, in which visualisation is again possible. This mirrors the recognition of the observer effect in quantum physics, which reinstated the context.

10.2. Science and abstraction revisited I have used the word “abstraction” quite freely in this book so far. It has two related aspects, one of which is generalisation through classification, and another de-contextualisation. It is worth considering more exactly how science involves abstraction. Feyerabend quotes J.T. Merz at some length, and the quote is highly relevant to the themes of this book: The different aspects of nature [listed above] . . . and the various sciences that have been elaborated by their aid, comprise what may appropriately be termed the abstract study of natural objects and phenomena. Though all the methods of reasoning . . . originated primarily through observation and reflection over things natural, they have this in common that they – for the purposes of examination – remove the objects out of the position and surroundings which nature has assigned to them: that they abstract them. This process of abstraction is either literally a process of removal from one place to another, from the great work- and storehouse of nature herself to the small workroom, the laboratory of the experimenter; or – where such removal is not possible – the process is carried out merely in the realm of contemplation; one or two special properties are noted and described, whilst the number of collateral data are for the moment disregarded. [A third method, not developed at the time, is the creation of “unnatural” conditions and, thereby, the production of “unnatural” phenomena.] There is, moreover, in addition to the aspect of convenience, one very powerful inducement for scientific workers to persevere in their process of abstraction .  .  . [T]his is the practical usefulness of such

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researches in the arts and industries . . . The wants and creations of artificial life have thus proved the greatest incentives to the abstract and artificial treatment of natural objects and processes for which the chemical and electrical laboratories with the calculating room of the mathematician on the one side and the workshop and factory on the other, have in the course of the century become so renowned . . . There is, however, in the human mind an opposite interest which fortunately counteracts to a considerable extent the one-sided working of the spirit of abstraction in science . . . This is the genuine love of nature, the consciousness that we lose all power if, to any great extent, we sever or weaken that connection which ties us to the world as it is – to things real and natural: it finds its expression in the ancient legend of the mighty giant [Antaeus] who derived all his strength from his mother earth and collapsed if severed from her . . . In the study of natural objects we meet (therefore) with a class of students who are attracted to things as they are . . . [Their] sciences are the truly descriptive sciences, in opposition to the abstract ones. (Merz 1965: Vol. 2, 200) (quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 153) [the last two insertions in brackets are my own] Several aspects of this passage are signifcant. Firstly, abstraction is defned either as removal from context, removal from contiguity relations, or as contemplative classifcation, similarities trumping differences. Feyerabend adds a third, in the frst brackets, the creation of unnatural conditions (see 10.3 below). This removal from context reminds us that paradigmatic relations are held to rely on absence (Table 0.1, p. 9), whereas contiguity relations depend on presence. Secondly, scientifc programmes and their abstractions are located between, on one side, the technical world of the factory and workshop, operationalisation in experience, and, on the other, the world of even greater abstraction of the mathematician. Thirdly, however, Merz sets up a distinction between these abstract sciences and the truly descriptive ones. The latter emphasise our vital connections to the natural world, without which we cannot survive, echoing the wholeness and interconnectedness in all its complexity which is a tenet of Gaia theory, Buddhism, Daoism, relationalism, and Bohm’s holographic universe (Chapters 8 and 9). The crude simplification inherent in scientific abstraction and experimentation is a persistent theme in Feyerabend. “Abstractions remove the particulars that distinguish an object from another . . . Experiments further remove or try to remove the links that tie every process to its surroundings . . . the remains are called “real”, which means they are regarded as more important than the totality itself” (Feyerabend 1999: 5). I have, in my time, sat through many a presentation on lab-based measurement of reaction times and responses to linguistic metaphors, which seemed to me quite irrelevant because the text responded to by the subjects were totally

258 Feyerabend and conquest of abundance de-contextualised from the genres in which they might naturally occur. The only relevant genre remaining in this research was that of the psychological test, which tells us nothing about the way these metaphors might be processed in texts outside the lab. Elsewhere, Feyerabend points out the nexus of abstraction linking the ignoring of the observation of contextualised natural phenomena, the use of experimentation, and the search for universal laws using mathematics. Descartes, Galileo, and Leibniz disregarded phenomena and postulated “universal and inexorable laws . . . They emphasised experiment over observation and considerably extended the use of mathematical formalisms” (Feyerabend 1999: 257). Quoting, this time from Monod, Feyerabend underscores Merz’s lament that abstract science weakens our bond with nature but nevertheless proves its power in technology: By a single stroke it [the idea that objective empirical knowledge is the only source of truth] claimed to sweep away the tradition of a hundred thousand years which had become one with human nature itself. It wrote an end to the ancient animist covenant between man and nature, leaving nothing in place of that precious bond but an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude . . . it has, however, commended recognition; but that is solely because of its prodigious power of performance. (Monod 1972: 169–170, quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 5–6) [my insertion] This power of performance is the technological and social success of an alienating science to which we are addicted. And which, to my mind, we have so abused that the time-span of its success might only last some 400 years from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the present century.

10.3. The transformations of science and its social situatedness Feyerabend, in his bracketed insertion in the quote from Merz above, referred to “the creation of ‘unnatural’ conditions and, thereby, the production of ‘unnatural’ phenomena”. Feyerabend deals at length with such transformations (and distortions) brought about by the stage set-up of scientific experimentation. Every scientific experiment involves two series of transformations and a comparison [nota bene]. Nature is transformed to obtain special events, these events are further transformed by data processing devices, scanners, etc. to turn them into evidence which is then compared with the outcome of a transformation of high theory through calculations, computer approximations, phenomenology, etc. An example is the

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UA1 experiment that started at CERN in summer 1981 and led to the discovery of the W and Z particles. On the side of the object there was a complicated arrangement leading to proton-antiproton collisions supposed to create short-term appearances of the particles sought, together with intricate devices consisting of detectors, computers for multiple tasks (checking the performance of the detectors, selecting possible candidates out of a plethora of events, displaying them for further study by scientists). On the side of the theoreticians there were predictions (from the electro-weak theory, specially adapted to the situation of the experiment, often using computers) to guide the selection. Neither “nature” nor its theoretical image were faced directly; they were both transformed by complex and sophisticated processes. (Feyerabend 1999: 103) [my insertion] Such experiments use artifcial measuring and computing instruments to produce data which is then compared with the predictions of the theory. This comparison involving calculations relies on the similarity dimension. But the staging or set up, with its extremely complex experimental and measurement apparatus, creates an artifcial contiguity, too. Of course, as noted in 9.1.1, quantum theory shows that the contiguities and contingencies introduced by experimentation undermine the objectivity of the results. In the Canonical Event Model (Figure 9.1) the observer is separate from the event observed, but in fact there is no such thing as a detached observer. Properties were once regarded as objective, but now are seen to depend on the way they are approached and perceived through experimentation and the use of apparatus. In quantum theory the observer effect means the objective/subjective dividing line is dissolved. The results are subjective because the observer cannot be separated from the observed object, but objective because of the power of their results and trustworthiness of the perception. Feyerabend dismisses the naive “‘scientific’ idea that the features of the world are independent of thought and perception or, to express it more dramatically, the idea that humans are aliens, not natural inhabitants of the universe” (Feyerabend 1999: 167). His view can be related to the Anthropic Principle, stressing a world which would not exist without our participation in it, which I discussed in 9.1.1, p. 234, and echoes Peat’s observations on the dissolving of the objective/subjective distinction in Blackfoot (9.2, p. 259). Along the same lines Feyerabend discusses behaviourism in terms of its results and its ideology. Its experimental staging, an artificial set of contiguities, gave it the power to achieve results which earlier stage sets did not, and it did so by embracing the ideology of “objectivity”. Behaviourists set up a stage, containing subjects, researchers, experimental equipment, and possible descriptions; they project their

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Indeed, a different stage and a different ideology which accepted the subjectivities of empathy and introspection could give us “different ways of explaining, and reacting to, human behaviour. Why should one type of aspect be regarded as ‘real’ while another receives no such dignity?” (Feyerabend 1999: 120). “Are we prepared to view ourselves in the manner suggested by scientists” – in the case of behaviourists without freedom or dignity (Skinner 1971) since our behaviour is determined by our conditioning – “or do we prefer to make personal contact, friendship, etc. the measure of our nature?” (Feyerabend 1999: 157). One recalls the marginalisation of the social and interpersonal aspects of meaning in (Chomskyan) semantics, cognitive linguistics, and even Relevance theory. Feyerabend concludes that every cultural and ideological tradition that is held by large populations of people can be justifed if it creates social cohesion, allows society to survive crises in the long term, and enables members to live life with some degree of fulflment. The ontologies of the Kuhnian scientific paradigm are not givens in nature just waiting to be discovered. They are the creations of scientists working on the parts of nature which show the least resistance, and which reflect a specific ideology, the beliefs and meanings that give power to satisfy the needs of the society at a particular time. This can be illustrated by developments in atomic theory. Scientists, being equipped with a complex organism and embedded in constantly changing physical and social surroundings, used ideas and actions (and, much later, equipment up to and including industrial complexes such as CERN) to manufacture, first metaphysical atoms, then rude physical atoms, and finally, complex systems of elementary particles out of a material that did not contain these elements but could be shaped into them. Scientists, according to this account, are sculptors of reality – but sculptors in a special sense. They not only act causally upon the world; they also create semantic conditions engendering strong inferences from known effects to novel projections, and conversely from the projections to testable effects . . . Every individual, group, and culture tries to arrive at an equilibrium between the entities it posits and leading beliefs, needs, expectations, and ways of arguing. (Feyerabend 1999: 144) I return to discuss Feyerabend’s ideas on how semantics is involved in the stage sets which sculpt reality in section 10.6.

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These quotes make clear that science is unavoidably positioned within culture, society, and ideology, that is, ‘meaning in the service of power’ (Thompson 1984). “We regard those things as real which play an important role in the kind of life we prefer” (Feyerabend 1999: 71), that is which give us the power and ability to live and function in that society. I would consider, for instance, Darwin. A case can be made that, related to the Wedgewood family, commercial manufacturers of pottery, he projected the capitalist commercial model onto the natural world, with ecological niches equivalent to market niches in what he calls “the economy of nature” (Darwin 1859/1991: 393). Feyerabend rejects the idea that “Darwin . . . proved a connection between man and other species without any support from changing evaluations, ideologies, social tendencies – and so on” (Feyerabend 1999: 72). As Ridley pointed out, Keynes regarded The Origin of Species “as simply Ricardian economics couched in scientific language” and Stephen Jay Gould has said that natural selection “was essentially Adam Smith’s economics read into nature”. Karl Marx made much the same point: “It is remarkable . . . how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian struggle for existence”. (Ridley 1997: 252) Moreover, science is located, more specifically, within the academic community, where it is influenced by personal and interpersonal factors and power struggles. Mulkay and Gilbert list some of the factors which were cited as giving rise to opponents’ errors as follows: prejudice, commitment to one’s own theories, reluctance to make the effort, complexity of the theory, dislike of the new theory, extreme naïvety, narrow disciplinary perspective, threat to status, rushing in too quickly, insufficient experimental skill, false intuition, subjective bias, personal rivalry, irrationality and general cussedness . . . not bothering to read the relevant literature and therefore not seeing the force of the argument, being too busy, being trained in terms of a false theory, being friendly with the correct theory’s opponents, living in a country where that theory is not popular, stupidity, accepting the views of an authoritative figure, being afraid of a theory, having invested a good deal of effort in a prior theory, having a reputation deriving from work based on an earlier theory, pig-headedness, being out of touch with reality, being American and therefore thinking in a woolly fashion, fear of being discredited with grant-giving bodies, being prevented by disciples from admitting one’s mistakes, and believing in

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The conclusion of this section must be that the notion of objective abstract science is a myth. It operates with the artificial contiguities of stage sets, within an ideological context, oriented towards successful performance in terms of the needs of cultures and societies, and is influenced by local social and interpersonal factors within academia. This may not, however, mean it is, or was, a useless myth without a power of its own.

10.4. The variety of science Given that science develops in diverse social and ideological contexts, and that the “objects” of investigation differ along with the stages set up to investigate them, and with the language used to confer a reality on them, it is not surprising that we have a variety of sciences. There is no such thing as “the” science. Science contains many different and yet empirically acceptable worldviews, each containing its own metaphysical and ideological background. During the Covid 19 crisis the UK government repeatedly insisted they were following “the science”. But what science was that? Virology? Genetics? Epidemiology? Social psychology? Psychiatry? Economics? [S]cience is a mixed bag of opinions, procedures, “facts”, “principles”, not a coherent unit. Different subjects (anthropology, psychology, biology, hydrodynamics, cosmology, etc. etc.) and different schools within the same subject (empirical and theoretical trends in astrophysics, cosmology, and hydrodynamics; phenomenology and “high theory” in elementary particle physics; morphology, embryology, molecular biology, etc. in biology – and so on) use widely different procedures, have different worldviews, argue about them – and have results: nature seems to respond positively to many approaches, not only to one. (Feyerabend 1999: 212) Feyerabend draws attention to the different scientifc worldviews in 19th century: the astronomical view, which involved mathematical refnements of action at distance laws – applied to electricity, magnetism, capilliarity; the atomic view, which informed chemical research; the kinetic and mechanical view of atoms used to investigate heat, electricity; the physical view, which saw energy as fundamental, and was applied by physicians, physiologists, and chemists; and the phenomenological view, which was related to the physical view but was more specifc, as in the study of elasticity.

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Not only do different sciences and the different subfields within them work with different worldviews and therefore different paradigms, the entities, the ontology of one science will potentially conflict with another. For instance, according to quantum physics “molecules . . . the basic entities of chemistry and molecular biology, do not exist, they just appear under well-defined and rather complex conditions” (Feyerabend 1999: 142). Conflicts even occur within the same sub-field and therefore demand the recognition of complementarity. This is the principle that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. Examples of the complementary properties of (sub-)atomic particles that Niels Bohr considered were position and momentum, spin on different axes, and the familiar wave and particle-related properties already discussed (9.1.1). The transition from one manifest world to another cannot be described in either except by excising large regions originally thought to be real – a good case for applying the notion of complementarity . . . Being as it is, independently of any kind of approach, can never be known, which means that really fundamental theories don’t exist. (Feyerabend 1999: 205) Commenting on the same field as Bohr, Heisenberg underlined: “Quantum theory is . . . a wonderful example for it shows that one can clearly understand a state of affairs yet know that one can describe it only in images and similes” (Heisenberg 1969: 2850, quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 175). The complementarity of diverse models, images and metaphors for reality are thus essential. There are many different maps of reality, from a variety of scientific viewpoints (Ziman 1980). Feyerabend, however, denies his views are relativistic. Though scientists are sculptors of the material of nature, “nature is not something formless that can be changed into any shape; it resists and by its resistance reveals its properties and laws” (Feyerabend 1999: 238). Scientists’ knowledge/ description is an artefact. Nature isn’t. “Being approached in different ways nature gives different responses” (Feyerabend 1999: 239). Procedures (experiments, models, ideas) of a research project interfere with nature, and they reveal how nature responds to the interference. The conclusion must be: There is no “scientific” world view just as there is no uniform enterprise “science” – except in the minds of metaphysicians, schoolmasters, and scientists blinded by the achievements of their own particular niche. Still, there are many things we can learn from the sciences. But we can also learn from the humanities, from religion, and from the remnants of ancient traditions that survived the onslaught of Western

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His fear was, however, that at times of crisis and facing uncertainty we tend to put faith in authority, so scientists might be treated like henchmen and generals, or priests. And the danger is that the “educated public” might believe in “the science”, a simple-minded and vapid illusion.

10.5. Knowledge: diversity, power, and the hegemony of a unified approach As he advocated, we can thus extend the notion of variety beyond the sciences to humanities – history, anthropology – and religion. In Chapter 7 I introduced a list/ladder of academic disciplines (Figure 7.3, p. 186), noting the tendency for mathematics to colonise the six disciplines above it. As well as within science, therefore, in all the non-scientific disciplines and in the subject matter they investigate there is, or should be, a celebration of the variety of approaches to knowledge. In fact, artistic creations and science are both artefacts, sculpting the world differently and each discovering knowledge through the yielding or resistance of the world to these shapings. [L]ike rocks and flowers works of art are products of nature .  .  . our entire universe from the mythical Big Bang via the emergence of hydrogen and helium, galaxies, fixed stars, planetary systems, viruses, bacteria, fleas, dogs to the Glorious Arrival of Western man is an artefact constructed by generations of scientist-artisans from a partly yielding, partly resisting material of unknown properties. (Feyerabend 1999: 224) People may believe “that the bits and pieces of science that are fying around today are superior by far to the analogous collections of a past age – a live nature, whimsical Gods, etc.”, whereas, in fact, “the superiority is the result of having followed a path of least resistance. Gods cannot be captured by experiment, matter can” (Feyerabend 1999: 142). What is true for science and religion is also true within a scientific field like molecular biology. Describing and manipulating genes is successful because the method works for them. But understanding embryonic and psychic development and the structure and function of the nervous system cannot be successfully investigated by this method. So these latter areas have shown insignificant progress compared with genetics. I would compare this with the developments of linguistics outlined in Chapter 8. The areas of least resistance were phonetics and phonology which could be simply reduced to limited systems of a restricted set of values: dental, labial, labio-dental,

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alveolar, glottal; plosives, fricatives, continuants; voiced-unvoiced; nasalnon-nasal. Discourse, by contrast, is much more complex and resistant to analysis. Similarly, in corpus linguistics using the orthographic word in conjunction with concordancing software is the path of least resistance, but it may preclude theories of meaning which take multi-word units into account, as we saw in our critique of priming theory (4.4.1, p. 102). We should not, imperialistically, deny the validity of knowledge to “unscientific” cultures, for instance, those which, from our “enlightened” point of view, we could regard as superstitious in addressing divinities, consulting oracles, or indulging in “meaningless” rites to improve mind and body. Because these cultures have been just as successful – they have enabled their members to live a moderately rich, fulfilling life, sustainable for themselves and their ecology. So we may conclude that “nonscientific notions, too, receive a response from Nature, that Nature is more complex than a belief in the uniformity and unique excellence of science would suggest” (Feyerabend 1999: 195–196). Indeed, I believe we need cultures and languages like Blackfoot as our industrialised consumer capitalist culture approaches catastrophic failure. Or we could learn from Daoist thought. While science in the Enlightenment mode asserted the inexorable and immutable basic laws of nature, by contrast, “early Chinese thinkers had taken the empirical variety at face value. They had favoured diversification, and had collected anomalies instead of trying to explain them away” (Feyerabend 1999: 165). We observed this in discussing the Daoist concept of ziran (8.3.2, p. 219). We need to avoid the blinkered elitism which so far has dominated Western civilisation (Feyerabend 1999: 241). In the introduction to Conquest of Abundance, the editor Terpstra points out that other forms of meaning and purpose exist beyond Western science. And, for the most part the knowledge possessed by “unscientific” cultures is acquired through action genres: People “create” a particular reality by developing a practice of interaction with being (actions and perceptions) and the associated language and concepts (mental operations between actions and perceptions). Not all practices of interaction are successful, but certainly more than one exist and give meaning to the lives of the people who develop them. (1999: xvii–xviii) Feyerabend suggests three approaches to the varieties of knowledges within science and other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and theology/religious studies. (The examples in 2) and 3) are illustrative quotations I have come across myself.) 1) List them and regard them as separate. 2) Make one superordinate, and suppose the others are a) derived from it or b) meaningless. This took place in the 19th century. Sciences were not

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treated equally, as if mathematics and physics were more fundamentally true than chemistry and biology (see Figure 7.3, p. 186). Even comprehensive sciences, such as chemistry and biology, for a long time were assigned a secondary role in the hierarchy of sciences. When the timescale of mid-nineteenth century geology and biology exceeded the estimates of the solar age as determined by physicists (such as Helmholtz and Kelvin) and corresponding estimates of the cooling of the earth’s surface, prevalence was given to the highly conjectural numbers of the latter. (Feyerabend 1999: 138) The reductionist tendency continues today. In the quotes below, I identify Steven Pinker as taking the 2a) option, suggesting that evolutionary psychology can be made superordinate to other academic disciplines such as aesthetics, sociology of the family and sexuality, war studies, moral philosophy, and religion: In the study of human behaviour no-one even talks about “sociobiology” or “selfish genes” anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science. In the study of humans there are major spheres of human experience – beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence – in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. Behavioural genetics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the application of the Human Genome Project. Cognitive neuro-science will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behaviour, including the emotionally and politically charged ones. (Pinker 2003: 135) It seems to me that Francis Crick takes the 2b) option, by suggesting many other academic disciplines and areas of human experience are meaningless apart from neuroscience: The “Astonishing Hypothesis” is that “YOU”, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll might have phrased it “You’re just a pack of neurons”. (Crick 1994: 3) 3) Ignore the differences, and pretend they can all be connected into a coherent “scientific worldview”. This would entail even more abstraction

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and generalisation based on a specious similarity. For instance we have had the cognitive linguist, Langacker, pronouncing on a unifying theory of language and psychology: As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century, one can see emerging in many disciplines – linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, semiotics, anthropology, computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and others – a constellation of ideas, outlooks, methods and empirical findings that seem on the verge of coalescing to form a coherent, comprehensive, and biologically natural conception of language and mind. (Langacker 1991: 538–539) More extremely, in 1998, at an event in the White House, Stephen Hawking made the following prediction: We shall have to rely on mathematical beauty and consistency to find the ultimate Theory of Everything. Nevertheless, I am confident we will discover it by the end of the 21st century, and probably much sooner. I would take a bet at 50–50 odds that it will be within twenty years, starting now. (Gleick 2021: 36) He would have lost his bet. Gleick concludes: “Why should the universe, which grows more gloriously complex the more we see, be reduced to one set of equations and formulae?” Approaches 2) and especially 3) are, for Feyerabend, mistaken, for he believed that any comprehensive unifying “scientific” map of reality is unattainable – or even if it were, it would be much too complicated to be understood or used. These approaches are extremely dangerous too. He excoriates Medawar’s celebration of abstract generalisations, as would Duns Scotus, Hopkins, and Daoists (Chapter 8): As science advances particular facts are comprehended within, and therefore in a sense annihilated by, general statements of steadily increasing explanatory power and compass whereupon the facts need no longer to be known explicitly. In all sciences we are being progressively relieved of the burden of singular instances, the tyranny of the particular. (Medawar, 1967: 114) He identifes Medawar’s attitude with the totalitarian tyranny of the Romanian President Ceaucescu: “I now add that Ceausescu did in practice what the hypothesis (and Medawar) do in theory. He tore down idiosyncratic

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ancient villages, suppressed idiosyncratic local beliefs, and replaced them by monsters and a uniform ideology” (Feyerabend 1999: 250). He sees this too in the workings of the EU: [T]he members of the European community, those standard bearers of Civilisation and the Free World, want to bring “backward” regions like Portugal, Greece and the south of Italy up to their own high level of existence. How do they determine backwardness? By notions such as “gross national product”, “life expectancy”, “literacy rate” and so on. This is their “reality”. We note here the use of quantifcation and statistics (see 6.3, 6.4) as an excuse for imposing a worldview, which is then translated into material reality: Action follows: . . . monocultures replace local production (for example eucalyptus trees in Portugal), dams are built where people lived before (Greece), and so on. Entire communities are displaced, their ways of life destroyed just as they were in Ceaucescu’s Romania, they are unhappy, they protest, even revolt – but this doesn’t count. It is not as “real” as are the facts projected by an “objective” economic science. Is it not wise to be afraid of such a civilisation? And is it not advisable to reverse a way of arguing that encourages the trends I have just described? . . . The inversion has many advantages. It is in agreement with human rights. It sensitises us to the fact that reality [of universalist science including economics] is the result of a choice and can be modified: we are not stuck with “progress” and “universality”. It is plausible because already at the quantum level Being is more ambiguous than the supporters of a realist metaphysics seem to assume . . . The inversion is not motivated by a contempt for science but by the wish to subject it, this product of relatively free agents, to the judgment of other free agents instead of being frightened by a petrified version of it. (Feyerabend 1999: 250–251) [my insertion] Having criticised economics and its statistical quantifications, Feyerabend turns his sights on philosophy. Compared with poetry and commonsense, philosophical discourse is barren – and insensitive. It frowns upon the emotional bonds and the changes that keep humans going, which means that philosophers have destroyed what they have found, much in the same way that the standard-bearers of Western civilisation have destroyed indigenous cultures and ways of life and replaced them with their own idiosyncratic “treasures”. (Feyerabend 1999: 270–271)

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We recognise here the kind of philosophical/mathematical linguistics that ignored the interpersonal, the emotional bonds which drive human behaviour and a life of fulflment. As a particular instance of misguided philosophy he attacks a document signed by philosophers, scientists, and administrators, appealing to all parliaments and governments of the world to introduce, support, and underwrite with full force the study of philosophy and its history and the related history of the natural humane sciences – from the intellectual treasures of the Greeks and the great oriental cultures to the present . . . [which would be] the ineradicable presupposition for every genuine encounter between peoples and cultures, for the creation of new categories to overcome existing contradictions and to be able to direct humanity on the path of goodness. (quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 269) This is precisely the approach 3), above, the quest for a super-category to “overcome differences and contradictions”. Categories by themselves cannot direct anything without power (kategorein in ancient Greek meant ‘to accuse’), and he fears this super-category would have to be imposed by a world agency through education or brainwashing. Besides which, these philosophers do not address the real problems of our time to do with hunger, disease, environmental degradation, war, and violence: The warring parties have found a wonderful way of ‘overcoming existing contradictions’ – ethnic cleansing. The appeal has nothing to say about these atrocities; in a way it even supports them by its proposed method of conceptual and/or cultural cleansing. (Feyerabend 1999: 272) We observe, rather in the vein of Foucault (1980) and Bourdieu (1991), that knowledge meaning and power are inextricably linked, as ideology. The question is whether the meaning is based on similarity, abstractions, generalisations, statistical quantification, and universal inexorable categories or on contiguity, practical experience, idiosyncrasy, haeccitas, and change. Both are linked to power, whether the power of technology and medicine to improve health or impose development on “primitive”, “backward”, or “superstitious” cultures; or the power to live a satisfying life in, say, a traditional Blackfoot community.

10.6. Language, ambiguity, and change When considering Feyerabend’s views of language and ambiguity it is useful to take both a semasiological and onomasiological approach (see

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1.2, p. 20). Language is ambiguous and the phenomena of nature are also ambiguous and partial. In a way similar to David Bohm, Feyerabend suggests that reality is coherent but hidden and we only have glimpses of it: facts are fragments not manifestations of what there is. The objects of quantum mechanics are hints or analogies. You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being – according to today’s cosmology! – can figure it all out? This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing “Ha! Ha! They think they have found me out!” (Feyerabend 1987: 309) Once the stage sets we use to investigate reality become entrenched they appear natural, customary and are believed to correspond to reality. Only when a newly constructed stage set comes along is the artificiality of the previous stage set noticed. The new stage set makes manifest what has been hidden before to “activate its inherent ambiguity and use it to effect change” (Feyerabend 1999: 113). What is the role of language in creating, maintaining, or changing the simplistic illusion of robust and secure scientific knowledge established by a stage set? The inadequacy of language mirrors the inadequacy of knowledge, but its ambiguities allow for change and new perspectives. Firstly, language can be a conservative and reactionary force, reinforcing existing paradigms and ontologies: Any language . . . is a conspiracy against experience in the sense of being a collective attempt to simplify and arrange experience into manageable parcels . . . To exercise a language regularly on some area of experience and activity . . . overlays the field after a time with a certain structure; the structure is that implied by the categories, the lexical and grammatical components of the language. (Baxandall 1971: 44, 47, quoted in Feyerabend 1999: 17–18) This is exactly what Whorf claimed in general (8.2.3, p. 199), and what Halliday demonstrated in terms of the development of a grammar working hand in hand with scientifc developments from Newton onwards (7.3.3, pp. 175–178). However, the redeeming feature of language, its vagueness and ambiguity or fluidity of application, as manifest in theories of prototypicality, radial categories, and family resemblances (7.1.1, 7.1.2), is what assures the potential for change. “Speaking a language or explaining a situation, after all, means both following the rules and changing them” (Feyerabend 1999: 125). As ethnomethodologists maintain, everything is for the first

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LANGUAGE AND COGNITION

PERCEPTION

SENSATIONS

MENTAL PROCESSES

WORLD

Figure 10.1 Language/cognition and perception mediating world knowledge and interpreting sensations

time and there are degrees of indexicality and reflexivity in every language use (8.2.9). Attempts to entirely assimilate the world to the language are not possible, so the semantics of a language have to accommodate to changing experience: Thinking and speaking a language, we continuously adapt to the situations we encounter and we change our ideas accordingly. The idea of love we had as children differs from the adolescent idea, which in turn differs from the idea of a great-great-grandmother looking back on a rich rewarding life with a variety of husbands, lovers, children, grandchildren, and dogs. The changes may be abrupt – most of the time they are continuous and hardly noticeable. They are also unforeseen, for nobody can know what events s/he will encounter and how s/he will react to them. Moreover they grow from the ideas of the moment, which will appear precise and well-defined only as long as life is stable and fairly routine: as in the case of anatomy, clarity is a property of corpses. (Feyerabend 1999: 78) The gradual changes might be regarded as approximations in the similarity dimension, but the more radical changes manifest themselves in metaphor or analogy. The analogy [metaphor/non-prototypical use] smoothes the transition from the original to the new sense; we feel that despite the change of meaning we are still speaking the same language. Now if a conceptual

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Feyerabend and conquest of abundance change does not go through a metalanguage but stays in the language itself (in which case we would speak of changing the properties of things rather than the use of words), and if it is not only a single term but an entire conceptual system that is being received, then we are faced with a transformation which, though starting from a welldefined mode of projection and proceeding through a series of steps which, though surprising, conform to the mode, prepares an entirely different stage. (Feyerabend 1999: 124) [my insertion]

So language itself, as it contributes to the determination of thought and theory and perception, is also an element of the stage set-up or the scientist’s and artist’s sculpting of the material world (see Figure 10.1). The theory-constitutive models or metaphors replace one set of meanings with a whole new set, because the new stage replaces a conventional onomasiology with a new paradigm of ontologies and taxonomies. And semasiologically, words and terms change their meanings too: “Absorbing the perceptions and moods of a new era they first become ambiguous and then flip over into new meanings” (Feyerabend 1999: 126). Important metaphors of this kind tend to be lexicalised into the (technical) dictionary. We have seen in Chapters 6 and 7 how the developments of science were accompanied by semantic classifications and by the changes in semantics brought about by grammatical metaphor to develop ontologies without which science would not make sense. Moreover, the metaphoric models, or sculptures, as Feyerabend calls them, create the realities which would not otherwise exist. We could put it as Harvey does: We see in short only those values which our value-laden metaphors allow us to see in our study of the natural world. Harmony and equilibrium; beauty, integrity and stability; co-operation and mutual aid; ugliness and violence; hierarchy and order; competition and the struggle for existence; turbulence and unpredictable dynamic change; atomistic causation; dialectics and principles of complementarity; chaos and disorder; fractals and strange attractors; all of them can be identified as “natural values” not because they are arbitrarily assigned to nature, but because however ruthless, pristine and rigorously “objective” our method of enquiry may be, the framework of interpretation is given in the metaphor rather than the evidence. (Harvey 1996: 163) Or we could go even further with the ethnomethodologists, and claim the refexivity of science – the metaphor is like a declaration, stating it brings about a change, a new shape, at least, to reality.

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10.7. Summary In ancient Greece situated practical activity and story-telling, emphasising the contiguities of time-bound experience were, by Parmenides and Plato, replaced by timeless scientific and mathematical abstractions emphasizing the similarity dimension. And the varieties of gods with human and local characteristics gave way, with Xenophanes, to the concept of a single God, inhuman and unlimited in time and space, polytheism and difference substituted by monotheism – similarity at its unifying extreme. While barter, an exchange of particular goods between identifiable individuals or groups, was increasingly abandoned in favour of money, a more abstract and impersonal means of exchange, in which goods are made similar through equal monetary value. The Greek love of abstraction laid the foundations of modern science which depends upon the decontextualisation away from the contiguities in which natural phenomena are embedded. Nevertheless, science can never escape its social and historical situatedness, and is forced to create new and artificial situations and to stage set-ups for the purpose of experimentation. Science looks both ways, towards the similarity-based, de-contextualised, highly abstract mathematics, but also towards technological practice, with its effects on lived experience and cultural practice. The interplay between abstraction and material practices reveals that often the high abstractions are extremely successful in technological terms. Yet, science and other kinds of knowledge neither can, nor should, strive for grand unifying theories, maximising similarity. Science cannot because there is no such thing as “the science”, only a variety of sciences with different methods of investigation and different paradigms/ontologies, even within the same scientific field. And beyond science there are a variety of other knowledges, with their own potential to create meaningful ideologies, practices, social cohesion, and a satisfying sustaining life. Any attempt to create unified reductionist theories of science, economics, and other knowledge tends towards totalitarianism and the loss of cultural and ecological diversity. Science has been successful where it has pursued the path of least resistance, sculpting reality in the quest for knowledge, leaving aside the intractable harder questions of human meaning and purpose, which non-scientific knowledge can address. Nature is ambiguous and so, thankfully, is the language with which we sculpt it. Language inevitably imposes systems of similarity or classification on our experience and knowledge, conferring realities, but ambiguity and flexibility is its saving grace: under the pressure of experience and discourse language changes, even slightly in use with approximation and vagueness, or more radically through metaphor, which, as part of a new staging, enables changes to theories, paradigms, and ontologies.

11 Conclusion (1) Evaluating the two dimensions

The last two chapters both summarise and extend the thesis of the book. In this penultimate chapter I summarise the areas I have already covered (11.1). I proceed to discuss the ambivalence of our value judgments about the two dimensions, the problems with the similarity dimension (11.2) and with the contiguity dimension (11.3), centring our thoughts around the conflict between the monolithic and diverse, the value and danger of limiting ourselves to practical everyday commonsense with its contiguities and teleology. In this context I explore the double-edged nature of literacy (11.4), exploring its manifestation in the new modes of communication brought about by the internet. The next and final chapter will summarise the ways in which the two dimensions interact, how various attempts have been made to synthesise them, and concludes that the inescapability of the similarity dimension mandates alternative models and metaphors.

11.1. Where the book has taken us and the ambivalence of the two dimensions Let’s remind ourselves of the main thesis of this book. We are material beings and connect to the physical world through our senses and through our actions and activities within it. But we are also thinking beings who try to perceive or create patterns or meanings. The meanings we create may be closer to the material world which we perceive and act on and in, or they may be more abstracted from it. The first kind of meaning works along the contiguity dimension. The second works along the similarity dimension. We cannot escape meaning and live in a world of mere senses and random activities. The world of everyday material action is, for a start, not random, but fulfils various purposes and intentions, such as our physical survival. Moreover, we do not live in isolation and, as we become socialised, we learn to participate in the joint activities or action genres of a culture. Our material activities, because they are performed for individual or cultural purposes, can be said to have pragmatic meanings. DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-12

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Equally, as thinking and languaging beings, we rely on similarity to create categories and concepts more or less distant from our material existence, less generalised in the case of basic level concepts, such as ‘dog’, highly generalised in concepts such as algebraic formulae, or money. Our cognitive activities, because they involve categorisations and de-contextualised generalisations, are abstract meanings. Pragmatic meaning and abstract meaning both impinge on and reconstruct our material universe. To suggest we live in a material world experienced through pure sense impression is in any case a distortion. Our brains try to make sense of our sense impressions, for example inverting the image which is upside down on our retina and often interpreting size of image in terms of distance, processes which belong to perception rather than pure sensation. On top of this, and even more important, language concepts and meanings also influence our perception of the material world and to some extent determine it (Figure 10.1, p. 271): we saw that pragmatic meanings tend to lead us to interpret encountered objects in terms of what they can be used for (3.1.3, pp. 65–66); and we also saw that the existence of concepts for siblings affected our perceptions. Language can determine our realities to varying degrees. It has an enormous influence on determining our institutional realities (Searle 1995), the instantiations of our culture. We noted this in relation to ethnomethodologists’ notions of reflexivity, and in the way declarations create institutional facts (8.2.9, p. 215). Language also constructs the brute facts of the material world to an important, if lesser, extent. Further, the world of abstract meanings, for example, pure scientific theories, can be applied and operationalised through technology and economics to bring about changes in the material world, and changes in our cultural practice with their own pragmatic purposes. The process also works in the opposite direction, so that identities and concepts are created and reinforced through participation in action and discourse schemas, often cultural. So there is a dialectic between the similarity dimension of abstraction and the contiguity dimension of social practice. These are the emerging themes throughout the book up to this point, which I summarise below. In the Introduction I explained the two dimensions of meaning, contiguity/ syntagmatic and similarity/paradigmatic first posited by Jakobson, identifying them with activity in two different areas of the brain, and showing their application to various areas of culture. Since Jakobson regarded metonymy as operating on the contiguity and metaphor on the similarity dimension, Chapter 1 used these dimensions to define metonymy and metaphor, both onomasiologically and semasiologically. Both tropes involve unconventional meanings, but interpreting metaphor depends on similarity or analogy, and metonymy on contiguity. I attempted to define contiguity and similarity more clearly. I employed the concepts of frame (things) and schema (activities/processes)

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to investigate kinds and degrees of contiguity: intra-frame, inter-frame, frame-schema, and schema-schema contiguities, of varying degrees of predictability. Similarities of various kinds, ranging from the literal through super-ordinate-hyponym relations, transfer metaphors, and analogies were proposed. Chapter 2 demonstrated the prevalence and importance for cognition of metaphor and metonymy, by considering their widespread lexicalisation in the dictionary, especially illustrating metaphors for the Canonical Event (CHANGE IS MOVEMENT, ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT FORWARDS etc.) and for emotions (EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION), and how both metonymy and metaphor are implicated in word-formation processes. It also discussed the ways in which metaphor and metonymy work in tandem and are difficult to separate, necessarily so, since, according to Lakoff’s Experiential Hypothesis, the contiguities of infant experience are the basis for conceptual metaphors used for abstract targets. Metaphor and metonymy often work together in metaphtonomy. Using sources from the actual literal context and the poetic function, which projects similarity onto the contiguity dimension of text, further complicate the distinction. Having shown the importance of the dimensions for metaphor and metonymy, Chapter 3 considered the role of contiguity and similarity in language development – when either cultures or children acquire literacy. With literacy comes an increasing emphasis on the similarity dimension. By contrast with ape communication, limited to the contiguities of present context, humans developed iconic communication, enabling reference to non-present contexts through similarity. And though children acquire speech in the course of shared participation in the action genres of a culture, embedded in the contiguities of physical context and material activities, when they become literate they use language abstracted from context. This goes hand in hand with an emphasis on nouns which classify by similarity, especially as students master grammatical metaphors like nominalisation. Similar patterns are observed in oral and literate cultures: oral cultures resist classification because of their privileging of practical experience. In non-literate cultures or pre-literate children the stream of language is not analysed into smaller semantic and syntactic units until necessary, but tends to aggregation in chunks, slogans, and formulae, along the contiguities of text. Chapter 4 took up the theme of textual contiguities. Our infant experience of language as a stream of continuous speech affects the way we process it, even as literate adults. I discussed corpus linguistics with its emphasis on collocations, and the revolution this has brought about in learners’ dictionaries – word meanings being increasingly explained in terms of the patterns of textual contiguities observed in corpora. This led me into outlining the recent priming theory of Michael Hoey and his ten hypotheses. The expectations primed by preceding texts in most cases reduce ambiguity, but humour defeats these expectations. To illustrate

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the theory the chapter gave examples of how various types of priming are overridden in jokes. I critiqued the theory, however, claiming that the textual contiguities are a reflection of the real world contiguities which operate as part of cultural practices in action genres, with knowledge and state of the world difficult to separate from knowledge of the language. Priming includes grammatical priming, and Chapter 5 discussed both grammar and narrative. The Material Process clause as analysed by Systemic Functional Grammar can be seen as a representation of context and contiguity relations. Therefore this grammar was used to analyse which participants, processes, or circumstances are deleted in metonymic compounds and phrases, and to show how the relationships between clauses represent inter-schema contiguities and metonymies. Taking an even wider perspective, I discussed narrative, an expansion of the contiguity dimension beyond the sentence. There are a number of written genres, not only narratives but recounts of actual happenings, procedures, or instructions, explanations of how things work, and information reports like encyclopaedia entries, discussions, and arguments. While the first four of these develop as a reflection of the contiguities of action schemas in unfolding sequences in time, the latter three are more abstracted from context. I then sketched the degrees of abstraction and realism in different literary modes ranging from the most abstract allegory to the least abstract reportage and documentary narratives. While Chapter 5 was about the contiguities of clause grammar and its expansion into narrative and other discourse genres, Chapter 6 homed in on the parts of the clause. After exploring the conceptual distinction between noun and verb it explained the structure of the noun phrase, concentrating on those elements used for classification though similarities and quantification, rather than those which anchor its referents to context. Building on Chapter 3, it discussed the use of nouns in the early literate cultures of Mesopotamia, demonstrating how classification and quantification in these grain-based economies were used as a means of control. It proceeded to consider more modern economies, where the similarity dimension takes its most extreme form in monetary exchange, the currency creating an equivalence between disparate goods. This led to an exemplification of how aspects of nature and humans have been taken into the market economy through commodification, and a recognition that GDP may be an illusory measure of human well-being. Chapter 7 explored further the classificatory tendencies of the noun (phrase) in relation to science and mathematics. It began by contrasting classical categories with alternatives such as radial categories and family resemblances, which accommodate categories to a changing world, and the role of elegant variation and metaphor in allowing flexibility and variety in classification. It proceeded to a discussion of abstraction by nouns and its indispensability to science, technology, and mathematics. Scientific theories and paradigms depend on ontologies, exemplars,

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and symbolic generalisations, mainly exploiting the similarity dimension. I then illustrated the role of nominalisation in scientific abstraction and theory development. While technology translates scientific theories and models into real world effects and process schemas, manufacturing industry strives for similarities through standardisation, as in industrial dies for mass production of near-identical products. The standardisation and abstraction of clock time is also essential to science. I discussed how quantification through quasi-tautological mathematics, involving abstract similarity taken to extremes, has dominated theorising in science and other academic disciplines. Chapter 8 sketched some of the problems with classificatory abstractions and quantifications and resistance to them in sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and poetry. Ethnology within sociology mounted a resistance to abstract similarity-based typology, insisting that categories like gender are achieved through participation in social practices or action genres within the contiguities of social context. The problems of statistics in the social sciences, as in the famous case of classifying suicides, raise questions about any pretension of sociology to be a science. In linguistics the rather abstract, mathematical, de-contextualised, and universalising linguistics advocated by Chomsky have gradually given way to studies of language which re-instate context, and a recognition of the varieties of languages and the thought patterns they privilege. A semantics of predicate logic concentrating on conceptual meaning has been balanced by an acknowledgement of the equal importance of social and affective meanings as part of the interpersonal context. Systemic Functional Linguistics has developed a theory of context and genre. Pragmatics has emphasised language as action for mutually recognised purposes, and developed flexible principles of cooperation and politeness. Finally I considered the poetry of G.M. Hopkins, the philosophies of Duns Scotus and Heraclitus, Daoism, and Buddhism. These variously resist classification, and emphasise the interrelatedness of humans and nature within interpenetrating processes. Chapter 9 took up the theme of process, centred on verbs. European languages, in particular English clause structure, construct and reinforce the billiard-ball or Canonical Event Model of material reality, quite out of step with quantum physics, Gaia theory, and process philosophies. In these latter physical reality does not comprise things but processes, change is often spontaneous, these processes interrelate in a dynamic whole, and observation affects the phenomena observed. The physicists David Bohm and David Peat, looking for a language to better represent this quantum world, recognised something like it in Algonquin languages such as Blackfoot. This language prioritises verbs and marginalises nouns, and I described features of the language from the only existing grammar by Frantz and from the perspective of native speaker linguists. Blackfoot does not deal in the categories of Western civilisation, and it describes phenomena which we label with the same noun in various different ways

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according to the process which they manifest. The interconnectedness of past, present, and future and of the human and natural world are other important aspects of Blackfoot culture which stress both local and global contiguity. Chapter 10 discussed the unfinished work of Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance, as it relates to and develops the themes of the book. He describes a trajectory in European thought away from knowledge as situated activity. This is observed in ancient Greece where process and story-telling gave way to a concept of permanent being, definition, and mathematical abstraction. Nevertheless, he points out how practical knowledge – action schemas in a cultural context – and abstract knowledge are often interdependent. His deep analysis of scientific abstraction reveals that, despite its universalist aims, it cannot escape its historical context. Science, in fact, re-contextualises by creating artificial contiguities in the stage-sets and props for experimentation. He gives examples of the varieties of sciences and of theories and practices within the same scientific field, and warns against the quest for a unified theory, an all-encompassing model. There are a variety of nonscientific knowledges, too, and they all prove their validity by fostering social cohesion and allowing humans to live fulfilling and sustaining lives within diverse cultures and ideologies. Finally I summarised his views on the role of language where he celebrates ambiguities and metaphors as part of the staging of our theories of realities, their paradigms and ontologies. This book is polemical at times, often questioning the similarity-based abstractions which lead to dehumanizing science and technology and economic systems. However, as I hope to show in this chapter, there are no easy value judgments to be made in favour of the contiguity over the similarity dimension. Certainly there are clear dangers in over-emphasising the latter (11.2), and commonsense categories, adopted unconsciously because of our language and conventional metaphors, are often an illusion, and difficult to argue against, as in the case of race. Yet there are equal problems with the world of immediate contexts (11.3) with their own limited commonsense experience. Scientific measuring instruments and mathematical statistics have expanded our understanding beyond the world of immediate perception and specific situation, have driven improvements to the quality of our lives, and, paradoxically, made us aware of wider patterns of global contiguity and interrelation (11.3.1). The contemporary English novel, with its “realistic” representation of everyday Material and Verbal Processes, extends local contiguity into narrative, and centres on the situated individual character. But this makes it so limited that it struggles to deal with global movements and forces like climate change which are threatening the survival of civilisation, if not humanity (11.3.2). The world of cultural practice, which prioritises human intentions and purposes and their mutual recognition, is ineluctably anthropocentric (11.3.3).

280 Evaluating the two dimensions The ambivalence of the two dimensions is also apparent in the advantages and disadvantages of literacy (11.4). Writing and print, decontextualised from the contiguities of place, person, and time, can be tools of control and oppression, but they can also liberate and allow critical thought. Orality is probably the richest form of interpersonal communication but it can facilitate unthinking repetition and emotional sloganeering. Our internet and social media communication seem to share few of the advantages of either medium, and many of the disadvantages.

11.2. Problems with the similarity dimension There are at least three main potential problems with the similarity dimension: the privileging of nouns, disguising process (11.2.1); the automatic acceptance of the categories handed down to us by language (11.2.2); and the drive to abstractions and unified theories and concepts, extreme examples of ignoring difference (11.2.3). All of these have had some adverse effects on human society, well-being, and ecology. 11.2.1. Nouns denying process and as elements of grammar If we are to avoid misleading abstractions we need a healthy scepticism of language-based categories, especially nouns, because they reinforce an illusion of permanence. We saw that contemporary scientific theories recognise process as primary, as did Heraclitus, Daoism, and Buddhism. Until our own time, the West has been unable to free itself from nonprocess perspectives – philosophies of consciousness – which turn their backs on the immediately experienced, aesthetically breathtaking, rich and intense momentary nows. (Jacobson 1988: 74) This inability is largely due to our commonsense language categories: To make the concept [of process] possible many careless habits of the Western tradition had to be overcome: its thingification of the world, its simple-minded submission to ordinary language and commonsense assumptions. (Jacobson 1998: 29) [my insertion] But not only do we have common nouns; we have proper nouns. For Buddhism, impermanence encompasses the self as well as the world of things, and thereby deconstructs the notion of possession and independent action. Our illusory sense of identity is shored up through domination: the exercise of power over humans in political and social domination,

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and over the environment using technology to produce and possess property, consumer goods, and other status symbols. Of course it is not only nouns that create categories of similarity. The systems of grammar depend too on abstract categories, even more abstract than nouns with their potential for imagery (7.2, p. 166). These include the very distinction between verbs and nouns, the categories of Material, Mental, Verbal, and Relational clauses (5.1.1, p. 114) and systems of which they are elements (8.2.5, p. 204). Unlike nouns, of whose categories we are aware, and whose use is therefore often contested, clausal grammar operates largely beneath our conscious awareness. And, in fact, though Material Process clauses are a reflection of the contiguity dimension, grammar itself is an abstract semantic system which implies a theory of the inner and outer world. We saw how English grammar affirms the Canonical Event theory of change, causality, and action, a theory which is inimical to quantum theory and Gaia theory. Blackfoot affirms a different theory which, by marginalising nouns, makes process primary. 11.2.2. The problems with nouns as classes The commonsense categories that language hands down to us may be “common” to a language community but not common beyond it. We tend to regard these as natural categories when, in fact, they are constructed by the languages we speak. What is commonsense in the English language, for instance the concepts of brother and sister, is not in Thai (8.2.3, p. 200). Moreover, these categorisations serve the purpose of ideology, the ways in which power is exercised, whether over nature or of one social group over another. It is not always easy to contest these commonsense social categories used in the exercise of power, especially when we make moral arguments involving them. This is certainly evident in the case of race and racial categories. From the perspective of the science of genetics, racial categories are spurious. After all, the human race originated in Africa and different “races” arose through adaptations to climate, for example, the need to absorb more radiation from sunlight to manufacture vitamin D in northern latitudes selected for whiter skin (Pinker 2003: 143). DNA evidence fails to support racial classifications. The overwhelming bulk of detectable genetic variation in the human species is between the individuals within the same population. About 85% in fact. Another 9% of the detectable variation is between populations assigned to the same “race”; while interracial differences constitute only about 6% of the genetic variation in the human species. (Marks 2002: 82)

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However, to pretend the classifcation of different races was not arbitrary, colour was a convenient metaphorical or metonymic mechanism. It was used by Linnaeus, the great botanical classifer, who came up with the racial classifcation scheme in Table 11.1, with all its racist baggage, and justifcation for white imperial domination. Blumenbach (1775/1865) added a fifth category of brown/Malays. This colour coding persists: white, whitey, lily-white, paleface, pink(ie); yellow; brown; darkie, black; redskin, red Indian. How do you argue against a commonsense category like this? The problem is that as soon as you make any moral arguments against racial discrimination you are already accepting the categories. As Appiah puts it: [I]n responding to discrimination with affirmative action, we find ourselves assigning people to racial categories. We think it justified to treat people as if they had races even when we officially believe that they don’t. What is going on in cases like this? Part of what happens here is a consequence of the way that mistaken beliefs can generate social categories, despite their being mistaken . . . Identities, conceived of as stable features of a social ontology grounded in natural facts, are often, then, assumed in our moral thinking, even though, in our theoretical hearts, we know them not to be real. They are one of our most potent idealisations. (Appiah 2017: 138–143) 11.2.3. Unified theories or concepts and their consequences Another possible problem with the similarity dimension is the impetus it gives to grand unifying theories. Feyerabend’s overriding preoccupation was the celebration and defence of abundance, the richness of the world we inhabit and shape in all its diversity of cultures, gods, theories, languages, and species. His enemy was the mono-, as against the multi-, poly-, and the diverse. And we can summarise some of the strands weaving through this book on the dangers of overemphasis on similarity in relation to this mono-mania. Most important is the alarming reduction in biodiversity which threatens the natural-human world, and I devote the last part of this section to its detailed discussion. Monolingualism and monoglossia In the ambiguities of language I dealt with in 10.6 (p. 269), Feyerabend sees a resistance to monosemy, and a welcome polysemy and metaphor. Besides metaphor, this book has examined other aspects of language and discourse resisting monoglossia and monolingualism, namely dialogism/ heteroglossia and multilingualism. Bakhtin insisted that meaning does not exist in the abstract but like a spark between the two terminals of

Table 11.1 Linnaeus’s classification of the species Homo sapiens in System Naturae (1798) (quoted in Marks 2002: 57, with my adaption adding row 4 with information from the text) American

European

Asian

African

Colour Temperament Humours Face

Red Irascible, impassive Choleric Yellow bile – gallbladder Thick straight black hair

White Vigorous, muscular Sanguine Blood –heart Long blond hair, blue eyes

Yellow Melancholy, stern Melancholy Black bile – spleen Black hair, dark eyes

Personality

Stubborn, happy, free

Covered by Ruled by

Fine red lines Custom

Sensitive, very smart, creative Tight clothing Law

Strict, contemptuous, greedy Loose garments Opinion

Black Sluggish, lazy Phlegmatic Phlegm – pituitary Black kinky hair, silky skin, short nose, thick lips, females with genital flap, elongated breasts Sly, slow, careless Grease Caprice

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speakers in dialogue (3.3). He inveighed against the monoglossia of totalitarian states, and celebrated the polyphony of novels like Dostoevsky’s, which represent many different voices, even in the same character. If languages create and reinforce ideologies, then multilingualism is a desirable antidote to monolithic ideologies. It is shameful that the teaching of modern languages has been so much reduced in British schools, precisely because the learning of another language, the more exotic the better, undoes, like metaphor, the commonsense categories which are entrenched by one’s first language (Sandor 1986). This is why I regarded my two years learning Thai in Thailand as just as valuable an education as my three years studying English at Oxford, and why I attempted a sketchy account of the Blackfoot language, culture, and ideology in Chapter 9. Monolingualism is, of course, a facet of monoculturalism. I mentioned how, when indigenous North American societies were invaded, they had imposed upon them a European culture with its de-contextualised similarity systems of classification, and how this had devastating effects, alienating them from nature and their own traditional cultures. Monotheism and mathematics I only briefly touched on Feyerabend’s account of the development of monotheism in Chapter 10, and I will expand on it a little here. In his chapter on Xenophanes he points out how the Homeric gods were like humans both in form, feelings, and behaviour, including our vices. The gods of local Greek religion were not abstract but specific, and were expected to respond to specific rituals. Every town had its own particular divinities or versions of Zeus, who took care of them in all aspects of their lives, and new divinities were easily added to the pantheon. Xenophanes, by contrast, insisted on One God, superior to the others: “One God alone is the greatest, the greatest of gods and men, not resembling the mortals, neither in shape or insight . . . Totally vision, totally knowledge, totally hearing” (Feyerabend 1999: 53). For Feyerabend Xenophanes’ God is a monster: inhuman, impervious to communication, uninfluenced by prayer, offerings, or arguments, in short, incapable of human relations and to be feared. By contrast, “There is no word for ‘God-fearing’ in the Iliad” (Feyerabend 1999: 54). Monotheism was also a break from the shamanic cosmology of huntergatherer societies. Nature itself was no longer sacred, on the contrary, divinity resided in a God who transcended the earth and inhabited the heavens. What was lost was a sense of interconnection with the spirits that animated the natural world and orchestrated its processes. Nature no longer had intrinsic power or value, but had value bestowed upon it by a beneficent creator (Lent 2017: 123). Furthermore, strict monotheism has been associated with intolerance, and even, in the Old Testament or the Koran, with genocide (Lent 2017).

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If there is one true God and religion, then the fear of contamination by other religions might mandate destroying their adherents. In a refreshing contrast to Moses, Joshua, and Elijah, certain leaders in other cultures, such as the Indian emperors Ashok and Akbar the Great, were models of tolerance: Ashok converted from Hinduism to Buddhism and promulgated respect for other sects, while Akbar abolished religious tests, discrimination in political appointments, and allowed interfaith marriage. However, monotheistic religions do not always entirely escape diversification. The Christian godhead splits into three in the trinity, with the son, more like an ancient Greek god, fully human, though without vicissitudes. In Catholicism, the female aspect of this humanity takes the form of Mary the mother of Christ. And the local and practical needs of society manifest themselves in the multiplication of saints representing localities, or with responsibility for ensuring the successful participation of humans in the action genres of everyday life. These might be seen as an equivalent, respectively, of ancient Rome’s household gods, lares familiares, or spirits of the pantry and cooking, the penates. We can distinguish the more abstract versions of monotheism, therefore, from those that leave a space for the humanity of God. Judaism and Islam, with their ban on the depiction of God or even God’s creatures, are more abstract than Protestantism, itself still more abstract than Catholicism, which allowed the veneration of images of saints and of the Virgin Mary. We saw how the Jesuit priest Hopkins promulgated a doctrine of inscape with the (in)stress on God’s immanence and manifestation in each individual human face, pushing towards the least abstract (8.3.1, p. 218). Less abstract, too, might be Hinduism, which appears more or less polytheistic, or at least acknowledges many gods and goddesses (Krishna, Shiva, Kali, etc.), even if they are technically manifestations of a single deity. It is not coincidental that many of the abstractions of mathematics, particularly algebra and geometry, were first developed within Islamic cultures with their most abstract form of monotheism. I have dealt with monotheism and mathematics in different parts of this book, but we can note how historically they coalesced as examples of unified theories working together towards a concept of abstract truth. Nicomachus, a mathematician of the 1st century, wrote a work called The Theology of Arithmetic. He regarded numbers as the creation of the divine mind, and operating on numbers revealed God’s own working. Roger Bacon, one of the first real scientists, viewed mathematics as the language of nature and a key to understanding the mind of the creator. Kepler felt that geometry was divine and the universe was created by geometrical laws. He wrote to a friend, “What else can the human mind hold besides numbers and magnitudes? These alone we apprehend correctly, and . . . our comprehension is . . . the same kind as God’s” (Lent 2017: 344–346). Newton, with his three laws of motion, derived from mathematics, believed he was defining God’s laws as revealed in the book of nature. Georg Cantor,

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the great mathematician of the late 19th and early 20th century, and a devout Catholic, thought his mathematical study of infinity could prove the existence of God. For the contemporary cosmologist Max Tegmark, like the late Stephen Hawking (10.5), the universe simply is mathematics, and, in discovering mathematical structures, we discover the truth of it (Lent 2017: 350–352). However, despite the weaknesses of the monotheistic mindset, its tendency to monstrous intolerance, de-sacralising of nature, and reductionist over-abstraction, there are attractions in the idea of a unified godhead. Positing a deity which lies unrecognised behind the multitude of religions may create a spirit of tolerance, respect, and even love. From amidst diversified and often warring creeds; over a vast time span of history: in the language of many a tribe and nation: out of the mouths of the learned and simple, the lowly and great: despite oceans of bloodshed, and torturing inhumanities, and persecutions unspeakable – the single voice of a greater Humanity rises confidently to heaven, saying “We adore Thee who art One and who art Love: and it is in unity and love that we would live together, doing Thy will”. (Greene and Gollancz 1962: 9) We might surmise a similar motivation in Chomsky’s universalism: if all languages are in some sense the same, then imperialist pretensions of one language as superior to others is nonsensical. Money, monotony, monocultures, and standardisation In my discussion of Feyerabend, I also touched on the replacement of barter with money, where specific objects with personal connotations gave way to the abstract and impersonal coin. Although the letters monare coincidental (no double pun intended), we saw how the variety of substances and objects can be reduced to a monetary equivalent, which de-contextualises, and hides the connections underpinning the global economy. The standardisations involved in engineering sought (though in vain) to produce identical objects, and monetisation took this to extremes of abstraction, relying on standardised dies to coin mintage. Mathematics, we noted, with Feyerabend, was, relying on clock time, at the root of attempts to reduce the varieties of science to the quantifiable and abstract, to create a monolithic unitary theory, allied as we have just seen, to a single godhead. And varieties of knowledge and ideology were replaced in cultures like Ceaucescu’s communist Romania. This led to a monotony in architecture in the soviet bloc, just as the misleading quantification of human well-being in terms of GDP led to monocultures. The ways in which monetary cost-benefit analyses and standardisation led to uniformity and monotony and the devastation of the diverse

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natural systems and human cultures has been explored definitively by Josephson in his book Industrialised Nature, which I discuss at length elsewhere (Goatly 2007). This industrialisation applied “efficient” mass production techniques to agricultural production, as to industry, where the product, the time in which it was made, and the industrial worker were standardised and quantified. We already noted the negative consequences of treating the industrial worker as a standard robotic figure (7.3.4). Standardising of the agricultural product led to monocultures, such as in Fordlandia, a massive rubber plantation in the Amazon. Similarly, the result of standardisation of hydroelectric projects was “a gray, uniform countryside; a gray, uniform series of dams; and a gray, uniform quality of life for workers and engineers alike” (Josephson 2002: 31). The standardised output of these technologies is much easier to quantify than the costs of making nature more predictable. Unfortunately, “when balancing costs and benefits, so long as the benefits we can quantify are greater than the costs we cannot, we ignore the incalculables” (Josephson 2002: 11, Goatly 2007: 296–297). We noted in Chapter 6 the illusory quantification of “well-being” by GDP (6.4.3, p. 155). Remember that an early shift towards monocultures began with the agrarian-based proto-literate cultures of Mesopotamia. Besides using nouns and lists to fixate on measurement and accounting, facilitating inequality and slavery, they had relatively impoverished and monotonous diets compared with hunter-gatherers. The attack on the diversity of the natural world If monotheism, religion, mathematics, science, economics, and industrial production tend towards favouring the similarity dimension of meaning, biology resists it, unless reduced to monocultures. The trajectory of life seems to be towards more differentiation, more complexity, and more interdependence. I mentioned Gaia theory in Chapter 9. I revisit it here in order to explore the notions of differentiation, complexity, and order, versus entropy, homogeneity, and disorder. Surprisingly, life evolves into structures of more and more complex order, diversity, and interrelation, through spontaneous self-organisation and self-generation. In doing so it defies the second law of thermodynamics, which posits entropy, the inexorable flow towards disorder, homogeneity, and loss of energy (Schrodinger 1944/1992). This is observable in parts of the biosphere not normally regarded as living, as with the sulphur cycle (9.1.1). The only explanation for the stability of these changing cycles is the influence of a control system, Gaia. “I see the earth and the life it bears as a system . . . that has the capacity to regulate the temperature and the composition of the earth’s surface and to keep it comfortable for living organisms” (Lovelock 1988: 31).

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The persistence of order implies differentiation. Imagine this simple scenario as an illustration of “order”. We have two gases separated by a partition in a cylinder. This is a minimally ordered state. Once the partition is removed the gases begin to diffuse and eventually mix so thoroughly that they are homogenous and disordered. For a picture of the homogeneity incompatible with life, imagine the relatively lifeless sand dunes of the Sahara desert in all their monotony. Of course life is far more ordered than the separation of two gases, more differentiated, complex, and interrelated. The stability of the atmosphere and of living beings within the biosphere is known as homeostasis, and homeostasis is a “colligative property of life”, because life is social, existing in contiguous communities and collectives (Lovelock 1998: 18). Obviously we are made up of cell communities, highly differentiated for disparate and interconnected physiological functions. Families are interdependent and differentiated by age and sex/gender and roles. Tribes are made up of different interdependent members. With the division of labour, members of communities perform differentiated tasks or action genres. And through international trade, specialisation, and competitive advantage, the globe has become more and more economically interconnected. Lovelock claims that similar interdependencies exist within the biosphere and that Gaia is a live planet “on which the living things, the air, the oceans and the rocks all combine” (Lovelock 1988: 19), again exemplified by the sulphur cycle (9.1.1, Figure 9.3, p. 233). This interdependence of a web of global contiguity calls into question the taxonomising of the similarity dimension: “The interdependence of organisms in symbiotic associations . . . blurred the boundaries of taxonomic definition: where did the individual organism begin and end . . . ?” (Ryan 2002: 82). The phenomenon of life, as part of the Gaia system which reverses entropy and creates more and more differentiated species, had achieved spectacular success. Until approximately 2.5 billion years ago, all life consisted of microorganisms – mainly single-celled archaea, bacteria, and protozoans. Nearly every phylum of multi-cellular organisms first appeared during the Cambrian explosion which lasted 140 million years. Over the following 400 million years vertebrate species diversified exponentially. And the last few million years saw the greatest biodiversity ever. If we include the microscopic and the macroscopic there may now be up to a trillion species. It is estimated that the global number of macroscopic species is somewhere near 9 million, the vast majority being arthropods, animals with an exoskeleton, like insects, spiders, and crustaceans. However, new species are regularly discovered (on average between 5,000 and 10,000 new species each year, most of them insects). The evolution of these nine million species showed an ever-increasing rise in diversity, especially on land. After the spectacular increase in species diversity of the last few million years, we humans arrived, ushering in a new mass extinction, the

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Holocene extinction event. Tragically, 300 years ago our modern, nounbased, and similarity-based science facilitated the technology of the Industrial Revolution using fossil fuels, whose exploitation also allowed an explosion of human population. The result is that more than one in five species on Earth now faces extinction, and that may rise to 50% by the end of the century, unless urgent action is taken. The following groups of species are at most at risk: amphibians, 40%; conifers, 34%; reef corals, 33%; sharks and rays, 30%; mammals, 25%; and birds, 14%. The current rate of extinction is up to 10,000 times higher than the average historical extinction rates. The worsening and loss of biodiversity are projected to continue, and even accelerate. It has been argued that the present rate of extinction is sufficient to eliminate most species on the planet Earth within 100 years (‘Biodiversity’ 2021, ‘Species Extinction Rate’ 2021). Ironically, the species that are disappearing are defined by similaritybased classification, so ultimately the extreme differentiation of haeccitas (8.3.1, p. 218) has to have limits imposed on it by our linguistic categories, whether folk or technical taxonomies. Moreover, if we fail to label species we are less likely to notice their disappearance (Mühlhäusler 1996). It was this kind of observational pure taxonomic science, rather than technologically transforming applied science, that was endorsed by Merz (10.2, p. 257).

11.3. Problems with the contiguity dimension We noted that the similarity dimension furnishes us with commonsense categories. But the everyday experience of local perceived experience might trap us in another kind of commonsense. To understand this we should remind ourselves that there are two kinds of contiguity. First, there is a local human-centred contiguity which is based on our everyday experience of and participation in the action schemas of our culture, and which is the context for the acquisition and use of language in preliterates. This is reflected in grammar and textual contiguity, and is the basis for our analysis of metonymy, or our understanding of narrative and recount. It is a commonsense world that privileges unaided human perception and Material Processes, and involves the physical contexts of place, time, and person. But, second, there is a global kind of contiguity, beyond commonsense, which we appreciate only by escaping from our limited perceptions and context-bound experiences, a contiguity of the web of life of interacting quantum processes, and the interdependencies inherent in chaos theory and the holographic universe. Jakobson’s contiguity is of the local kind, and it is the dimension of meaning focused on in this book. However the global kind will be important in this section as it was in discussion of Gaia theory above. I have pointed out some adverse consequences of abstraction from experience along the lines of the similarity dimension. These suggest there

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may be advantages to the taken-for-granted view of the world which arises from our encounters with it in all the richness of the local contiguities and action schemas of the practical life of a culture, limiting theory to what is useful “for all practical purposes”. Commonsense, traditional types of religion, and other well entrenched and practically effective forms of life . . . contain subtly articulated ontologies including spirits, Gods, dreams, animals, battles, rainbows, pains etc. Each entity behaves in a complex and characteristic way which, though conforming to a pattern, constantly reveals new and surprising features and thus cannot be captured in a formula; it affects and is affected by other entities and processes constituting a rich and varied universe. (Feyerabend 1999: 10) Similarly, ethnomethodologists emphasise common ground, established and produced by participation in action schemas, and even regard it as objective, at least, objectively available: To cite the existence and prevalence of these practices is not in any way to indulge in a general scepticism about the existence of an objectively available world. Rather it is to point to some of the ways in which the world is rendered objectively available and is maintained as such. To cite these practices is to find some of the ways in which the phenomenon which we gloss as a known-in-common world is available as the product of the socially organised work. (Heritage 1984: 220–221) Being commonsensically “objectively available” they are taken for granted, latent, and naturalised cultural practices: “As a result, the endogenous reproductive processes through which institutional realities are maintained remain largely invisible to those who participate within them” (Heritage 1984: 232). However, there is a danger here. Because they remain invisible, and the ideologies behind them are latent, they may be too powerful. And as already noted, this commonsense world cannot escape similarity entirely because it is often underpinned by the abstractions of noun-based categories with which we operate. In the next sections I discuss how this commonsense world of everyday local contiguities, like the commonsense noun-based abstractions, is a limiting and, in some cases, a perilous one. I consider the narrowness of our perceptions, the inadequacy of narrative in the contemporary Western novel to deal with global contiguities, and the arrogance of anthropocentrism.

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11.3.1. Science and escape from the contiguities of context: scientific instruments and statistics It is only by moving away from the local contiguities of experience into areas like the quantum world that we can appreciate the ultimate holographic interconnectedness, the web of global contiguity which binds us together with each other and the universe. As we have seen in 10.3 (p. 258) part of the stage set-up for scientific experimentation are measuring instruments and apparatus. These expand our perceptions, even if they introduce an extra level of distortion of everyday experience in doing so. Early reactions to the invention of the microscope display a scepticism of these “distortions”. The 18th century poet Alexander Pope asks: Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fy. Say what the use, were fner optics giv’n, T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er, To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore? Or quick effuvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? (An Essay on Man, Pope 2007/ f.p. 1733–1734, part 6) He deals with the three senses here, touch and smell as well as sight, and resists any movement beyond the “common” sense by which humans are attuned to their environment. For him the exaggeration of sensitivity, epitomised by the microscope, is dangerous: to normal sight, as it diminishes us to the status of fies and distracts us from an understanding of the larger picture of the Deity (heaven); to touch, because it exaggerates pain; and to smell, as the pleasurable scent of the rose would kill us. Similarly, Gulliver’s Travels might be seen as partly an indictment of the absurd size-distortions brought into being by the microscope, depicting Brobdingnagians magnifed, and Lilliputians diminished as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But where would have been the microbial theory of disease without the microscope? And how would we have defeated disease and increased quality of life without it? We recall, too, the Dickensian scepticism of statistics in Hard Times (Chapter 6). But how would the fact that cholera was a water-borne disease have been discovered without the epidemiological statistics which determined it was associated with the use of specific public water pumps? How would the smallpox vaccine have been developed had there been no statistical evidence of the absence of the disease amongst milkmaids, indicating that cowpox bacteria could induce immunity in humans? Dickens harrowingly describes the effects

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of cholera and smallpox in his novels. But, despite his antagonism to statistics in Hard Times, it was the statistical quantificational approach to disease, with its reliance on categorisation and abstraction, that led to Gladstone’s Public Health Act, the building of sewage systems in London and Paris, and the resulting reductions in suffering and mortality. Feyerabend acknowledged that our perceptions cut down the abundance of experience because of their limitations; it is obvious enough that the perceptible colour spectrum runs from red to violet, but we cannot see ultra-violet or infra-red. It is only by the de-contextualisation of natural phenomena in the lab, and by introducing elaborate stagings of artificial scientific apparatus which take us beyond the limitations of our perceptual faculties, that we are able to develop quantum theory, microbial theories of matter, Gaia theory, or to understand the phenomenon of climate change. And the measurements made by such apparatus are necessarily reported in mathematical and statistical terms. Our perceptual apparatus is very attuned to change, but within a very short time frame. Climate includes abstract temperature and precipitation patterns, and climate change is slow and involves considerable dayto-day variation. This means climate and climactic changes are difficult to perceive – we have the word “weather” for what is perceptible in our commonsense world of local contiguities.

11.3.2. Narratives extending contiguity and the failings of the contemporary novel The inability of our unaided perceptual apparatus to comprehend the impersonal physical forces such as climate change, or the global contiguities of social and ecological existence, has a specific manifestation in the contemporary novel. Narratives, reliant on a clausal grammar of Material and Verbal Processes, and its expansion along the syntagmatic axis (Chapter 5), represent the everyday realistic world of local contiguities available to our unaided perception. Unfortunately, and partly as a consequence, contemporary narratives have failed to deal with the global climactic changes that threaten humanity. In The Great Derangmement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh (2016) proposes several reasons why the prevalent form of modern narrative, the contemporary novel of the English-speaking world, has outlawed the very forces and worldviews necessary for representing climate change. 1) Discontinuities of space and time militate against representing the global and the epochal, the longue durée. This is not true of the epic, for instance The Odyssey ranges over wide spaces, The Ramayana over eras and epochs. Ghosh quotes an example from the 16th-century Chinese folk epic The Journey to the West:

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“At this point the firmament first acquired its foundation. With another 5,400 years came the Tzu epoch; the ethereal and the light rose up to form the four phenomena of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heavenly bodies . . . Following P’an Ku’s construction of the universe .  .  . the world was divided into four great continents .  .  . Beyond the ocean there was a country named Ao-lai. It was near a great ocean, in the midst of which was located the famous FlowerFruit Mountain”. Here is a form of prose narrative, still immensely popular, that ranges widely and freely over vast expanses of time and space . . . Novels, on the other hand, conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years. (Ghosh 2016: 61–62) The essence of the Anthropocene/Holocene period, in which humans change the life of the planet, is “phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space” (Ghosh 2016: 63). Ghosh is here pleading for the novel to shift further up the abstraction scale in Figure 5.2 (p. 134). More specifically, the conception of time in the novel is a linear one in which change equals progress towards an eschatological endpoint, but a “progress” brought about by separation of humans from the rest of the planet and its history. It is this conception of time (which has much in common with both Protestant and secular teleologies, like those of Hegel and Marx) that allows the work of partitioning to proceed within the novel, always aligning itself with the avant-garde as it hurtles forward in its impatience to erase every archaic reminder of Man’s kinship with the nonhuman. (Ghosh 2016: 70) 2) There is, thus, no place for the non-human in the modern novel. “Nature remains off-limits to Culture, the knowledge of which is consigned entirely to the sciences” (Ghosh 2016: 71). This is why it comes as a surprise – a shock, really – to look back upon that period of surging carbon emissions and recognise that very few of the literary minds of that intensely engagé period were alive to the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity: that of the earth and its atmosphere. (Ghosh 2016: 124)

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This contrasts with Homeric poetry, where these forces were symbolised in the persons of the gods. Homer had some feeling about the sea; a faith in the animation of it much stronger than Keats’s. But all this sense of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a Sea Power. He never says [as a Romantic poet might] the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the wave, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god. (Bate 1991: 75) [my insertion] We are reminded that James Lovelock’s ecological theory was named (by William Golding) after the earth goddess, Gaia. Neither Homer, nor the Romantic poet, nor Gaia theory represent the commonsensical view of the world of the realistic contemporary novel. Ghosh himself, by the way, attempted to remedy this deficiency, particularly in The Hungry Tide (2004), in which the typhoon and its tidal surge, as well as the Sundarbans on the Bay of Bengal, become important protagonists (Zurru 2017). 3) Instead of the forces of nature, the novel fixates on the individual characters and their moral choices. John Updike distinguishes the novel from the fable and the chronicle by calling it an “individual moral adventure” (Ghosh 2016: 77). He consequently regards fictions which treat “men in the aggregate”, the forces and power of the collective to act, as atypical (Ghosh 2016: 78). The novel inherits the Enlightenment view of the individual free to make choices, with a liberty unconstrained by natural non-human forces. Nonhuman forces and systems had no place in this calculus of liberty: indeed, being independent of Nature was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself. Only those peoples who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were thought to be endowed with historical agency. (Ghosh 2016: 119) Tragically, though, measures to address climate change cannot be left to the individual moral choice. And the tragic irony is that at the very moment when we realise that “global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity fnds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike” (Ghosh 2016: 80–81). The commonsense view that we act primarily as individuals free from the constraints of nature and the forces of collective social change has been constructed by economics, politics, and the contemporary novel. Mainstream economics concerns itself with the individual making supposedly rational choices on behalf of themselves and their immediate nuclear family, choices

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which are presumed to eventually and indirectly lead to the general good of all. Much politics has descended into identity politics. And most novels have let us down by reinforcing this individualism. This is perhaps the most important critique of the contemporary novel as far as the themes of this book are concerned. This novel focuses on the individual in all the local particularities of time and place and causal contiguities of previous actions and events. Think how many titles of 19th century novels are proper names. It thereby, unlike say the fable or allegory (Chapter 5), is less interested in abstract categories, such as class and statistics. It is anecdotal, usually an adjective applied by sociologists and others to personal evidence that has no statistical significance. Ghosh’s conclusion is that the contemporary novel is failing us by ignoring the forces of climate change, and that this is an enormous lost opportunity. The great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be. But as with much else that is uncanny about the Anthropocene, this challenge has appeared before us at the very moment when the form of imagining that is best suited to answering it – fiction – has turned in a radically different direction. (Ghosh 2016: 128–129) In brief, the contemporary novel insists on the particular local contiguities of a limited time and place, and of a commonsense latent ideology which celebrates the ultimate importance of the individual character, which makes it the least abstract form of literature (see 5.3.2, Figure 5.2, p. 134). By doing so, it has turned away from the larger web of global contiguities which bind us to our fellow living things, the biosphere, and the geological earth and soil. But this is partly because such contiguities are not easily apprehensible by our limited perceptual apparatus. Ghosh is attempting to recruit narrative fiction for ecological purposes, to overcome its autotelic nature, that is, go beyond art for art’s sake. The question of teleology or purpose brings us to a further possible weakness in the contiguity approach, if this is seen in terms of the purposeful action schemas on which contiguity so often depends. 11.3.3. Teleology and anthropocentrism Feyerabend pointed out that as scientific knowledge and understanding advances the sense of purpose diminishes. Science answers the question “what?” but not the question “why?” or “what for?” The “what” question,

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the abstract, pure, scientific, taxonomical approach emphasising the similarity dimension, whether in science or linguistics, can be contrasted with the “why” question, the functional, pragmatic, or practical approach situated in the cultural-generic context of local contiguity. The second approach involves intention and purpose. So a further area of concern about contiguity-emphasising meaning is this dependence upon and assumption of purpose. Action and discourse genres clearly have an end result in mind (Fairclough 2001), and intentions and their recognition are essential aspects of pragmatic theories of communication, in contrast to more “scientific” and mathematical semantic theories (8.2). The sense of purpose may be extended more widely into biology, history, religion, and eschatology. The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987) suggested that inherent in living systems are the propensities to self-organisation and autopoeisis or “self-generation”. It is as though they have a sense of purpose and a basic understanding of what they need to do to guarantee their existence and development. In the poet Hopkins’ view not only is identity achieved through process, “What I do is me”, but these processes are part of and reveal a divine purpose, “for that I came”. This celebration of the uniqueness and sanctity of each created thing in action is one view of divine purpose. But more abstractly, and perhaps dangerously, divine purpose may be developed into an eschatology. The philosopher-theologian Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1965) claimed evolution moves inexorably to its end-point, the Omega of the glorified Christ. Or as Hans Küng puts it: Thus this God does not exist behind the flux of history but is known as the God of history. Precisely as the God of the beginning is he the God of the end, precisely as alpha is he the omega, and precisely as the creatively primordial One is he also the eschatologically future One, the coming One whom man and human kind, actively progressing in hope, may await as the one who will make all things new and who therefore here and now demands that man and humankind rethink and return from the past to the future of the coming kingdom in which God will not only be in all, but will be all in all. (Küng 1987: 464) In this view, living things move to a purpose or end, in both senses. Hence, to explain their behaviour necessitates thinking in terms of so-called “fnal causes”, i.e. causes which have goals and purposes, the gathering and consummation of creation up into the Omega-Christ. As Tennyson put it, That God, that ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element,

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And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves. (‘Epilogue’, 1969, ll.141–144) However, this totalizing unifying theology of the “One” is a long way from Hopkins’ emphasis on haeccitas, the individuation that manifests divine inscape. Again, Feyerabend would defnitely shudder. Despite purpose having a local aspect in the action genres of lived experience, eschatology has now shifted it to the ultimate of the similarity dimension, God or absolute meaning. Anthropocentrism is, perhaps, equally suspect. We noted one aspect of it in the empathy hierarchy, the tendency to make humans the subjectActors in English grammar (9.1.2). Placing humans and human purposes, participation, and observation centre stage has, inevitably, received great support from the “Anthropic Principle”, that the very point of the universe is to give rise to intelligent life and that observers are necessary to bring the universe into being (‘Anthropic Principle’ 2021) .This is a view quite compatible with eschatological theory, except that it is a human event to which the whole creation has moved, rather than a divine one. This anthropocentric “eschatology” insists nature is only here to serve the needs of humanity. “What you do for me is you, for that you exist”. In Francis Bacon’s view this is part of a divine plan: Man, if we look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world . . . For the whole world works together in the service of man; and there is nothing from which he does not derive use and fruit . . . insomuch that all things seem to be going about man’s business and not their own. (quoted in Lent 2017: 280) Anthropocentrism finds a different manifestation in economic theories that value nature only in terms of the ecological services it provides (6.4.2, p. 152). I believe species have a right to exist whether they provide services to humans or not. Yet, the wake-up call on climate change will, to judge from our record so far (COP 26), only rouse us when (rich) people begin to suffer; species loss is apparently acceptable as long as it does not impact on humans, however illusory that distinction given the ultimate contiguities in the web of life. Technology applies science to further anthropocentric exploitation. The technological machines achieve identity by the mantra: “What you do for me is you, for that I made you”. At its worst anthropocentrism narrows to a self-centredness concerned only with one’s immediate family and their economic prosperity: The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to

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Feyerabend has much to say about how different world views and ideologies, different sciences and technologies are validated through the power of performance, as they achieve their purposes by fostering a cohesive society in which humans live fulfilled lives. But the question of how these purposes are determined, and how hegemony may operate within societies to make subjects acquiesce in their own domination, is left largely unexplored. Who sets the purposes? And whose interests do they serve? Moreover, different world views and models will be suitable for different purposes. And what purpose is most paramount now, if not the survival of the natural world, which, for the moment, includes us?

11.4. Pre-literate, literate, and post-literate culture The fact that we cannot make simplistic value judgments about the similarity dimension and the contiguity dimension, abstraction versus experience, is especially evident when we consider pre-literate, literate, and post-literate cultures. I associated literacy with similarity-based abstraction and pre-literate cultures with contiguity-based experience within local material practices. How does this relate to the increasingly postliterate culture in which we now live? This is a culture dominated by the visual image, apparently closer to lived reality than words. And by internet communication, e.g. emails, chat groups, tweets, Facebook, etc. which share some features of face-to-face discourse but not others. There are clear arguments in favour of literacy. Without it, analytical and critical thinking would hardly be possible. Holding an argument in place to examine and question it becomes very difficult in an oral culture. Non-literate and post-literate cultures have the licence to rely on slogans and clichés, which literate cultures rightly despise as unthinking (Orwell 2006/f.p.1946): “The clichés in political denunciations in many lowtechnology, developing cultures – enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers – that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes” (Ong 2002: 38). However, slogans and clichés seem increasingly common in (post-)literate societies on either side of the political divides: “yes we can”, “hope and change”, “hope not hate”; “Make America Great Again”, “march of the makers”, “strivers not skivers”. In the UK Brexit spawned many of these: “Brexit means Brexit”, “a red, white, and blue Brexit”, “take back control”, and “an oven-ready deal”, the latter not referring to the 160,000+ UK deaths from Covid, but, unfortunately, more appropriate to them. These tendencies have been encouraged by the secondary orality

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induced by the telephone, radio, and television which “has striking resemblances to the old [orality] in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas” (Ong 2002: 133–134) [my insertion]. Additionally, because our post-literate culture is dominated not just by speech but by visualisation, politicians cultivate an image of the celebrity and the personality. Thus the [oral] noetic economy of its nature generates outsize fgures, that is, heroic fgures, not for romantic reasons or refectively didactic reasons but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form. Colourless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics. (Ong 2002: 69) [my insertion] Donald Trump and Boris Johnson spring to mind, not just as colourful personalities, but as sloganeers. The UN warned some time ago that: Unless we take care, we shall have a form of communication . . . based purely on images, visual and sound, which will develop, parallel but independent, alongside instruction based on writing. This dualism endangers the spiritual unity of civilisation because of the deep psychological differences that separate the two processes of mental training, one of which – that based on the image – appeals mainly to feeling, emotion and reflex response, while the other – based on writing – is, on the contrary, essentially an exercise in critical thought. (UNESCO 1966: 32, quoted in Finnegan 2014: location 1777) It is something of a truism that literacy can liberate us from uncritical thinking and authoritarianism. For instance, printing and widespread access to printed books such as the Bible in the vernacular fostered the Protestant Reformation which liberated parts of Europe from the dogma and power structures of the Roman Catholic Church. Even so, arguments in favour of literacy need to be balanced against potential drawbacks. As noted, in the early cities of Mesopotamia literacy coincided with increases in hierarchical power structures and slavery, and was used as a means of control, reducing subjects to numbers and slaves to the status of animals (6.3, p. 146). Perhaps literacy has a similar function in modern states: Indeed it can be argued that writing can be used precisely to uphold the current authority structure and prevent dissenting views: if you cannot read, you cannot be an obedient citizen . . . In order to be a good and loyal citizen, it is also necessary for you to believe in the

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I have detailed how literacy and the science it makes possible run the risk of alienating us from lived experience into meaningless abstraction, as we become metaphorical slaves of the (abstract) noun, and subject to the totalitarian uniformities of monologic theories. Indeed, the knowledge of diverse oral cultures may be essential so we can explore alternative worldviews that are more useful than our current dead-end technological ones, used for the benefit of consumer capitalism and implicated in trashing the environment. It may be disastrous for us to marginalise them: I have been increasingly struck by the strength of the European preoccupation with written forms and the way this colours thoughts and definition . . . Over the last centuries of European history written modes have been taken as the paradigm for education, scholarship and artistic activity, a dominant cultural view widely accepted even beyond the narrow circle of academics. What was written was to be valued and analysed; and what was not written was not worth scholarly study. (Finnegan 2014: location 2798) Where does the internet sit in relation to the advantages and disadvantages of literacy? In its infancy it was hailed as providing an opportunity for the democratisation and redistribution of the power over information away from the mainstream media controlled by large conglomerates, just as printing democratised religious knowledge and opinion during the Reformation. Citizen journalism was touted as allowing ordinary people to set the news agenda and tell their own stories (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016). It still has this potential, but in terms of the distinctive features of speech and writing it often represents the worst of both. Let’s consider some of the elements of these modes in relation to the internet. Internet “chat”, emails, SMS, and tweets share some features of writing and some of speech. Both speech and these forms of internet communication are subject to time pressures. Speech cannot be revised before decoding, and though these internet discourse genres are theoretically revisable, they are often not revised. How often must politicians and other public figures have regretted firing off a tweet before reconsidering it, and perhaps we have launched emails which we could, in retrospect, have toned down. The most severe time pressure is during internet “chat”, because there are immediate exchanges of addresser and addressee roles, and the addressee’s decoding, though not isochronous as in speech, ideally follows almost immediately the addresser’s

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encoding. Such time pressures encourage the use of formulae. These often employ textual metonymies and abbreviations, e.g. AFAIK, btw, etc., for a couple of reasons: the medium is manual-visual rather than vocal-aural and we speak faster than we can type; and there may be limits to the number of characters allowed (Crystal 2008). Like speech, most forms of internet communication expect or hope for feedback of some kind, though not as immediate as in chat, where the chatters are present in time. By contrast, and this is one difference from speech, communicators on the internet, as in writing, are not present in space. Moreover, chat, SMS, and emails will be more directional than speech, which is broadcast to everyone within earshot (even if Facebook posts and tweets are often intended for as large a readership/viewership as possible). Another crucial difference is that the codes of internet chat, like writing, are much poorer than those of speech. In chat, SMS, and emails there is nothing like the equivalent of speech’s variations in intonation, rhythm, stress, voice-quality (timbre), tempo, loudness, often accompanied by the codes of non-verbal communication. Emoticons are a very poor attempt to compensate for this poverty. Lacking these paralinguistic codes, as does writing, these internet genres under-resource interpersonal meaning. They also do so by information concentration through abbreviation, since redundancy has interpersonal or phatic functions, for instance, in greetings and in cultural rituals (Goatly 2012). In addition, because communication is at a distance, information about the communicators is not automatically available, with the result that, unlike face-to-face speech, there is scope for anonymity. The question of anonymity brings us to consider the principles of cooperation and politeness, and concept of face, which the pragmaticians Grice and Leech proposed as governing conversation (8.2.6, p. 205), but which often seem to be ignored in internet communication. Take impoliteness first. Anonymity or adopting a false persona, by attenuating the face of the self and the other, weakens the politeness maxims, especially agreement, approbation, and modesty. They reduce inhibitions in the addresser, allowing for disapprobatory harassment and aggression, for instance flaming sequences, which resemble the exchange of the immodest boasts of boxers before a fight, or of warriors in oral cultures (cf. The Battle of Maldon, Crossley-Holland and Mitchell 1965). Disagreement seems more common than agreement in blogs like the Guardian’s comment is free (c.i.f.), even if likes/recommends are a shorthand for agreement. The submaxims of agreement, opinion reticence, and of sympathy, feeling reticence, are noticeably very weak in much social media and blog discourse. And Facebook posts often break the modesty maxim by showing off. Other aspects of internet communication weaken the Co-operative Principle maxims. Most notoriously fake news and trolling break the maxim of quality, and are an aspect of clickbait, impolite provocation

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that anticipates disagreement. Lurking and spamming break quantity by giving too little and too much information respectively (Crystal 2001). What about the maxim of relation or relevance? Some commenters try to introduce their obsessions even when they are off topic, leading to accusations of a “shoe-in”. Others distract by irrelevance, causing ripostes like “Look, a squirrel!” I suggested that relevance should be related to purpose. But what exactly is the purpose of posts and chat and tweets? Are they, especially the anonymous ones, to provoke by exaggeration and trolling? Or to share ideas and solidarity within a virtual community? And do personal non-anonymous Facebook posts just draw attention to oneself: “Just look at me and what I’m doing/eating!” I already remarked on the importance of self-image, image in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Internet communication seems largely to be about expressiveness, images, and spectacle. There could be no better vehicle for this expressivism than the Internet, which makes various means of self-expression instantly available through social media . . . As far back as the 1960s Guy Debord argued in his seminal book The Society of the Spectacle: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation . . . The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle re-establishes its rule”. (Ghosh 2016: 131) According to Ghosh and Debord, there is no real communication going on where expressiveness is concerned. Jakobson identified the expressive function as emphasising the addresser (Jakobson 1960). Swearing when you drop a hammer on your foot is expressive and needs no addressee present. In which case, it is not communicative at all. Perhaps the expressiveness of social media is not quite so extreme, but it is very egocentric. As Ghosh and Debord stress, it precludes real dialogue and shared participation. What then, in summary, can we conclude? Internet communication and social media hold out the possibility of greater human interaction than print. But this is largely illusory. There is only a virtual presence at a distance, sometimes anonymous, and communication is often individualistically expressive. It is non-participatory, in the sense of cooperation in material activity; for instance, Zoom gyms are individualistic copying, unlike, say, co-operating in laying a patio together. When in written form (rather than, for example, video-conferencing) internet discourse tends to be poorer in codes than real face-to-face speech. Because it is not geared

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towards joint participation in material action genres, it is a debased form of conversation, through weakening or breaking the maxims of the Cooperative Principle (quality, quantity, relevance) and the Politeness Principle (agreement, modesty, approbation, opinion and feeling reticence), which preserves and enhances the interpersonal relationships that make cooperation possible. Like speech it tends to be cliché-ridden and uncritical, and overly inter-textual. One could justifiably claim that internet communication combines the worst features of speech and writing, specious in its contiguity, and shallow in abstract, similarity-based reasoning. If Debord was prophetic, E.M. Forster was even more so with his short story/meditation ‘The Machine Stops’ which anticipates the internet and tablets. Written as the first underground railway tunnels were being built in London in the early years of the 20th century, it depicts a world where the atmosphere has become so polluted that most people live underground, and communicate and have their physical needs supplied through The Machine. To operate it they press buttons on discs, rather than on the rectangles we use. The need for real journeys is reduced, and if characters are forced to make them, they find physical contact repulsive (might Covid 19 induce the same feelings?). And their humanity is reduced to a minimum. Interestingly, the information generated by and spread though The Machine is filtered away from the context of real experience through a succession of intertextualities (despite the ironic claims of the last clause of the following extract): “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of [the lecturers]. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought HoYung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives”. (Forster 1909) [my insertion] Wikipedia is an analogous intertextual phenomenon. It is very diffcult to know who the authors of its entries are, as the texts are subject to multiple edits, revisions, rejections and re-writings. We certainly recognise in this Forster extract a prophecy of the social media intertextuality with which we are familiar: in our case it is an intertextuality that generates fake news, conspiracy theories like anti-vaxxer

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memes, at increasing distances from reality, spreading and amplifying them, often anonymously as the name QAnon suggests. Unlike in the story, our internet may not intertextually modify a previous text, but simply pass it on, for example in re-tweets. These are similar to the proverbial expressions, formulae, and slogans prevalent in oral culture, and beget new uncritical dogmatism. If a larger-than-life “wise” person, like our Donald, has managed to encapsulate knowledge in a memorable saying or proverb or tweet slogan, why try to reinvent a different phraseology?

11.5. Summary In the first of these concluding chapters I began with a retrospective overview of the book’s theme and its coverage in previous chapters. I then summed up some of the problems with the similarity dimension, with its emphasis on noun-based categories, and centring on its dangerous manifestations in “mono-mania”: monolingualism, monoglossia, money, monotony, monocultures and standardisation, and monotheism in relation to mathematics. I extended the argument by expanding on Gaia theory, which stresses increased biological order, differentiation, and global interconnectedness, and by suggesting that overemphasis on the similarity dimension, through industrialising nature, was one of the causes of the precipitous decline in biodiversity. Next I turned to problems with the contiguity dimension. Science has progressed by using instruments that take us beyond the local contiguities of everyday experience. The contemporary novel in English is so wedded to particular and limited contiguities of time, place, and person that it has proved incapable of dealing with large-scale spans of geography and time with their global contiguities, and the forces, such as climate change, within which they take place. Disappointingly, authors, except perhaps in science fiction writing, have evaded their responsibility to suggest alternative sustainable ways of living. The local contiguities of action schemas recognise human purpose and intention, and this can lead to an anthropocentrism, bolstered by theories such as the Anthropic Principle. Alternatively, the sense of divine purpose can align itself with monotheism on the similarity dimension in eschatology. The ambiguity of value judgments about literacy versus oralcy was then addressed, showing how aspects of oral culture and mindset are newly manifest in our post-literate culture. I argued that some modes of internet communication are hyper-intertextual in their distancing from lived experience, and display negative features of both speech and writing – impoliteness, disregard for truth, focus on image and spectacle, and sloganeering.

12 Conclusion (2) Interplay, synthesis, and the need for diverse metaphors

This final chapter acknowledges the interdependence of the two dimensions. Firstly, I summarise the ways in which the two dimensions have been seen to work together in the earlier chapters of the book (12.1). I then proceed to discuss philosophies and religions that have attempted a synthesis of the one and the many, of the similar and the diverse interconnected in contiguity (12.2). Recognising the interdependence of contiguity and similarity, and the inevitability of the latter dimension in our human search for meaning, I conclude that a diversity of metaphors, models, and useful fictions are essential if we are to glimpse truths about our existence, and that some are more useful than others in our ecological crisis (12.3).

12.1. The interdependence of similarity and contiguity and their paradoxes One dimension of meaning cannot be divorced from the other, and it is perhaps misguided to see them as independent. We can only really talk about an emphasis on one dimension rather than another. Indeed, throughout this book we have seen many instances of similarity and contiguity working together and interdependent. In Jakobson’s most basic and original characterisation, with which I began and on which I based this book, the very notions of paradigm and syntagm are mutually defining: selection is always a selection of what to combine with what. Furthermore, as Derrida (1967) claimed, nothing exists outside the text, by which he meant text and its similarity-based meanings incorporate the contiguities of co-text and contexts – material, interpersonal, generic, institutional, and historical. Beyond these points their interdependence has emerged at various junctures in the book, as summarised below. Metaphor and metonymy are inextricable in many of their manifestations: most metaphor themes for concretising metaphors have their basis in metonymy themes, according to Lakoff’s Experiential Hypothesis; the richness of metaphors like “the gills kneading” depend upon DOI: 10.4324/9781003285977-13

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extending along the syntagmatic dimensions, a process taken to extremes in extended metaphor and allegory, and even in narrative, an extended phenomenalistic metaphor; similarly, metaphors with relational grounds depend upon matching the contiguities across two schemas; situational triggering exploits the contiguities of context in selecting sources; the hologram combines metonymy and metaphor, contiguity and similarity, the part-whole contiguity reflecting a similarity relation between the part and the whole. Quite apart from their intertwining in metaphor and metonymy, the border between contiguity and similarity may be fuzzy and overlapping: shapes and parts can be regarded as either elements of meaning that participate in similarity/classification, or as features of objects in contiguity relations. I suggested that frames are usually experientially established by and theoretically subsumed within schemas. (A tenuous relation in Homeric epics, where the idea of a permanent character could only mean a state or action or an event which occurs repeatedly.) Children acquire similaritybased meanings during their experience of participation in the rich context of action schemas with all their contiguities. Concepts like ‘fruit’ have an abstract taxonomic definition in botany, but the everyday folk meaning is created through practice, namely, the action schema of eating foods uncooked as a dessert, thereby excluding pumpkins, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Atoms of the “same” element are differentiated depending upon how they react in schemas. In both cases the schema (contiguity) may even undermine the class (similarity). Similarly, hydrology engineers established pre-theoretical categories through their practice (10.1.2). And the transgender Agnes established her identity as a woman through participation in action and discourse schemas, realising G.M. Hopkins’ quote “what I do is me”. Identity, the way you classify yourself, is predicated on subject-positioning within genres, the way we speak and are spoken to, the way we insert ourselves and others into cultural activities. Reciprocally, categories predict practices, our similarity-based concepts, models, and metaphors are realised in the contiguities of lived experience. Most obviously this works with law, where being classified as guilty or not guilty leads to different experiences, and with gender, though translating gender categories into experience has become much more complex lately. Conceptualising humans and the state as machines, as did Hobbes (1651/1997), might lead us to treat the industrial worker like a machine, all the more convenient as in production lines he/she has to interact with other machines (7.3.4, Goatly 2007). In Thai the words for elder and younger sibling carry with them implications for practice, like the elder giving financial support to the younger and the younger respect to the elder sibling. Classifying races, with some deemed inferior or like animals, facilitates guilt-free exploitation and imperialism. Moreover, we will use classifications of different kinds and of different

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specificities according to the practices we are engaged in – Rex the dog might be a cocker spaniel if entering him for a dog show, but simply a dog if looking for the relevant aisle for his food in the supermarket while shopping. We can round off our discussion of the interplay of similarity and contiguity with insights from quantum theory, and specifically relational theory. Objects, identified by the categories to which we assign them, only exist in relation to other objects, and in interaction with them. If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move towards it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybird there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells, connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars of one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality. In these layers we have been able to recognise regularities, and have gathered information relevant to ourselves that has enabled us to create a picture of each layer and to think about it with a certain coherence. Each one is an approximation. Reality is not divided into levels. The levels into which we break it down, the objects into which it appears to be divided, are the ways in which nature relates to us, in dynamical configurations of physical events in our brain that we call concepts. The separation of reality into levels is relative to our way of being in interaction with it. (Rovelli 2021: 155–156) The objects and levels by which we conceptualise the natural world depend entirely upon our dynamic actional interfaces with it. Objects referred to and classifed by nouns dependent upon similarity are products or functions of their interactions and contiguity relations with physical reality and they cannot be ultimately abstracted from it. Besides these interplays of the dimensions there are other complications and paradoxes. Number theory, on the abstract similarity dimension, was tremendously successful, not only in mathematical terms, but in terms of technology with its impact on social practices. “Abstract theory triumphed .  .  . in the end .  .  . ; an undeflected preference for practical knowledge would have been most impractical” (Feyerabend 1999: 195). I remarked that (sub-)classification by similarity-based categories often functions in the service of specificity and thereby aids the anchoring of the noun phrase to the context of speech. The varieties of

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species disappearing because of human attacks on biodiversity are defined and recognised by similarity-based classifications. The fact that textual metonymy involves deletion suggests that it facilitates the removal of certain features of the context with their rich patterns of contiguity. So although it exploits the contiguity dimension it can also be used for the purposes of abstraction, the diminution of the richness of context. Thus metonymy simultaneously acknowledges and backgrounds context. And there is something paradoxical in the use of the word identity. It suggests complete similarity but also expresses an individuality which would seem to deny similarity through individuation or haeccitas. Perhaps this can be linked to the idea that when we see the same person twice they are alike, the basis for identity parades, or to the illusion that we are permanent unchanging beings.

12.2. Synthesising the two dimensions Jeremy Lent in his recent book The Patterning Instinct (2017) outlined various attempts to reconcile the global contiguity or connectedness of all creation in its diversity with a unifying similarity system, to combine the many with the one, and the immanent experience of life and culture with the idea of transcendence. He considers transcendent pantheism of the Hindu Upanishads and Baghavad Gita (12.2.1), and Chinese philosophies of Daoism and Neo-Confucianism, relating the latter to modern systems theory and the notion of self-organisation and complexity (12.2.3). I find Lent convincing, except in his dismissal of Christianity, which he critiques in the Greek version proposed by St Paul. So, as well as summarising his explorations, I also discuss the Christian idea of incarnation in the gospels as a further attempt at reconciling transcendence and immanence (12.2.2). 12.2.1. Transcendent pantheism Pantheism might be described as the belief that God exists in all aspects of the universe including landscape, plants, animals, humans, the sky, gods, and in truth. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, Brahman incarnate, describes himself as follows: “I pervade the entire universe in my unmanifested form. All creatures find their existence in me, but I am not limited by them. Behold my divine mystery! These creatures do not really dwell in me, and though I bring them forth and support them, I am not confined within them”. (Lent 2017: 174) Or, as the one of the Upanishads states, “[Brahman] is fre and the sun, and the moon and the stars. He is the air and the sea . . . He is this boy,

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he is that girl, he is this man, he is that woman, and he is this old man, too, tottering on his staff. His face is everywhere” (Lent 2017: 174) (cf. Hopkins’ “Christ plays in ten thousand places . . . through the features of men’s faces” (8.3.1)). Pervading the whole universe Brahman thereby unites it in interconnection. Lent presents this as a synthesis of the hunter-gatherer view of interconnected nature with the idea of the transcendent force of the universe. It stands in contradistinction to Greek philosophy, where reason is a uniquely human attribute, and a gateway to the divine, thereby dividing humans and God from the rest of the created world. Transcendent pantheism might be an attempt to combine the shamanic sense of the interconnected contiguities of the universe with the human instinct to find similarities in patterns of meaning, in order to create a unifying cosmology (Lent 2017: 174–176). In the fascination with Agni, the god of fire, Lent recognises the reconciliation of the One with the Many, unity with diversity. Fire is instantiated in many phenomena – while remaining essentially the same. Manifest in all these different fires, Agni existed ubiquitously and simultaneously. One Rig Veda hymn elevates Agni as the supreme deity containing and uniting all others: “You, O Agni, are Indra, you are Vishnu . . . You, O Agni, are King Varuna . . . You are Mitra . . . You are Aryaman . . . You, O Agni, are Rudra” (quoted in Lent 2017: 162). Although Hinduism is partly a joyful celebration of sensual existence in all its variety and contiguity, and the Upanishads embrace the tangible, sensual world (Lent 2017: 173–174), ultimately its yogic project, like Buddhism, is to achieve liberation from them and from the cycle of reincarnation (Lent 2017: 166). It is here that we see a difference between the Hindu and Christian concepts of incarnation. 12.2.2. The Christian doctrine of incarnation Hinduism and Christianity both have strong traditions of incarnation – that God takes human form in order to save the lost world. In Hinduism it is Vishnu who usually has this role, in Christianity, Jesus Christ. However there are telling differences in the concepts of incarnation. The historicity of Jesus’ incarnation is important in a way in which historicity is not in Hinduism. For only by becoming a real human in a historical context can the Christian God claim to be going to the extreme point of saving the lost. Vishnu, by contrast, remains a mythic presence in nature. In addition, the point of incarnation seems to be different. A monist interpretation of Hinduism sees only one reality – that is spirit, and the material as an illusion. A dualist version recognises matter as real but evolving towards the spiritual (Bassuk 1987: 52). In either case the thrust in Hinduism is away from the illusory world of matter towards a spiritual universe, and a consequent downplaying of historicity and immanence, a de-contextualisation and abstraction from lived experience.

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Like the Hindu gods, the Greek gods, though more human than Xenophanes’s abstract God, were ahistorical and spiritual rather than flesh and blood, distinguished by their immortality, incorruptibility (absence of decay), and divine paternity, as though disguised as humans. In this tradition, the early Greek interpreters of Jesus’ message attempted to thrust a Platonic dualism on him, to make him less human, as did John Wesley in the carol ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’: “Veiled [sic] in flesh the Godhead see”. In his discussion, Lent critiques this Greek version, associated with St Paul, rather than exploring the version of Jesus in the gospels. For in fact, the New Testament never explicitly states that Jesus has two natures, or that as God he was also “invisible, imperishable, untouchable, unbegotten, immutable, timeless, and impassible” (Küng 1987: 439). The very notion of the soul was a Greek idea inconsistent with the teaching of the gospels. The bodily resurrection of Christ, rather than the survival of some spiritual presence, was vital for the early Christians. The creed states “I believe in the resurrection of the body”. And Christ himself questioned the dichotomy between soul and body – healing a disabled man he claimed an equivalence in saying to him “your sins are forgiven” or “take up your bed and walk”: the body and the soul are, if not one and the same, indistinguishable. Hegel rejected the dualism associated with Greek and Hindu ideas of incarnation (Bassuk 1987: 89). God, the ultimate truth, only realises himself as God through incarnation and the experience of life and death, and he/she is otherwise incomplete until made perfect through suffering. “While it is true that God displays his humanity and fellow humanity in humanity, he does not thereby reveal his non-divinity but rather the deepest divinity of his Godhead” (Küng 1987: 450). The opening passage of St John’s gospel is: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. In insisting that Word must become Flesh, indeed, that without becoming flesh it is not truly Word at all, Hegel’s ideas on the incarnation prefigure Lakoff’s experientialist philosophy. All our thought and all truth are embodied, and this is not a limitation; indeed it is a necessity, for without the flesh there is no idea or possibility of thought or understanding (Balkin 1998: 140). So, in this Christian conception of incarnation, though there is one eternal God, one Truth, suggesting a great, transcendent, unifying abstraction, he only becomes God by identifying with immanent humanity, participating in lived human experience in a historically specific time and place. We are back with Hopkins in his attempt to reconcile process and immortality, immanence in the haeccitas of individuals created through divine inscape. Or we might remember Eliot’s “still point of the turning world”, the transcendent timeless fixed point around which the world of time and change spins and thereby achieves and points to its ultimate meaning.

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12.2.3. Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, and systems theory We have seen that Hinduism/Buddhism regarded the material world as ultimately illusory, but that the Christian gospels posited a non-dualistic view in which the material and spiritual become indistinguishable in the incarnation. Daoism and Neo-Confucianism attempt another kind of synthesis, and refute the notion that the material universe, with all its contiguities of experience, is an illusion or something to be escaped from. But neither do they deny the possibility of an ultimate reality or of principles of patterning of similarity that operate dynamically across the many facets of the material universe. These two aspects of Neo-Confucianism are best approached through the concepts of qi and li. The Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi believed that, at a fundamental level, the universe could be considered as their interactions. Qi referred to the entirety of both the energy and the matter of the whole universe, which can, as Einstein discovered, be transmuted from matter to energy and vice versa. Li referred to the principle by which qi was organised. Qi and li interact and determine every aspect of reality, and one cannot exist without the other (Lent 2017: 256–257). Joseph Needham, the colossus of Chinese studies in the West, defined li as “the invisible organizing fields or forces existing at all levels within the natural world” (Needham 1972: 475–476). He explained the interaction of qi and li with the exemplar of wave motion, stressing that li was not a fixed pattern but a dynamic, changing one. A wave breaking on the shore exhibits qi, the water and the energy within it, while the forces that organise it into a dynamic pattern are its li. Although we consider a candle flame, or even an individual human being, as a relatively stable entity, this “stability” is actually a matter of the relative permanence of li. The qi components of a flame are the wax, gases, and the energy for their combustion to produce light, and the qi components of our bodies are the energetic cells constituting them. But both are transitory – the wax burns away, the gases change and dissipate, while most cells and probably all the molecules of our bodies are replaced over a period of seven years. It is the patterning forces of li which allow us to perceive the flame and the person as having an identity (Lent 2017: 257). However, even patterns generated by the force of li change dynamically, so permanence is an illusion and all is process (Chapter 9). In Confucianism, rather than Neo-Confucianism, li takes on another aspect. It is the organizing principle of action, often referred to as “rites”, which transform the invisible into the visible by performance on appropriate occasions. The word “rite” suggests rituals, but should not be restricted to these. It is, rather, the activities demanded in a healthy society, by participating in which we cooperate with and enact the organizing forces of li. It is tempting to see genres as the li of cultural activity, as collectively they constitute culture.

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For Zhu Xi the patterns themselves form larger meta-patterns which connect or subsume all others. He identified the ultimate meta-pattern as the Dao, the general set of principles comprising all the li of the universe. The Dao is beyond our human understanding, but the more specific ordering principles of li can be known and acted upon so that we live in harmony with it. At a more abstract level still he distinguished the Dao from The Supreme Ultimate, which consisted of all the li without any qi. It is the fundamental organizing principle of the universe in its potentiality before its actual coming into existence, whereas the Dao embraces the material manifestations of the ever-changing and amazingly complex interactions between li and qi which constitute the universe as it exists. A persistent theme in Neo-Confucian thought is the existence of the Supreme Ultimate as a unity that is, at the same time, manifest in endless differentiations, that, like holograms, contain it. By way of illustration he [Zhu Xi] used the Buddhist metaphor of moonlight: The moon is in heaven and it the only single one. Though it is reflected in rivers and lakes, and is observable everywhere, it is ultimately a unitary phenomenon. In this metaphor, Zhu Xi claimed, Buddhists glimpsed the li of the Dao. (Lent 2017: 260–261) For another philosopher, Zhang Zai, “The Principle [li] is one, but its function is differentiated into the many” (Lent 2017: 255). Lent sums up the differences between Daoism/Neo-Confucianism and Western patterns of scientific thought from Plato to the early 20th century. For the Chinese, there was no distinct separation between humankind and nature. Humanity existed in a constantly changing universe comprising waves of qi forever alternating between yin and yang [see Table 8.1, p. 223]. Arising from this cosmological viewpoint, the ultimate objective was harmonisation: the healthy integration of the individual with society and of humanity with the natural world. The intellect was used not to arrive at some abstract conception of Truth but to learn the wisdom of harmonizing with the Dao. Seeking fixed laws of nature made no sense, since everything in the cosmos was in a state of dynamic flow. The very idea of using pure logic to arrive at a universal theory of something was an absurdity, since nothing existed in an isolated theoretical form without context. Finally, the use of technology was quite acceptable as a way of enhancing civilised life, but, with no conception of humanity’s separation from nature, the idea of “conquering nature” was unthinkable. (Lent 2017: 329–330) [my insertion] The contiguity dimension predominates here: our connection with other members of society (denied by Reagan and Thatcher in the US and UK

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who celebrated the individual and the nuclear family as more fundamental sources of meaning than society); our connection with nature; the harmonisation with these other social and natural systems to which we are connected and through which we achieve our value and values; therefore a resistance against attempts to dominate natural systems with technology (wu-wei, 8.3.2); and the irrelevance of using mathematical logic to pursue universals divorced from the contiguities of context. However, in the notion of organizing systems and forces of li we recognise the similarity dimension at work. The action genre systems which organise our cultural activities refect this similarity, even though these genres provide rich contexts of contiguity fundamental to language acquisition (Chapter 3), and refected in co-text (Chapter 4) and grammar/narrative (Chapter 5). Lent evaluates these Chinese philosophies positively in relation to systems theory. Gaia theory discussed above sees the biosphere as a complex of interlocking systems. Complex systems display a propensity for selforganisation and self-creation or autopoesis (li) (see 9.1.1). This organisation into interpenetrating systems creates a cohesive whole out of the matter and energy of the universe (qi). And none of these systems can be understood in isolation; indeed their complexity only allows an incomplete understanding of the Dao or the Supreme Ultimate.

12.3. Conclusion: the need for diverse and useful metaphors and models We inhabit not only a material tangible system but, as a defining feature of our humanity, an abstract cognitive system. The material world of our immediate tangible context establishes the dimension of contiguity. But the abstract cognitive world is so dependent on language and its categories that we are bound up with the similarity dimension, even if, as in Blackfoot, this is more a categorisation of events and processes rather than things. Moreover, as Figure 10.1 (p. 271) makes clear, and as Sapir and Whorf proposed, the very perception of the world is affected by our language, its concepts and stereotypes, based on generalisation, abstraction, and patterns of similarity. Further still, the generic activities by which we interact with it are themselves typed concepts, as “generic” indicates. Since we cannot escape the similarity dimension, the best we can do is to keep an open mind to a variety of classifications, and regard them as fluid and revisable, and this is why metaphor is so important, as it challenges the commonsense categories that our first language imposes on us. Metaphor introduces polysemy and ambiguity and constructs alternative models of reality (7.1.3). In fact, we could regard a second or foreign language as a metaphor for our first language. The classes are different (e.g. ‘brother’/‘sister’ in English versus ‘elder sibling’/‘younger sibling’ in Thai) and therefore highlight different properties from our first language and its conventions, just as metaphor does, by its ad hoc unconventional class-inclusions.

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Metaphors, we should remember, especially the richest literary ones, depend both on similarity and contiguity, because their interpretations rely on schemas, for example the schemas of a fish breathing through its gills and of hands kneading bread. We may even regard the novel as a metaphor for “life”, a metaphor which is extended through narrative on the contiguity dimension. An imaginary metaphorical world, a text world (Werth 1994) is created inside which, as readers suspending our disbelief, we accept the language as literal, in a “phenomenalistic construal” (5.3.2). Metaphors, also, especially the concretising ones with their imagery potential, do much to ground the abstract concepts of high-level categories in the world of perceptual material experience at the basic level. Metaphors and narratives are creative linguistic usages and may resemble evolutionary creativity. They create diversity, just like mutations, which are very similar to, but not identical genetically with the organism from which they mutate. Most mutations are not successful, however, just as many metaphorical coinages do not find themselves accepted into the currency of the lexicon. And some narrative fictions, phenomenalistic metaphors, survive and are useful for our survival, while others deserve extinction. In an interesting recent book Kwame Anthony Appiah (2017) has explored the 19th century philosopher Vaihinger’s celebration of useful fictions; how we successfully understand the world, act in it and behave morally, “as if” something were true, even though we know it isn’t. This philosophical approach emphasises the similarity (difference) dimension. And though he, surprisingly, does not align his discussion with metaphor theory it is useful to do so, especially since scientific models, literature, narrative, and myth are contiguously extended forms of metaphor. The word “fiction” reminds us of Ghosh’s idea that potentially the novel presents useful hypothetical alternatives to the society we inhabit – alternatives better realised in science fiction than in the realistic contemporary novel (Ghosh 2016). Appiah was one of the philosophers Feyerabend criticised in Conquest of Abundance (Feyerabend 1999: 267–268), and he seems humble enough to take on board some of the latter’s ideas. So the book covers familiar ground. First there is the idea that all classification and linguistic description is a fiction: “But object, attribute, and the judgment in which they are combined, are fictions, i.e., errors – but fruitful errors” (Appiah 2017: 1). Second, scientific theories are idealisations and ways of reducing complexity, because our cognitive capacities are unable to cope with it. It is precisely the difficulty of embracing “the whole subject” that makes idealisation inescapable. It’s the fact that the phenomena are “excessively complicated” that requires us to leave out some of

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the details . . . [T]he complexities exceed our cognitive capacity to encompass them, and that is as much a fact about us as about them. (Appiah 2017: 23–24) Thirdly, the idea that models/theories/useful fictions are used to get things done, for practical or pragmatic purposes, an interaction between similarity/ abstract theory and contiguity/practical experience. Useful scientific and technological fictions give us the power to understand and act on and in the world. “I can think of the earth as spherical and as ellipsoidal, for different purposes . . . Our knowledge of reality is held, then, in pictures of the world, each of which has something wrong with it but is good enough for some purposes” (Appiah 2017: 110). But, fourthly, our fictions not only give power over the world, but over our own behaviour, that is, like Homeric epics, they have a moral dimension. This is especially true of religion, which even if it is no longer held to be true, can nevertheless survive as a useful fiction, as poetry and myth. Even an atheist may recognise the ethical efficacy of religious texts taken as myths. Vaihinger . . . did think that we are more likely to be able to live by our ideals if we express them – “poetically”, as it were – in religious language. “All the nobler aspects of life are based upon fictions”, he wrote . . . And Vaihinger’s strategy of argument shows that the utility of fictions can be seen not just in their power to aid us in manipulating the world outside us but also in their capacity to help us manage our selves. (Appiah 2017: 25–26) We recall what Ghosh said about the novel as representing the individual and their moral choices. Fifthly, what is important is that we should entertain a variety of models, narratives, languages, pictures, or metaphors. “Once we come to see that many of our best theories are idealisations, we will also see why our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it” (Appiah 2017: x). And, because we and our models, languages and narratives, and the world they model ultimately only exist as part of a web of relations and interactions, we need to put these models, languages and narratives, and world in co-operative dialogue with each other. As Rovelli, interpreting quantum theory, concludes: The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. “Entities” are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else . . . There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent

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This might mean that, instead of seeking a unifying theory embracing all the disciplines in the ladder of Figure 7.3 (p. 186), we can entertain a metaphorical relationship between the disciplines. For instance, social and biological theories are not identical, but they may be metaphors of each other, as long as we insist that metaphor implies differences as well as similarities. I suggested that priming and grammar could be a good metaphor for some aspects of quantum theory, and metaphors a metaphor for mutations. But beware. It is disastrous if we attempt to reduce these pictures to one big unifying vision: In the twentieth century that vision was expressed in the positivist ideal of the unification of the sciences, with its goal of reducing psychology to biology, and then to chemistry and then to physics – considering physics to be the only real science because it is the most fundamental and the most general .  .  . [W]henever someone proposes replacing one of our many pictures with a better picture, it will always be a good idea to ask Vaihinger’s question: “Better for what?” (Appiah 2017: 110–111) Generally speaking, we might also ask ourselves, especially when considering political and economic models/fictions like capitalism or socialism, “better for whom?” But, as the whole of humanity is likely to suffer from climate catastrophe during this century, then it is worth re-iterating this overriding question: what pictures, metaphors, languages, or models do we adopt if our purpose is to mitigate this catastrophe? So although models and metaphors and languages and narratives may be put into dialogue with each other, this does not mean all are of equal value, equally fit for purpose. Blackfoot might be better than English for recognising quantum reality. If we want to survive, some metaphors are better than others. In another book (Goatly 2007) I explored the manifestation of ideology in entrenched lexicalised metaphors. I suggested two clusters, which I now reassess in terms of the contiguity and similarity dimensions (Table 12.1). The first cluster emphasises relationships of diverse entities with their individual qualities involved in co-operation in

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Table 12.1 Ideological and metaphorical oppositions Relationship Diversity Quality Co-operation

Isolation Sameness Quantity Competition

ORGANISATION IS MACHINE

QUALITY IS QUANTITY/SIZE

SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS BUILDING

QUALITY IS WEALTH

SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS BODY

ACTIVITY IS GAME/FIGHTING

RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY/COHESION

FREEDOM IS SPACE TO MOVE

cohesive relationships. The second cluster emphasises isolation of similar entities whose qualities are reduced to quantification, involved in competition, free from the restrictions of connection. The bottom line of this table is worth special attention. RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY/COHESION is realised by lexis such as close, next of kin, togetherness, contacts, attached to, connections, solidarity, and bond. FREEDOM IS SPACE TO MOVE most tellingly is realised by unrestricted, unbridled, unrestrained, with their counterparts for lack of freedom – hobble, chained to, fettered/shackled, strapped, restraint, and bound to, binding, bondage. The question is “do we wish to acknowledge and strengthen our relations and interactions with others and nature, to bond, or do we, in our ignorance, regard such relationships as bondage?” The two current crises, the pandemic and climate catastrophe, remind us of the bonds of global contiguities – we are connected with bats, pangolins, viruses, and peoples throughout the world. We are connected with the web of life and cannot isolate ourselves from changes to the biosphere that happen thousands of miles away. We live in a relational, quantum universe. I think the cluster of metaphors in the second column is misleading and the frst column closer to the truth we need, or, if you like, the most useful fction. We use various patterns of similarity, models, metaphors, fictions, in the quest for glimpses of this truth. However, from an anthropocentric viewpoint, and unable to discover ultimate Truth, what is true/useful will be relative to human purpose: architects make do with a model of the earth in which it is flat; for astronauts, however, it has to be, more or less, spherical. If our purpose is the long-term survival of the human race and civilised culture as part of the abundantly diverse biosphere of our planet earth, then truth/usefulness will be whatever promotes the practices ensuring that survival; though from a nature-centric view, the biosphere will be more important than the humans who are destroying it. In any case, the metaphorical fictions and models will be selected according to purpose and the power to act and live sustainably within a culture which these models confer. Semiosis, creating patterns of similarity, is grounded in our interaction with the contiguities of a real world. We have no direct access to this

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world, since cognition and language affect perception, and all three intervene between the world and our sensations (Figure 10.1, p. 271). That what we perceive is independent of or mediates sense data is clear from the fact that the majority of neural signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain but from the brain to the eyes. Stereotypical knowledge of frames and schemas in our perceptual and cognitive-linguistic apparatus allows the brain to predict what we see, and only if there is a discrepancy do neural circuits send corrective feedback signals to the brain (Rovelli 2021). These stereotypes are the models of thinking we have evolved which are positively adaptive and relevant to our environment and culture. Consider, for instance, the ways in which perception uses a model or stereotype to transform and predict sensation. Our stereotypical model reshapes raw sensations: it inverts the images on our retina, and often interprets the size of the image in terms of distance rather than absolute size of the imaged object. This perceptual model serves us well in most cases; it is tested against experience, through negative feedback when our predictions are wrong, and if the model is more or less true for our purposes we can, for example, make the predictions required to cross the road safely without being run over. If these predictive models are inadequate we don’t survive. Apparently, in the last four hundred years in Europe we have embraced a technological and economic model which makes the ideological prediction that we can dominate, commodify, and exploit nature to serve the purposes of international (consumer) capitalism. This model is being tested against our experience; initially the feedback was, on balance, perhaps positive, but in the last 70 years catastrophically negative. Survival is at risk. When you have an effective enough technology so that you can really act upon your epistemological errors and can create havoc in the world in which you live, then the error is lethal. Epistemological error is all right, it’s fine up to the point at which you create around yourself a universe in which that error becomes immanent in monstrous changes of the universe that you have created and now try to live in. (Bateson 1975: 460–461) The negativity lies, in part, because we have denied the webs of global contiguity that bind us with the biosphere. We have chosen to sever our participatory union with the rest of creation, and to redefine the world as a binary field where only subject and objects exist. We have chosen autonomy over participation, isolation over communion, and have used power to turn the world’s phenomena into objects for manipulation and expropriation. (Rifkin 1987: 223)

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It is for this reason that we need alternative languages like Blackfoot, which challenge the model of human domination of nature reinforced by European languaging. And alternative metaphors and models – Gaia theory, quantum and relational theory, Scotism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, and others sketched in this book. Yet, ultimately, the metaphorical models we build, however diverse, give us mere glimpses of a reality beyond our comprehension. Describing a response and not Being itself, all knowledge about the world now becomes ambiguous and transparent. It points beyond itself to other types of knowledge and, together with them, to an unknown and forever unknowable Basic Reality. Thus the literary forms used by the composers of the Bible seem far better adapted to our situation than the more lucid but basically superficial stories that have replaced them. (Feyerabend 1999: 195–196) Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite argued that to see ultimate Truth directly is to see nothing at all. “God is emanations, you know? And they come down and become more and more material. And down, down at the last emanation, you can see a little trace of it and guess at it” (Feyerabend 1987: 309). Objects, like meaning, exist in at least three dimensions. I have explored two of them, and hope they have given some insights into how meaning works in our ever-changing and unstable cultural and ecological context. No doubt there are others.

12.4. Postscript and self-critique One reviewer requested that I put the approach exemplified in this book into some kind of perspective. First, it is obvious from Table 0.1 (p. 9) that other areas of culture, art, and psychology can be and have been viewed through the lenses of similarity and contiguity, metaphor and metonymy, including: drama and film; montage and close-up; dream symbolism and dream condensation and displacement; surrealism and cubism; imitative magic and contagious magic. For example, Lodge (1977) categorises novels in the metaphoric and metonymic mode, though not entirely convincingly (Goatly 2011: 290–291). Second, the coverage in this book could be extended even further into theoretical areas only hinted at, such as: Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s work on categorisation and the cultural construction of human identities; Derrida’s theories of textuality; the commonalities between Heraclitus and Daoism; text world theory/ phenomenalistic metaphor and types of verisimilitude in literature; or developments in foreign language teaching. I have simply scratched the surface. Thirdly, this work has demonstrated that after measured steps

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from the technical understanding of metaphor, metonymy, through language and literacy acquisition and priming to the nature of grammar, I have taken a leap into vital areas of cultural practice and ideology such as science, manufacturing, capitalism, ecology, and religion, which take us far beyond the narrow confines of theoretical semantics. To do so I have often quoted more or less recent works (Rovelli, Ghosh, Lent, Scott, King, Peat, Feyerabend) which are themselves summaries of other scientific theories, religions, philosophies, cultures, and their ideologies, so that parts of this book are at the end of an intertextual chain, like, if shorter than, those that Forster satirised and that I warned against at the end of the last chapter. This leap means the book represents two abstract end points of critical linguistics or critical discourse analysis: (cognitive) linguistic theory and ideology. As I come to the end of my career and welcome the birth of a grandchild, I often ask myself, what is the point of semantic theory unless it addresses these wider ecological and societal issues and their ideologies? The reason this book invites many further explorations in the areas of cultural, ecological, and philosophical theory and practice is because its scope is shocking. In the Introduction I suggested (critical) metaphor/ metonymy analysis takes place at various levels of generalisation, starting at the bottom with text analysis and going up through corpus linguistics, lexicology, to cognitive linguistics, some of which invokes supposed universals like Canonical Event Structure. Like the latter, this book’s thesis operates at an extremely high level of generalisation with the binary cognitive distinction between similarity and contiguity hypothesised as relevant to most meaning making and much cultural practice (look again at Table 0.2, p. 15). In doing so, I, paradoxically, seem to have been searching for a universal theory which itself betrays an excess on the similarity dimension (rather like approach 3) criticised by Feyerabend in 10.5). At least I hope this is paradoxical, in that I may have given an insight into the glorious varieties and uniquenesses of natural phenomena and our ways of making sense of them, and the webs of social and ecological contiguity to and in which we belong.

Appendix 1 Metaphor themes associated with the Canonical Event Schema

Typographical conventions for appendices Metaphor themes are in bold capitals, e.g. change is movement Metaphor sub-themes are underlined, e.g. to change is to change position The metaphorical meaning is in lowercase normal type, e.g. change in opinion Examples are in italics, e.g. old people are moving away from eating meat CHANGE IS MOVEMENT to change is to change position movement change in opinion there’s been a movement towards shorter working hours move change opinion or behaviour old people are moving away from eating meat move on start doing a new activity we moved on from painting to wallpapering shift change attitudes to homosexuality shifted during the 90s drift general development or change the peace talks are the latest efforts to stop the drift towards full-scale war budge change your opinion or decision they won’t budge on the issue of equal pay pass change, be transformed wax passes from liquid to solid when you cool it swing change significantly (of opinions or feelings) her mood can quickly swing from calm to hysterical switch change to something quite different China is switching to a market economy lurch suddenly and uncontrollably change from one activity to another in his spare time he lurches from one hobby to another lurch uncontrolled or unplanned change I deplore the US’s lurch into nationalism flit change an activity she’s always flitting from one hobby to another

322 Appendix 1 jump suddenly change from one activity to another I don’t think it’s as easy to jump from psychology to brain sciences as you think upheaval great change involving much difficulty, activity or trouble emigrating to Australia was a great upheaval for all the family rhythm regular pattern of change the rhythm of the seasons does not exist in Singapore mobility ability to change (to a better job, status, or class) education is the key to social mobility changes are movements of fluids flux constant change in the general flux of politics she stood like the one constant landmark ebb and flow frequently changing situation the ebb and flow of fashion continues unchecked turbulent changing in a confused and disorganised way we must hold on to religion in these turbulent times turbulence confusion and disorganised change the early 1970s were a time of social turbulence breath of fresh air something that is new and different Gorbachev was a breath of fresh air in the Russian government ripples generally spreading effects of an event or action the ripples of Indonesia’s currency crisis quickly spread to Singapore to cause to change is to cause to move rearrange change the organisation or order of something the board meeting on 20 December is rearranged for the 5 January move the goalposts change the rules or procedures to gain an unfair advantage every time he fulfils the conditions the council moves the goalposts shuffle change in government or management he lost his place on the board of directors during a management shuffle movement social or political organisation trying to change attitudes or behaviour the trades union movement is becoming more powerful agitate argue energetically to try to achieve a change Hilary Clinton agitated hard for health reform tweak change slightly to make more correct, suitable or effective the software needs only to be tweaked a little to meet your needs twist change in the way something happens the dramatic irony at the end of Act IV gave the play an unexpected twist stretch change the usual limits schools are getting used to stretching their budgets commute change one thing to another his three year sentence was commuted to 18 months by the appeal judge shake up make major changes in an organisation the reform of institutions is one way of shaking up the country

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shake out major organisational changes that lead to losses of jobs there’s been a shake out in Merrill Lynch recently world-shaking very surprising and important in changing perception or behaviour 911 was a world-shaking event shock threat of change to way of life or system we’ve already suffered the economic pain of two terrorist shocks unsettled tending to change suddenly the weather will be unsettled in the next few days the winds of change forces in a situation which are likely to cause changes the winds of change are blowing through teenage culture to reverse a change is to move back to the original position swing back change back to its original state public opinion swung back behind President Bush reverse change to the opposite the appeal court reversed the lower court’s decision get back to return to a previous state I must try to get back to sleep oscillate change repeatedly from one attitude to another his feelings were oscillating between desperation and hope come full circle to recur, come into existence again fashion has come full circle – I can wear my flares again seesaw continually change from one state to another and back again the Dow-Jones Index see-sawed up and down pendulum change from one opinion to an opposite one the pendulum will swing back away from the individualism of the 80s and 90s to change completely is to turn or rotate turn change quality, character, or colour suddenly my mother turned nasty on the turn about to change universities’ attitudes towards excess alcohol consumption are on the turn turn into become, be transformed into the witch turned Peter into a frog turnabout complete change from one state or condition to its opposite what accounts for the dramatic turnabout in the university’s examination performance this year? revolution complete change in society through force the French Revolution destroyed the aristocracy gyration frequent and sudden changes the gyrations in government policy are amazing rotate regularly change the person who does a job the headship of department rotates among senior members in rotation taking turns to do a job in our family we do the washing up in rotation wheel of fortune changes that take place in life the wheels of fortune have been very unkind to him

324 Appendix 1 wheel change brought about by time or luck in his view the wheel of history could not be turned back turn something on its head cause something to be the opposite of what it was these new discoveries turn the accepted paradigms on their head turn . . . inside out reverse change a system or way of life completely the attacks on the WTC turned geopolitics inside out turn .  .  . upside down change a system or way of life completely my world was turned upside down by AIDS tip over into change from the first thing into another thing the play tipped over from tragedy into comedy when Hamlet dropped his sword into the orchestra pit CAUSE IS FORCE causing an activity/process is causing movement draw cause a reaction the letter to the newspaper drew an angry response bring cause, result in, or produce her absence has brought us so much emotional heartache lead influence or cause his hatred of racism led him to write a political novel push cause to do I pushed my son to apply to Cambridge send cause to happen or become attempting to hold a conversation with my son always sends me crazy propel cause to do or take part in the country was being propelled towards war spur encourage or make a development happen faster it’s the money that spurs these fishermen to risk a long ocean journey pull perform an action the criminals that pulled the jewellery theft were never caught unleash let a powerful force take effect the war in Iraq risks unleashing forces beyond the control of the US and UK to coerce is to exert a force on force make or oblige against your will I was forced to take piano lessons when I was a child drive force someone to do something it was his children’s indifference that drove him to suicide steamroller force an action or happening he steamrollered the proposal through parliament bulldoze force or cause something to happen he bulldozed the reforms through parliament put someone through make someone do or experience something unpleasant those two husbands put me through hell impel force to do I felt impelled to go on speaking compel force to do as a school boy he was compelled to wear shorts even in winter

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the energy/reason causing a process is momentum momentum force that keeps an event developing the momentum towards central control of the EU economy is disturbing impetus force which causes something to happen quicker the plan gave renewed impetus to the economic regeneration of East London mainspring most important reason for something happening greed was the mainspring of his success driving force person or thing which is the main cause of an event or action Wilberforce was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery moving force person(s) who instigates or makes something happen worried parents were the moving force behind the safety improvement motive reason for doing something what was his motive for the murder? engine way of achieving improvements or changes cash crop agriculture has failed as an engine of economic development EFFECT IS IMPACT to have an effect is to hit strike cause (someone) to have a feeling or idea my report may strike some people as pessimistic striking getting a lot of attention by being unusual or noticeable perhaps the most striking aspect of his poetry is that it is so easy to read hit have a strong negative effect on the economy was hit by a series of strikes hit popular success his very first record was a tremendous hit make a hit with start to be liked by you made a real hit with my mother when you came to tea impinge on have a (negative) effect on by limiting spending limits will seriously impinge on the education budget impact on have a powerful effect on the anti-pornography campaign impacted on the religious leaders repercussion effect that an action or event has on something President Kennedy’s assassination had far-reaching repercussions impact powerful effect my chemistry teacher had an enormous impact on my intellectual development to intentionally cause an effect is to hit hammer/ram home make certain something is understood by repetition he hammered home the need for using condoms drive home state strongly she really drove home the message that we need to economise buffet cause to experience many difficult or unpleasant events or situations in recent years, the Middle-East has been buffeted by war strike home have the intended effect the message about the dangers of cigarettes seems to have struck home

326 Appendix 1 spur encouragement to action it’s the money that is the spur to risking a long ocean journey kick give up (a habit) I’ve kicked cigarettes, heroin, and booze degree of effect is degree of impact and its results hard hit seriously affected by the tourism industry was hard hit by the SARS outbreak whopping surprisingly large the banks made a whopping 60% profit thumping impressively great or severe the right has a thumping majority spanking impressively he has a spanking new bicycle clout power and influence over people or events he had no real political clout yet was still influential behind the scenes bludgeon persuade or force she bludgeoned me into working for the Samaritans bombshell sudden startling and unpleasant news her resignation was a political bombshell punch effectiveness or force my anxiety made me state the vital points of my lecture without enough punch pack a punch have a strongly intoxicating effect (of drinks) that cocktail you gave me really packed a punch punch-line climax or most crucial part of a story or joke I could never tell jokes very well – I either forgot the punch-line or said it too early knockout very impressive activity the show was a knockout – all the seats were sold for ten nights smash very popular show, play, or song it is the public who decide if a film is a smash or a flop earth-shaking extremely important, very surprising or shocking the death of Princess Diana was earth-shaking news earth-shattering extremely important, very surprising or shocking 9/11 was an earth-shattering event in two senses of the word to have extra effects is to cause to move knock-on effect indirect cause of other events or situations if one or two trains run late, it has a knock-on effect on the entire network domino effect one bad thing happening and causing other bad things to happen the US feared a domino effect in South East Asia if Vietnam fell to the communists spillover effects of activity beyond what was originally intended what will the spillover effects be of war with Iraq? ripple effect spreading effect(s) caused by another event or action the economic downturn has had a ripple effect on the entire community possibility of being affected is possibility of being hit vulnerable at risk, in danger young children are very vulnerable to indoctrination

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untouchable beyond criticism, punishment, or change the primary education budget of 10 billion is untouchable protect keep away from bad influences you can buy software to protect your children from internet pornography shield keep away from bad influences you can buy software to shield your children from internet pornography ACTIVITY/PROCESS IS MOVEMENT (FORWARD) action/process is movement move happen now we have a new boss things are beginning to move faster in motion taking place or operating plans to cut the incidence of AIDS are already in motion movement social or political organisation trying to change attitudes or behaviour the trades union movement is becoming more powerful move action taken to achieve something the cut in interest rates was a wise move turnover amount of business done in a period of time the company’s turnover has increased by 20% this year recycle process (rubbish) so that it can be reused he invested in a company that recycled glass action or process is movement forwards go function my watch hasn’t gone since I swam with it on go forward take place, happen the play went forward despite the last minute changes to the cast go on happen the head didn’t know what was going on in the department goings on inappropriate strange or amusing events or activities there’ve been strange goings-on in the house next door recently get up and go positive about new plans or ideas and with the energy and enthusiasm to put idea into action his get-up-and-go attitude is what impressed the interview panel come/go on! please do Go on! Have another cake! proceed start the students proceeded with a demonstration proceedings organised series of events in a particular place the proceedings will be open to the public process series of linked actions or events the process of knitting can become very tedious get moving start working or performing an action after lunch we can get moving on answering the letters venture risky or uncertain plan of action after several failed business ventures he killed himself pass happen his speech passed without comment keep on trucking continue with what you are already doing if you can’t get a job don’t give up applying, just keep on trucking

328 Appendix 1 in progress happening, taking place don’t enter the studio while recording is in progress on the way about to happen or appear big changes are on the way in the Hong Kong civil service through finished I’m through with marking activity/process is manner and elements of walking walk on eggshells be very careful not to do anything wrong I was walking on eggshells for half a year, hoping she wouldn’t re-attempt suicide get into your stride become familiar with performing some activity after a week in my new job I got into my stride have legs have the momentum or ability to continue the rebound in the stock market may not have legs afoot in progress (of plans) there’s a scheme afoot to sterilise people with learning disabilities step stage in a process the next step is to marinate the beef step by step carefully one stage at a time you have to complete the process of applying for university step by step activity/process is running running continuously happening over a period of time he also began a running feud with Saddam Hussein up and running operating at last the doctor’s computer system is up and running run operate keep clear of the machinery when it’s running run operation or period of production the production run turns out 70 cars a night run manage my father ran a shoe shop in Lincoln run show or be performed My Fair Lady is running in the theatre till May re-run repeat showing or sequence of performances there’s a re-run of Nunn’s Macbeth next month pursue carry out an activity, interest, or plan it is difficult for the spouses of politicians to pursue their own interests on the trot without pausing in the course of an action she worked 30 hours on the trot to get the essay finished in time indication or condition for an action is indication or condition of movement signpost indication of what is going to or should happen falling profits are a signpost of more job lay-offs herald be a sign that something good is about to begin the agreement heralds a new era in relations between Palestine and Israel the green light permission to proceed with a plan of action my boss gave me the green light to spend $4000 on books

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go-ahead permission no official go-ahead has yet been given to begin the research passport way of succeeding or attaining a university degree is often a passport to a good career DEVELOPING/SUCCEEDING IS MOVING FORWARD developing/succeeding is moving forward advance develop or improve we have advanced greatly in our understanding of the oceans advances successful developments modern advances in medical technology should have reduced the cost of healthcare progress develop or improve my command of English is progressing steadily progress improvement or development there has been progress in literacy rates in Yemen progressive new and modern in ideas the progressive forces in Iran are strengthening pursue make great efforts to succeed in or achieve it is impossible to pursue economic reform and democracy simultaneously a going concern an effective business his dotcom company is now a going concern make a go of make something succeed she’s really making a go of her new boutique a lot going for lots of advantages the area around the waterfront has a lot going for it carry continue and develop Lenin carried Marx’s economic ideas further (degree of) success is path ahead go places become successful his playing is so expressive he is bound to go places go-ahead using new methods and ideas to succeed this is a very go-ahead company ahead more advanced or successful Labour are ahead in the opinion polls forge ahead develop successfully after the Human Genome Project’s completion genetic engineering forged ahead make headway get closer to achieving something police were making little headway in the investigation point the way forward show what can or should be done to develop the EU can point the way forward to resolution of the Palestinian question a step forward improvement setting up the welfare state was a great step forward in healthcare blaze a trail do something no-one else has done before Fleming blazed a trail in drug therapy with the first antibiotic

330 Appendix 1 home straight the last part of a long or difficult activity the publication process is now reaching the home straight home stretch the last part of a long or difficult activity the eradication of polio is now in the home stretch prospects possibility of achieving success if you stay in this company you have good prospects to change from failure to success is to change direction turn round/around change from failure to success the new boss was able to turn around the company in six months turn the corner start to improve for years I struggled with maths but since this new teacher arrived I’ve begun to turn the corner turning point time at which things improve and begin to succeed the antismoking group called the new regulations a turning point in the campaign watershed turning point in the development the events were a watershed in Malaysia’s political history INACTIVITY IS IMMOBILITY inactive or unsuccessful is unmoving up the creek (without a paddle) in trouble and powerless to take action he’s really up the creek now his computer has crashed stagnant not operating or being active by 1991 the economies of the G7 countries were stagnant standstill condition in which all activity has stopped shortages have brought normal life to a virtual standstill gridlock situation where it is impossible to get things done the negotiations made no progress due to bureaucratic and legal gridlock paralysed unable to act or function at the moment we have a paralysed government stick at nothing not allow anything to prevent you I would stick at nothing to visit Old Trafford to be inactive is to remain in one place wait refrain from doing anything I wanted to buy a house but she persuaded me to wait hang about refrain from doing something if you hang about any longer you’ll miss the deadline for university applications kick your heels be forced to wait with nothing to do I’ve been kicking my heels here for two hours sit on delay taking action on he had been sitting on the document for at least two months sit on your hands/around/on your backside do nothing she sits on her hands all day while I do all the work sit by/back fail to take action to stop something wrong they just sat by and watched the teenager being beaten up

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sit out wait patiently for the end of something without taking action he can afford to sit out the property slump sit tight refrain from action if they sat tight and trusted him things would get better lie about/around do no work, remain inactive and passive they spent Sunday lying around the house, watching TV to prevent action is to prevent movement restrain limit or prevent in the 70s, the government tried to restrain corruption hold back prevent his parents’ poverty held him back from going to college clamp down take strong official action to prevent or control the police are clamping down on speeding clip the wings of restrict the power to act freely don’t try to clip your teenagers’ wings too much BEGIN IS START MOVING to begin is to start moving go begin I’ll just connect up the computer and then we’ll be ready to go set out begin a plan of action they set out to overthrow the current political regime start begin an activity I started writing poetry when I was seven take the first step begin doing something you’d better take the first step and write off for university prospectuses start off do as the first part of an activity she started off by accusing him of blackmail to make something or someone start is to make them move set/put the wheels in motion (begin a complex process within a system Major put the wheels of educational reform in motion kick-start take a course of action to quickly restart a process the bank has chosen to kick-start the economy by slashing interest rates get the show on the road start doing a planned activity together let’s get the show on the road or we won’t finish in time start . . . off cause to begin I started him off on his writing career stir cause to take action I was stirred to action by his speech conditions for beginning a process or activity are conditions for starting to move a launching pad situation/activity used for progress or advancement the Leeds piano competition was his launching pad jumping off point situation or occasion which is a starting point for something his experience with children was a jumping off point for a teaching career

332 Appendix 1 find your feet become familiar with and confident enough to act on your own after a few weeks in the job she found her feet the green light permission to proceed with a plan of action my boss gave me the green light to spend $4000 on books to begin well or badly is to start moving effectively and energetically or ineffectively get off to a good start do something well at the beginning renovating our house has got off to a good start hit the ground running immediately and energetically start working or performing a task successfully he intends to hit the ground running as soon as he gets official permission for the scheme flying start successful beginning to an activity he got off to a flying start in his new career slow off the mark not able to respond immediately they were slow off the mark in dealing with AIDS awareness education false start failed attempt to do something after a couple of false starts she’s begun to play the piano well get off on the wrong foot start something badly by making mistakes he got off on the wrong foot when he joined the school by refusing to wear a tie start again from square one start working again because earlier attempts failed pumping concrete into the base didn’t correct the lean so the engineer started again from square one CONTINUE IS GO ON to continue doing (until finished) is to continue moving onwards or forwards (to the end) go on continue doing he went on with his art classes even after reemployment go ahead continue or begin to do something why don’t you go ahead and seek permission afterwards? press on/ahead continue with a task or activity with determination unions are determined to press ahead with the strike push ahead continue with an activity in a determined way Uganda will have to push ahead with destructive World Bank policies proceed continue with something after lunch we proceeded with the main discussion carry on continue to do something she carried on with the show in spite of having a cold going strong continuing to live, perform, or be popular Cliff Richard is still going strong after 50 years keep the wheels turning maintain a process and prevent it stopping the new bill will keep the wheels of economic reform turning

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stay the course finish something you have started despite difficulties I started by studying medicine but I was unable to stay the course point of no return situation in which you have to continue with an action because it is too late to stop Macbeth reached the point of no return in his murderous career after killing Macduff’s family to continue happening or taking place is to continue moving onwards or forwards run on continue for a long time the meeting ran on past midnight overrun continue too long the lecture overran by ten minutes roll on continue without giving any sign of stopping the arguments over GM roll on endlessly trundle on continue but with minimum intensity the property market has been trundling on but prices have been steadily falling ongoing continuing to exist or develop we have an ongoing situation of third world indebtedness CEASE IS STOP to cease or abandon an activity is to cease moving forwards stop finish doing something she stopped knitting and looked out into the garden stop short of decide not to do I stopped short of telling him the whole truth, I thought it would devastate him pull up short suddenly stop doing something I was criticising John but seeing him approach I pulled up short come to a full stop be abandoned or be discontinued the talks between the US and North Korea came to a full stop come to an end be finished, cease (of an activity) one more act and the play will come to an end come to a standstill cease (of an activity) the entertainment scene in Hong Kong came to a standstill due to the SARS epidemic grind to a halt come to an end (of process or activity) because of the strike industry will grind to a halt halt ceasing to do something the police brought their investigations to a halt after two years bail out stop doing or being involved with an activity at the moment you should bail out of stock market investment conditions causing an activity to cease or fail are conditions causing movement to cease run out of gas begin to fail, become ineffective his company was successful into the 1980s but then it ran out of gas run out of steam lack the energy to continue with an activity after nine months playing tennis Venus ran out of steam

334 Appendix 1 stall delay an action or process the athlete was confident he would be able to stall a doping investigation in neutral not making much effort in an activity I didn’t concentrate much because I was tired and my mind was in neutral in the doldrums without activity or success my career has been in the doldrums for the last three years sticky difficult to make progress with we have got a sticky problem – we’re short of hospital beds run into the ground exhaust through overwork he ran himself into the ground with his 12 hour working day fall by the wayside fail to finish an activity some of its competitors have fallen by the wayside to make a person or process cease is to stop them moving forwards bring up short make someone cease from an activity I was knitting quite happily when the news on the TV about 9/11 brought me up short put a stop to make someone end something we’ll have to put a stop to this scandal-mongering stop prevent from doing something I stopped him spending so much time on computer games stop in their tracks surprise and suddenly cause to stop an activity a sudden loud shout made me stop in my tracks arrest stop the development of this drug promises to arrest the disease within six weeks halt stop something happening the government halted repayments to the IMF SUCCESS/EASE IS SPEED success or ease of performing an activity are speed on all/full cylinders working effectively and successfully after months of writer’s block I’m now working on full cylinders lick fast rate of action he’s been getting through his work at quite a lick speed rate of activity if you do your marking at such great speed you’re bound to make mistakes pace speed of doing something schoolchildren should be allowed to work at their own pace at a clip proceeding at a high rate of activity he’s been delivering these circulars at quite a clip to perform or develop successfully and easily is to move quickly speed up do something quicker doing our own legal work sped up the process of buying the house dash off do something quickly without much effort I’ll just dash off another reference before dinner

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gallop develop very quickly and uncontrollably the Thai economy galloped ahead in the early 90s romp through succeed without much effort Hannah romped through her accountancy exams coast do something easily without any special effort Australia coasted to victory against Italy in last night’s match breeze through cope successfully with without worrying about he breezed through his examinations take in your stride deal calmly with something he took his boss’s negative comments in his stride streamline improve the effectiveness of an organisation state companies were streamlined by firing workers UNSUCCESSFUL/DIFFICULT IS SLOW to prevent or make difficult is to cause to move slowly retard prevent something being achieved quickly my illness retarded the progress on my novel check stop something continuing sex education is also expected to help check the spread of AIDS hamstring limit what can be done we were hamstrung by the illness of our goalkeeper performing unsuccessfully or with difficulty is moving or walking slowly slow not very clever or observant I feel so slow when I’m with James – he’s so much brighter than me in the slow lane not succeeding or progressing if you are wrong, you’ll end up in the corporate slow lane crawl progress or achieve things slowly and with difficulty the Ukrainian economy is crawling out of recession slog work hard and steadily through they complete the program by slogging through an intensive 11-month course plod work slowly and continuously without enthusiasm I plod through my work each day, but my mind is on my sick father tick over continue basic functions but without expansion or improvement the company is ticking over and profits are steady but not spectacular watch your step be careful in order to avoid getting into trouble you have to watch your step in training with the new manager feel your way deal with a situation or task in an uncertain way I’ve never edited a book before, so I’m partly just feeling my way performing unsuccessfully or with difficulty is awkward or careless walking slipshod carelessly done this essay was a really slipshod piece of work on the skids out of control and likely to fail my career is on the skids, I’m afraid

336 Appendix 1 flat-footed clumsy, awkward, and slow in response the reaction of the unions caught the government flat-footed false step unwise action that may have a dangerous effect making a date with an internet acquaintance was a false step lame duck someone that is not effective at what they do a lame duck chief justice cannot make many changes limp develop slowly the economy has been limping along for the last three years falter lose strength or purpose and (almost) stop attempts at reforming health care faltered early on stagger operate unsuccessfully because of problems the national health service staggers from one crisis to the next stumble make a serious mistake and nearly fail my father’s publishing firm stumbled badly in the 80s but just survived stumble across/upon/on find by accident workmen stumbled upon remains of Roman pottery while they were excavating stumbling-block something which prevents action or agreement reluctance to compromise is the major stumbling block to a settlement MEANS IS ROAD/TRACK means or methods are a track, path or road way method of doing something the best way to commit suicide is with aluminium sulphate two-way street activity which demands effort by two people a successful marriage is a two-way street by way of as a way of doing she sent me flowers by way of apology pathway course of action or way of achieving education will create a pathway to success route means of achieving something researchers are trying to obtain the same information through an indirect route road to/of activities or events that result in I don’t know whether taking this job will be a road to success or to disaster road process of achieving we are bound to see setbacks along the road to recovery path way of achieving something networking, not working hard is the quickest path to success avenue method or way or possibility we should explore every avenue for a cure to this disease effective means or methods are the correct or most direct track on track proceeding according to plan, achieving success our university is on track to expand student numbers by 15% short-circuit use a more direct method of doing something to short-circuit normal procedures write to your MP

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on the right lines/track using a suitable and successful method my research assistant is working along the right lines fast track quickest way of achieving a goal for many Yugoslavs independence seemed the fast track to democracy the path/ line of least resistance the easiest way to achieve something I took the line of least resistance and agreed to early retirement unsatisfactory means or methods are unsatisfactory or defective roads or paths road to nowhere behaviour that leads to failure career-wise studying Latin at university might be a road to nowhere blind alley situation or method that has been tried and found useless punishing delinquents harshly in a military style camp was found to be a blind alley go round the houses use a long and indirect method you can multiply by adding together many times – but that’s going round the houses on the wrong track with a mistaken objective or method I think Sharon is on the wrong track in collectively punishing Palestinians backdoor secret indirect or dishonest method MPs have given themselves a backdoor pay rise by increasing travelling expenses 200% cut corners do something in the cheapest and quickest but not the best way the builders cut corners in sinking the foundation piles MEANS/OPPORTUNITY IS TRANSPORT means or opportunity is (part of) a vehicle vehicle way of achieving the seminar was a vehicle for furthering co-operation wheels way in which an organisation operates he knows the wheels of administration turn slowly linchpin important member of a group that enables it to operate successfully Shanghai is the linchpin of the Chinese equity market opportunity is getting on or riding a vehicle go along for the ride attend an activity without taking part I’m not a committee member – I’ve just come along for the ride get a free ride enjoy an activity without paying for it I got a free ride since Julia’s friends paid my entrance fee passenger passive member of an organisation we don’t need any more passengers on this project a ticket to way of succeeding or attaining a university is often a ticket to a good career ticket policies supported by an election candidate he was elected on the abortion ticket miss the bus lose the chance or opportunity if you don’t get your application in soon you will miss the bus

338 Appendix 1 miss the boat miss the opportunity if you don’t get your application in soon you will miss the boat OPPORTUNITY/POSSIBILITY IS OPENING to make or be possible is to open or be open open-door allowing people or goods to come freely into a place or country Australia’s open-door policy on immigrants was abandoned in the late 90s open to question uncertain the government figures are open to question leave the door open to continue to allow the possibility of the last clause leaves the door open for extending the contract open operating or functioning the company has been open for six months open the door to/on make possible these talks may well open the door to a peaceful solution open the floodgates to allow something to happen much more often or seriously than before the change in the law will open the floodgates to many more court cases clear/open the way for create an opportunity for something to happen this legal judgment could open the way for other children to sue their parents to stop an activity or make impossible is to close closed not operating or functioning the firm from which you bought your refrigerator is now closed close the door on decide that that activity or part of life is finished I finally closed the door on my first marriage close down stop an organisation continuing its activities debt forced the Canadian school to close down foreclose prevent being considered as a future possibility the ministers’ aggressive stance has foreclosed any chance of a diplomatic agreement close the stable door after the horse has bolted act too late to prevent something that has already happened finally China began to admit its Covid problem – closing the stable door after the horse had bolted pack in stop doing something he packed in his job with the Post Office last week shut up shop stop doing business they shut up shop and emigrated to Australia shut down stop operating a business smaller contractors had been forced to shut down opportunity is a physical opening or gap through which one can see break opportunity for improving a situation I worked for years as a clerk until I had a lucky break gateway opportunity to get further success in an activity the prestigious job was a gateway to success in modelling

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opening possibility of achieving something advantageous there are many openings for investments in Shenzen window of opportunity brief chance of achieving success the window of opportunity for buying cheap stocks will soon be over prospects possibility of achieving success if you stay in this company you have good prospects vista range of future possibilities he presented a vista of a future where technology had solved our environmental problems see your way clear to be able and willing to do something I can now see my way clear to writing another novel look-in chance to do something or succeed the opposition was not very good – and we didn’t give them a look-in to take or make an opportunity or possibility is to move through an opening breakthrough important development or achievement the discovery of a new polio vaccine was a medical breakthrough a foot in the door opportunity for success if I can just get a foot in the door of the newspaper, I might work my way up into journalism on the threshold about to he thinks he’s on the threshold of an important discovery have/get your way be allowed to do what you want to do he had his way and we went to Spain for our holiday key to way of achieving the key to confidence is being satisfied with yourself DIFFICULTY IS OBSTACLE/IMPEDIMENT difficulty or prevention is a barrier, obstacle, or impediment hurdle difficulty there were many hurdles before the contract could be signed dead end state where progress or improvement is impossible my career seemed to have reached a dead end minefield very complicated situation full of hidden dangers genetic engineering presents a minefield of ethical problems pitfall an unexpected difficulty there are many pitfalls in buying your first home impediment difficulty preventing a process or activity war is the greatest impediment to progress baggage emotional problems that are caused by a past experience our marriage didn’t last long – he brought too much baggage from his previous relationship bottleneck problem which delays development samples containing dangerous germs create a bottleneck in the process stumbling-block something which prevents action or agreement reluctance to compromise is the major stumbling block to a settlement in a jam in difficulties I’m in a jam – I don’t seem to have the right screwdriver for this job

340 Appendix 1 snag small difficulty or disadvantage there’s only one snag – we haven’t any matches to light the fire not out of the woods yet still having difficulties or problems Hong Kong’s economy is not out of the woods yet jungle confusing situation which makes action difficult he was deterred in starting his company by the jungle of regulations run into/up against meet unexpected difficulties in its second year the business ran into difficulties meet with experience difficulty he met with several financial problems during his university years encounter experience something unpleasant he encountered a great deal of opposition to his plans to make difficult or prevent is to erect a barrier or impediment intervene become involved or interfere in parents intervene too little in their children’s education impede cause problems for the successful completion of nowadays being a woman doesn’t impede the development of one’s career stonewall delay making a decision about future action the ministry has stonewalled too long on the matter of compensation for Gulf War victims obstruct make it difficult for something to happen or develop conservative clerics have been obstructing reform for years block stop someone doing something the rebel MPs blocked the introduction of the new law put up oppose by expressing (of objections, obstacles) no one has yet put up any objections to the proposal hinder limit the development of the laws and bureaucracy hinder new businesses insurmountable impossible to deal with successfully defeating the Taliban presents insurmountable problems difficulty in doing successfully is difficulty in moving on the path uphill needing a large amount of effort it’ll be an uphill struggle to get the new plan adopted the rub the difficulty suicide might be ok, but what happens after death is the rub hard/tough going difficult I found mathematics at university rather hard going in a scrape in a difficult situation created by yourself he was always getting into scrapes with the headmaster SOLUTION IS WAY ROUND/OVER/THROUGH To solve difficulties is to move over get over find a solution to we got over the difficulty of losing a teacher by combining the two classes

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surmount overcome (difficulties) he was able to surmount his disability to become a famous physicist overcome succeed in controlling or dealing with we certainly hope that the school will eventually overcome its continuing drug problem over the hump finished with the most difficult part of an activity I think we’re over the hump now, and will need less manpower for the job ride roughshod over do something regardless of what others feel he rides roughshod over junior colleagues to solve difficulties or problems is to move around or sideways lateral thinking imaginative, non-traditional way of solving a problem if the normal methods don’t work try some lateral thinking get around find a way of dealing with or avoiding a problem you can get around this law by changing your nationality way round solution I can’t find a way round this problem circumnavigate avoid a problem or difficulty SUVs are a way of circumnavigating taxes on cars with big engines skate round avoid dealing completely with having cold weather shelters for the homeless just skates around the problem manoeuvre cleverly change a situation for your benefit he brilliantly manoeuvred himself back into power negotiate overcome difficulties if he’s a really good manager he’ll be able to negotiate the financial problems of the company sidestep avoid discussing or dealing with he was trying to sidestep responsibility for the accident to solve difficulties or problems is to move through get through finish dealing with successfully he got through all his university exams come through manage to get to the end of a difficult situation he came through the crisis with his finances still healthy push through succeed in getting accepted despite opposition the election result will enable the prime minister to push through tough policies go through with do something already decided which is unpleasant or difficult he went through with his decision to adopt a Romanian child scrape through manage with a lot of difficulty to succeed in he just scraped through his exams despite his illness pass be successful in an exam he passed nine GCSE exams pull through survive, become well again we wondered whether he would pull through after the operation through finished I’m through with Jerry now, after years of insults light at the end of the tunnel hopes of a pleasant future situation in an unpleasant one sometimes he doubted there was any light at the end of the tunnel and despaired

342 Appendix 1 making easier is making a path for prepare the way for make an action or development easier it was a political initiative which would prepare the way for war smooth the way for make something easier or more likely to happen the mentorship scheme smoothes the way for assimilation of new students pave the way for make something possible this funding paves the way for expansion of student numbers the path/line of least resistance the easiest way to achieve something I took the line of least resistance and agreed to early retirement

Appendix 2 Lexical details of the emotion is sense impression nexus

NEGATIVE EMOTION IS DISCOMFORT/PAIN negative emotion is physical pain or discomfort headache cause of worry or difficulty the increase in the price of aviation fuel is a big headache heartache very sad feelings her running away from home caused great heartache pain emotional suffering the divorce caused him great pain pain in the neck/backside/arse very annoying person or thing John and his rabbits are a real pain in the arse twinge experience of slight negative emotion or conscience from time to time I feel twinge of regret that I never became an architect pang painful emotion he suffered pangs of remorse for over a week a sore point/spot subject that causes pain or embarrassment his failure to attend university is a sore point with him on pins and needles worried or anxious I was on pins and needles all day, waiting for my exam results feeling or responding to negative emotion is feeling or responding to pain uncomfortable slightly worried or embarrassed the demands for money made them feel uncomfortable sore angry he was sore about our forgetting to feed the dogs nauseous extremely unattractive the green and yellow decorations were nauseous smart be upset he’s still smarting because his girlfriend broke up with him writhe undergo unpleasant emotions mentioning her debts makes her writhe with embarrassment flinch refuse to think about or do something unpleasant the UN should not flinch in the face of the challenge of North Korea agonise spend time anxiously trying to make a decision about she agonised for months about which university to choose to annoy/disgust is to irritate get on someone’s tits annoy Paul, you’re really getting on my tits – will you shut up?

344 Appendix 2 get up your nose annoy her table manners really get up my nose irritate annoy why do you have to irritate your little sister? itch eagerness, impatience viewers often have an insatiable itch to switch channels irritable made angry easily, in a bad mood what makes you so irritable this morning? niggle worry slightly over a long period I have this niggling doubt that she might not be able to cope with university NEGATIVE EMOTION IS HURT/INJURY causing bad emotion is striking bruise damage someone’s feelings my self-confidence was badly bruised by my experience of unemployment slap on the wrist gentle warning or punishment the boss gave me a slap on the wrist because I was careless with examination papers slap in the face insulting, disrespectful, or thoughtless action promoting my junior over my head was a real slap in the face causing bad emotion is wounding or inflicting pain hurt cause emotional pain to your unkind remark really hurt her touch a raw nerve accidentally upset somebody by mentioning a sensitive topic when I mentioned his former girlfriend this touched a raw nerve cut up emotionally hurt Matt was very cut up when Julie finished their relationship cut to the quick hurt badly someone’s emotions your rejection cut him to the quick wound injure, upset, or hurt emotionally I was wounded by my daughter’s rejection of my advice tear . . . apart make you feel worried, upset, or unhappy don’t think it hasn’t torn me apart to be away from you scar produce an emotional effect (of an unpleasant experience) I was scarred by my childhood bullyings in a private school on the rack suffering from great mental pain this last prosecution question really put Milosevic on the rack wrench unhappiness accompanying the leaving or abandoning of something leaving the company after 30 years was a wrench causing (bad) emotion is piercing sting annoy or upset he was stung by her criticism thorn in the flesh continual annoyance he was a thorn in the flesh for the government goad deliberately anger or irritate into a response she tried to goad him into some unguarded response bed of nails difficult or unpleasant situation or way of life working for the government in Thatcher’s Britain was a bed of nails get under your skin annoy his treatment of his daughter really gets under my skin

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transfix affect deeply with a powerful emotion she was transfixed with horror prick cause to experience an emotion I was pricked by the needle of curiosity piercing experienced strongly she was aware of a sharp piercing pleasure potential to affect with or be affected by emotion is potential to prick or be pricked prickly/spiky easily angry or annoyed my aunt is a rather prickly character thick-skinned insensitive, not easily hurt by criticism or insult she’s very thick-skinned – don’t feel guilty about what you said to her thin-skinned sensitive, easily hurt or made unhappy by criticism be careful how you criticise her – she’s very thin-skinned HAPPINESS/HOPE IS LIGHT hopeful and happy is bright (object/substance) sunny cheerful and happy the Disneyland staff are supposed to wear big sunny smiles bright full of hope or happiness with these exam results you have very bright prospects brightly happily, optimistically Senegal began brightly by beating France 1–0 on the bright side considering the positive aspects let’s try and look on the bright side – one of the twins survived ray small amount of positive emotion these results are a ray of hope in a gloomy situation beacon inspiring or encouraging person Carreras was a beacon of hope for cancer sufferers light at the end of the tunnel hopes of a pleasant future situation in an unpleasant one sometimes he doubted there was any light at the end of the tunnel and despaired starry-eyed unrealistically optimistic or idealistic these starry-eyed students have never done a hard day’s work in their lives stardust pleasant dreamy or romantic feelings these romance novels used to fill teenage girls with stardust carry a torch for continue hopefully to love or be passionate about he’s held a torch for Jane these 20 years, even though she’s now married glimmer slight optimistic sign this quarter’s figures show a glimmer of hope express hope or happiness is to emit light radiant with joy showing in the face the bride looked radiant as she kissed the bridegroom radiance great happiness visible on the face there was a special radiance in her face shine express happiness his face shone with joy glow look attractive with happiness and health the schoolchildren’s faces were glowing with excitement

346 Appendix 2 light up suddenly look surprised or happy when I mentioned food his eyes lit up with pleasure lighten become happier and less anxious (of mood) on Friday afternoon the atmosphere in the office lightened brighten become more pleasant, happy, or optimistic their spirits brightened when they saw the lights of a farmhouse in the distance SADNESS/PESSIMISM IS DARK hopeless or sad is dark dark sad or gloomy the death of my child was the darkest experience in my life black very miserable and depressed his mood was even blacker than the day before dim hopeless his chances of getting into university are rather dim gloom unhappiness or pessimism all the gloom and doom about the future of the environment depresses me a false dawnsigns of hopes for improvement which are deceptive he went through rehab and we thought he’d lost his addiction, but it was a false dawn cause, experience, or expression of sadness is a cloud/shadow a cloud negative thoughts or emotions when he took his life he was suffering under a cloud of despair about his future cloud show sadness, worry, or anger John’s face clouded with despair pall feeling of sadness the bad news of the player’s death cast a pall over the match cloud make a situation unpleasant poor job prospects have clouded the outlook for the economy cast a cloud over make less hopeful or optimistic the rise in interest rates cast a cloud over the property market a cloud hanging over something unpleasant which may have harmful effects the scandals are a cloud hanging over the future of the president in the shadow of being made unhappy by he lived the rest of his life in the shadow of a second possible heart attack overshadow cause to seem or be less happy news of his father’s death overshadowed his winning the gold cast a shadow make people anxious or less happy the death of John’s father cast a shadow over his birthday party ANGER IS HEAT angry is hot hotly in an angry way (of arguing/speaking) he hotly denied taking any bribes hot temper tendency to get angry easily he seems very charming but he actually has a hot temper

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hot under the collar very annoyed he gets very hot under the collar when I criticise his novel blistering angry and unkind blistering remarks came from the delegates heated angry or emotional (situation or discussion) there was a heated argument between the prime minister and his deputy incandescent extremely angry he was incandescent with rage to get angry is to burn flaming angry we had a flaming argument about religion flare, flare up get suddenly angry she flared up when she found out I’d been gambling flare-up sudden emotional argument their marriage was punctuated by regular flare-ups over money blazing row noisy, excited, and angry argument the murder was preceded by a blazing row we could hear through the wall tempers flare people become suddenly angry tempers flared over who was entitled to the sunken treasure slow burn slowly increasing anger when he walks around like that you know he’s on a slow burn sparks fly angry fighting occurs they hate each other: when they meet the sparks will fly incendiary likely to cause anger or violence Smith’s incendiary speech led to furious riots tinderbox dangerous or uncontrolled situation in which violence is likely the racial tension in Bradford is a tinderbox ready to ignite to get angry is to boil boil be angry all the time I was boiling with rage, but dare not object boiling point state of anger which is likely to get out of control and become violent the crowd was at boiling point, and the police started firing tear gas seethe experience unexpressed anger she is seething at all the bad reviews she received fume express impatience and anger “that’s your last chance”, he fumed simmer be almost unable to control anger she was simmering with rage when I left the room steamed up very annoyed and showing your anger he got very steamed up about his boss’s mistreatment of him FRIENDLY IS WARM friendly is warm warm friendly and affectionate they are a very warm family warmth friendliness he shook my hand with great warmth warm-hearted generous and affectionate my mother-in-law is a kind warm-hearted woman

348 Appendix 2 to increase friendliness is to increase warmth warm to become more friendly towards the orphan was shy at first but gradually warmed to us melt become less harsh in emotion I only have to gaze into her eyes and she melts thaw become friendlier she was distant at first but soon her attitude began to thaw break the ice create a friendly atmosphere amongst people who have never met before I’ve devised a few games to break the ice at the beginning of the meeting UNFRIENDLY IS COLD to be unfriendly or hostile is to be cold cold unfriendly or unkind she looked hard into his cold eyes coldly in an unfriendly or unemotional way the children received their new step-father rather coldly cold shoulder intentional unfriendliness he looked for support, but Smith gave him the cold shoulder coldness lack of emotions or unfriendliness I detected a new coldness in her attitude a cold fish person who is unfriendly or negative in emotions he was a cold fish – I never really got to know him cold war state of extreme hostility short of war between countries with different ideologies during the Cold War the US had some restraint on its military domination of the Middle East frigid unfriendly or very formal he gave me a frigid look chilly unfriendly or unwelcoming I was put off by their chilly politeness cool polite but not friendly or positive she’s been very cool to me since I criticised her hairstyle (unfriendly) unfriendliness is (quality of) a cold substance frost hostile attitude which is polite on the surface there was a certain frost in his attitude ever since our argument icy with a controlled lack of affection/friendliness his reaction was icy wintry unfriendly or hostile (of expression) she gave me a wintry smile and didn’t return my greeting glacial very unfriendly or hostile the Queen’s gaze was glacial to reduce friendliness is to make colder cool become less friendly or emotional after our first passionate affair she started to cool towards me freeze out ignore in an unfriendly way so as to exclude the EU are trying to freeze Zimbabwe out by applying sanctions left out in the cold excluded from an activity in an unfriendly way I didn’t get to know about the meeting, and felt left out in the cold

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Subject index

Please note that in entries with many page numbers the most important treatment of the topic is indicated in bold. abbreviation, 28–29, 44, 57, 61, 70, 83, 111, 301 abstract, see narrative structure abstract nouns, 176 of science, 167 abstraction advantages of, 289–293 by classification by nouns, 157–158, 165–168, 281 by mathematics, 187 by money, capitalism, 253 by science and technology, 167–171, 173–176, 178, 181–182, 187, 256–258, 289–291 definition of, 256–257 in circumstances, 111–113 in hypotactic clauses, 125–126 in linguistics, 189, 196–197, 201 in literary genres, 133–138 in social sciences, 189, 195 in written genres, 127–132 in literacy, 72, 75–77, 79 in religion, 308–310, 312–313 in unified theories, 285–286 lack of in Blackfoot, 247–249 rejection by poetry/philosophy, Buddhism, 218, 220 see also de-contextualisation, categorisation/classification academic discourse/writing, see literacy accounting, bookkeeping, 146–150, 287 acronym, 67 action genre, action schema, 73, 114, 127, 160, 171, 192, 265, 274, 303 importance in oral cultures, 76–78 in language learning, 63–70

in metonymy, 24–26 in pragmatics, 208–211 reflected in grammar, 110–111 reflected in priming, 85–87, 104–106 actor, 127, 204, 297 in Canonical Event/congruent grammar, 227, 235 problematised in Blackfoot, 243 see also material process affective, affective meaning, 51–52, 202, 225, 278 Against the Grain, 146, 156 aggregation of text, 76, 80–84, 276 agricultural, agrarian society, see grain-based societies air traffic control, 165, 217 algebra, algebraic, see mathematics Algonquin language group, 237–238 allegory, 134–138, 277, 295, 306 naïve, 134, 137 allusion, 57–58, 80 ambiguity, 20, 50, 94, 123, 144, 152, 159, 188, 201, 250, 276, 279, 282, 313, 319 disambiguation in relevance theory, 206–209 in priming theory and reduction of, 86, 90–92, 102–103, 108–109 advantages of, 268–273 analogy, 4, 19, 30, 34–35, 55, 62, 109, 135, 271, 275 relational grounds/similarity, 34–35, 306 animate nature, animism, 247, 258, 264 see also shamanism nature-human connection, 257 nature-human divide, 254, 312

Subject index anonymity, 214, 253 in genre, 68–69, 301–302, 304 in internet communication, 301–302, 304 anthropic principle, 234, 259, 297, 304 Anthropocene, 293, 295 anthropocentrism, 206, 279, 290, 295, 297, 304, 317 anthropology, 189, 193, 199, 262, 264, 265, 267 ape, 61–62, 83, 276 see also primate aphasia, 4–7, 58 approximation, 22–23, 31, 159, 160, 273 argument, written genre of, 75, 111, 128–129, 178, 202, 277 artisan, artisanal knowledge, 148, 255–266 ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, 218, 221 As You Like It, 138 atom, 34, 168, 176, 237, 244, 251, 260, 262, 307 and dynamism, 229 copper atom, 168 sodium atom, 168 structure, 14 automaton, 182, 185 autonomy, of nouns, 142, 143, 156 of verbs in Blackfoot, 241 autopoesis, 313 see also self-organisation barter, 150, 253, 273, 286 basic level, basic level term, 22, 157, 167, 170, 187, 275, 314 Battle of Maldon, 301 behavioural process, 113, 116, 117 behaviourism, 259 berdache, 193 Bhagavad Gita, 308 Bhutan, 156 Bible, 299, 319 see also New Testament, Old Testament billiard ball, 142, 156, 227, 229, 237, 278 biodiversity, 248, 282, 288–289, 304, 308 biology, 184–188, 211, 251, 262, 263, 266, 287, 296, 316 biological view of physics, 185 biosphere, 31, 287, 288, 295, 313, 317, 318 Blackfoot, Niitsi’powahsin, 110, 141, 236–249, 254, 259, 265, 269, 278–279, 281, 284, 313, 316, 319 culture, 244–248

365

Bleak House, 136 body language, 71, 76, 205 body parts, 151–152 Broca’s area, 5–7, 111, 141 Buddhism, Buddhist, 22, 189, 218–221, 224–227, 257–278, 280, 285, 309, 311–312 Cambrian explosion, 288 Canonical Event Model/Schema, CM, 39, 177, 227–231, 233–234, 236, 248, 259, 278, 281, 320 absent in Blackfoot, 243 capitalism, capitalist, 2, 31, 141, 148, 156, 249, 261, 298, 316, 320 and commodification, 151, 154 and Darwin, 261 consumer, 265, 300, 318 carrier, see relational process categorisation/classification, chapter 6 and 7 passim, 17, 22, 78, 140, 157–163, 235, 292, 313, 319 classical categorisation/ classification, 158, 162, 170, 168, 187, 277 racial categories, 281, 282 radial categories, 157, 161–165, 270, 277 resistance to chapter 8, passim scepticism about classification, 190 sub-classification, 6, 141, 146 rejected by Buddhism, 220 see also metaphor as class-inclusion Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church, 285, 299 celebrity, 299 CERN, 259, 260 chaos theory, 30, 185, 289 chat, chat groups, 298, 300–302 chemistry, 168, 174, 186, 251, 263, 266, 316 China, Chinese, 42, 67, 78, 117, 201, 223, 249, 265, 292, 308 celebrating diversity and resisting classification, 78, 265 language and writing, 143, 147, 150–151, 201 religion, 223, 249, 311–313 cholera, 291–292 Chomskyan, Chomsky, 86, 174, 197, 199, 201–202, 211, 213, 225, 238, 260 Christian, Christianity, 57, 134, 285, 308–311 chunks of text, 80, 81, 103, 106, 108, 276

366

Subject index

circumstance in clause, 110, 112, 120, 235–236, 243 direction, 28, 118 instrument, 117, 118, 119, 120 location, 117, 118, 120, 132, 235 manner, 117 means, 118, 119 place, 110, 117, 119, 120, 127 time, 111, 113, 117–119, 132 circumstantial adjunct, 113–114 class inclusion, 3, 6, 21–22, 62, 163, 252, 313 classifier in noun phrase, 121, 123, 145, 171, 176, 190, 282 classification, see categorisation clause, 28, 55, 74, 75, 85, 91, 130–132, 138, 140, 143, 146, 147, 166, 177–178, 226, 236, 277, 281 and Broca’s area, 141 in Blackfoot, 240–245 in narrative, 130–132 semantics of, 110–113 semantics of in interpreting metonymy, 118, 121 two combined into 1 in grammatical metaphor, 174–176 clause types hypotactic, subordinating, subordinate, 92, 111, 113, 124–127, 132, 176 paratactic, co-ordinating, 111, 124, 127, 132, 138, 176 free relative, 226, 241–242, 244 see also behavioural process, existential process, material process, mental process, relational process,verbal process cliché, 93, 298 climate catastrophe, 316–317 climate change, 279, 292, 294–295, 297, 304 clock, 158, 179, 182, 246 biological, 246 coda, see narrative structure coding, coded communication, 3, 205 cognitive linguistics, 9, 26, 39, 260, 320 coins, 118, 182, 253, 286 collaboration, 196, 316 collective, 270, 294, 295 colligate, colligation, 54, 90, 106 Collins CoBUILD English Dictionary, 86 Collins CoBUILD Wordbanks Online, 92, 101, 105, 107

collocation, 8, 80, 85–110, 153, 172, 188, 217, 249, 276 commodification, 51, 139, 151–154, 157, 189, 277 common ground, 62, 64, 290 commonsense, 23, 274, 282, 284, 313 in contemporary novel, 294–295 noun categories, 163, 200, 279–282, 284 of limited everyday experience, 289–290, 292 and Canonical Event, 227 commonsense v. philosophy in ancient Greece, 252, 268 Communicative Grammar of English, 216 competition, 105, 261, 272, 316 complementarity, 234, 263 complex systems, 260 complicating action, see narrative structure compound, compounding, 37, 45–46, 50, 107–108, 111, 114, 138, 277 interpreting metonymic compounds, 118, 120–121 computation, computational, 186, 198, 225 computer, 89, 102, 108, 173, 181, 187, 194, 197, 204, 258, 267 Conquest of Abundance, chapter 10 passim conferring reality, 214–215, 262, 317 Confucianism, 311 congruent grammar, 74–76, 175–176, 227, 236 connotative meaning, 201–202 conservation of matter, 251 consistency, 174, 267 and Gödel, 184 context orientation, anchoring to context, 73, 96, 113, 144–146, 156, 159, 277, 307 contextualisation, de-contextualisation, in oral cultures, 71, 79, 82 in linguistics, 197, 199, 201, 202, 211, 212 in science and engineering, 253–258 contextual assumption, 210 contextual implication, 210 contiguity, passim frame-frame, 123 frame-schema, 36, 40, 121, 123

Subject index global, 17, 29, 31, 36, 221, 228, 230, 248, 279, 288–292, 304, 308, 317–318, 317 Gaia and species loss, 288–289 ignored by the contemporary novel, 292, 294, 295 inter-frame, 23–25, 36, 40, 111, 115, 117, 121, 123, 276 inter-schema, 23–26, 111, 124 intra-frame, 23, 36, 123 intra-schema, 23–24, 63 local, 17, 29, 36, 232, 279, 289–292, 295–296, 304 schema-schema, 36, 276 convention, conventional, 18–22, 32, 35, 50, 54, 58, 74, 163, 185, 272, 279 see also unconventional conversational analysis, 212 conversion, 37, 40, 43, 46–47, 50, 117–118, 137, 143, 175, 240 co-operative principle, CP, 206–207, 212, 301, 303 maxim of manner/brevity, 207, 212 maxim of quality, 206, 212, 301 maxim of quantity, 206 maxim of relation, 206, 302 coronavirus, Covid-19, 116, 154, 177, 262, 298, 303 corpus linguistics, 9, 86, 102, 109, 265, 276, 320 counting, 147–148, 150, 178 creation, see material process critical discourse analysis, CDA, 320 critical features, 32, 34 critical metaphor analysis, CMA, 9, 320 critical thinking, 280, 298–299 cultural knowledge, 66, 206, 210 cultural relativity, 195–196 culture, passim ancient Greek, 250–251 and science, 260, 261 Blackfoot, 244, 247–248 in language acquisition, 60–69 in early cities, 146–148, 150 internet, 298–299, 304 Dao, 219–223, 312–313 Daoism, 189, 218–227, 235, 249, 257, 265, 267, 278, 280, 308, 311–313, 319 Supreme Ultimate, 312–313 dark age of ancient Greece, 149, 252 declarations, 215, 272, 275

367

de-contextualisation, see contextualisation defamiliarisation, 163 definition, indifference to in oral culture, 76–79 in ancient Greece, 251–252 in dictionaries, 2, 87, 143 in encyclopaedia, 169 mathematical, 184–185 of a horse, 139–140 of metaphor and metonymy, 17, 18, 20, 21 deictic, deixis, 62, 121, 140–141, 178 deictic centre, 215 in ethnomethodology, 212–215 in noun phrase, 144–146 person deixis, 213 place deixis, 213–214 time deixis, 140, 213–215 widening of concept, 213 delayed choice experiment, 234 deletion, ellipsis, and metonymy, 9, 28–29, 49, 54, 70, 75, 83, 111, 123, 125, 127, 132, 277 and decontextualisation, 29, 178, 308 deletion of colligate in poetic metaphors, 54 increasing information, reducing redundancy, 83 relation to priming, 106, 109 compounds involving metonymic deletions, 114, 118, 121 demonstratives, 144 dependent origination (in Buddhism), 224 description, as written genre, 129 dharma wheel, 224 dialect, 150, 202 class, 213 geographical, 213 dialogism, dialogic, 1, 83, 179, 282 dialogue, 71, 81, 83–84, 191, 201, 284, 302, 315–316 dictionaries, 2, 9, 19–20, 38, 43, 60, 78–79, 85–89, 143, 205, 272, 276 learners, 108, 217 dies, die casting, 179–181, 222, 278, 286 différance, deferral, 109 differentiation, 111, 148, 230, 288, 306, 312

368

Subject index

diglossia, see monoglossia disambiguation, see ambiguity disciplines, ladder of, 185–189, 264, 316 discourse genre, 66, 105–106 discussion, as written genre, 75, 111, 128–129, 277 displacement, 9, 61 dissipation of energy, 229 distinguishers, 33, 159 diversification, 265, 285 diversification of metaphorical sources, 134, 138, 163, 141 differentiation, 169, 193, 220, 225, 265, 287–289, 304 domain, 7, 17, 26, 35, 55, 62, 142, 164 Dombey and Son, 297, 298 dualism, non-dualism, 299, 310–311 dynamic equilibrium, 229, 233 ecological services, 297 ecology, ecological, 17, 36, 154, 178, 185, 188, 227, 261, 265, 273, 280, 305, 319–320 and contemporary novel, 292, 294–295 and grammar, 235–236 Gaia theory, 232–233, 287–288 ecological crises, 178, 185, 305 ecosystem, 150 economics, 17, 31, 67, 138, 151, 173, 186, 249, 261, 268, 275, 279, 287, 294, 297, 316, 318 natural capital agenda, 153–155 egalitarian, see élite eightfold path (in Buddhism), 224 electron as particle or wave, 73, 113, 205, 228, 234, 263 elegant variation, 157, 162, 164, 165, 187, 277 ellipsis, see deletion email, 57, 298, 300, 301 emblem, 136–137 embodied simulation, 67, 166–167 emergence, 148, 230 in blending theory, 230 emoticon, 301 empathy hierarchy, 235, 247, 297 encyclopaedia, 72, 73, 75, 83, 169, 277 engineering, 163, 180, 286 engineering tolerance, 180, 181

Enlightenment, 248, 265, 294 enrichment, in relevance theory, 208–211 entanglement, 232 entrenched, entrenchment, 38, 40, 123, 270, 284, 290, 316 entropy, 229, 234, 287, 288 epic, 149–150, 251–252, 292, 306, 315 epithet, in noun phrase, 121, 123, 141–146, 159, 171 objective, 145–146 subjective, attitudinal, 145–146 eschatology, eschatological, see purpose ethnic cleansing, 269 ethnomethodology, ethnomethodologists, 23, 69, 109, 189, 191, 212–215, 219, 225, 270, 272, 275, 290 etic/-emic distinction, 197 graphetic-graphemic, 197 phonemic-phonetic, 201 European and American Geophysical Unions, 233 European languages, 141, 143, 226, 227, 236, 241, 248, 278 evaluation, see narrative structure event schema/structure, 39, 59, 177, 227, 320 see also Canonical Event Every Man in his Humour, 136 Every Man out of his Humour, 135 exemplars, 64, 68, 171–172, 277, 311 experiential hypothesis, experientalist, 37, 51–52, 276, 305, 310 experimentation, 168, 234, 250, 257–259, 273, 279, 291 explanation, as written genre, 75, 129, 277 expressive function, expressivism, 302 extinction rate, 289 see also Holocene Extinction Event Facebook, 298, 301–302 facial expression, 76, 79 factive, factual, non-factive, contrafactive, 125–126, 128, 132 see also realis/irrealis family resemblances, 157, 161–162, 270 Farewell to Arms, 136 feedback, 71, 232, 235, 301, 318 fiction, 70, 136, 193, 294, 316–317 useful, 305, 314–315 science, 304, 314

Subject index first-order entities, 166 fixed expressions, 80–81 flashbacks, 82, 129 football commentary, 17, 26, 64 foraging, 131, 147 foregrounding, 58–59 formulaic language, formula, for metaphor and metonymy, 20, 34, 38, 40, 51, 55 in internet communication, 298–299, 301, 304 in oral cultures, 76, 80–82, 276, 298, 304 in priming and collocation, 93, 106–107, 109 mathematical, logical and scientific, 172, 174, 183, 197–198, 234, 256–257, 267, 275–276, 290 fractals, 232 frame, 11, 123, 177, 191, 318 definition, 23 and metaphor, 55 in interpreting metonymies, 40, 115, 117, 121, 123 in language acquisition, 63, 66–67, 191 in types of contiguity, 23–36 fuzzy, fuzziness, 22, 159, 306 Gaia, Gaia theory, 30, 221, 230, 257, 278, 281, 287–289, 292, 294, 304, 313, 319 and grammar, 226–227, 230, 232–235 and Blackfoot culture, 246, 248 Garden of Eden, 147 GDP, 141, 155, 277, 286–287 gender, 100–102, 148, 192–193, 278, 288, 306 generalisation, 9, 22, 143, 165, 177, 195, 256, 267, 313, 320 generative rules, 197 generic context, 160, 211 in language teaching, 217 generic priming, 86, 88, 102, 104, 106 Genesis, 124, 127, 131, 147 genetic variation, 281 genitive, of- genitive, 111, 114, 121–123, 138, 216 genocide, 248, 284 genre, generic, 23, 26, 109–111, 147, 160, 165, 191, 206, 225, 242, 251, 258, 276–278, 285, 288, 306, 311, 313

369

in oral contexts, 60–69, 71, 75–76, 78, 81–83 reflected in priming, 87–88, 103–106 ancillary, 23, 64 constitutive, 23, 64 importance for pragmatic theory, 210–212, 216–217 internet, 300–301 literary, 111, 129, 131–132, 134, 138, 145 occupational, 202, 214 restricted, 217 theory of, 199 written, 127, 128, 131 see also argument, description, discussion, explanation, information report, narrative, recount geometry, 183, 232, 256, 285 gesture, 61–62, 66, 76, 79, 82–83, 240 global contiguity, see contiguity, global global warming, 52, 114, 185, 294, 295 God, gods, 44, 124, 190, 218–219, 251, 254, 273, 284–286, 282, 294, 296–297, 308–310, 319 household, 285 not discoverable by experiment, 264 Trinity, 285 see also monotheism, Buddhism, Christian, Hindu, Islam, Judaism grain-based/agrarian societies, 146–149, 156, 277, 287 grammatical metaphor, incongruent grammar, 70, 73–76, 175, 178, 272 see also metaphor, source, target grammatical resource expansion, 178, 226 grammatical words, 73, 76, 80 Great Derangement, 292 Greece, Greeks, Ancient, 81, 105, 145, 149, 168, 175, 178–181, 221, 250–256, 268–269, 273, 279, 284–285, 308–310 Gross National Happiness, 156 grounds, of metaphor, 18, 19, 55, 94, 164, 173, 211–212 Gulliver’s Travels, 291 haeccitas, 219–220, 224–225, 269, 289, 297, 308, 310 haecitties, 69 handwriting, 179 Hard Times, 139, 291–292 hedges, 22

370

Subject index

hegemony, 141, 157, 183, 255, 264, 298 Henry IV parts, 1 and 2, 138 Henry V, 138 hieroglyphs, 147 see also writing systems Hindu, Hinduism, 285, 308–311 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 185 Holocene, 289, 293 Holocene extinction event, 289 hologram, 23, 30–31, 127, 221, 230, 232, 247, 257, 289, 306, 312 homeostasis, 30, 39, 232, 288 homogeneity, 182, 287–288 humour, 67, 77, 86, 90–94, 102, 104–105, 108–109, 209, 276 humour literature, 135, 137 Hungry Tide, 294 hunter-gatherer, 146–149, 153, 247, 284, 287, 309 hydraulics, 255 hydrodynamics, 255, 262 hydrology, 306 hyponym, 3, 6, 8, 36, 38, 89, 137, 198, 242, 276 hyponymic chains, 159, 167 absent in Blackfoot, 242 in classification, 158–159, 161, 167, 169 and similarity, 21–22, 33–34 hypotactic, see clause, hypotactic. iconic, 61–62, 66, 82–83, 276 idealisation, 40, 67–68, 86, 194, 196, 199, 203, 225, 255, 314 idealised cognitive model, ICM, 40–42, 67–68 ideogram, 147, 150 see also writing systems ideology, 1, 2, 8, 248, 250, 259–262, 269, 284, 286, 316, 318, 320 latent, 290, 295 in science, 260 idioms, 48–50, 80–81, 107, 109, 152 one-phrase, 48 two-phrase, 48–50 idiosyncrasy, 79, 179, 202, 213–214, 269 Iliad, 149, 284 illiterate, 77–79, 149 see also preliterate imagery, 157, 166–167, 170, 187, 281, 314 image, 108, 166, 173, 242, 244, 263, 285, 299, 302, 318

imagism, 136 immanence, 220, 224, 285, 308–310, 318 see also transcendence imperialism, 79, 136, 179, 181, 282, 306 implicate order, 8, 30, 31, 210, 212, 230, 232, 235, 237, 276 implication, implicature, 200, 205–206, 208, 210, 211 in medias res, 82, 129 incarnation, incarnate, 136, 308–311 re-incarnation, 309 indexical, indexicality, 61–62, 195–196, 212–215, 217, 271 indigenous, people/culture, 153, 246–248, 268, 284 science, 237 individualism, individualistic, 295, 302 individuation, 69, 218–220, 297, 308 see also haeccitas, ziran industry, industrial, 168, 180, 260, 278, 287 worker, 182, 287, 306 Industrial Revolution, 179, 180, 258, 289 Industrialised Nature, 287 infant, 37, 51–52, 62–65, 76, 85–86, 276 inferencing, see implication, implicature information content, 106–107 information report, as written genre, 75, 129, 140, 145, 169, 277 information science/theory, cybernetics, 186–187 inscape, 218–220, 223–224, 285, 297, 310 instress, 218–219, 220, 285 intentionality, 60–61, 202, 206 in communicative language teaching, 216 interdependence, 230, 287, 288, 289, 305 of contiguity and similarity, 305 internet, 2, 152, 214, 274, 280, 298, 300–304 interrelatedness, interconnectedness, 226–249, 257, 278–291, 304 in Daoism, 221 intertextuality, 303–304, 320 intolerance, 284, 286 intonation, 72, 205, 301 intuitions, 9, 86, 202 Islam, 285

Subject index Japan, 153, 155 Japanese, 153, 200, 201 jokes, 19, 86, 92–94, 98, 151, 179, 208–212, 215, 277 Journey to the West, 292 Judaism, 285 Kicktionary, 26 kinaesthetic simulation, see embodied simulation knowledge in discourse processing co-textual knowledge, 206, 210, 217 of language/communicative codes, 86, 104, 202, 217 of the physical context, 210 background knowledge, 205–206, 210, 217 situational knowledge, 206, 217 socio-cultural knowledge, 217 knowledge of the world v. of language, 86, 104, 202 Kobe earthquake, 155 Koran, 284 Kuhnian, Kuhn, T.S. 164, 171–174, 195, 198, 260 language development/acquisition, 1, 9, 60, 62–65, 71, 77, 82, 111, 199, 276, 313 language instinct, 86 language teaching methods, 215–218, 319 languaging, 60, 76–77, 80, 83, 275, 319 language universals, see universals Latin, 143, 170, 181, 182, 216, 231 law, 79, 114, 192, 306 laws, general laws, 195, 219 Leibnizian, Leibniz, 230, 258 lexical words, 73, 76 lexicalisation, 28, 40, 43, 50, 121, 137, 163, 272, 316 lexicology, lexicography, 1, 85–86, 320 lexicon, 8, 22, 37, 38, 40, 43, 60, 205, 314 li, in Daoism, 311, 312, 313 Limba, 79 literacy, literate, 60, 71, 103, 111, 139, 141, 174, 191, 268, 274, 276–277, 280, 287, 320 academic discourse/writing, 61, 72–73, 174

371

and quantification, 146, 150 and subordinate clauses, 124–125 post-literate/-literacy, 298–300, 304 pre-literacy, 60, 76–85, 103, 108, 110–111, 138, 146, 276, 298 literate-oral distinction, 149 literal, literalness, 62, 96, 114, 123, 136, 160, 166, 201, 202, 209, 276, 314 and class inclusion, 22 and metonymy, 20, 25, 28, 127, 152 and metaphor, 31–35, 137 and transparency in compounds, 107–108 target, 17–18 and metaphor with metonymy, 53–56 and grammatical metaphor, 73–75, 175 literalisation of sources, see source literary stylistics, 58 logical transitivity, 199 logos, 223, 231 Machine Stops, 303 machine tools, 179–180 macroscopic species, 288 making sense, 1, 74, 128, 131, 133, 193, 196, 250, 272, 275 manufacture, 158, 179, 180, 182 mapping, 62, 65 market, marketisation, 31, 131, 141, 150–157, 235, 261, 277 mass extinction, 288 material process, 100, 110, 112, 115–120, 127, 130, 140, 203–204, 226, 236, 277, 279, 281, 289 actor as participant, 110, 112, 115–117, 119–120, 123–124 creation as participant, 112, 115–117, 123 goal as participant, 110, 112, 115–120, 127, 204, 227, 235, 243 recipient as participant, 112, 119 mathematics, mathematical, 52, 79, 141, 226, 258, 264 algebra, algebraic, 174, 198, 256, 275, 285 and God, 284–287 and abstraction for science, 157–158, 168, 173–174, 177 and numbers in ancient Greece, 252–254 and tautology, 188 arithmetic, 174

372

Subject index

hegemony of, 182–187, 266 see also statistics measurability, 93, 143, 146–150, 153–158, 175, 177–183, 257, 263, 287 measuring instruments, 109, 182–183, 279, 291 memory, memorisation, 3, 7, 22, 57, 81–82, 122, 150, 157, 266, 299, 304 episodic, 7, 166 procedural, 7, 166–167 semantic, 166–167 working, 178 mental process, 112, 113, 116–118, 120, 166 phenomenon as participant, 112, 116, 118–120, 236 senser as participant, 112, 119–120 Mesopotamia, 79, 141, 146, 149, 174, 191, 277, 287, 299 metal, reactive, 172 see also sodium Metalude, 38 MetaNet, 38 metaphor, chapters 1 and 2 passim, see also similarity, class-inclusion analogical, 17, 37 and priming, 106–107 and reification, 177 as alternative classification, 162, see also class-inclusion genre, culture and understanding of, 66–67 in language acquisition, 63 in primate communication, 61–62 2(GR)AMS theory, 106, 211 value of diverse, 313–317 metaphor types concretising, 34, 36–38, 40, 51, 55, 59, 121, 138, 305, 314 explanatory and model-theoretic, 34, 172–173, 272 extended, 54–55, 135, 306 lexicalised, 163, 316 mimetic, 61, 62, 66, 83 phenomenalistic, 70, 136, 306, 314, 319 physical-relational, 34 symbolic, 34–35, 53, 55, 135 transfer, 17, 55, 121, 276 metaphoric competence, 61, 69–70, 82 metaphtonomy, 56, 276 meteorological verbs, 238 methane, 232–233

metonymy, chapters 1 and 2 passim see also contiguity analysis by Systemic Functional Grammar, 114–127 and measurement of time, 182 and priming, 106–107, 109 and processing effort, 80 classification of, 111, 118 in paratactic clauses, 127, 132 in primate communication, 61–62 textual, 17, 28, 29, 44, 45, 49, 57, 67, 83, 106, 120, 202, 209, 301, 308 see also deletion, ellipsis and metonymy metonymic competence, 69–70, 82 MI score, 93 microbial theory of disease, 291 microscope, microscopic, 6, 291 Middle English, 81 mirror hypothesis, mirror neurons, 7, 167 Modern Times, 182 molecule, molecular biology, 229, 264 monetisation, 226, 286 money, 24, 31, 119, 141, 148, 241, 253, 273, 275, 277, 286, 304 quantification and commodification, 150–156 and mathematics, 182–185 monoculturalism, 284 monocultures, 268, 284, 286–287, 304 monoglossia, monoglossic, diglossia, 84, 282, 284, 304 monolingualism, 282, 284, 304 monologic, monologism, 179, 300 mono-mania, 282, 304 monosemy, 282 monotheism, 253, 254, 273, 284–287, 304 see also God monotony, 286–288, 304 Monsanto, 153 morpheme, morphology, 85, 103, 197, 241, 243, 245 myth, mythology, 38, 131, 147, 246, 300, 314–315, 262 narrative, chapter 5 passim, 8, 69, 74, 77, 81, 82, 106, 129, 189, 249 as extended metaphor, 306 in ancient Greece, 251–253 in contemporary novels, 292–293, 295 value of diverse narratives, 313–316 narrative structure, abstract, 129, 131, 132 coda, 130–131

Subject index complicating action, 130–132 evaluation, 130, 132, 133 orientation, 127, 130, 132, 249 resolution, 130–132 National Museum of Washington, 190 Native American, 190 see also Algonquin natural capital agenda, 154, 156, 185 Neo-Confucianism, 14, 308, 311–312, 319 Netherlands, 153 neuron, 7, 66, 167, 203, 232, 266, 307, 318 see also mirror hypothesis neuroscience, neurolinguistics, 66, 267 as unified theory, 266 New Testament, 310 see also Bible news reports, 26, 103, 106 values, 103, 105 nominalisation, 24, 71, 82, 124, 137, 141, 157–158, 165, 176, 187, 203, 249, 276, 278 and scientific theory, 174–178 effects on noun semantics, 142 in learning academic writing, 73–76 in metonymies, 115–117, 119–120, 123 disputed concept in Blackfoot, 236, 238, 240–241 eliminating time and person, 178 rhetorical uses, 178, 202 see also grammatical metaphor non-verbal communication, 72, 301 noun, passim Blackfoot free of, 236–243 conceptual status compared with verbs, 140–143, 159, 243 countable, uncountable, 50, 143, 146, 150 for classification, 157, 159, 165 in abstraction and theory development, 166–167, 172, 174, 178–179 in written language, 72–76 process nouns, 117, 119 processing in Wernicke’s area, 7, 141 noun phrase, chapter 6 passim, 87, 114, 123, 160, 176, 177, 197, 213, 238, 249, 277, 307 and categorisation, 160, 171 and nominalisation, 176–178

373

in congruent and metaphorical grammar, 74–75 structure, 121, 123, 143 see also classifier, numerative, quantifier, premodification, thing, postmodification novel, 18, 57, 136, 138, 165, 242, 279, 290, 304, 314–315 as metaphor, 314 see also metaphor, phenomenalistic contemporary, 292–295, 314 nucleus, 34, 169, 307 see also atom numerative, in noun phrase, numbers, 121, 123, 145–146, 252 nutrition, 147 observer, 77, 109, 167, 228, 233–234, 248, 256, 259, 297 observer effect, 226 participant observer, 191 Odyssey, 149, 292 Ohm’s law, 173 Old English, 81 Old Testament, 284 see also Bible Old Wives’ Tale, 136 onomasiological, onomasiologically, 20–22, 269, 272, 275 see also semasiological ontology, 250–251, 260, 263, 273, 277, 279, 282, 290 and classification, 169 in ethnomethodology, 191, 195 in Kuhnian paradigm, 164, 171–173, 195, 260 differing within sciences, 263 in relation to language ambiguity, 270, 272 opacity, 107, 121 oral, orality, 1, 83, 85, 124, 138, 217, 252, 276, 280 and internet communication, 298–301, 304 and early literate culture, 149–150 oral cultures, 76–82, 124, 276 secondary orality, 298 ordered state, 19, 28, 129, 178, 288 orientation, see narrative structure orthographic word, 80–81, 102–103, 108, 109, 265 ownership of land, 153 oxygen, 72, 231–233 panacea, 168 pandemic see coronavirus, Covid 19

374

Subject index

pantheism, 308, 309 paradigm, 79, 109, 157, 158, 168, 187, 247, 250, 260, 263, 277, 279, 305 Chomskyan, 197, 198, 201, 202 in grammar, 4, 171, 197, 203, 205, 216–217, 257, 305 Kuhnian, 171–174, 195, 198, 260 mathematical, 183–185 shifts caused by ambiguity, 173, 270, 272 social science, 191, 195 paradigmatic choices in SFG, 203 substitution, 102 paralinguistic codes, 301 particle physics, 184 particles, sentence-initial, 205 patenting of gene sequences, 152 plants, 153 Pepys Diary, 133, 136 perception, 165, 201, 265, 272, 275 determined by language, 275, 313 limitations of, 289–292, 295 permanence of being, 252 illusion of, 236, 280 personality, 266, 29 phenomenon, see mental process Phenomenon of Man, 296 phonetics, 85, 197, 264 phonemes, phonology, 58–59, 85, 103, 147, 197, 264 acquisition, 201 supra-segmental, 205 phrasal compounds, 80 phrasebooks, 217 physical sciences, 195 physics, 165, 168, 176, 178, 182, 185–186, 188, 256, 266, 278, 316 and variety of science, 262–263 quantum physics, 226–249 Pilgrim’s Progress, 134 Plato, Platonic, Platonist, 53, 168, 183, 251–254, 273, 310, 312 plot v. story, 129 poetic function, 58, 81, 108, 276 poetry, 9, 59, 81, 82, 103, 108, 189, 225, 226, 249, 268, 278, 294, 315 leisurely reading of, 211 politeness principle, PP, 67, 207 maxim of agreement, 207, 301, 303 maxim of approbation, 207, 301, 303 maxim of modesty, 207, 301, 303 maxim of sympathy, 207, 301

feeling reticence, 207, 301, 303 opinion reticence, 207, 301, 303 politeness, grand strategy, 207 polysemy, 282, 313 polytheism, 253, 254, 273, 285 Portrait of a Lady, 164 possession, see relational process possessor, see relational process postmodification, 121, 123, 146, 176 pragmatic, 1, 50, 62, 68, 97, 106, 144, 225, 274, 275, 296, 315 pragmatics, 9, 89, 189, 196, 218, 205–212, 214, 217–218 contrasted with semantics, 205 socio-pragmatic theory, 64 predicate logic, 198, 201, 278 pre-literate, see literacy premodification, 94, 176 primate, 60–61 see also, ape priming, chapter 4 passim, 1, 28, 80, 84–109, 138, 188, 172, 199, 202, 205, 212, 276–277, 320 as analogy for quantum theory, 109, 316 caveats about, 102–106 hypotheses, 86, 104, 106 orthographic word and path of least resistance, 102, 265 overriding, in jokes, 86, 92, 101, 108, 209, 282 priming types colligational, 89, 90 collocational, 89–90, 93, 96 generic, 86, 102 grammatical category, 90, 91, 107 grammatical function, 98 grammatical role, 100–101 pragmatic association, 89 pragmatic function, 97 semantic set association, 89, 90, 94, 98, 106–107 textual colligational, 91 textual collocational, 91 textual semantic association, 91, 101, 106 printing, 60, 179, 299, 300 probability, probabilistic, 17, 87, 204, 188, 232, 234 procedure, as written genre, 74, 129, 262 process, chapter 9 passim, 219–224 denied by Parmenides, 251 philosophy, 218, 223–224, 249 reality as, 167, 221, 228, 248

Subject index primacy of, 226, 230, 235, 251 dynamic properties of structures, 229 proper name/noun, 146, 166, 280, 295 propositional attitude, 208 Protestant, Protestantism, 293, 285, 299 prototype, prototypical, categories, 68, 73, 142, 157, 159–162, 165–166, 171–172, 227, 270 metaphors, metonymies, 22–23, 33–34 proverb, proverbial, 50, 80, 137, 304 Public Health Act, 292 public notices, 214 purpose, 1, 113, 225, 281, 302, 304 and pragmatics, 206, 274–275 categorisation and modelling according to, 191, 307, 317 divine, 219, 296 eschatology, 293, 296, 297, 304 in clauses, 125–127, 132, 138 in genres and culture, 62–64, 128, 160, 202, 206, 211–212, 216–217, 274 in haeccitas, 219, 221 in standard manufactures, 158, 181, 188 sense of meaning, 1, 265, 273, 295, 296 survival of ecology as paramount, 298, 316–317 teleology, 65–66, 274, 295 see also circumstantial adjunct; clauses, hypotactic Pythagoreans, Pythagoras, 183, 253 qi, in Daoism, 223, 311–313 qualitative difference, 151, 155, 182–183 quantification, 146, 204, 287 quantifiers, in the noun phrase, 145 quantum, quantum theory, chapter 9 passim, 23, 30, 109, 165, 173, 178, 188, 195, 215, 221, 225–249, 256, 259, 263, 278, 281, 307 and Daoism, 221 against Canonical Event, 227–233 and ambiguity of being, 268, 270 and global contiguity, 30, 289, 291 and interconnectedness, 231–232, 315–319 race, 195, 279–282, 306, 317 classification, 281–282 Ramayana, 292

375

realis, irrealis, 125–126, 128, 132 see also factive realism, 9, 132–137, 279, 292, 294, 314 verisimilitude, in literature, 134, 319 receiver, see verbal process recipient, see material process recount, written genre, 74, 111, 129, 132–133, 137–138, 277 reductionism, reductionist, 157, 185, 188, 198, 266, 273, 316 redundancy, redundant, 83, 301 reference definite specific, 143, 144–145 generic, 144–145 indefinite non-specific, 145–146 indefinite specific, 144–145 indefinite article, 144–145, 159, 192 unique, 144, 146 reference assignment, 208–209 reflexivity, 212, 215, 217, 271–272, 275 and problems of discourse analysis, 215 Reformation, 299–300 Reinvention of Humanity, 189 relational process, 112, 115, 130, 140, 230, 281 carrier as participant, 112, 113 possession as participant, 112, 115, 120 possessor as participant, 112, 115, 120 circumstantial, 112, 113 identifying clauses, 112 token as participant, 112, 120 relational grounds, relational similarity, see analogy relational theory, 188, 230–231, 307, 319 and Daoism, 221 relativity, linguistic, 179, 196, 200, 203, 215, 225 relativity, semantic, 214–215 relativity theory, 228, 237 and deixis, 215 relevance, relevance theory, 3, 68, 106, 208–212, 217, 260 religion, 62, 250, 254, 263–266, 287, 290, 296, 300, 320 monotheism, 284–286 as useful fiction, 315 repeatability, 179, 182, 184, 192

