Cognitive chiasmus: Embodied phenomenology in Dylan Thomas

WIRES Cognitive Science

2023

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The findings of cognitive linguistics demonstrate the thoroughly embodied grounding of linguistic constructions and linguistic meaning ranging from abstract thought to interactive communication. A historical survey and updated summary of work in this area illustrates the many layers of bodily meaning that we rely on when thinking and communicating as human beings. Key distinctions, definitions, and clarifications, plus an overview of key works on embodied cognition in cognitive linguistics provide necessary context for understanding specific aspects of linguistic embodiment, including schemas and iconicity, mapping and metaphor, categories and projections, embodied grammar and abstract thought, intersubjectivity, and textual meaning. Realigning philosophical presuppositions with the findings of cognitive linguistics has important consequences: Body and mind can be reunited in lived experience. Both imaginative thought and rational thought can be understood as reliant on the same movement and memory structures. Even the most habituated form‐content relationships in language can be understood as growing out of vital networks of real‐world experiential relations, from the personal to the interpersonal. And instead of being understood as the narrow purview of semantics and pragmatics, the study of meaning can be embraced as the purpose and function of linguistics. These consequences have potential for revolutionizing scientific inquiry and theory building across a wide array of disciplines.This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics Psychology > Language Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science

Section: Conceptual Blendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodiment and language

WIRES Cognitive Science

2023

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“…The first assumption is that only bilateral relations are legitimate in cultural and body-based modeling (see e.g., Washburn andCrowe 1988, Norrman 1999). I discuss this problem elsewhere (Pelkey 2013a(Pelkey , 2016(Pelkey , 2017. The second is far more relevant for my current argument (as introduced above in critique of Heine 1997): the assumption that only the upper half of the human body has potential for conceptual modeling.…”

Section: Upright Posture and The Anatomical Planesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As I have begun to argue elsewhere (Pelkey 2013a(Pelkey , 2016(Pelkey , 2017, conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) is in need of primary modeling explanations to better ground the theory-internal evolutionary proposal that "double-scope integration" underlies the emergence of the human language faculty. Simply put, double-scope integration is thinking of two or more sets of things in terms of each other by backgrounding certain features and foregrounding others in order to see them or something else in a new light or to otherwise introduce some new possibility.…”

Section: Inverse Embodied Modeling As Grammatical-integrational Groundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts

2018

Cognitive Semiotics

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Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English ‘table leg,’ ‘mountain face’) have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity, and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated “algorithmically.” I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects “stripped of their bodily associations” (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the “algorithm” in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memories — an experiential ground that generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration.

“…With this in mind, as Corso (2014) argues, the virtual absence of discussion in the literature on the visual spectacle of the square is itself conspicuous. It should also be no secret that the human experience of visual geometry is tied to our own specific embodiment (Van Lier 2003, Pelkey 2013aWalsh Matthews & Pelkey 2015); but this is an insight that is itself relatively neglected in the literature. We cannot assume from this situation, however, that Greimas and his early interpreters were entirely unaware of the possibility of such connections.…”

Section: Greimas Embodiedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Greimas embodied: How kinesthetic opposition grounds the semiotic square

2017

Semiotica

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According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects”. The veracity of this bold hypothesis has received little attention in the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modeled in these diagrams are rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast—including verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. The paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement, recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition, recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics and prescient insights from Greimas himself. The argument is further tested via multimodal content analyses of a popular music video—highlighting relationships the semiotic square shares with mundane cultural ideologies and showing how these relationships might be traced to memory structures of bodily movement. The paper highlights the neglected relevance of embodied chiasmus and illustrates the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought.