Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women’s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2016

Week 15 – Answers

Pragmatics

Dirven and Verspoor (2004), Chapter 7

Lee (2001), Chapter 13

Dirven and Verspoor (2004), Chapter 7 – Doing things with words: Pragmatics

1. How do cognitive linguists view speech acts and how do they organize them?

Working from Searle’s original 5-part taxonomy (1969), cognitive linguists have made a 3-part taxonomy of their own.

Knowledge-based (informative) speech acts

Volition-based (obligative) speech acts

State-changing (constitutive) speech acts

2. How is the concept of conversational implicature used in cognitive linguistic theory?

Maxims, as proposed by Grice (1975), themselves are part of our cognitive structure. Implicature, or the way we interpret utterances, occurs on the basis of these maxims and as such is a cognitive process. It is also important to bear in mind that cognitive linguistics does not make a fundamental distinction between competence-performance or production reception, so the implicatures we use to help us interpret utterances are part of the same process we use to create utterances. We have all these norms, set by our society, in all the different types of speech acts, but maybe more specifically in constitutive speech acts and all these norms form the basis of our utterances, but they can also be changed. These norms are tempered by context as well the purposeful flouting of maxims. With this in mind, the process of putting together utterances seems indeed to be a cognitive process along the lines proposed by cognitive linguists.

The flouting of maxims is part of our cognitive intent/structure and reveals/sheds light on the way the speaker chooses to build mental spaces.

3. How are pragmatic considerations seen to function overall in the theory of cognitive linguistics?

Generally the theory of cognitive linguistics is easily able to accommodate pragmatic theories of language use. This is done on the above mentioned assumption that pragmatic considerations are part of the way we frame an utterance and have a direct effect on the way we map the constituent parts of an utterance together. This relates to what Lee (2001) mentions regarding the idea that meaning is something that is manufactured from the mind using language but is not inherent in language itself.

Lee (2001), Chapter 13, Creativity and the nature of meaning

4. How is creativity manufactured in the cognitive approach?

Creativity is manufactured with every instance of language use, potentially at least. Because of the theory of constructions, this kind of creativity may have less to do with the creation of sentences than the use of lexical items. And as Lee (2001), not all instances of language use are creative either. The amount and degree of creativity varies.

A: How’s it going?

B: Fine, thanks.

This is not exactly an exchange brimming with creativity. Other instances of language use will be extremely creative making use of mapping operations.

5. What affects/interfaces with the creative process?

In effect

The things that people know

Interpersonal knowledge

Encyclopedic knowledge

Cultural knowledge

The context

The intent of the speaker

6. Are the means for creating language finite or fixed?

The means for creating language are definitely infinite. It is an infinite as our thought s and our ability to extend, alter and change our thoughts as we are confronted with new situations. Again, it is essentially on lexis that language is creative in the cognitive view.

In this the last week in his class we've decided to focus on the idea of creativity as a means to try to tie together observations about the two very different approaches to linguistics we have been looking at. It should be clear from our description of the generative approach that Chomsky's initial selling point of the approach is that it was able to easily describe what he thought was the creative nature of language. Basically what Chomsky claims in all versions of generative grammar is that from a finite number of different linguistic elements an infinite number of different utterances can be produced. What Chomsky and all generativists seek to do is to find the cognitive mechanisms which allow for this type of creativity. More than this, Chomsky further claims that people are able to produce and understand utterances which they have not encountered previously. For him creativity simply comes from the actual structural process of producing and parsing novel structures. There is no concern for creating novel meanings, nor for how new concepts are encoded into language or how they might affect a language over time. Chomsky argues that such things do not happen normally (systematically) and that from a simply numerical situation creativity in producing utterances on a regular basis far outweighs any kind of creativity in producing new meanings. In short, according to Chomsky we are creating every time we produce any kind of utterance. All utterances are creative on all levels, even the most mundane ones. Now, in order for this to be true this means that we must build utterances from the bottom up (from the component parts) every single time. On this view we have the principles and parameters of universal grammar (Chomsky, 1981) or in later versions UG itself to help guide us in this endeavor, but in essence it is always a bottom up creative process. It has to be because the lexical items (lexemes), which are inserted into the structure, are done so based on their categorization information and not on their meaning (at least at first). Since meaning is cut out of the initial stages of the process than this structural process becomes the creative element and must be recreated every time a new utterance is produced. This is important to rationalize because whether we are aware of it or not this is the model we base all our teaching on. Almost all teaching principles are derived from this somewhat archaic and entirely grammar-focused (structure-focused) model.

Lee (2001), as a linguist with strong cognitive tendencies, challenges this Chomskian view of creativity by employing the simple idea of meaning. As we've seen throughout this course one of the main challenges to, or indeed problems with, the generative model is that it separates structure from meaning and language itself from its use (remember Chomsky’s I-language and e-language distinction). For many people working in the field of linguistics this is simply counterintuitive. It would be nice if it were true but language appears to be a bit more messy and a bit more involved than that. Thus, for Lee and other proponents of the cognitive model, creativity comes not from the building of structures themselves, but rather from how the structures are used to encode new (or old) meanings and new (or old) concepts. Structures are not a means in and of themselves, as in the generative model. They are accomplices in the process of creating of meaning and for them meaning is essential. This is essentially what Lee (2001) tries to show us in his final chapter.

