Making sense of a blend

Brandt, Line; Brandt, Per Aage

doi:10.1075/arcl.3.12bra

Cited by 109 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As I will show, this notion offers a clear conceptual link between the theory that understanding actions involves embodied simulation, central to some of the EC literature, and research in cognitive linguistics -particularly Construction Grammar (Croft 2001;Goldberg 2006) and work on intersubjectivity in language (e.g. Brandt and Brandt 2005;Du Bois forthcoming;Pascual 2002;Verhagen 2005;Zlatev et al 2008). 2 Furthermore, the proposed framework can be extended to phenomena that received little attention in EC and cognitive linguistic literature.…”

mentioning

confidence: 90%

Reenactment: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Meaning and Linguistic Content

Sandler¹

2011

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment -the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances -makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction. Keywords: action; cognitive linguistics; dialogue; embodied cognition; meaning; simulation. 1 Language has often been viewed as the epitome of abstract cognition, as formal logical calculus in thin disguise. Accordingly, in the debates around embodied cognition (EC) and embodied social cognition, 1 raging in cognitive science today, the supposedly disembodied nature of language and meaning -abstract concepts, logical syntactic rules, etc. -counts against EC.EC-based and related approaches instead tend to view language as a tool of human action and interaction (e.g. Tylén et al. 2010). However, these approaches face a challenge when dealing with linguistic content: if we view utterances consistently as actions, how do we account for the meanings of their parts (e.g. words, phrases) and for the relation between the meanings of these parts and the meaning of a whole utterance in action terms? This challenge Furthermore, the proposed framework can be extended to phenomena that received little attention in EC and cognitive linguistic literature. I will particularly focus on reference to remote objects and complex enunciational structures, such as reported speech and irony.These linguistic theories and phenomena are discussed in the latter part of the paper.Before that, a more detailed discussion is due of the notion of reenactment itself, its connection to EC, and the conception of meaning it presumes. 1 I will address social cognition only in the basic sense of meaningfully interacting with others, ignoring issues that have to do with the so-called "theory of mind". 2 I am thus following a programme akin to that of Gal...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 90%

Reenactment: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Meaning and Linguistic Content

Sandler¹

2011

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 90%

“…7 It is common in the cognitive linguistics literature dealing with forms of polyphony (e.g. Brandt and Brandt 2005;Pascual 2002;Verhagen 2005) to describe these phenomena in terms of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994;Fauconnier and Turner 2002): Each character occupies a mental space. Such usage offers a clear link between work on polyphony and intersubjectivity in language and mainstream cognitive linguistics, and is not alien to mental space theory itself (see e.g.…”

Section: Reenactment and Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reenactment: an embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content

Sandler

2011

Phenom Cogn Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment -the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances -makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction. Furthermore, the proposed framework can be extended to phenomena that received little attention in EC and cognitive linguistic literature. I will particularly focus on reference to remote objects and complex enunciational structures, such as reported speech and irony. KeywordsThese linguistic theories and phenomena are discussed in the latter part of the paper.Before that, a more detailed discussion is due of the notion of reenactment itself, its connection to EC, and the conception of meaning it presumes.1 I will address social cognition only in the basic sense of meaningfully interacting with others, ignoring issues that have to do with the so-called "theory of mind". 2 I am thus following a programme akin to that of Gallese and Lakoff (2005 There is a long-standing tradition aiming to account for linguistic meaning in terms of action-meaning. This is the mainstream approach in pragmatics (following Austin 1962).However, the traditional division of labor between pragmatics and semantics has left it to pragmatics to account for the meaning of utterances as actions, based on a referential-logical interpretation of their content. EC challenged this division of labor by proposing an account of concept meaning in terms of action meaning. Gallese and Lakoff (2005) partly performing them in the motor system of the brain.4 Borghi and Cimatti (2009) propose an important extension of this approach to account for abstract words. They raise the hypothesis that linguistic meaning is grounded in our embodied social experience. That is, we experience the use of words, our own and others', in various social settings as a situate...

show abstract

“…At the same time, certain works by Brandt (2005) are grounded on, and demonstrate the benefits of, re-integrating a semiotic level together with conceptual and mental levels, through the analysis of some borderline phenomena like the meaning of metaphors (cp. the notion of a "Semiotic Space" and the attention dedicated to linguistic enunciarion in Brandt and Brandt 2005). In this way, the works of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002) are enriched by that semio-iinguisric level that in classical cognirive theories was reduced to pure conceptual perspecrives.…”

Section: From Structuralism To Cognitive Semioticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Logic of Relatives to Cognitive Semiotics: On some unsuspected correspondences between Peirce and Structuralism

Paolucci¹

2008

Cognitive Semiotics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates the actuality of structuralism in its relaüonship with cognitive semanocs. It does so through a trajectory that begins with Peirce's Logic of Relatives, then Tesniere's and Greimas' actantial syntax are considered with respect to dynamic semiotics and Frege's chemistry of concepts, ending in cognitive semiotics. The articie argues for the complete compatibility of Peirce's semiotics with a structuralist epistemology, of which the Logic of Relatives antidpates some fundamental traits. A Peirce-inspired intetpretative semiotics has often been opposed to structural and generative semiotics. This is not necessarily the case. Through passages from Peirce, Tesniere, Greimas and dynamic semiotics works, unsuspected echoes and correspondences are unveiled, but a crucial divergence also comes to light. The different authors share a conception of the sentence as grounded on purely relational positions, called relatives or correlates (Peirce), actants (Tesniere) and proto-actants (Greimas). Peirce considers the primitive relatives as triads (the model of "A gives B to C") from which dyads can be generated. Contrarily, the Greimasian development of structuralism decomposes actantial structures into primitive dyads ("A renounces to B" and "C receives B"), thus breaking the structural balance that constitutes the topological and relational Gestalten on which the Logic of Relatives and actantial syntax are grounded. Indeed, those Gestalten are not reducible to conjunctions and disjunctions of algebraic inspiration, or to a conceptual chemistry inspired by logic (as in Frege): this is the reason why Peirce's and Tesniere's structural theories have prompted a great interest in dynamic semiotics. Moreover, through their semio-linguistic specificity, these models still allow us to investigate the heritage of structuralism, and situate it within a cognitive semiotic perspective.

show abstract

Making sense of a blend

Cited by 109 publications

References 7 publications

Reenactment: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Meaning and Linguistic Content

Reenactment: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Meaning and Linguistic Content

Reenactment: an embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content

From Logic of Relatives to Cognitive Semiotics: On some unsuspected correspondences between Peirce and Structuralism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About