376

Subject index

in clocks, 246 unrepeatability, 109, 271 resolution, see narrative structure resource depletion, 185 resurrection, 224, 310 Revenge of Gaia, 235 reversibility in Newtonian science, 251 Richard II, 138 Rig Veda, 309 Rivals, 136 SAD (seasonal affective disorder), 52 saints, 285 salience, salient, 21–22, 33–34 saltations, 229 samsara, 224 schema, passim definition, 23 see also action genre/action schema, Canonical Event Schema, contiguity School for Scandal, 136 science, passim, especially abstraction in experimentation, 256–258 and noun phrases, 168–186 measuring instruments in, 291–292 quantum physics, 227–235 unified theories of, 282 ff. varieties of, 262–263 Scotism, 319 script, 23, 26, 64, 66, 69, 92, 105, 150, 164 sculpting, sculptors of reality, 66, 250, 260–264, 272, 273 secondary imagination, 163 self-organisation, 228–229, 287, 296, 308, 313 see also autopoesis semantics, passim contrasted with pragmatics, 205 expanding meaning beyond the conceptual, 201 ff. of grammar in analysing metonymy, 111–126 reflecting genre/state of the world, 104–108 semasiological, 20, 269, 272 senser, see mental process service encounter, 217 sexagesimal system, 79 sexuality, sexual identity, 192–193, 266 SFG, see Systemic Functional Grammar shamanism, 284, 309 Shooting an Elephant, 136, 137

Sierra Leone, 79 similarity, types of analogical metaphors, 17, 37 approximative, 17, 36 general-specific, 17 non-prototype, 17, 35–36, 271 transfer metaphors, 17 simile, 125 situational triggering, 53, 54, 306 slavery, 148, 287, 299 slide rest lathe, 180, 197 slogan, 58, 276, 280, 298–299, 304 smallpox vaccine, 291 SMS, 300, 301 social media, 280, 301–303 Society of the Spectacle, 302 sociology, social sciences, 189–195, 212, 225, 226, 249, 265, 278 of the family, 266 Somali, 82 sound patterns (in poetry) alliteration, 59, 81 assonance, 59 metre, metrical patterns, 81 rhyme, 81 rhythm, 59, 229 source of metaphor/metonymy, 74, 75, 148, 173, 190, 230, 245, 258 definition and exemplification, 18–20 diversification, 163–164 in compounds, 115–117 in extended metaphor, allegory and analogy, 55, 135 in grammatical metaphor, 74–75 literalisation of, 53–54 see also situational triggering multivalency of targets, 138 origins in metonymy, 50, 51, 53, 57 similarity/interaction with target, 32, 34–35 source terms in word-formation, 38–39 species, macroscopic, microscopic, 288 spectacle, 302, 304 speech act, 60, 207–208, 210, 214–215 speech and writing, 70–80 passim, 174, 303, 304 spontaneity of change, 229 St John’s Gospel, 310 stage set/set-up, in experiments, 250, 258–260, 262, 270, 272–273, 291–292

Subject index standardisation, 157, 158, 168, 187, 189, 217, 278, 189, 286, 304 and monotony, 286–287 in early grain-based cities, 147–148 of language, 196, 197 in literate culture, 76, 78 in manufacturing, 179, 180, 182 of names, 140–141 of time, 182 see also time statistics, statistical 93, 140, 148, 189, 225, 295 and GDP as doubtful value, 268–269 problems in social sciences, 193–194 reductionism in unified theories, 267 value of, 291–292 stereotypical, 22, 68, 69, 318 still point of the turning world, 224, 310 story-telling, story-teller, 76, 133, 250, 251–252, 273, 279 subject position, subject-positioning, 65, 192, 306 substitution, 5, 6, 28, 54, 217 suffixation, 37, 44, 46, 50, 175 suicide, 189, 193–194, 225, 295 sulphur cycle, 30, 233, 287–288 sulphuric acid, 233 Sumer, 148 superordinate, 8, 265 and classification, 143, 158–161, 165, 167, 169 and metaphor, 21–22 in similarity types, 33–36, 38, 49–50, 137 theme in literature, 137 symbiosis, 288 symbol, symbolic, symbolism, 9, 33, 36, 72, 148, 171, 182, 223, 247, 278, 319 in human quest for meaning, 3–4, 37, 62 in literary genres, 134–136, 138 symbolic formulae/generalisations of paradigms, 171, 174, 176, 183, 197–198 symbolic metaphor, 34–35, 53, 55, 135 status, 281 synecdoche, 3, 33, 35 syntactic parallelism, 81 syntagm, 29, 109, 205, 305 synthesis of the one and the many, 305, 308–312

377

system diagram, 203 systemic functional linguistics/ grammar, SFG, 111, 112, 202–204, 206, 212, 277 systems network, 203 systems theory, 308, 311, 313 target of metaphor and metonymy, 26, 38, 39, 115, 116, 117, 136, 173, 212, 230 schema as metonymic basis for metaphor, 51–52, 67 see also experiential hypothesis in extended metaphor allegory and analogy, 55, 135 in grammatical metaphor, 74–75 in metonymical lexis (compounds), 115–117 in situational triggering, 54 definition and exemplification, 18–20 in diversification, 138, 163–164 similarity/interaction with source, 32, 34, 35 target, see verbal process taxation, 147 taxonomies, 75, 79, 147, 157, 167, 170, 171, 174–175, 187, 218, 242, 272, 288–289, 306 and noun phrases, 171 resisted in Blackfoot, 242 as end in itself, 296 technology, chapter 7.3. 168–182 passim dangers of, 289, 297, 318 without dominating nature, 312–313 relation to science and mathematics, 255, 258, 273, 307 telescope, 291 tense as time deixis, 213 present simple, 130, 140, 213 Tess of the D’Urbevilles, 131, 253 text world, 314, 319 text-linguistics, 85–86 textual contiguity, 8, 17, 55, 84, 110, 127, 129, 289 Thai, 143, 200, 201, 281, 284, 306, 313 ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire and of the comfort of the resurrection’, 221 theme in information structure of clause, 91, 134, 178, 202 thematic meaning, 202

378

Subject index

thermodynamics, 229 second law, 287 thing in noun phrase, 121, 144, 145, 146, 171, 176 time as unbounded flux in Blackfoot, 245 clock, 182, 187, 278, 286 cyclical, 244 entropy and the observer, 234 solar, 182 standard, 182 token, see relational process tooth fairy, 152 topology, 256 totalitarian, 84, 267, 284, 300 transcendence, 220, 308–310 see also immanence transitoriness, 71, 76, 156, 219, 311 see also permanence of being, illusion of trolling, 301–302 T-score, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99 see also MI score tweets, 114, 298, 300–304 unconventional, 32, 62, 163, 275, 313 meaning in metaphor and metonymy, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22 unified/unifying/unitary theories, 250, 273, 280, 282, 285–286 of language, 267 uniqueness, 190, 199, 218, 219, 221, 225, 296 of context, 212 universal(s), universalism, passim, 195, 216, 217, 313 and social science, 189–195 in linguistics, 196–204 laws, 190, 194, 195, 218, 258 of non-phonetic writing, 147 resistance to in linguistics, 205–215 resistance to in poetry and philosophy, 218–225 theory, 312, 320 unnatural conditions, 257–258 Upanishads, 308, 309 Uruk, 147–149 vague, vagueness, 89, 123, 138, 159–160, 194, 206, 208–210, 225, 273 variety of sciences, 262 verbal process, 112, 113, 119, 127, 130, 279, 281, 292

receiver as participant, 112, 119, 127 sayer as participant, 112, 115, 120, 127 target as participant, 112 verbiage as participant, 112–113, 115, 119–120 verb, passim, and imagery, 166–167 importance in Blackfoot, 236–243 in Canonical Event, 226–228 conceptual status compared with nouns, 140–143, 159 conversion to and from, 43 in spoken congruent language, 71–75 autonomy in Latin, Chinese, Thai, Blackfoot, 201 dependency in English, 143 nominalisation of, 75 phrasal, 47, 50, 80, 107 processing in Broca’s area, 7, 141 reciprocal, 236 verb-noun distinction absent in Blackfoot, 243 verbalisation, 142, 239 adding semantic content, 142 in conversions, 117–118 vernacular, 170, 171, 181, 299 visual image, 298 see also spectacle vocal communication, 61, 62 Volpone, 136 water companies, water management, 153 web of life, 289, 297, 317 Wernicke’s area, 5–7, 141 whirlpool, 167, 228 Wikipedia, 214, 303 Women in Love, 136 word boundaries, 80, 81, 103 word-formation, 29, 37, 40, 56, 59, 114, 276 by metaphor and metonymy, 42–50 writing systems, 146, 150 wu-wei, 220, 313 yang, 223–224, 312 yin, 22–24, 312 ziran, 219, 220, 223, 225, 265 zone activation, 20–21, 24 Zoom, 302 Zuñi, 193

Name and author index (including gods, mythical persons)

Abelson, R. 23 Achebe, C. 57 Adams, D. 185 Agnes, 192–193, 201, 242, 252, 306 Agni, 309 Aitchison, J. 8 Akbar the Great, 285 Allan, K. 9, 55 Althusser, L. 65 Anaxagoras, 251 Annaz, D. 69 Anderson, L. 153 Anderson, P. 185 Antaeus, 257 Antinucci, F. 82 Appiah, K. 203, 282, 314–316 Aquinas, T. 219 Ardila, A. 6, 7 Ashok, 285 Atkinson, J.M. 193 Attardo, S. 92 Bacon, R. 285 Bacon, F. 297 Bakhtin, M/Volosinov, V.N. 83, 179 Balkin, J.M. 310 Ball, P. 168 Ballantyne, R.M. 57 Barcelona, A. 29 Barrow, J. 173 Bassuk, D.E. 309–310 Bastien, B. 247–248 Bate, J. 294 Baxandall, M. 270 Benedict, R. 189, 191, 193, 195–196 Bennett, A. 136 Bentham, J. 140 Biernacka, E. 57 Black, M. 55

Blake, W. 218 Blokland, M. 153 Bloomfield, L. 196–197 Blumberg, M. 52 Blumenbach, J.F. 282 Boas, F. 189–191, 193, 195–196, 225 Boehm, C. 149 Bohm, D. 13, 30, 178, 228–229, 232, 237, 248, 257, 270, 278 Bohr, N. 234, 263 Bourdieu, P. 269, 319 Boyd, R. 173 Brahman, 308–309 Braine, M.D.S. 70 Broca, 5– 7, 111, 141 Bruner, J. 63, 65 Bunyan, J. 134, 136 Cameron, L. 166 Cameron, D. 179 Cantor, G. 285 Capra, F. 220, 229 Carter, R. 80 Ceaucescu, N. 267–268, 286 Chaplin, C. 182 Charteris-Black, J. 9 Chilton, P. 163 Chomsky, N. 86, 174, 196–200, 203–204, 211, 238, 255, 278, 286 Christ, 219, 222, 285, 296, 309, 310 see also Jesus Clarke, D. 3, 70 Clivillés, B. 28 Coleridge, S.T. 163 Cooper, M. 186–187 Corning, P.A. 230 Crick, F. 266 Croft, W. 104 Crossley-Holland, K. 301

380

Name and author index

Cruse, D.A. 104 Crystal, D. 72, 202, 213, 301–302 Culler, J. 134 Dalton, J. 255 Damasio, A.R. 7, 39 Darwin, C. 1, 185, 187, 261 Davidse, K. 204 Davy, D. 72, 202, 213 De Chardin, P.T. 296 De Saussure, 4, 85, 196–197 Debord, G. 302–303 Deignan, A. 9, 38 Democritus, 251, 255 Dennett, D. 203 Derewianka, B. 74, 76 Derrida, J. 109, 305, 319 Descartes, R. 183, 221, 258 Dickens, C. 136, 139–140, 291, 298 Dick, A.S. 7 Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, 319 Dostoevsky, F. 84, 284 Drew, P. 212 Duns Scotus, 12, 189, 218–220, 225, 267, 278 Durkheim, E. 194 Einstein, A. 113, 192, 215, 311 Elijah, 285 Eliot, T.S. 160, 224, 310 Empedocles, 251 Euclid, 256 Euler, L. 255 Evans, N. 200 Everett, D.I. 200 Fairclough, N. 23, 64, 69, 206, 296 Fauconnier, G. 230 Feyerabend, 82, 133, 174, 219, 250–273, 279, 282, 284, 286, 290, 292, 295, 297–298, 307, 314, 319–320 Finnegan, R. 77, 79, 299–300 Fodor, J. 33, 159 Forster, E.M. 303, 320 Foucault, M. 269, 319 Frantz, D. 238–240, 244, 278 Freeborn, D. 73 French, D. 73, 181, 200 Fromm, E. 152 Gaarder, J. 183 Galileo, 178, 183, 258 Gallese, V. 66, 78

Galtung, J. 103 Gardner, H. 70 Gardner, W.H, 222–223 Garfinkel, H. 69, 189, 192–193, 195, 215, 225 Garton, A. 80 Geeraerts, D. 20, 23–24, 51, 56 Geertz, C. 1, 185 Ghosh, A. 235, 292–295, 302, 314–315, 320 Gibbs, R. 67, 166–167 Gladstone, W. 292 Gleick, J. 267 Glucksberg, S. 21, 62, 163 Goatly, A. passim Gödel, K. 174, 184–185 Godrej, D. 153 Golding, W. 18, 19, 24, 33, 55–57, 294 Gollancz, V. 286 González, E.R. 28 Goody, J. 78 Goossens, L. 56 Gordon, P. 200 Gould, S.J. 261 Gradgrind, T. 139–141 Grady, J.E. 37 Graeber, D. 149 Greene, J. 23 Greene, B. 286 Grice, P. 12, 206–208, 212, 225, 301 Gumperz, J.J. 200 Habgood, J. 152, 183 Halliday, 73, 74, 111, 113, 125–126, 144–145, 159, 170, 175, 178, 205, 226 Hammurabi, 192 Hardy, T. 131, 253–254 Harnad, S.R. 187 Hartley, L.P. 17 Harvey, D. 150, 153–154, 173, 231, 272 Hasan, R. 203, 205 Hawking, S. 267, 286 Hegel, G.W.F. 221, 293, 310 Heidegger, M. 155 Helm, D. 154 Hemingway, E. 136 Henderson, Sakej, 237 Heraclitus, 168, 189, 221–225, 231, 235, 251, 278, 280, 319 Heritage, J. 68–69, 160, 189–195, 212, 214–215, 225, 262, 290 Hiley, B. 232

Name and author index Hiradhar, P. 131, 154, 236, 300 Hobbes, T. 306 Hoey, M. 10, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 103–104, 106, 108, 217, 276 Homer, 81, 251–252, 284, 294, 306, 315 Hopkins, G.M. 12, 189, 218–221, 224–225, 267, 278, 285, 296–297, 306, 309–310 Horgan, J. 184–186, 230, 234 Hough, G. 111, 134, 136–138 Housman, A.E. 30, 134–135 Hudson, R. 167 Hughes, T. 54 Hurston, Z.N. 189–190 Huxley, T. 183 Jacobs, R.A. 198 Jacobson, N.P. 224, 280 Jakobson, 4, 7, 8, 10, 17, 28–29, 58, 108, 171, 172, 275, 289, 302, 305 James, H. 30, 146, 164, 294 Jesus, 140, 309–310 see also Christ Johnson, M. 9, 22, 38, 173 Jones, R.S. 173, 183 Jonson, B. 135 Josephson, P.R. 287 Joshua, 285 Jupe, Sissy 139, 194 Kali, 285 Kant, E. 221 Kashyap, J. 224 Katz, J. 33, 159 Kaufmann, S.A. 230 Keats, J. 294 Kepler, J. 285 Keynes, J.M. 261 Keysar, B. 163 King, C. 189–196, 309, 320 Kohn, L. 220–221, 223 Koller, V. 166 Konjathy, L. 220, 223 Kövecses, Z. 9, 20, 23–24, 40, 41, 116, 123 Kress, G. 163 Krishna, 285, 308 Kuhl, P.K. 201 Kuhn, T.S., Kuhnian, 11, 164, 171–174, 195, 198, 260 Küng, H. 221, 251, 296, 310 Kuznets, S. 155

381

Labov, W. 129, 130 Lakoff, G. 9, 22, 37–38, 51, 66, 78, 152, 160–162, 173, 200, 276, 305, 310 Lamb, S.M. 108 Langacker, R. 10, 141–143, 227, 235, 241, 267 Langford, D. 73 Lawrence, D.H. 51, 136, 138 Leech, G.N. 12, 104, 201, 202, 206–208, 213, 216, 225, 301 Lehrer, A. 160 Leibniz, G.W. Leibnizian, 13, 230, 258 Lent, J. 1, 4, 14, 38, 53, 66, 78, 145, 147–149, 155, 168, 183, 218, 221, 232, 247, 251, 254, 284–286, 297, 308–313, 320 Leroy, Little Bear 238, 239, 241–245 Lessing, G.E. 221 Leucippus, 251 Levin, S.R. 70, 136 Levinson, S.C. 200, 215 Linnaeus, C. 147, 282, 283 Locke, J. 183 Lodge, D. 8–10, 133, 136, 319 Littlemore, J. 40–41, 66–67, 107 Lovelock, J. 30, 232–235, 287–288, 294 Luria, A.R. 77–79 Lyons, J. 166, 196–197 MacCormac, E.R. 166 Marks, J. 187, 281, 283 Martel, Y. 200–201 Martin, J.R. 18, 64, 203 Marx, K. 100, 101, 150, 261, 293 Mason, O. 190 Matthiessen, C. 111, 113, 126, 144, 145, 203 Maturana, H.R. 296 Maudslay, H.A. 180 May, A. 67 McGlone, M. 62, 163 Mead, M. 189, 193, 196 Medawar, P. 267 Merz, J.T. 256–258, 289 Metcalf, A. 108 Milburn, J.A. 173 Mitchell, B. 301 Moll, H. 62 Monbiot, G. 154 Moneta, 182 Monod, J. 258 Montgomery, M. 131–132

382

Name and author index

Moses, 285 Mühlhäusler, P. 289 Mumford, L. 182 Musolff, A. 9 Napi, 246–247 Needham, J. 311 Nerlich, B. 3, 70 Newton, I. 178–179, 218, 227, 229–230, 251, 256, 270, 285 Nicomachus, 285 Olson, D. 60 Ong, W. 10, 76–82, 85, 103, 124, 179, 298–299 Oreskes, N. 185 Orwell, G. 136, 298 Palmer, F.R. 198 Paradis, C. 20–21 Parakarama, A. 179 Parmenides, 251, 273 Parry, M. 82 Parsons, E.C. 190 Peat, D. 183–184, 237–238, 244–247, 259, 278, 320 Peirsman, Y. 20, 23, 24 Pepys, S. 129, 133, 136 Phillippson, R. 179 Phillips, H. 186 Pinker, S. 200, 266, 281 Pope, A. 291 Postman, N. 300 Pound, E. 58, 136 Pratt, U. 80 Prigogine, I. 185, 188, 229, 234 Proctor, L. 153 Prudhon, P.J. 149 Pythagoras, Pythagoreans, 183, 253 Radden, G. 20, 23–24, 40–41, 55, 116, 123 Raskin, V. 92 Renouf, A. 107 Richards, J.C. 216 Ridley, M. 261 Rifkin, J. 52, 182, 187, 246, 318 Ritchie, G. 92 Roberts, R. 180 Rogers, T.S. 216 Rosch, E. 160 Rosenbaum, P.S. 198 Rosenstiel, A.K. 70

Rovelli, C. 30, 109, 215, 231–244, 307, 315–320 Ruge, M. 103 Rundblad, G. 69 Ryan, F. 233, 288 Ryan, Heavyhead, 238–246 Sacks, H. 194, 212 Sampson, G. 86, 106 Sanders, B. 29 Sandor, A. 284 Santa Ana, O. 149 Sapir, E. 7, 12, 196, 199–200, 203, 215, 225, 313 Schank, R. 23 Schegloff, E. 212 Schumacher, E.F. 151 Schutz, A. 68, 70, 190–191 Scott, J. 146–150, 156, 320 Searle, J. 60, 207–208, 215, 275 Seligman, M.E.P. 155 Semino, E. 53 Seto, K. 3 Shakespeare, W. 136, 138 Shakespeare, T. 152 Sheridan, R.B. 136 Shiva, 285 Sinclair, J.M. 86, 91–92, 107 Skinner, B.F. 260 Socrates, 53, 198 Spector, T. 147 Spenser, E. 232 Sperber, D. 3, 60, 208, 225 St Paul, 24, 42, 115, 308, 310 Steen, G. 166 Steiner, G. 199–200 Stengers, I. 185, 229, 234 Svartvik, J. 216 Swales, J. 64, 68 Tabossi, P. 21, 88, 92 Talmy, L. 10 Tan, K.L. 76 Tannen, D. 199 Tata, P. 153 Taylor, J.R. 26 Tegmark, M. 286 Tennyson, A. 296 Terpstra, B. 265 Thierry, G. 200 Thomas, E. 53, 136 Thompson, J.B. 261 Tibballs, G. 19, 209 Tomasello, M. 10, 23, 60–66, 70, 199

Name and author index Tremblay, P. 7. Trimble, L. 158 Turner, M. 230 Uri, H. 7 Utemorrah, D. 247 Vaihinger, H. 314–316 Varela, F.J. 296 Virgin Mary, 285 Vishnu, 309 Watson, P. 174 Watt, I. 78 Weber, M. 194 Wedgewood, J. 261 Weizenbaum, J. 173, 182 Wengrow, D. 149 Werth, P. 314 Wesley, C. 310

383

Wheeler, J. 234 White, P.R.R. 170 Whitehead, A.N. 230 Whorf, B.L. 12, 196, 199–200, 203, 215, 225, 270, 313 Wilkinson, P.R. 38 Wilkinson, J. 180 Wilson, 3, 12, 60, 151, 208, 211, 225 Winner, E. 69 Wittgenstein, L. von, 162, 214 Wray, A. 65, 80, 108 Xenophanes, 254, 273, 284, 310 Yeats, W.B. 57, 163 Zhang Zai, 312 Zhu Xi, 311, 312 Ziman, J. 263 Zurru, E. 294

Metaphor theme and metonymy theme index

ACTIVITY 1 AS ACTIVITY 2 IN THE SAME LOCATION AS ACTIVITY 1, 47 ACTION AND RESULTING ACTION AS ACTION, 116 ACTION AS ACTOR/AGENT, 41, 115 ACTION AS INSTRUMENT, 41, 47, 56, 70, 117 ACTION/ACTIVITY AS LOCATION OF ACTION, 41, 48, 117, 125 ACTION AS MANNER OF ACTION, 41 ACTION AS MEANS, 41 ACTION AS OBJECT ACTED UPON, 63 ACTION AS OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION, OBJECT FOR ACTION, 41, 66, 117 ACTION AS RESULT, 41, 116, 125 ACTION AS TIME PERIOD OF ACTION, 41, 127 ACTIVITY IS GAME/FIGHTING, 317 ACTION AS INTENTION, 48 ACTIVITY AS KNOWLEDGE OF NEED FOR ACTIVITY, 48 ACTIVITY AS PART OF INSTRUMENT FOR ACTIVITY, 47 ACTIVITY AS PLACE OF ACTIVITY, 24 ACTIVITY AS SUB- ACTIVITY, 47 ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT FORWARDS, 49, 177 ACTIVITY/PROCESS IS MOVEMENT (FORWARD), 38 ACTOR/AGENT AS ACTION, 41, 115 AFFECTION IS WARMTH, 52 ANGER IS HEAT, 39, 52 ATTRIBUTES ARE POSSESSIONS, 152

BEGIN IS START MOVING, 38 CAUSE IS LINK/CONNECTION, 25 CAUSE AS EFFECT, EFFECT FOR CAUSE, 41, 47, 48, 66, 51, 125, 132 CAUSE IS FORCE, 38 CAUSE OF EMOTION AS EMOTION, 42, 116 CEASE IS STOP, 38 CHANGE IS MOVEMENT, 38 CHARACTERISTIC IS ENTITY, 34, 55 COMPLEX EVENT AS SUCCESSIVE EVENT, 41 COMPLEX EVENT AS SUBEVENT, 24 COMPLEX EVENTS AS CO-PRESENT SUB-EVENT, 41 CONTENTS AS CONTAINER/ CONTAINED, CONTAINER/ CONTAINER FOR CONTAINED, 24, 42, 66, 70 CONTAINER AS CONTENTS/ CONTAINED, 24, 42 CONTINUE IS GO ON, 38 CONTROLLED AS CONTROLLER, 24, 42, 115 CONTROLLER AS CONTROLLED, 42, 115 DEVELOPING/SUCCEEDING IS MOVING FORWARD, 38 DIFFICULTY/PREVENTION IS OBSTACLE, 39, 49 DIRECTION AS LOCATION/PLACE (OF PROCESS), 27 EFFECT AS CAUSE, 41, 46, 47, 48, 107, 125, 132, 177 EFFECT IS IMPACT, 38 EMOTION IS FOOD/EATING, 39

Metaphor theme and metonymy theme index EMOTION AS CAUSE OF EMOTION, 42, 51, 125 EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/ BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT, 125 EMOTION IS EXPLOSION, 39 EMOTION IS MOVEMENT, 48 EMOTION AS PHYSIOLOGICAL/ BEHAVIOURAL EFFECT, 52, 117 EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION, 10, 39, 51, 59, 276 ENTITY AS (IS) CHARACTERISTIC OF ENTITY, 26, 35, 123 ENTITY IS CHARACTERISTIC, 34, 50, 135 ENTITY INVOLVED IN MOTION AS TIME OF MOTION, 24, 41, 117 ENTITY THAT CAUSED STATE AS STATE, 115 ENTITY THAT CAUSED STATE/ EVENT AS EVENT, 41 EVENT AS SUB-EVENT, 47, 61, 116 EVENT THAT CAUSED SOUND AS SOUND, 116 EVENT THAT SOUND CAUSED AS SOUND, 25, 42, 125 EXPRESSION/CONSCIOUSNESS IS OUT, 46 FREEDOM IS SPACE TO MOVE, 317 FUTURE TIME AS TIME, 48 HAPPINESS/HOPE IS LIGHT, 51 HYPONYM IS SUPERORDINATE, 33 INACTIVITY IS IMMOBILITY, 38 INHABITANTS AS PLACE, 42 INSTRUMENT AS ACTION, 41, 117 MANNER OF ACTION AS ACTION, 117 MEANS IS ROAD/TRACK, 39 MIND IS CONTAINER/BUILDING, 49 MORE AS/IS HIGH, 37 MOTION AS DESTINATION, 41, 118

385

OBJECT/PERSON AS LOCATION, 24, 48 OBJECT/PERSON CAUSING MENTAL STATE AS MENTAL STATE, 42, 116 OPPORTUNITY/POSSIBILITY IS OPENING, 39 ORGANISATION IS MACHINE, 317 ORIGINAL FORM AS MODIFIED FORM, 42 PART OF INSTRUMENT FOR ACTIVITY, 47 PART AS WHOLE, 23 PERCEPTION AS MANNER OF PERCEPTION, 41 PERCEPTION AS ORGAN OF PERCEPTION, 41 PERCEPTION AS THING PERCEIVED, 41, 118 POLITE IS SMOOTH, 46 POSSESSED AS POSSESSOR, 42, 115 POSSESSOR AS POSSESSED/ POSSESSION, 24, 27, 42, 70, 94, 115, 152 PROCESS AS MEANS, 27 PROCESS AS PREVIOUS SUBPROCESS, 28 PROCESS AS RESULTING LOCATION, 27 PRODUCT AS PRODUCER, 42, 67, 115 PRODUCT MADE IN A PLACE AS PLACE, 24, 42, 117 PROTRACTED ACTIVITY AS ACT, 47 QUALITY IS QUANTITY/SIZE, 317 QUALITY IS WEALTH, 317 QUALITY AS EXPRESSION OF QUALITY, 46

NEGATIVE EMOTION IS HURT/ INJURY, 51 NEGATIVE EMOTION IS DISCOMFORT, 39, 51

REASON FOR EVENT AS TIME PERIOD OF EVENT, 127 REASON FOR EVENT AS TIME PREVIOUS TO EVENT, 127 RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY/ COHESION, 317 RESULT AS ACTION, 41, 116, 125, 142 RESULT OF ACTION AS INTENTION OF ACTION, 127

OBJECT AS SUBSTANCE, 27 OBJECT INVOLVED IN THE ACTION AS ACTION, 24, 41, 116

SADNESS/PESSIMISM IS DARK, 51 SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS BODY, 317

386

Metaphor theme and metonymy theme index

SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS BUILDING, 317 SOLUTION IS WAY ROUND/OVER/ THROUGH, 39 STATE AS BEHAVIOUR CAUSED BY IT, 41 STATE IS A LOCATION/PLACE, 39 SUB-EVENT AS EVENT, 47 SUCCESS/EASE IS SPEED, 38 SUPERORDINATE IS HYPONYM, 33, 34, 50, 172

THING AS (IS) QUALITY, 123 THING PERCEIVED AS PERCEPTION, 41, 116 TIME ELAPSING IS MOVEMENT, 49 TIME PERIOD OF ACTION AS ACTION, 117 USER OF OBJECT AS OBJECT, 42, 115 WHOLE AS PART, 23, 48, 70, 94 WORK AS AUTHOR, 42, 115