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Author: Gunter Radden | Klaus-Michael Kopcke | Thomas Berg | Peter Siemund

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Aspects of Meaning Construction

Aspects of Meaning Construction Edited by

Günter Radden University of Hamburg

Klaus-Michael Köpcke University of Münster

Thomas Berg Peter Siemund University of Hamburg

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aspects of meaning construction / edited by Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Semantics. 2. Metonyms. 3. Metaphor. 4. Grammar, Comparative and general. O. Radden, Günter. P325.A775 2007 401.43--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 3242 7 (Hb; alk. paper)

2006047946

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

For Klaus-Uwe Panther on the occasion of his 65th birthday

Table of contents List of contributors Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

ix 1

part 1 Metonymy and metaphor 1. Experimental tests of figurative meaning construction Raymond Gibbs, Jr.

19

2. High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Ricardo Mairal Usón

33

3. The role of metonymy in meaning construction at discourse level: A case study Antonio Barcelona

51

4. Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective on body part terms Martin Hilpert

77

5. Arguing the case against coercion Debra Ziegeler 6. When Zidane is not simply Zidane, and Bill Gates is not just Bill Gates: Some thoughts on the construction of metaphtonymic meanings of proper names Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó 7. Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation Anatol Stefanowitsch

99

125 143

part 2 Mental spaces and conceptual blending 8. Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns Ronald W. Langacker 9. The construction of meaning in relative clauses: Indeterminacy and constraints Kiki Nikiforidou

171

189

viii Aspects of Meaning Construction

10. Constraints on inferential constructions Christian Koops

207

11. The construction of vagueness: “Sort of ” expressions in Romance languages Wiltrud Mihatsch

225

12. Communication or memory mismatch: Towards a cognitive typology of questions Wolfgang Schulze

247

13. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans: Variety-specific meaning construction in the into-causative Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

265

Index of authors Index of subjects Index of metonymies and metaphors

283 285 289

List of contributors Antonio Barcelona Departamento de Filologia Inglesa Universidad de Murcia E-30071 Murcia Spain E-mail: [email protected] Thomas Berg University of Hamburg Institute of English and American Studies Von-Melle-Park 6 D-20146 Hamburg Germany E-mail: [email protected] Mario Brdar Department of English Language and Literature Jossip Juraj Strossmayer University Lorenzo Jägera 9 HR-31000 Osijek Croatia E-mail: [email protected] Rita Brdar-Szabó Germanistikai Intézet Eötvös Loránd University 19-21 Ajtósi Dürer sor H-1146 Budapest Hungary E-mail: [email protected] Raymond Gibbs Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA E-mail: [email protected] Stefan Th. Gries Department of Linguistics University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100

USA E-mail: [email protected] Martin Hilpert Rice University Department of Linguistics MS 23 6100 Main Street Houston, TX 77005-1892 USA E-mail: [email protected] Christian Koops Rice University Department of Linguistics – MS 23 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 USA E-mail: [email protected] Klaus-Michael Köpcke Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Germanistisches Institut Leonardo Campus 11 D-48149 Münster Germany E-mail: [email protected] Ronald W. Langacker University of California San Diego Linguistics, 0108 La Jolla, CA 92093-0108, USA E-mail: [email protected] Ricardo Mairal Usón Despacho 618 Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas Facultad de Filología Senda del Rey, 7 E-28040 Madrid Spain E-mail: [email protected]

Aspects of Meaning Construction Wiltrud Mihatsch Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft University of Bielefeld Postfach 100131 D-33501 Bielefeld Germany E-mail: [email protected] Kiki Nikiforidou 24 Argirokastrou St., Vrilissia GR-Athens 152 35 Greece E-mail: [email protected] Günter Radden University of Hamburg Institute of English and American Studies Von-Melle-Park 6 D-20146 Hamburg Germany E-mail: [email protected] Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Faculty of Letters and Education University of La Rioja Edificio Quintiliano c/ La Cigüeña 60 Campus Universitario E-26004, Logroño, La Rioja Spain E-mail: [email protected] Wolfgang Schulze Institut für Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft Dept. II, F 13/14 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Germany E-mail: [email protected] Peter Siemund University of Hamburg Institute of English and American Studies Von-Melle-Park 6 D-20146 Hamburg Germany E-mail: [email protected]

Anatol Stefanowitsch University of Bremen Bibliothekstrasse / GW2 D-28334 Bremen Germany E-mail: [email protected] Stefanie Wulff Department of Linguistics University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93109-3100 USA E-mail: [email protected] Debra Ziegeler Suite 189, Lansdowne House 792 Wilmslow Road Manchester M20 6UG UK E-mail: [email protected]

introduction

The construction of meaning in language Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg, Peter Siemund University of Hamburg/University of Münster/University of Hamburg

1. Underspecification and the construction of meaning It is unanimously agreed in Cognitive Linguistics that meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. For the listener this means that he takes linguistic units as prompts and constructs from them a meaningful conceptual representation. In fact, this principle of meaning construction is not confined to language. Every transformation of a sensory stimulus into a mental representation is an instance of meaning construction, which is rooted in the interaction of human beings with their environment. The world around us is not meaningful per se but rather acquires meaning through the human mind. For example, the moon is not in itself meaningful but it may be made purposeful in very different ways: astronomers and lovers have fairly disparate views of the moon. The fundamental principles by which the mental transformation of a sensory stimulus is effected were discovered by Gestalt psychologists in the early twentieth century. Sensory stimuli tend to be interpreted in such a way that we see “good” gestalts. Figure 1 illustrates the presumably universal Gestalt principle of closure. The pattern of equidistant dots in (a) is typically seen as a square in (b). That is, the lines connecting the dots are in the eyes of the beholder: they are mentally added to the visual input and transform it into a meaningful Gestalt. A holistic figure such as a square is simply more meaningful to us than four isolated dots. Gestalt principles are fundamental devices of meaning construction; they operate automatically and beyond our awareness and are probably shared by all human beings. We may compare the individual dots in (a) to a string of linguistic units and the

a. Equidistant dots

b. Square

Figure 1. Gestalt principle of closure

Aspects of Meaning Construction

⇒ a. “Meaningless” figure

b. Two carpenter’s squares

c. Picture frame

d. Picture frame

Figure 2. Reproductions of a seemingly meaningless figure

square in (b) to the conceptual representation which is evoked by these linguistic units. Meaning construction pervades every aspect of our lives. A crucial aspect of our interaction in the world is being able to identify and categorize things. In his pioneering work on remembering, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1932) confronted subjects with what would seem to be meaningless figures and asked them to remember and reproduce them. One of the figures they were shown was Figure 2a. Some subjects would reproduce the figure the way it was presented to them, i.e. as (b), others would reproduce it as (c) or (d). The striking observation Bartlett made was that, in reproducing meaningless figures, his subjects turned them into meaningful drawings. For example, some subjects would interpret figure (a) as “two carpenter’s squares” and hence reproduce it faithfully as in (b); other subjects would interpret it as a “picture-frame” and reproduce it as in (c) or (d). Bartlett fittingly described people’s desire to associate things with meaning as “effort after meaning.” Interestingly, finding a name for a meaningless figure turned out to be very helpful in the subjects’ effort after meaning: they often felt relieved when they found a label which expressed a certain concept. In Langacker’s (1987) terminology, the subjects were able to project a “sanctioning structure,” i.e. the concept of two carpenter’s squares or a picture frame, to the meaningless figures. We reinterpret apparent meaninglessness in terms of underspecification: Bartlett’s subjects imposed an interpretation on the stimulus figures which are somehow underspecified. This can be seen from the fact that, within a certain range, subjects differ in their interpretation of what they see. This range is, amongst others, constrained by the figure itself. Underspecification is especially relevant for the interpretation of linguistic material. We believe that each utterance is underspecified in the sense that it cannot possibly express all aspects that are relevant to its full interpretation. Underspecification in language is not just the result of time constraints but is governed by communicative principles. For example, according to Grice’s maxim of quantity, an underspecified utterance means something different from a fully explicated utterance. In his iconic approach to text interpretation, Posner (1986: 305f) provides a convincing example of differing interpretations derived from underspecified and more explicitly specified descriptions of the same situation:

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

(1) a. Mr. Smith stopped in front of his house. He waved to a passing neighbour and got out of his car. b. Mr. Smith stopped in front of his house. He raised his arm and smiled to a passing neighbour. He pulled the handle of the door of his car, pushed the door open, swung his legs out, heaved his body out, and shut the door.

The two passages differ with respect to the detail of description. Description (1a) is less detailed, but the reader will easily mentally supply the actions that are explicated in description (1b). Moreover, the reader understands Mr. Smith to be a normal adult and his actions as everyday behaviour. The painstaking description (1b), by contrast, is not just more detailed but suggests great effort involved in the actions. Hence Mr. Smith tends to be seen as a cautious elderly gentleman who plans every step carefully. None of these meanings are explicitly expressed in the description— they are inferred, or constructed. Linguistic units almost invariably underspecify the conceptualizations they code (Langacker 1987: 66). In his study on “The windowing of attention in language,” Talmy (1996) has shown that the gapping of conceptual material in event frames may even be grammatically required. For example, in causal events we normally window our attention on the ultimate result. In expressing such events, we give expression to the final event, possibly also express the penultimate subevent, but have to gap the subevents in the middle of the causal chain. Thus, I broke the window by hitting it with a rock represents the normal way of expressing a causal event, mentioning the penultimate event is of marginal acceptability (?I broke the window by throwing a rock at it), and mentioning an intermediate subevent makes the sentence unacceptable (*I broke the window by swinging a rock with my arm). A host of subevents leading to the breaking of a window are of course conceptually present. The preceding examples show that underspecification is an essential feature of language in use. In an ongoing piece of discourse linguistic expressions tend to evoke large amounts of knowledge. Fauconnier’s (1999: 96) wording on this issue deserves to be quoted in full: Language is only the tip of a spectacular cognitive iceberg, and when we engage in any language activity, be it mundane or artistically creative, we draw unconsciously on vast cognitive resources, call up innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers and elaborations. This is what language is about and what language is for.