He makes a great final push to show us that creativity, and indeed meaning, is cognitive and not structural. In the cognitive view, creativity is inherent in mapping across mental spaces. Thus, it is not the forming of structures devoid of concerns of meaning which is creative but the joining of concepts or ideas taken from frames and/or radial categories and projected into mental spaces which shows genuine human cognitive creativity. I use the term cognitive creativity to underscore the belief that such creativity is not limited just to language, but applies to general cognition as well. The implication, then is that language is a part of human general cognitive processes and capabilities and functions under the same principles as well as restrictions. Now, once these mental spaces have been set up then different elements of each mental space are mapped together in order to achieve meaning. Any structure created will be a product of the mapping process. Thus, it is the creation of new meanings with old (pre-existing) structures (structural components) which is truly creative. It should also be mentioned that in the cognitive view this is not some sort of special of rarely occurring phenomenon, but rather happens all the time.

Fauconnier (1997: 9-11) identifies three basic types of mappings which he terms projection mappings, pragmatic function mappings, and schema mappings. Projection mappings, also known as metaphorical mappings involve projecting part of one domain onto another. The general idea is that in order to talk about one thing we adopt the structure of something else and in the process borrow certain concepts and vocabulary items associated with the source. The simplest way of thinking about this would be to project a movie onto the surface of something else, a large mural perhaps. In this way the images from the movie (the projected source) will be on top of and be used to define (but not completely) the underlying (new, target domain) structure. A simple example would be taking the familiar structure of anger is heat (See, Lakoff and Kövecses, 1987 for a detailed discussion of this structure). This structure is called a cultural model in that all speakers of English are familiar with it. Thus, it is hardly controversial to go one step further and claim that this structure is used to mold thought and as such is often projected onto other structures such as, John boiled in rage, or He ran about the room with steam coming out his ears. It should be clear based on the above discussion that both the development and the comprehension of such utterances are reliant on the source domain.

Another type of mapping is the pragmatic function mapping. In such mappings two different categories of objects are mapped onto each other by a common pragmatic function. Thus, a painter and the painting she has created can be identified by just one or the other term, as demonstrated in the examples below.

(1) Bring me that Georgia O`Keeffe over there. (referring to a specific painting by Georgia O`Keeffe)

(2) Oh look, here comes `The Faraway`. (referring to Georgia O`Keeffe herself)

or

(3) Get a load of Mr. Spills A Lot over there. (referring to guy who must spill things often)

In such examples we can see how people or things can be blended with properties that are salient to them (as deemed by the speaker) and can then be referred to by those properties.

(4) Giant Head waltzed around the ballroom floor like a giraffe on speed.

This can be done for humorous purposes as in (4), because the speaker wants to draw the listener’s attention to something as in (3), or simply because the speaker does not know the name of the person/thing s/he is talking about as in (1).

The last type of mapping mentioned by Fauconnier (1997) is schema mapping. In schema mappings an entire schema/frame is used to structure a situation. Thus, is someone says that this course was difficult the uttering of `this course` will open up a schema (Fauconnier’s term) or frame (Lee`s term). The opening of this frame not only allows the listener to understand the utterance as a whole (provided she has that frame), but enables her to make a judgment of the validity of the claim. She might utter in response, “No way! The Human Learning and Cognition course I took last semester was much harder than this class. We had to draw mental space mappings all the damn time”. As we speak frames are projected into the discourses we create.

As we discussed previously in this course, mapping is a regular process in the forming of utterances, but it is not always necessary. In the cognitive model, not all utterances are created by a complicated mapping process. This is particularly true in informal conversation as argued by Lee (2001: 198).

(5) Good morning.

(6) Good morning my dove.

Example 5 shows an utterance devoid of any creative processes. In (5) a single mental space is opened for the utterance. Example 6, on the other hand, does show what cognitivists would call creativity. In this example, a mental space would have to be opened for dove and the person being a called a dove as well as the speaker (because of the possessive my). The creativity, from the cognitive point of view, comes in mapping elements of the radial category for dove onto the person being called a dove. It is this and similar such processes which underlies the creative process in language.

Based on this it is easy to see a connection between what cognitivists view as creativity and the word coining process and indeed there is a connection. If we understand that creativity is based on cognitive structure and/or linguistic structure and not linguistic structure alone we can see this connection. We are creative in taking pre-existing concepts and blending them together to form new concepts, or by taking features from one concept and applying them, in part, onto another concept. How this evolves linguistically is of little or no concern because linguistic structures are seen as by-products of cognitive processes. It is not on the structural level that creativity occurs except for the cases when new linguistic elements are created as a result of a creative cognitive process as in the case of workaholic from alcoholic or spellathon from marathon. The moment of creation here is both cognitive as well as linguistic. It is cognitive in that features from the source concept are being mapped onto a preexisting loaner concept to create a cognitively new concept. It is a linguistic process in that the creative process just so happens to create two new morphemes, -aholic and -athon, in the process. Two new words have been coined and once the first -aholic word has been coined then others like chocaholic, loveaholic, meanaholic, etc. can be made (and for the other morpheme, just to be fair, sleepathon, rideathon, stinkathon, smashemupathon, etc.). On the one hand, the coining of all these new words, some of which I think I have just made up here, is a creative process. If, however, these new coinings become accepted as words in the language then they are no longer creative. They are just pulled down from the mental lexicon when their concept (in production) or form (in reception) is fired.