Cognitive Linguistics - Key Topics

Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak, Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110623123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The key topics discussed in this book illustrate the breadth of cognitive linguistic research and include semantic typology, space, fictive motion, argument structure constructions, and prototype effects in grammar. New themes such as individual differences, emergence, and default non-salient interpretations also receive coverage.

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

Chapter 1: Semantic typology

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Stockholm, Sweden

Definitions of cognitive linguistics normally emphasize the interaction of language and cognition, cf. “[c]ognitive linguistics is the study of how language relates to the human mind” (Kibrik 2011: 15). As is customary, such programmatic statements operate with generic nouns, in this case “language” and “mind”, and abstract away from the concrete manifestations of human languages and human minds. This is certainly justified for a research agenda, but it is important not to overlook the reality behind it. Leaving the issue of the diversity of minds to cognitive scientists, as a typologist I will focus here on language diversity: there are between 6,000 and 8,000 languages currently spoken in the world, and “[t]he crucial fact for understanding the place of language in human cognition is its diversity” (Evans and Levinson 2009: 431).

Linguistic diversity does not imply that any generalizations over language properties and the language-mind relations are meaningless or premature before these have been studied for all the world’s languages, the majority of which still lack any decent description. It does imply, though, that such generalizations gain a lot from careful systematic cross-linguistic studies that may unveil cross-linguistic regularities behind diversity. This chapter focuses on the discipline for which cross-linguistic comparison is foundational, namely linguistic typology, and in particular on its semantically oriented direction, semantic typology. Section 1 introduces semantic typology, section 2 gives examples of central research within semantic typology. Section 3 discusses the major methodological challenges that semantic typologists face, section 4 summarizes the lessons to be drawn, and section 5 points out a few directions for further research. The chapter’s overarching goal is to show the value of bringing linguistic diversity and semantic typology into research on “how language relates to mind”.

1 Introducing semantic typology

Typology is “the study of linguistic patterns that are found cross-linguistically, in particular, patterns that can be discovered solely by cross-linguistic comparison” (Croft 2003: 1). Typological research takes linguistic diversity as its point of departure, assumes that the variation across languages is restricted, and aims at discovering the systematicity behind it.

The typological research angle that is probably most interesting for cognitive linguists is semantic typology, which comprises “the systematic cross-linguistic study of how languages express meaning by way of signs” (Evans 2011: 504). Semantic typology is orthogonal to the more traditional compartments of typology, such as phonetic/phonological, grammatical or lexical, since meanings are normally expressed by an intricate interplay among signs of various kinds − words, morphological markers, syntactic constructions, prosody, gestures, etc.

This chapter will focus on some of the linguistic domains where painstaking semantic comparison according to the standards of linguistic typology has demonstrated significant linguistic diversity coupled with regularities of great value for cognitive research. Purely grammatical phenomena (e.g., tense), as well as those that have mainly figured in grammatical discussions (e.g., word classes) are left out here. The majority of cases discussed will involve meanings expressed by lexical items, often in combination with particular constructions (lexical semantic typology, or just lexical typology). But even with these restrictions, it is not possible to do justice to all the semantic-typological research within the limited space of this chapter (for overviews and references cf. Brown 2001; Goddard 2001; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2008; Koch 2001; Evans 2011).

The main emphasis will be on the linguistic categorization of different cognitive domains and/or on different meanings that can be expressed by one and the same word (often coupled with different constructions) or by words related to each other (either synchronically or historically), with somewhat different relative weight attached to these issues in different cases. Both categorization within cognitive domains (onomaseology) and questions of polysemy and semantic shifts, and in particular universal metaphoric and metonymic processes (semasiology) are, of course, central issues in cognitive semantics. The discussion will touch upon the following questions:

• − How do speakers of different languages categorize a particular cognitive domain by means of words and other linguistic expressions?
• − To what extent is linguistic categorization universal or language- and culture-specific?
• − What semantic shifts are frequent across languages?
• − What is the interplay among the various factors that shape linguistic categorization and patterns of semantic shifts?

2 Semantic typology: selected major examples

2.1 Colour

Colour has figured prominently in linguistic and anthropological research, in cognitive research in general and in cognitive linguistics in particular, among others, in discussion of prototypes (cf. Taylor volume 2) and embodiment. It is a popular textbook example of striking cross-linguistic diversity in linguistic categorization, which has been claimed to be severely restricted, at least with respect to basic terms (allegedly present in all languages) and their foci. In the universalist view, stemming from Eleanor (Heider) Rosch’s experiments on colour cognition among the Dugum Dani (Heider 1972) and the colour-naming survey by Berlin and Kay (1969), all languages choose their subsets of basic terms from a universal stock according to a universal hierarchy. Universality in linguistic colour categorisation is supposed to originate in the neurophysiology of vision (Kay and McDaniel 1978), and/or in the visual environment of humans (Shepard 1992).

This view has been strongly challenged by “relativists”, such as Levinson (2001), Lucy (1997), or Wierzbicka (2005). They have, among other things, questioned the validity of the decontextualized denotation-based methodology (various tasks based on Munsell chips) underlying the lion’s share of colour studies in the Berlin-Kay paradigm. It is, for instance, doubtful whether colour constitutes a coherent semantic domain in many languages once their putative “basic” colour terms have undergone proper linguistic analysis (cf. Levinson 2000), not to mention the fact that the word ‘colour’ is absent from many (most?) of the world’s languages. People use colour words (or words that come up as colour words in the Berlin-Kay paradigm) for communicating meanings that can hardly be reduced to the physiology of seeing but are most probably based on comparison with salient visual prototypes in the environments − universal (sky, fire or blood) or more local (such as local minerals) (Wierzbicka 2005). And surely, the word for ‘red’ in a language that only has ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘red’ simply cannot mean the same as ‘red’ in a language with a richer repertoire of colour words.

Significantly, the distribution of the different colour systems across the languages of the world shows remarkable geographic differences (cf. Kay and Maffi 2005; Kay et al. 2009). For instance, many of the languages that do not distinguish ‘blue’ and ‘green’ (the “grue” languages, the majority of the 120 languages in Kay and Maffi 2005) are concentrated to the tropics. The inhabitants of these areas are exposed to sunlight with high proportions of ultraviolet-B, which, in turn, often leads to deficiency in colour vision (Lindsey and Brown 2002; Bornstein 2007). This casts additional doubts on the universality of the focal colour categories available to all (sighted) human beings.

Colour remains the most widely cross-linguistically studied domain in terms of the languages covered by systematic methodology and the intensity of theoretical discussions (cf. Malt and Wolff [eds.] 2010 for recent overviews; MacLaury et al. 2007 and references therein; and http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/ for the World Color Survey Site).

2.2 From cognition to perception

The well-known and putatively universal metaphor knowing is seeing (a special case of the thinking is perceiving metaphor in the mind-as-body system) has been central in the discussions of embodiment (Sweetser 1990; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Bergen volume 1). In her influential study, Sweetser (1990) notices that in Indo-European languages, verbs of seeing often demonstrate metaphorical extensions to meanings of thinking and/or knowing. This contrasts them with verbs for other perception modalities. In particular, verbs of hearing often show semantic extensions to understanding and/or to obeying (social interaction). In Sweetser’s (1990: 37) words, “[t]he objective, intellectual side of our mental life seems to be regularly linked with the sense of vision”, because vision is our “primary source of data about the objective world”, because it has “the ability to pick out one stimulus at will from many”, and because it may be shared by different people in the same place. Hearing, on the other hand, is primarily connected to linguistic communication and is therefore a person’s powerful means of intellectual and emotional power over other people. Sweetser hypothesizes that “[t]he link between physical hearing and obeying or heeding − between physical and internal receptivity or reception − may well, in fact, be universal, rather than merely Indo-European” (1990: 42) and that “[i]t would be a novelty for a verb meaning ‘hear’ to develop a usage meaning ‘know’ rather than ‘understand’, whereas such a usage is common for verbs meaning ‘see’” (1990: 43).

However, as shown by Evans and Wilkins (2000) and contrary to Sweetser’s hypotheses, the most recurrent semantic extension in Australian Aboriginal languages is between the auditory sense and cognition, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Semantic typology
• Chapter 2: Polysemy
• Chapter 3: Space
• Chapter 4: Time
• Chapter 5: Motion
• Chapter 6: Fictive motion
• Chapter 7: Prototype effects in grammar
• Chapter 8: Argument structure constructions
• Chapter 9: Default nonliteral interpretations. The case of negation as a low-salience marker
• Chapter 10: Tense, aspect and mood
• Chapter 11: Grammaticalization
• Chapter 12: Individual differences in grammatical knowledge
• Chapter 13: Signed languages
• Chapter 14: Emergentism
• Index