In the spirit of this cognitive view of language, we propose the following definition of meaning construction: Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings in every communicative act on the basis of underspecified linguistic units.

Aspects of Meaning Construction

This definition does not restrict the notion of meaning construction to the creation of novel meanings, i.e. novel representations. The task of constructing meanings is probably more demanding when they are novel than when they are conventionalized, as will be shown in the examples below. A second point in the definition that deserves to be stressed is the role of the speech participants. The process of meaning construction is usually understood from the perspective of the listener while the role of the speaker is underestimated. However, both the speaker’s and the listener’s perspectives need to be taken into account because both are involved in meaning construction. In planning his linguistic expressions, the ideal speaker anticipates the particular meaning construction which the listener will presumably create. If there is a mismatch between the anticipated meaning construction and the one created by the hearer, the interlocutors will negotiate repair strategies in order to obtain a closer match between the two meaning constructions. Thus, meaning construction is a dynamic process in which fine-tuning between the interlocutors plays an essential role. The relevance of fine-tuning becomes particularly clear in situations of miscommunication. Let us use one of Deborah Tannen’s (1990: 51) examples between two speakers to illustrate the point.

(2) a. b. c. d.

he: I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep well last night. she: I didn’t sleep either. I never do. he: Why are you trying to belittle me? she: I’m not! I’m just trying to show that I understand.

The man apparently intended to communicate his nightly suffering (2a), and the woman constructed the illocutionary meaning from his underspecified utterance. Her reply (2b), however, gave rise to a serious misunderstanding: she intended to show her understanding whereas he interpreted her utterance to mean that she denied him “the uniqueness of his experience.” This example also demonstrates that meaning construction is an online process in which the communicative value of each utterance is determined and redefined with each turn and contribution. It also shows that meaning construction is not solely a matter of the hearer and his interpretation of an utterance; it crucially also involves the speaker and his assessment of the hearer’s state of mind, his knowledge, his emotions, etc. Only when we also consider the other person’s perspective can we . In this respect we take a different view of the notion of meaning construction from Evans and Green (2006: 363), who restrict their understanding of meaning construction to novel representations: “Meaning construction is the process whereby language ‘prompts for’ novel cognitive representations of varying degrees of complexity. These representations relate to conceived scenes and aspects of scenes, such as states of affairs in the world, emotion and affect, subjective experiences, and so on.”

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

detect the whole impact of meaning construction in the above dialogue. The man produced utterance (2a) with the expectation in mind that his spouse would understand the intended meaning of his utterance and pity him; the woman gave her reply (2b) in the belief that sharing the same experience in this particular situation would mean the same to her companion as it did to her, which was obviously not the case. Processes of meaning construction resulting from underspecification are, in principle, the same in miscommunication and successful communication. In his paper “Constructing the meaning of personal pronouns,” Langacker (this volume) draws attention to “intersubjectivity” in communication, i.e. the apprehension of other minds. Intersubjectivity involves the conceptual coordination between the interlocutors, who are simultaneously the conceptualizers.

2. Types of underspecification Linguistic underspecification is manifested in different ways. We see at least three ways in which linguistic units can be said to be underspecified and in need of conceptual augmentation: (i) linguistic units verbalize meanings implicitly or indirectly, (ii) linguistic units are indeterminate, and (iii) linguistic units are incompatible. These three manifestations of linguistic underspecification will be termed ‘implicitness,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘incompatibility.’ These types of underspecification do not establish clearly defined categories but may overlap.

2.1 Implicitness The notion of implicitness in this context is taken to mean that either no linguistic unit is present or that the linguistic unit is not conventionally associated with a particular meaning. This is the most common type of underspecification. Simple words and complex expressions underspecify conceptualizations in different ways. Simple words are associated with one or more conventionalized meanings which, within a given context, serve as prompts for the activation of richer conceptualizations (see also Nikiforidou, this volume). In the well-known case of the commercial event frame, any word denoting an aspect of a commercial event prompts the commercial event frame. Verbs such as buy, sell, cost, pay, etc. provide different entry points while the commercial event frame as a whole is not verbalized. At the same time, each entry point may further invite more specific processes of meaning constructions. For example, in Harry sold his car for a good price, the amount of money paid in this transaction is understood to be higher than in Harry bought his car for a good price. Again, this meaning is not present in the linguistic expression. A further example of implicit meanings evoked by a single word is the adjective safe in

Aspects of Meaning Construction

usages such as The beach is safe. Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 25–7) show that safe prompts us to construct a counterfactual scenario of danger in which a person is harmed. None of this is present in the linguistic unit. Complex expressions tend to underspecify with respect to the individual lexical items and with respect to their composition. As argued by Langacker (2000: 152), the component structures of complex expressions usually motivate, but do not predict, the composite structure. Language thus exhibits partial rather than full compositionality, i.e. the meaning of a composite structure is underspecified and needs to be constructed. This applies to morphological, syntactic, pragmatic and discourse structures alike. Many scholars have shown that the meanings of compounds and derivations are underspecified from their components. Thus, the compound trouser suit does not indicate that it is women’s garment, the compound push chair does not reveal that it is designed to move children in it, and the compound wheelchair does not express that it is meant to transport elderly and/or sick people. Many syntactic constructions suppress entities that are part of the situation: Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón (this volume) have pointed out that, in nominalizations such as destruction, participants of the event may be left implicit; similarly, the inchoative construction in The door opened suppresses the controlling entity. Other examples of suppression include the passive construction, which optionally suppresses the agent, the imperative, which suppresses the addressee, modal verbs, which obligatorily suppress the speaker (*You may come in by me), complement clauses, which may suppress the subject participant, etc. Grammatical implicatures are also instances of meaning construction. As shown by Posner (1986), the ordering of attributive adjectives may invite implicatures. For example, a small precious stone is a precious stone that is small, while a precious small stone is a small stone that is precious. Furthermore, our world knowledge of precious stones tells us that a small precious stone is smaller than a precious small stone, none of which is explicated in language.

2.2 Indeterminacy Indeterminacy refers to situations in which a linguistic unit is underspecified due to its vagueness in meaning. Indeterminacy is, as suggested by Langacker (in press), the canonical situation in grammar. It is probably also the canonical situation with lexical categories. This point can be illustrated by an example taken from Talmy (1988: 92). The verb break is indeterminate with respect to the manner, the effect, the speed of breaking, etc. Thus, break in the context of sentences (3a) and (3b) evokes very different meanings of breaking due to our knowledge of the world:

(3) a. The heat broke the guitar. b. A falling radio broke the guitar.

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

The manner of breaking in sentence (3a) is seen as slow, leading to gradual warping and tracework of cracks, and the like, while the manner of breaking in sentence (3b) is seen as involving a sudden localized disruption. Grammatical indeterminacy is found in possessives (my horse can mean ‘the horse I own,’ ‘the horse I ride,’ ‘the horse I bet on,’ etc.), pronouns (we can include or exclude the hearer), attributive adjectives (nice in a nice present can be restrictive or non-restrictive), modal verbs (The car should have air conditioning is vague between an epistemic and root interpretation), indefinite quantifiers, and a host of other grammatical phenomena. In a study by Hörmann (1983, quoted in Gibbs 1994: 38f), subjects were asked to estimate the number of people expressed by a few in different situations. The lowest, the median and the highest average estimates are given in (4):

(4) a. a few people standing before a hut b. a few people c. a few people standing before the building

4.55 5.72 6.99

Gibbs (1994: 39) interprets these findings in terms of meaning construction: “Listeners do not simply look up the particular number associated with a few but construct its meaning, given some specific situation.”

2.3 Incompatibility Incompatibility is understood as an instance of underspecification since it requires the interlocutors to construct meanings in order to reconcile the conflict between expressions. These meanings are prompted by linguistic expressions but not linguistically specified. Studies on meaning construction have mainly been concerned with this type of underspecification, probably because its deviant linguistic structure and the listener’s effort after meaning call for an explanation. For obvious reasons incompatibilities are restricted to composite structures. Incompatibilities may occur between lexical units or between lexical and grammatical units—there do not seem to be incompatibilities between grammatical units. Lexical incompatibilities include the composition of antonyms, tautology, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, understatement, and profile/active-zone discrepancy; lexical-grammatical incompatibilities involve mismatches between a construction and lexical units used in it. A few of these instances of incompatibility will be dealt with here. People’s interpretation of antonymic adjectives was studied by Byrne (1979, reported in Posner 1986). Byrne asked his subjects to interpret noun phrases with contradictory attributive adjectives. The phrases were not rejected as meaningless but interpreted iconically according to the order of their adjectives. Thus, a slow fast dog was understood as a fast dog made temporarily slow, e.g. by injury, illness or age,

Aspects of Meaning Construction

and a fast slow dog was interpreted as a slow dog made temporarily fast, e.g. a rocket-powered Saint Bernard. We interpret these findings in terms of meaning construction. The iconic principle of proximity provides an inferential pathway along which meaning construction may occur: units which belong together conceptually are more closely integrated syntactically. On the basis of this iconic principle, the more distant adjective invites aspects of meaning construction such as ‘be made,’ ‘temporarily’ or a setting in concrete real-world situations. Tautologies may also be seen as instances of lexical incompatibility: the predicate of a nominal tautology is not compatible with the subject because it predicates the very content of the nominal and hence is not informative in its literal meaning. This linguistic situation therefore prompts meaningful interpretations. Thus, the well-known conversational tautology Boys will be boys is, depending on the context, understood to mean ‘boys are unruly’ or ‘boys are cute and adorable’ (Gibbs 1994: 345–51). In this case the meaning construction prompted by the tautological expressions is guided by metonymic reasoning based on shared stereotypical knowledge. Metaphor, metonymy, oxymora, and some other “figures of speech” involve semantically “deviant” usages of language. Their incompatibility is resolved by constructing a target meaning which the speaker apparently intended to convey. Thus, in the sentence She is married to a library, the semantics of be married and library are incompatible and require the construction of meaning. The deviance may reside in either of the two terms. The listener may abandon the literal meaning of be married and construct a metaphorical meaning such as ‘frequent a library’ or ‘study at a library,’ or he may abandon the meaning of library and construct a metonymic meaning such as ‘extremely well-read person,’ ‘lover of books’ or ‘person who has books all over.’ In either case, the meaning construction is prompted by source expressions which are incompatible with other linguistic material which belongs to the target. Figures of speech other than metaphor and metonymy have hardly been studied within the cognitive-linguistic framework (apart from Gibbs 1994). The oxymoron in screaming silence and the understatement in She’s a bit of all right, meaning ‘good-looking’ or ‘terrific,’ of course also require substantial efforts to construct their meanings. Probably the commonest—and hence least noticeable—type of incompatibility is the phenomenon described by Langacker as “profile/active-zone discrepancy.” An entity in a relationship is expressed, or profiled in Langacker’s terminology, but only a facet of it, an active zone, directly and crucially participates in this relationship. In his example The cigarette in her mouth was unlit, only “a particular portion of the cigarette (one end) was contained in a particular portion of the mouth (a segment of the lips)” (Langacker, in press). Profile/active zone discrepancy is a kind of metonymy, i.e. whole for part, and involves focusing on an active zone as

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

its meaning construction, something which is normally performed automatically within a culturally given context. Incompatibilities between grammatical constructions and lexical units are often treated within the framework of construction grammar. The meaning of the grammatical construction may sometimes be in conflict with the meaning of lexical items which are not normally used in this construction. Probably the best-known study of a lexico-grammatical incompatibility is Goldberg’s (1995) analysis of the caused-motion construction with verbs that do not denote motion. In her classic example Fred sneezed the napkin off the table, the caused-motion construction in conjunction with the lexical verb sneeze prompts a construction of meaning which can be paraphrased as ‘with the force of one’s sneezing cause something to move away in a sudden, explosive, etc. manner.’ What is underspecified in this sentence is not the construction but the lexical item. The caused-motion construction imposes a shift in the grammatical valency of the verb from a one-place predicate to a three-place predicate and concomitantly a shift in meaning from a non-causative meaning of the verb to a caused-motion meaning. The verb sneeze in this usage is thus underspecified with respect to the causal nature of the subject argument, an argument describing an affected entity and a further argument describing a direction. In addition, other aspects of meaning are inferred such as ‘abrupt and uncontrolled motion’ and ‘motion away from the sneezer.’ The following section will deal with possible ways of resolving this and other types of underspecification.

3. Ways of constructing underspecified meanings The three types of underspecification distinguished in the preceding section share the property that underspecified linguistic units evoke a whole scenario. We think and experience the world in terms of scenarios. Linguistic units are prompts for accessing such scenarios, i.e. the meanings of these linguistic units metonymically stand as parts for the whole scenario. The part for whole-metonymy can thus be seen as a fundamental principle of all kinds of meaning construction. Scenarios are naturally part of a given culture and are crucial sources of information in meaning construction. Without knowledge of the scenarios surrounding September 11, 2001, language users would not be able to understand the meaning of a sign in public buses in New York City: “If you see something, do something.” The linguistic units in this sentence are at the highest possible level of generality, or indeterminacy, and could mean almost anything: the indefinite pronoun something neither specifies what you have to look for nor what one has to do. Yet most Americans will probably interpret this highly underspecified message in precisely the way it was meant to be understood.

10

Aspects of Meaning Construction

Meaning construction is an inferential process. The potential range of inferences is constrained by the linguistic expressions that serve as prompts, the situational and discourse context, the language users’ encyclopaedic knowledge, their personal attitudes and certainly many more factors. These are very specific determinants and account for specific aspects of meanings. It is at this specific level that potentially different scenarios are evoked, as in the case of Boys will be boys, which may give rise to scenarios of ‘boys’ unruly behaviour,’ ‘their being cute’ or ‘their being adorable.’ Whichever scenario is evoked as the listener’s meaning construction, it is based on a general principle according to which things may stand for one or some of their properties. The conceptual metonymy thing for property of a thing is readily available to members of a community and guides more specific inferences. For example, the presenter who completed her first public talk at the ICLC in Seoul by saying “I’m just a student” did, of course, not want to inform the audience about her academic status. Thanks to our knowledge of the thing for property of the thing-metonymy we know that her underspecified concluding words were meant to refer to properties of students. For lack of any evidence to the contrary we think of properties set in stereotypical scenarios associated with students in the Western culture: ‘intelligent,’ ‘partially trained academically,’ ‘critical,’ etc. Since her utterance was situated in an academic setting and meant as a meaningful act of communication, we further infer that its illocutionary force was probably that of an apology in case the audience felt that, due to her partial academic training, her paper might not meet with the high academic standards expected of presentations. In what follows we will mainly concentrate on the general principles guiding meaning construction like the conceptual metonymy in the above examples. Such general guiding principles of meaning construction are metonymy, metaphor, conceptual blending, iconicity and possibly some more. The papers in this volume concentrate on the first three principles in various aspects of meaning construction. Panther and Thornburg (2003, 2004) were among the first to recognize the general function of conceptual metonymy in inferences. They describe metonymy as natural inference schemas and inferential pathways. Conceptual metonymies operate at an intermediate level and guide the interlocutor in the construction of meaning. Their metonymic approach to meaning construction has been especially insightful in their analysis of lexico-grammatical incompatibility, i.e. in cases of grammatical coercion. For example, a number of constructions are only compatible with actions but are often used with stative predicates, like the imperative construction in Be wealthy in ten months. The meaning of the sentence can be paraphrased ‘Do something to the effect that you will be wealthy in ten months.’ The schematic meaning to be constructed is that of an action leading to a resultant state. Actions and their results are related metonymically, and our understanding of the sentence makes use of the widely used metonymy result for action. This me-

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

tonymy serves as a general inferential pathway that guides the listener to more specific interpretations. The specific kinds of action to be taken have to be inferred by reasonable guesses, such as the purchase of shares. Traditionally, it is claimed that grammatical constructions override the meanings of lexical expressions. Panther and Thornburg (2004), however, show that coercions are not always unidirectional. In their example Enjoy your summer vacation! the imperative construction does not, in its non-directive reading, coerce lexical adjustment, but the lexical item enjoy with its meaning of ‘spontaneously occurring experiential state’ coerces an adjustment of the meaning of the imperative construction: it is now understood to express an optative meaning, namely the speaker’s wish or hope. Metonymy is without doubt a powerful principle guiding inferential processes of meaning construction. Many of the contributions in this volume have been inspired by Panther and Thornburg’s view of metonymies as natural inference schemas. For example, Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Mairal Usón focus on high-level metonymies in meaning construction. High-level metonymies are particularly pertinent in grammar. For example, they interrelate actions, processes and results. Thus, the process use of close in The door closed well thanks to her instructions involves the metonymy process for action, and the middle construction in This bread cuts easily is motivated by the double metonymy process for action for result. Like conceptual metonymies, conceptual metaphors serve as pathways for meaning construction. As shown by Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 52–5), the conceptual metaphor theories are buildings is structured by focusing on certain parts of a building (foundations and outer shell) but also allows us to exploit other parts (the roof, rooms, staircases, hallways, etc.) which are normally not used in the metaphor. When we are confronted with a sentence like His theory is covered with gargoyles, we understand its schematic meaning on the basis of the metaphor theories are buildings. We can then make further reasonable guesses about this particular theory by relating it to a scenario like that of grotesque creatures sitting on the gutters of medieval churches. Image metaphors, i.e. metaphorical expressions which are not based on conceptual metaphors, are not expandable in the same way. For example, the word bicycle is used in soccer to describe a player’s shot while falling backwards. This metaphorical term does not motivate the use of unused parts of a bicycle like the saddle, the handle-bars or the chain in talking about soccer. The lack of a conceptual metaphor as an inferential pathway may also increase the difficulty of constructing an adequate meaning. Thus, a trite sentence such as Philosophy is the foundation of our knowledge is easily interpretable due to our knowledge of the theories are building-metaphor, but the graffito Philosophy is the wallpaper of the mind requires quite some “effort after meaning” and will probably be interpreted differently by different people.

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Conceptual metaphor is a predominantly lexical inference schema and less commonly found in grammar. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Mairal Usón (this volume) provide instances of high-level metaphors operating at the lexico-grammatical level. One of their examples is the metaphor communicative action is effectual action, which accounts for the conversion of the intransitive verb talk (to someone) to a goal-directed transitive verb in He talked me into it. Variations in the use of the caused-motion construction with intransitive verbs are extensively discussed by Wulff, Stefanowitsch, and Gries (this volume). The notion of meaning construction has mainly been associated with mental spaces and the emergence of new meanings by conceptual blending. Fauconnier and Turner (1996: 40) define mental spaces as “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action.” Conceptual blending occurs when two or more mental spaces are conceptually integrated to form a new complex concept. This is, for instance, the case in morphological blends and compounds, whose complex meanings are derived from blending two input spaces. In Fauconnier and Turner’s (2000) example landyacht, selective elements of the two named input spaces ‘land’ and ‘yacht’ are projected onto a blended space and give rise to the emergent meaning ‘expensive luxury car.’ Conceptual blending also occurs from implicit cues as in the case of the danger frame evoked by safe in 2.1. A highly underspecified space-builder is also the negator no in a sentence like There is no beer in the fridge. The meaning construction involves “unpacking” the blend composed of a reality space in which there is no beer in the fridge and a counterfactual space triggered by no in which there is beer in the fridge. The input spaces are typically related by a small set of vital relations, which serve as general principles guiding meaning construction, such as relations of time, space, representation, cause-effect, analogy, and reality-counterfactuality. Relations between mental spaces may also involve ‘contiguity’ or ‘similarity’ and hence are metonymic or metaphoric, i.e. metonymy and metaphor may be seen as special instances of conceptual blending (see Coulson and Oakley 2003 for metonymic blends and Grady 2005 for metaphorical blends). The contributions collected in this volume are grouped according to their focus on meaning construction in metonymy and metaphor on the one hand and mental spaces and conceptual blending on the other hand. Part I is devoted to meaning construction in metonymy and metaphor. The papers address the following issues: Raymond Gibbs, Jr. surveys recent research on online meaning construction related to figurative language. While empirical research from psycholinguistics has not yet been able to investigate the conceptual nature of metonymy, there is considerable evidence of metonymic inferencing in language understanding and meaning construction. Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Ricardo Mairal Usón demonstrate

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

the role of high-level metaphor and metonymy in the construction of meaning in the domain of transitivity. Antonio Barcelona studies meaning construction through implicatures in a piece of narrative discourse. The results of his empirical investigation show that readers’ expectations about the development of the text are to a large extent guided by metonymies. Martin Hilpert investigates the construction of meaning through chained metonymies. His cross-linguistic study is concerned with body part terms and their lexical extensions and development of grammatical meanings. Debra Ziegeler argues that the notion of coercion is an inadequate tool in accounting for mismatches at the syntax–semantics interface. In her discussion of three representative cases of “coercion” she proposes alternative explanations, in particular metonymy, which are better suited to account for the construction of meaning. Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó study the use of figuratively used personal names and show how their online construction of figurative meaning involves tiers of metonymic and metaphoric mappings. Anatol Stefanowitsch investigates the collocations in which selected metaphors occur and, on the basis of rich corpus data, concludes that statistical properties of collocational overlap can guide the construction of metaphoric meaning. Part II is devoted to mental spaces and conceptual blending in the construction of meaning. It includes the following contributions: Ronald Langacker explores the conceptual function of the personal pronouns I and you. The abstracted meanings of these pronouns invoke very basic cognitive models pertaining to the ground, a speech event, subject vs. object of conception, and intersubjectivity, which refers to the interlocutors’ mutual apprehension of each other’s minds. Kiki Nikiforidou shows that Greek relatives may be highly underspecified with respect to the intended interpretation and, in order to be interpreted, require the construction of a blend with complex emergent meanings. Christian Koops addresses the cross-linguistic variability of inferential constructions, in particular the it is that-construction, a construction that facilitates the hearer’s construction of meaning. He shows that this construction is highly restricted and constrained in discourse. Wiltrud Mihatsch studies the emergence of Romance approximators such as espèce de, which are derived from taxonomic nouns like espèce ‘species.’ This shift in meaning is motivated by communicative goals related to loose meaning construction. Wolfgang Schulze argues that questions are the immediate reflexes of a memory mismatch. Questions require a change of perspective and are seen as alter-ego

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conceptualizations, a notion that is comparable to Langacker’s notion of intersubjectivity. Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Gries show that the into-causative construction has a much wider application in British English than in American English and hence is associated with different meaning constructions in these two varieties of English.

References Bartlett, Sir Frederic C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reissued 1995. Byrne, Brian. 1979. Rules of pronominal adjective order, and the interpretation of incompatible adjective pairs. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18: 73–8. Coulson, Seana and Oakley, Todd. 2003. Metonymy and conceptual blending. In Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg (eds), 51–79. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Evans, Vyvyan and Green, Melanie. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1999. Methods and generalizations. In Scope and Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics, Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (eds), 95–127. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Construction: Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Grady, Joseph. 2005. Primary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1595–1614. Hörmann, Hans. 1983. The calculating listener or how many are einige, mehrere, and ein paar (some, several, and a few). In Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language, Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwarze, and Arnim von Stechow (eds), 221–34. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. In press. Metonymy in grammar. In Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar, Linda Thornburg, Antonio Barcelona and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds). Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2003. Metonymies as natural inference and activation schemas. In Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg (eds), 127–47. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Introduction: The construction of meaning in language

Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda L. 2004. The role of metonymy in meaning construction. metaphorik.de 6: 91–116. Posner, Roland. 1986. Iconicity in syntax: The natural order of attributes. In Iconicity: Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok, Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner (eds), 305–37. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Talmy, Leonard. 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. Talmy, Leonard. 1996. The windowing of attention in language. In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning, Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 235–87. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books.

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part 1

Metonymy and metaphor

chapter 1

Experimental tests of figurative meaning construction Raymond Gibbs, Jr. University of California, Santa Cruz

One of the major claims of recent cognitive linguistics research is that metonymy constitutes a fundamental scheme of human cognition and is not just a rhetorical device employed for specific communicative purposes. The work of Klaus-Uwe Panther and others has suggested that certain metonymies are natural inference schemes operating during many aspects of language production and understanding. This chapter explores the relations between cognitive linguistic ideas on conceptual metonymy and recent psycholinguistic experiments examining online meaning construction. I suggest that there is no direct evidence supporting the idea that conceptual metonymies are immediately recruited during metonymic language processing, but that this gap is due to the difficulties in testing whether very abstract schemes are accessed during online meaning construction. Nonetheless, there exists various experimental support for other cognitive linguistic claims about metonymy, including the importance of metonymy for highlighting certain aspects of discourse topics, the interaction of metonymy and grammatical structure in sentence comprehension, and the idea that conceptual metonymies may interact with pragmatic information to constrain specific interpretations of metonymic utterances. Keywords: conceptual metonymy, corpus linguistics, figurative language, meaning construction, metaphor, metonymy, pragmatics, psycholinguistic experiments

1. Introduction Some time ago I was in a local pub with friends when the following brief conversation occurred as a late arrival approached the group. Greg: “Hi, is Nicole still here?” Megan: “She left about two beers ago.” When Megan gave her reply to Greg’s question, everyone present seemed to have a reasonable understanding about the approximate time that Nicole left the pub (about 30 minutes ago) as I immediately inquired as to how they interpreted Megan’s indirect response. How did this general understanding of Megan’s utterance happen? The phrase “two beers ago” is not typically used to indicate a period of

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time, yet in this context people were readily able to infer that “two beers ago” referred to a period of time in which the last two beers were consumed. Listeners used their pragmatic knowledge of the local situation (e.g., the amount of time in which two beers had been consumed), in addition to conceptual information that “two beers ago” could stand for the time it took everyone to drink the last two beers. This conceptual knowledge was not just specific to the drinking of beers, but more generally suggests how the mention of some activity can stand for the time it takes for that activity to occur (i.e., activity for time to do that activity). In this way, our understanding of “She left about two beers ago” relied on our ability to quickly access both specific pragmatic knowledge and a conceptual metonymy and integrate these two kinds of information to construct an appropriate figurative reading of Megan’s comment. My aim in this chapter is to discuss some of the relevant empirical work on how pragmatic and conceptual information are accessed and mutually constrain people’s understanding of figurative meaning, with a special emphasis on metonymy. I specifically explore the relation of ideas from cognitive linguistics on metonymy to experimental work in psycholinguistics. The key question here is: Do theories from cognitive linguistics provide psychologically real accounts of how people construct meaning in ordinary discourse situations? My description of empirical works suggests a positive answer to this question. Nonetheless, understanding metonymy requires important mutual adjustment processes accessing both conceptual and pragmatic information during online meaning construction.

2. Metonymy and meaning construction The idea that conceptual metonymy plays a central role in ordinary meaning construction has been proposed in recent work by Panther and Thornburg (2003, 2004). They distinguish their account of conceptual metonymy from pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation, such as Grice’s (1989) and that of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which assume that more abstract inferential processes, based on maxims or the principles of relevance, are required for listeners to derive appropriate meaning for what speakers say. A significant part of Panther and Thornburg’s claim is that metonymy provides what they refer to as “natural inference schemes,” because these schemas reflect recurrent, entrenched conceptual mappings. Conceptual metonymies, such as part for whole, cause for effect, person for role, and representation for represented, are not just used in inferential communication, but are “vital relations” underlying reasoning. Conceptual metonymies reflect an intermediate level of inferential reasoning, precisely because they are sufficiently abstract to serve a wide variety of inferential situations, and yet are

Figurative meaning construction

specific enough to provide detailed accounts of meaning construction in specific contexts of language use. They determine both explicit meaning (i.e., explicatures) and implicit communication (i.e., particularized conversational implicatures). Recent work on conceptual metonymy has done much to correct the overbearing privilege of metaphor in cognitive linguistic studies of language and thought. Especially the collections of papers in Panther and Radden (1999) and Panther and Thornburg (2003) have presented detailed illustration of the ways that metonymy shapes language, thought, and more specifically, pragmatic inferencing. The advocacy of conceptual metonymy over strict pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation by many cognitive linguists does not imply that pragmatics has no role in meaning construction. On the contrary, as correctly claimed by Panther and Thornburg, conceptual metonymy provides an important constraint on pragmatic inferential processes, and that conceptual factors are clearly integrated with pragmatic ones in utterance interpretation. For example, they have shown that conceptual metonymies constrain pragmatic functions such as the referential, predicational, and illocutionary levels of speech acts, as well as shape the organizational content of the mental lexicon, interact with grammatical structure, and are employed in the creation of novel pragmatic meaning. Presented below are my reflections on the psychological status of several cognitive linguistic claims about conceptual metonymy and I will suggest some concrete ways that conceptual metonymies interact with pragmatic information to create specific, contextually-appropriate inferences from speakers’ utterances in conversation.

