Analogy as Structure and Process

A useful taxonomy of the different types of analogical relationship between two distinct 'systems' can be constructed in the form of a tetrachoric table based on the distinctions 'epistemic vs. ontological' and 'symmetric vs. asymmetric'. At the same time, such dynamic cognitive processes as discovery, invention, and application (or imitation) receive some additional explication. This talk will be based on Itkonen (2005).

Reference:

Itkonen, Esa. 2005. Analogy as structure and process. Amsterdam: Benjamins
(Human Cognitive Processing).

Anu Koskela
DPhil Candidate
Dept. of Linguistics and English Language/
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Sussex
UK

Vertical polysemy, dynamic meaning and conventionality

Cognitive linguistic research into word meaning has stressed the non-discrete, encyclopaedic nature of word meaning. It has been argued that words are not associated with fixed senses, but rather word senses emerge dynamically in discourse situations (e.g. Geeraerts, 1993; Sinha, 1999). Building on this assumption, this talk explores the phenomenon of vertical polysemy from a dynamic semantics viewpoint. In vertical polysemy a single lexical form is associated with two (or more) senses which are in a relationship of inclusion. The word therefore has two senses which designate categories on different hierarchical taxonomic levels – e.g. the meaning of run can either be construed as a superordinate or as a contrasting category to the meaning of jog.

I present a survey of some types of vertical polysemy, exploring the ways in which vertical polysemy can emerge in communication, and argue that in vertical polysemy both the narrower and broader construals of the meaning of a lexical form constitute communicatively useful categories. This frequently means that the narrower and broader senses are defined against particular contextually or culturally salient conceptual domains. For example, for the verb drink, the broader meaning ‘consume liquid’ is motivated by the significance in human experience of the consumption of liquids (as opposed to eating), while the motivation of the narrower ‘consume alcohol’ sense lies in the cultural significance of alcohol. I further argue that different cases of vertical polysemy exhibit a gradation of conventionality in the sense that there is variation in the degree to which the broader and narrower senses are predictable on the basis of the context and the shared beliefs of speakers and hearers. This examination of vertical polysemy illustrates the flexible and dynamic nature of linguistic categorisation and the importance of cultural shared knowledge for linguistic communication.

Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Docent, DPhil
Department of Theoretical Philosophy
University of Helsinki
Finland

Mental spaces and Peirce’s logical diagrams

Cognitive semantics is replete with spatiality of our mental world and meaning: geometric, topological, embodied, image-schematic and prototypical concepts are commonplace. But logical rigor is absent. I suggest reconstructing mental spaces through Peirce’s century-old logical diagrams. They were intended to be icons of the content of the mind: “It is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams” (Peirce 1931-58, 4.127).

The following correspondence may be noted. According to Fauconnier & Turner (2002), mental spaces and their combinations are conceptual packages of simple iconic objects and connections, associated with frames of background information and experience. In Peirce, mental spaces correspond to dynamic interpretants, “effect[s] actually produced on the mind by the Sign” (8.343).

Fauconnier & Turner claim that the blends, which may accommodate structures not present in the input spaces such as identities between objects in different spaces, result in emergent ideas by virtue of projective composition, elaboration and application. In logical diagrams, identities and spaces are topological connectivities between subareas, operating through juxtaposition and identity between continuous predicates and individuals. New ‘blends’ arise by virtue of (i) structurepreserving continuous deformations corresponding to composition; (ii) collateral observation and the common ground in interpreting the diagrams corresponding to frame elaboration; (iii) experimentation on diagrammatic representations for creative reasoning (abduction) corresponding to application. Just as blends may feedback the input spaces to produce new blends, Peirce’s interpretation was recursive: “The whole purpose of a sign is that it shall be interpreted in another sign”; “When a sign determines an interpretation of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself” (8.191).

According to the neural interpretation, mental spaces are association patterns and co-activation is the inter-space projection. Peirce’s belief was that diagrams are our true pictures of thought in action. The binding problem thus derives logical content from spatial connectivity, predicate continuity and identity.

Cognitive semantics thus falls under Peirce’s category of thirdness of change, time, space, representation, analogy and intentionality. Moreover, a Peircean reconstruction necessitates the extension of mental spaces to communal, distributed cognition.

References

Fauconnier, G., and Turner, M., (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books.
Peirce, C. S., (1931-58). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A.W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, C. S., (1967). Manuscripts in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, as identified by Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), and in ‘The Peirce Papers: A supplementary catalogue’, Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 7 (1971), 37-57.
Pietarinen, A.-V., (2005). Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication, (Synthese Library Series), Dordrecht: Springer.

Semantics as a grammatical interface: Representational and processing perspectives

Language is prominently a means to express conceptual structures. However, the way from concepts to language is not necessarily a direct one: when they are expressed, conceptual representations are integrated into the grammatical system, and this integration does not always establish one-to-one correlations between conceptual and syntactic features. Linguistic constraints on these correlations can be captured by grammatical-semantic representations that mediate between the general conceptual and the syntactic system. Does this integration establish a separate, linguistic, system of meaning? What architecture could account for such an intermediary, and what could be the evidence for a distinction of semantic and conceptual structures?

In my talk, I propose a model that identifies a semantic level SEM as a grammatical interface of the conceptual system CS, that is, as a gateway to language for conceptual structures. I formalise SEM to be a relational structure that captures language-specific patterns and thus constitutes a system in its own standing within the general conceptual module CS. Hence, as an interface level, SEM has a dual status. One the one hand, it belongs to its mother module, CS. On the other hand, it is part of the grammatical system: it is that part of CS that accounts for grammatical and lexical constraints, that is, for linguistic aspects of meaning. This approach allows us to identify those aspects of meaning that have reflexes in the linguistic system and distinguish them from general conceptual structures, without forcing us to assume two separate modules for semantic and conceptual representations.

I support the notion of such a semantic interface from both a representational and a processing point of view: I discuss grammatical evidence for the distinction and the correlation of semantic and conceptual structures, and present psycholinguistic evidence for the activation of semantic (vs. general conceptual and syntactic) features in language comprehension on the one hand and for language-specific effects of semantic structures on the conceptual mother module on the other hand.