3. Proving the psychological reality of conceptual metonymies Are conceptual metonymies such as part for whole, object for user, and place for event really conceptual in the sense that people have enduring knowledge of such relations that affects their immediate thoughts and language use? Linguistic evidence is, at the very least, suggestive of the enduring cognitive, and not just linguistic, nature of metonymy. This does not imply a secondary status for the linguistic examination of metonymy in comparison to investigating metonymy as a pervasive scheme of thought. But cognitive linguistics argue that metonymy is fundamentally motivated by thought in the sense that people often think metonymically, which provides the grounding for why speakers use metonymy. “Metonymy is speech” is therefore not just a rhetorical move that people engage in for special communicative purposes, as traditionally thought within linguistics and literature (Gibbs 1994). But the cognitive linguistic work gives rise to the question as to whether there is specific evidence that people actually have generalized conceptual mappings such as object for user, and recruit this knowledge as they think, speak, and under-

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stand. Do people speak metonymically as frequently as suggested by cognitive linguistic analyses (see the essays in Panther and Thornberg 2003)? Most cognitive linguistic studies have examined a limited range of texts in their exploration of metonymic reasoning. Panther and Thornburg, to their credit, have at least investigated a diverse set of examples in making their claims for the prominence of conceptual metonymy in language and thought. It is frankly unclear from both a linguistic and psychological perspective as to how frequent a particular type of figurative expression must be within a language for it to be recognized as a significant part of the way people ordinarily speak and think. Nonetheless, there is a growing movement in figurative language scholarship to conduct corpus studies that aim to provide actual counts of the distribution of metonymic language. One study examined the British National Corpus using an annotation scheme that detected metonymic regularities in regard to country names and reliably distinguished literal from metonymic usage (Markert and Nissim 2003). Contrary to the claim that metonymies referring to place for event (e.g., “He was shocked by Vietnam”) are frequent in discourse, less than 1% of all country names were used to refer to events. Sixteen percent of the country names metonymically referred to people (i.e., place for people), and there were no instances found related to place for product. But a further analysis showed that countries which were economically and politically more important to British readers, such as Japan, had a significantly higher proportion of metonymic readings than did less important countries (e.g., Guyana). This higher proportion of metonymic interpretations of more relevant, important country names was primarily due to the higher number of place for person metonymies. Corpus linguistic research like this is important for more clearly establishing the frequency and specificity of figurative meaning constructions. At the very least, such work provides an important empirical complement to linguistic research based on individual scholars’ own intuitions and created examples. Yet empirical counts of certain kinds of language use, like that of Markert and Nissum (2003) suggest that cognitive linguists must be very cautious before claiming that any particular figure of speech is common. The fact that people can possibly and meaningfully talk about place for event metonymies does not necessarily imply that speakers indeed frequently produce such figures in spoken or written language. Further discussion within cognitive and corpus linguistics needs to address the criteria for making theoretically motivated claims about the ubiquity of metonymy, and metaphor for that matter, in real discourse. For example, how frequent does a particular metonymic mapping have to be in language to indicate the presence of an underlying conceptual metonymy motivating this speech? Corpus linguistic studies of metonymy can also be employed to provide critical tests of specific ideas about conceptual metonymy, such as Panther and Thornburg’s

Figurative meaning construction

claim that in a prototypical metonymy, the target meaning is more prominent than the source. Thus, expressions such as “He was shocked by Vietnam” are readily understandable as having a metonymic reading because of the prominence of the specific target (place). In fact, as Panther and Thornburg (2004) argue, the traditional view of metonymy as a substitution for some other term may have some validity in cases where the target meaning has become “maximally prominent,” exactly as is the case in an expression like “He was shocked by Vietnam.” But the substitution works precisely because of people’s highly specific conceptual understanding of Vietnam as a concrete instantiation of the more general place for event. Proving the conceptual reality of metonymy, as with metaphor, is very much dependent on the results of psychological studies. There is a sizeable literature in experimental psycholinguistics demonstrating that conceptual metaphors (e.g., life is a journey) are at least used when individuals make sense of why many conventional and novel metaphors have the particular meanings they do (Gibbs 1994, 2006). Conceptual metaphors may also be recruited during people’s immediate comprehension of much metaphoric language (Gibbs et al. 1997; Pfaff, Gibbs, and Johnson 1997), although there remains significant debate over this issue (see Glucksberg 2001). In contrast to the plethora of studies on conceptual metaphor, there are virtually no experimental studies that have explicitly attempted to find evidence on the role of conceptual metonymies in figurative meaning construction. I have previously argued that various evidence from both cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics is quite consistent with the idea that people normally engage in metonymic reasoning during many aspects of ordinary text and spoken language understanding, especially that referring to part-whole relationships (Gibbs 1994, 1999). But, once again, there are no studies that show that those specific conceptual mappings, referring to basic metonymic relations, shape online meaning construction. Is there a reason for psycholinguists’ failure to study conceptual metonymies in figurative meaning construction, despite the prominence of work by cognitive linguists such as Panther demonstrating the salience of metonymy in many aspects of utterance interpretation? One difficulty in experimentally testing for the presence of conceptual metonymies during utterance interpretation is that these presumably entrenched knowledge structures are rather abstract. Consider first the situation with conceptual metaphor. Experimental studies have shown, for instance, that people appear to have tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors (e.g., anger is heated fluid in a container) and use these to makes sense of many figurative expressions (e.g., “John blew his stack”). For example, people are faster to process metaphoric statements if these are read in contexts that depict similar metaphorical mappings (Pfaff, Gibbs, and Johnson 1997), and appear to draw inferences about what specific metaphoric statements mean based on the correspondences arising

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from underlying conceptual metaphors (Gibbs 1992). Furthermore, several studies show that people’s mental images for idiomatic and proverbial phrases in English are constrained by conceptual metaphors that link these phrases with their figurative meanings (Gibbs and O’Brien 1990; Gibbs, Strom, and Spivey-Knowlton 1997). Finally, exploring people’s intuitions about specific source domain information, such as that of hunger in the primary metaphor desire is hunger, enables researchers to make predictions about the kinds of source-to-target domains mappings that motivate the existence and understanding of many metaphoric expressions. For instance, the fact that people have certain embodied experiences of hunger that are particularly salient suggests that these should be mapped onto any talk about abstract desires unrelated to hunger. Indeed, people from two cultures, the United States and Brazil, rate statements strongly associated with salient hunger experiences (e.g., “He hungered for fame and fortune”) to be more acceptable than were phrases that reflected less salient aspects of embodied hunger (e.g., “I become talkative for fame and fortune”) (Gibbs, Lima, and Francuzo 2004). This research is important because it independently examines people’s embodied experiences and uses this information to make predictions about the kinds of figurative expressions ordinarily used to express metaphorical conceptions, such as those related to desire is hunger. Cognitive linguists work more deductively by examining systematic patterns of language to infer possible conceptual structures motivating such language. Yet they are never able to independently assess conceptual structures and the possible embodied foundations for those structures, because they are primarily working with linguistic materials. It is important to note that any experimental claim that conceptual metaphors (e.g. love relationships are journeys) are recruited in understanding conventional or novel metaphoric language (e.g., “Our marriage has hit a dead-end street”) does not imply that these conceptual metaphors provide all the knowledge needed to understand the figurative expression. Conceptual metaphors may only provide partial scaffolding for the eventual meaning constructed for what a person communicates with various sorts of enriched pragmatics having an important complementary role (see section 5). But this discussion of the experimental work on conceptual metaphor in figurative language understanding suggests that the specificity of conceptual and primary metaphors makes these entrenched knowledge structures more amenable to empirical investigation than appears to be the case for more abstract conceptual metonymies such as part for whole, object for user, place for event, or cause for effect. For example, it has been quite possible to ask people in various ways about their experiences of the source domain heated fluid in a container (i.e., anger is heated fluid in a container) or even more general experiences such as journey (i.e., life is a journey) in a way that seems quite difficult to do with

Figurative meaning construction

abstract domains like object, place, event, and so on. Psycholinguistic studies have shown, for instance, that people can immediately judge that the letter string “heat” is a word right after reading “John blew his stack,” because of the quick recruitment of the conceptual metaphor anger is heated fluid in a container (Gibbs, Bogdonovich, Sykes and Barr 1997). But it is not clear that the same type of study could be done with a target word like “user” when people read a metonymic phrase such as “The sax has the flu today” (i.e., object for user). The challenge for both cognitive linguists and psycholinguists is to discover more specific metonymic relations that may be amenable to empirical test and to find ways of showing that schematic knowledge of the sort like object for user seems to be used in speaking and listening. One possibility for the latter is to employ a priming paradigm to see if reading metonymic phrases motivated by specific conceptual metonymies, such as “The sax has the flu today” (object for user), facilitates people’s reading of metonymic phrases supported by similar conceptual metonymies (e.g., “We need a new glove at third base”) as opposed to phrases motivated by different conceptual metonymies (e.g., “Iraq is becoming another Vietnam” or place for event).

4. Studies on metonymic processing Despite the paucity of experimental studies that directly explore the possible role of conceptual metonymy in language use, psycholinguists have investigated a few features of metonymic language understanding, many of which are consistent with Panther and Thornburg’s own analyses. Experimental results show that people can readily understand referential metonymic expressions, such as “The scalpel was sued for malpractice” (in reference to a surgeon) as well as they do comparable referential metaphoric statements, such as “The butcher was sued for malpractice,” even if both types of statements take longer to process than non-figurative equivalents such as “The surgeon was sued for malpractice” (Gibbs 1990). One may argue that people’s relatively quick understanding of referential metonymies, at least in the sense of taking no longer to process than comparable metaphoric statement, is due to the immediate activation of a relevant conceptual metonymy, such as object for user in “The scalpel was sued for malpractice.” But these results per se do not directly show this to be the case, nor were they designed to do so. Also note that the result showing that both metonymic and metaphoric referential statements took longer to interpret than did corresponding literal expressions is likely due to the fact that the critical word indicating a metonymic or metaphoric meaning was in a sentence-initial position. I raise this point because cognitive linguistic studies of figurative meaning construction, most generally, often talk about

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how different utterances are interpreted by looking at the expression as a whole, but do not seek to explain the online, incremental nature of figurative meaning construction as people hear or read each word. Thus, part of the challenge in any theory of meaning construction is to describe exactly what sorts of conceptual and pragmatic information is employed and when it is accessed during immediate understanding. More specifically, reading the NP “The scalpel” may not invite any metonymic reading until the VP “was sued for malpractice” is encountered. In other cases, a metonymic reading may be constructed immediately upon seeing the target term as in “Susan enjoyed the book” (i.e., reading the book). Exactly when metonymic readings are accessed or constructed is clearly a topic for further psycholinguistic investigations that can examine online processing in an incremental manner. Finally, other aspects of the Gibbs (1990) findings provide empirical support for one important claim of Panther and Thornburg (2004) when they assert that metonymies both make targets accessible (e.g., “scalpel” activates the referent of “surgeon”) and available for further elaboration in ensuring discourse. When people were asked to describe why the initial noun phrase in each final statement (e.g., “The scalpel was sued for malpractice”) referred to its earlier stated referent (i.e., why the surgeon was called a “scalpel”), participants 88% of the time described the underlying nature of the metonymic relationship (e.g., “the surgeon was called a ‘scalpel’ because surgeons often used scalpels” or “the athlete was called a ‘glove’ because gloves are an important part of a baseball player”). This finding suggests that readers determine the figurative connections between the final metonymic statements and their previously stated referents, and do not simply associate a target with its referent in an arbitrary manner. Moreover, when participants were asked to talk more about the “surgeon,” for example, their discussions were primarily focused around the specific metonymic label (e.g., “the surgeon was just an uncaring object”). In this way, metonymic referential descriptions appear to make targets both accessible and available in discourse processing, just as argued by Panther and Thornburg (2004). A different set of experiments showed how people’s familiarity with specific targets facilitated metonymic processing. An analysis of people’s eye-movements as they read showed that processing of familiar place for institution metonymies such as “the convent” in “That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent,” took no longer than did sentences containing literal interpretations of the same expressions (Frisson and Pickering 1999). On the other hand, metonymic statements that contained unfamiliar place for institution metonymies, such as “That blasphemous woman had to answer to the stadium,” took considerably longer to read than both familiar metonymic statements and literal equivalents. Similar findings were also reported for familiar and unfamiliar place for event metonymies, such as “A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam” (familiar) and “A lot of Ameri-

Figurative meaning construction

cans protested during Finland” (unfamiliar), although the processing delay for the unfamiliar statements arose late in their processing. Frisson and Pickering (1999) interpret these various results as being inconsistent with literal-first or figurativefirst models of figurative language processing. They alternatively argue that their findings support an “underspecification model” in which a single, underspecified representation for these metonymies arose first that was later fleshed out into a contextually appropriate figurative meaning. One may also conclude from Frisson and Pickering’s work that a reader’s familiarity with the specific instantiation of a conceptual metonymy has a clear influence on the speed with which people understand metonymic statements. For instance, when people read “A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam,” their correct understanding of this phrase is not completed once an abstract place for event metonymy is accessed or inferred, as readers must recognize what aspect of the place has a specific relationship to some event (e.g., what aspect of the country Vietnam was associated with American protests). To the extent that people have more familiar or stereotypical associations with a particular place, in this example, then the easier it will be for them to correctly construct what is meant by a metonymic statement like “A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam.” One possibility is that when a person hears an unfamiliar place for event metonymic statement such as “A lot of Americans protested during Finland,” they may immediately realize that some sort of place for event association is being drawn, and have this schematic representation in mind, but then experience difficulty determining the exact meaning of the expression due to a failure in seeing the specific instantiation of this conceptual metonymy (e.g., what event is saliently related to Finland?). Frisson and Pickering do not discuss the idea that an abstract conceptual metonymy is immediately recruited when reading a metonymic statement that is then fleshed out to provide more precise figurative meaning. Of course, eye-movement data alone are unable to detect the presence of underlying conceptual representations during utterance interpretation. Once again, what is needed are other experimental methods that enable researchers to see if specific kinds of conceptual representations arise during online meaning construction. Panther and Thornburg have argued that conceptual metonymy interacts with grammatical structure during utterance interpretation. Indeed, there is experimental evidence that is consistent with this idea. One eye-tracking study examined the processing of metonymies in syntactically ambiguous sentences (Pickering and Traxler 1998). For instance, participants read a context sentence mentioning either an actual professor or a statue of a professor, and then read a syntactically ambiguous sentence about a janitor polishing the professor on one syntactic analysis. The results showed that readers quickly adopted the plausible metonymic interpretation when it was available, which then affected the process of syntactic ambiguity

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resolution. Participants appear to have rapidly adopted the metonymic reading though no effects occurred at the point at which “professor” was first encountered. The point at which a metonymic reading is established during online meaning construction may differ depending on various lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic factors. Once more, showing exactly when metonymic readings are constructed, and whether these are influenced by entrenched conceptual metonymies is an important topic for figurative language research.

5. Mutual adjustment during figurative language processing Panther and Thornburg’s advocacy of conceptual metonymies still acknowledges the importance of pragmatics in figurative meaning construction. Let me suggest some specific ways this may work. Consider first the metaphor “Robert is a bulldozer.” How do we get from properties of machines to properties of human beings, a transition that is required in this instance of ad hoc concept construction? Does the context in which this statement appears shape its processing? In “Robert is a bulldozer,” the word “bulldozer” typically points to a set of familiar conceptual metaphors, such as people are machines, the mind is a machine, thinking is a mechanical activity, and so on. In some instances, the link between a lexical concept and a specific conceptual metaphor may be so entrenched that a specific metaphorical concept is immediately accessed, and found to help establish a relevant reading of “Robert is a bulldozer.” In other cases, listeners will need to test various conceptual metaphors in order of their accessibility until finding one that creates an interpretation of “Robert is a bulldozer,” which, as Sperber and Wilson (1995, also see Carston 2002) have shown, satisfies the expectation of optimal relevance. Not surprisingly, the more accessible a conceptual metaphor is given a lexical concept, the easier it will be to create an appropriate ad hoc concept and to understand a verbal metaphor. Of course, context also constrains the construction of ad hoc categories. Assume that in the case of “Robert is a bulldozer,” the context, as part of the mutual cognitive environment holding at that moment for the speaker and listener, primes the incorporation of the mind as machine metaphor, such as when Robert or someone else is previously described as a powerful thinker. This conceptual metaphor provides many possible mappings between the source domain machine and the target domain mind. At this point, a relevance-guided sorting process determines which of the many possible source-to-target domain mappings of the machine to mind metaphor may be applied to constructing the ad hoc concept bulldozer* that meets the expectation of optimal relevance for this context. Overall, then, the creation of ad hoc categories during metaphor understanding incorporates people’s

Figurative meaning construction

tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors and the processing constraints imposed by the communicative principle of relevance (Gibbs and Tendahl in press). A similar integrating of conceptual and pragmatic information may shape metonymy processing. For instance, the simple expression “Bush invaded Iraq” may immediately evoke several different conceptual metonymies such as person for nation, person for event, or person for place. Which one of these provides the most optimally relevant, and contextually-appropriate reading will be constrained by a variety of pragmatic factors, including whether the expression was encountered in a news story, a political commentary, or in answer to the question during a political debate “Who’s responsible for the tragedy in Iraq these days?” The ad hoc construction of Bush referring to the person primarily responsible for the United States invading Iraq in the most recent Gulf war is not accomplished by the activation of a single conceptual metonymy, but through pragmatic adjustment regarding several possible conceptual metonymies. Moreover, the conceptual prominence that the metonymic target “Bush” has in a discourse situation is not just due to the activation of some conceptual metonymy, but is more precisely shaped by how the pragmatics at hand supports optimally relevant readings (with these being constrained by the principle that utterance interpretation is guided by a trade-off of maximizing cognitive effects while minimizing cognitive effort (Sperber and Wilson 1995)). For instance, if the expression “Bush invaded Iraq” is given as a reply to the question “Who’s responsible for the tragedy in Iraq these days,” the metonymic reading of “Bush” will highlight President Bush’s individual role in initiating the Iraq war. In a different context, such as when two people are describing the role that various nations had in the Iraq war, the statement “Bush invaded Iraq” will highlight Bush as standing for the United States and perhaps decrease President Bush’s individual culpability in waging the Iraq war. Finally, metonymic expressions provide certain cognitive effects that are also influenced by pragmatics. According to relevance theory, cognitive effects are achieved by one of the following three types: (1) new information provided by a contextual implication, (2) strengthening of an existing assumption, and (3) a contradiction and possible elimination of an existing assumption. Previous research has shown how metaphorical statements, such as “Lawyers are sharks” can be used to strengthen a previous speaker’s negative claims about lawyers, add new information to what a previous speaker said about lawyers, or contradict what another speaker had previously said about lawyers (Gibbs and Tendahl 2006). In each case, our reading of exactly the way that lawyers are sharks differs to some degree. A similar possibility surely exists for understanding metonymic expressions. Hearing “Bush invaded Iraq” may strengthen some idea about Bush, add some new information about Bush, or contradict some current belief about Bush, both as a person and as a metonymic entity that stands-for a place, a nation or an event.

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There are clearly subtle types of interactions that occur between conceptual and pragmatic information when people construct meanings for figurative language. Although it may be the case, as Panther and Thornburg have convincingly demonstrated, that purely pragmatic accounts are incapable of drawing detailed enough metonymic inferences, they are also right that the conceptual approach to metonymy advocated in cognitive linguistics is also insufficient for explaining realistic metonymic readings.

6. Conclusion The study of metonymy has finally come of age in cognitive linguistics, as demonstrated by the work of Klaus-Uwe Panther and others. This research has important connections to psycholinguistic studies of online meaning construction specifically related to metonymy. In general, the empirical research from psychology has not been able to specifically show that people ordinarily access conceptual metonymies as part of their immediate understanding of many metonymic utterances. But the lack of evidence in support of conceptual metonymy is primarily due to the difficulties associated with trying to create experimental tests showing that very abstract mappings, like place for event, are actually recruited during online linguistic processing. Other psycholinguistic evidence, nonetheless, is more directly consistent with cognitive linguistic claims about metonymic language understanding. Studies show that people can quickly draw metonymic inferences during reading and that these inferences make specific targets (i.e., the person in a object for user metonymy such as “The scalpel was sued for malpractice”) more accessible and available in subsequent discourse processing. People’s familiarity with certain metonymic mappings also facilitates their understanding of relevant metonymic utterances, which provides indirect support for the claim that enduring conceptual metonymies may effect online meaning construction. Additional experimental findings are consistent with the claim that metonymy interacts with grammatical structure during immediate processing of certain metonymic expressions. Finally, I have argued that conceptual information strongly interacts with particular pragmatic knowledge when people process metonymic expressions. In this way, conceptual metonymies such as person for nation may constrain the pragmatic interpretation of expressions like “Bush invaded Iraq” by highlighting certain aspects of Bush (i.e., his standing as a symbol for the United States), while diminishing others (i.e., Bush’s individual responsibility for the Iraq war). This possibility is directly in line with cognitive linguistic proposals that pragmatics alone is insufficient to explain immediate meaning construction and needs to be reinforced by

Figurative meaning construction

available, and often quite accessible, metonymic mappings, such as those potentially represented by conceptual metonymies. The focus of this chapter on metonymy in online meaning construction serves as a case study of the important influence that cognitive linguistic work has had on experimental psycholinguistics. There remain many questions about how to best experimentally test ideas from cognitive linguistics, and whether some of the putative conceptual schemes discovered by cognitive linguists are indeed psychologically real. But it is also clear that the major advances in the study of metonymy and the novel claim that metonymy is a form of thought and not just a rhetorical device, will have significant implications for psychological theories of how people conceive of certain topics and apply that knowledge during online meaning construction.

References Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Frisson, Steven and Pickering, Martin. 1999. The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eyemovements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 25: 1366–1383. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Comprehending figurative referential descriptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 16: 56- 66. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1992. What do idioms really mean? Journal of Memory and Language 31: 485–506. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1999. Speaking and thinking with metonymy. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 61–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. and O’Brien, Jennifer. 1990. Idioms and mental imagery: The metaphorical motivation for idiomatic meaning. Cognition 36(1): 35–64. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., Bogdonovich, Josephine, Sykes, Jeffrey and Barr, Dale J. 1997. Metaphor in idiom comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 37: 141–54. Gibbs, Raymond, Strom, L., and Spivey-Knowlton, Michael J. 1997. Conceptual metaphor in mental imagery for proverbs. Journal of Mental Imagery 21: 83–110. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., Lima, Paula and Francuzo, Edson. 2004. Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 1189- 1210. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, Raymond Jr. and Tendahl, Markus. 2006. Cognitive effort and effects in metaphor comprehension: Relevance theory and psycholinguistics. Mind & Language 21: 379–403. Glucksberg, Sam. 2001. Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphor to Idioms. New York: Oxford University Press. Grice, Herbert Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Markert, Katja and Nissim, Malvina. 2003. Corpus-based metonymy analysis. Metaphor and Symbol 18: 175–88. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Radden, Günter (eds). 1999. Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda (eds) 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2004. The Role of Conceptual Metonymy in Meaning Construction. metaphorik.de 6: 91–116. Pfaff, Kerry L., Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. and Johnson, Michael D. 1997. Metaphor in using and understanding euphemism and dysphemism. Applied Psycholinguistics 18: 59–83. Pickering, Martin and Traxler, Matthew. 1998. Plausibility and recovery from garden paths: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 24: 940- 961. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Relevance: Cognition and Communication (2nd edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

chapter 2

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction* Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Ricardo Mairal Usón University of La Rioja/National University of Distance Education, Madrid

This chapter addresses the problem of meaning construction in grammar from the point of view of high-level metaphor and metonymy. We argue that meaning construction, in the sense given to this term by Panther (2005), is essentially an inferential activity whether at the level of so-called pragmatic meaning (e.g. implicature derivation, illocutionary meaning) or when dealing with core grammar phenomena, especially conversion processes and constructional alternation, which we explore within the domain of transitivity. In our study we are able to find high-level metaphor and metonymy at the basis of some of these grammatical processes. We also observe that the same principles and conceptual patterns (e.g. metaphor-metonymy interaction and metonymic chaining) that constrain metaphorical and metonymic activity at other levels of analysis are operational at the grammatical level too. Keywords: alternations, coercion, construction, double metonymy, grammatical conversion, high-level metaphor, high-level metonymy, invariance, transitivity

1. Introduction In Cognitive Linguistics metaphor is generally defined as a cognitive mapping (or set of correspondences) across discrete conceptual domains (Lakoff 1993), while metonymy is seen as a domain-internal mapping where one of the domains involved provides a point of access to the other (cf. Kövecses and Radden 1998; see also Barcelona 2002 and Radden 2002 for definitional and demarcation issues). Both processes are central to our understanding of how meaning is constructed in actual language use, since they regulate much of our inferential activity, including pragmatic implications (Panther 2005).

* Financial support for this research has been provided by the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grants HUM2004–05947–C02–01/FILO and HUM2005–02870/FILO. The research has been co-financed through FEDER funds.

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One of the directions of recent research in Cognitive Linguistics is the connection between metonymy and grammatical description. Some preliminary attempts may be found in work by Kövecses and Radden (1998), Panther and Thornburg (1999, 2000), Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez (2001). A more ambitious project is under way now in a collective volume edited by Thornburg, Panther, and Barcelona (forthcoming), whose leading article, “Metonymic grammar,” by Ronald Langacker, argues that grammatical links are basically metonymic to the extent that meaning is not compositional and linguistic expressions serve as points of access to extra conceptual material. Thus, a compositional theory cannot predict why the meaning of ‘mosquito net’ (used to protect ourselves from mosquitoes) does not follow the same interpretation pattern as ‘butterfly net’ (used to catch butterflies). Langacker argues that a grammatical relationship between two elements can be established on the basis of the mental access they provide to the entities needed for conceptual integration. However, in our view grammar is not only metonymic in the sense that the relationship between elements of formal structure and meaning is pervasively unpredictable or, as Langacker puts it, indeterminate. As we will show, there is a significant amount of linguistic evidence that many grammatical phenomena are grounded in metonymy and that we need to have a good understanding of how metonymic activity takes place in order to understand their semantic makeup and thereby their communicative potential. What is more, we will argue that metonymy is not the only motivating factor underlying grammatically guided meaning construction. Metaphor also plays a very significant role in grammatical organization and our consequent ability to exploit grammar to construct meaning.

2. Levels of description Understanding the cognitive grounding of grammar is contingent on considering description levels for metaphor and metonymy. This issue has been addressed in detail in Ruiz de Mendoza (2005a), where it is argued that it is possible to find a unified framework for inferential and grammatical description by distinguishing between high and low levels of description, on the one hand, and situational and non-situational cognitive models, on the other. Thus, implicature is seen as the result of metonymic activity on low-level situational models; illocutionary meaning, especially where there is inferential activity, takes place by applying metonymic expansion operations to partial structure from high-level situational models. Interestingly enough, many grammatical processes also seem to have an inferential nature, which calls for an explanation of their semantic import in terms of metonymic operations on high-level (i.e. generic) non-situational cognitive models (tradition-

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction

al examples of referential metonymy are simply operations on low-level non-situational cognitive models, as in order for customer and ruler for army). For example, think of the meaning implications of the following sentences:

(1) I think I’m getting cold. (2) The door opened. (3) I saw the destruction of the city.

One favored interpretation of sentences like (1) is that the speaker is indirectly asking the addressee to take action to solve the problem he is complaining about. In a theory that admits the existence of high-level (or generic) cognitive models, whether of a situational or a non-situational kind, the so-called “illocutionary value” of (1) can be explained by postulating the activity of a metonymy whereby part of a high-level situational model stands for the whole of it (this kind of model is what Panther and Thornburg (1998) have called an illocutionary scenario). The high-level model is based on the cultural convention that we are expected to help other people when needed. This convention is based on high-level or generic structure derived from many low-level everyday situations that specify the ways in which people make requests or otherwise engage in directive illocutionary activity. Making the addressee aware that we are in need is a way of calling attention to the whole situation in which people are expected to help and consequently counts as a request for help. Now consider example (2). This sentence is generally treated as a case of the inchoative construction, which in English alternates with the causative construction (cf. Someone opened the door). In interpreting (2) the language user is aware that doors do not open without an external cause (a person, an animal, the wind, etc.), so in the appropriate contexts (2) would give rise to more or less specific inferences as to the nature of the controlling entity. Imagine that we have heard a dog growl behind the door and then we see the door move open. In that context, a valid inference would be ‘The dog opened the door.’ This inference is retrieved on the basis of a high-level metonymic process, which we will label process for action (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez 2001). Finally, consider sentence (3), where the event of destroying a city is treated as a physical entity. It may be argued that this sentence is an example of the high-level metaphor events are entities. Postulating this metaphor allows us to predict a number of meaning implications: some participant entities may be left implicit thereby being backgrounded (e.g. the agent of the action); the event is seen as an encapsulated piece of experience that can be treated as an instrument (We were threatened with destruction), as an object of perception (We saw their destruction) or of knowledge and understanding (We knew about their destruction); however, since the nominalization preserves the internal structure of the event, it is possible

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to make use of it in terms of time relationships (We were able to put an end to the destruction of the city). The idea that some grammatical processes have a metaphorical explanation is also found in Halliday (1994) under the label grammatical metaphor, although the differences are significant. Besides the obvious case of nominalizations, Halliday includes within this notion such linguistic phenomena as non-literal modality expressions (e.g. I think she knows as a grammatically non-congruent version of She probably knows), and mood (or speech act) expressions (e.g. I wouldn’t do that if I were you as a non-congruent form of Don’t do that!). High-level metaphor results from finding correspondences between high-level propositional cognitive models. Halliday’s grammatical metaphor, in contrast, is a matter of applying linguistic resources from one system to another system. For example, we may express probability in a congruent way by means of the adverb “probably,” which is a modality resource, or by making use of non-congruent hypotactic projection within the logical subcomponent of the ideational system (“I think” introducing “she knows”). We do not follow Halliday’s proposal for two crucial reasons. One is that metaphor is not necessarily a matter of using language non-congruently, as has been demonstrated by the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in language (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). Instead, metaphor can be understood as a cognitive process that allows us to reason about a conceptual domain in terms of the structure and logic of another domain. The other reason is that what Halliday regards as “non-congruent versions within a system” of “congruent” grammatical options from a different system may be more simply treated as different constructional realizations that express relatively similar meanings. Thus, there is nothing metaphorical in expressing a warning by means of an if-conditional complex clause. In fact, there is no principled reason why using an imperative to issue a warning is more congruent than using a conventional if-conditional construction. From the perspective of grammatical mood, a negative imperative maps onto a command not to do something, but this is not necessarily a warning (cf. Don’t do the ironing today; I’ll do it so you can have some rest). From our discussion, it is evident that our proposal to explain some grammatical processes on the basis of high-level metaphorical and metonymic operations has two clear advantages: (i) it allows us to capture relevant inferences or meaning implications whose actual communicative impact may otherwise be lost from our description; (ii) it allows us to introduce a greater degree of regularity in our descriptive and explanatory apparatus, thus enhancing the predictive power of the model. We now turn our attention to the question of general constraints on metaphor and metonymy since these constraints carry over to cases of high-level metaphor and metonymy, as will be seen in section 5.

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction

3. Constraints on metaphor and metonymy One of the problems with the original formulation of the cognitive theory of metaphor was to account for the way in which a linguistic description may rule out cases of non-metaphor on a principled basis. The Invariance Principle (Lakoff 1993) was originally formulated as a constraint on metaphor. According to this principle, the topological (i.e. image-schematic) structure of the target domain of a metaphoric mapping has to be preserved in a way that is consistent with the topological structure of the source. For example, if we map a tree onto a person, the top of the three will map onto the person’s head, the branches onto the arms, the trunk onto the body, and so on. It may be argued that the Invariance Principle also applies to metonymy. But here, since metonymies are domain-internal mappings, what is preserved is the basic topological configuration underlying the mapping. Thus, the metonymy from bottle to wine (e.g. He has been drinking bottle after bottle) preserves the structural container-contents relationship of the ‘container’ image schema in such a way that since we think of wine as being held inside a bottle, it is possible to make the bottle stand for the wine in the context of drinking (cf. *He wants to drink another cork, which disrupts the basic container-contents relationship). However, the Invariance Principle is limited to cases of metaphor based on image schemas. In order to cover non-topological metaphors, Ruiz de Mendoza (1998) formulated the Extended Invariance Principle, according to which the generic-level structure of the metaphoric target has to be preserved in a way that is consistent with the generic-level structure of the source. The Extended Invariance Principle applies conceptual consistency constraints to all kinds of high-level structure. Thus, a person’s robustness may find an appropriate correlate in the strength of a tree or of any other object, such as the bodywork of car. In the case of metonymy, the principle applies by preserving the generic-structure configuration of domain-internal relationships; e.g. the controlled-controller relationship between ‘bus-driver’ and ‘bus’ is preserved in The buses are on strike, but not in *The wheels are on strike. The Extended Invariance Principle focuses on adequately correlating source and target elements. Thus, in love is a journey, travelers naturally map onto lovers since both are controlling entities that develop a goal-oriented activity, and the love relationship maps onto a vehicle since both the relationship and the vehicle are ways of achieving the intended aims. Note that the source elements are but role characterizations that need to be realized by specific frame elements. It is here where there is room for potential oddities. Think for example of the infelicity of talking about a relatively unimportant difficulty in the love relationship in terms of a serious physical impediment to motion, such as a ravine or a steep hillside. The Extended Invariance Principle is insufficient to rule out such potential oddities. In order to deal

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with this problem, Ruiz de Mendoza and Santibáñez (2003) have formulated the Correlation Principle, which places constraints on metaphoric mappings on the basis of the implicational structure of source and target elements. Thus, for a metaphoric source element to qualify as the counterpart of an element in the target domain, the source element needs to share the relevant implicational structure of the target element. For example, Our relationship crashed right after takeoff is about a relationship that looked strong and promising, but has been abandoned in a dramatic, unwanted way. The source domain could hardly have a vehicle other than an airplane to yield the right meaning effects. This kind of vehicle is powerful and can cover very long distances in very little time, which readily maps onto the idea that the love relationship was expected to grow strong and achieve success in a comparatively short period of time. But this expectation is thwarted. In its application to metonymy, the Correlation Principle is also active in the selection of the most relevant source domain in terms of its potential to afford access to the intended target domain. In The ham sandwich is waiting for his check, the kind of meal ordered is not the only possible way for the waitress to achieve her referential purpose (cf. The hooked nose/The fur coat/The muddy shoes is waiting for his check) but it is a straightforward, convenient way in the fast food restaurant context. Another relevant principle is the Mapping Enforcement Principle (Ruiz de Mendoza, 2005b), which ensures that no item in the target will be discarded from a mapping system if there is a way to find a corresponding item in the source. Consider the expression He gave John a kick. Lakoff (1993) notes that here an action is seen as a transfer of possession, but the person who figuratively receives the kick does not have it afterwards. For Lakoff, the Invariance Principle would seem to constrain the mapping in such a way that the possession element from the transfer schema has to be discarded since there is no corresponding element in the target. The rest of the Source

Target

giver

kicker

receiver

kickee

object

kick

giving

kicking

possession

effects of kicking

Figure 1. An action is a transfer of possession

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction

target elements seem to have perfect matches in the source: the agent is the giver; the patient is the receiver; and kicking is giving. There is a problem with this account, though, since one of the crucial meaning effects of ‘giving a kick’ is that the person who ‘gets the kick’ is affected by it, i.e. the person does not have the kick but rather the effects of the kick. A solution to this problem is to postulate the existence of a metonymic mapping from ‘kicking’ to the ‘effects of kicking’ (i.e. action for effect of the action) in the target. This metonymy, which is a consequence of the Mapping Enforcement Principle, enables us to preserve the possession element in the metaphoric source (see Figure 1).

4. Metonymic chains The Mapping Enforcement Principle is active not only in the metonymic development of some metaphors but also in the production of double metonymies (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Díez, 2002) also called metonymic chains (Barcelona, 2002: 266). Consider these examples:

(4) I love Proust (‘Proust’s work’) (5) Proust is on the top shelf (‘a book containing Proust’s work’)

In (4) we have a clear case of author for work. In (5), however, even though Proust’s work is involved, this single mapping is insufficient to account for the full semantic import of the expression. We need a second metonymic mapping from Proust’s work to the medium in which it is presented, thus yielding the double metonymy author for work for medium. Since metonymy is based on domain-inclusion relationships where the source may be a subdomain of the target or the target a subdomain of the source (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza, 2000), metonymy consists basically of domain expansion and reduction operations. This allows us to predict four double metonymy types (see Figures 2a–d, p. 40): a. Double domain reduction: Wall Street is in panic. b. Double domain expansion: His sister heads the policy unit. c. Domain reduction and domain expansion: Proust is on the top shelf. d. Domain expansion and domain reduction: He has too much lip.

5. Metaphor, metonymy, and grammar Our discussion of metaphor and metonymy has provided us with a number of analytical tools for understanding meaning construction processes. These tools are re-

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place

action of leading institution

leader/agent people

Figure 2a. place for institution for people

head

Figure 2b. head for leader for leading

action

author work medium/ format

Figure 2c. author for work for medium

instrument

ability

Figure 2b. instrument for action for ability

lated to two crucial areas on enquiry in cognitive modeling: (i) the existence of a high-level of description; (ii) the existence of principles that constrain metaphoric and metonymic activity. The following sections study the way in which these analytical tools bear on the explanation of some instances of how meaning is constructed in grammar on the basis of high-level inferential activity. For reasons of space limitations we will restrict our discussion to the domain of transitivity.

5.1 The action frame and transitivity Following Halliday (1994), we mean by transitivity the area of grammar concerned with types of processes and their relationships with the central participants, attributes and circumstances. We relate this area of grammar to a high-level propositional idealized cognitive model, which we will refer to as the action frame. The structure of this cognitive model has been the object of study of linguistic theories

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction

that take into consideration semantic functions (or roles) (e.g. agent, object, instrument, etc.) and related semantic parameters such as number of participants, kinesis, aspect, punctuality, volition, affectedness of object, among others (cf. Hopper and Thompson 1980). One important assumption of such theories is that, at some level of description, a linguistic expression (to the extent that it sets up relationships between predicates and their arguments) designates a state of affairs that can be assessed in terms of parameters like dynamism, control, telicity, duration, and others. For example, in Dik’s Functional Grammar (Dik 1997), which makes use of some of Vendler’s seminal Aktionsart distinctions (cf. Vendler 1967), actions are defined as dynamic controlled events, to be contrasted with processes, which are dynamic but uncontrolled. Actions are subdivided into activities (non-telic; e.g. John was reading) and accomplishments (telic; e.g. John ran the marathon). Processes may be further subdivided into cases of dynamism (non-telic; e.g. The clock was ticking) or of change (telic; e.g. The apple fell from the tree). However, this kind of description has two limitations. First, it focuses on a classification of modes of action arising from predicate-argument relationships, thus ignoring other complementary perspectives like the intrinsic nature of actors and objects. In addition, in reducing the distinction between actions and processes to just a matter of a mode of action feature (i.e. control), it misses other points of connection and differences between the two event types. We shall deal with each problem in turn. Actions typically have objects that may be of different kinds, depending on the type of action. Thus, in We all ran the marathon, the marathon is the result of a telic action; in The sheriff killed the gunman, the gunman is an affected object; in John spent hours listening to the same music, the music is the experienced object of a controlled activity; in The boss scolded Jim, a controlled accomplishment, Jim is the receiver (and the goal) of the boss’s remarks. Each object type relates to a different mode of controlled action: resultative, effectual, experiential, and communicative. It is thus possible to classify action predications not only from the point of view of telicity, as Dik does, but also by taking into account the nature of the object of the action (see Table 1). Using this additional criterion to classify modes of action has important consequences for understanding high-level metaphoric activity in grammar, as will be evidenced in the next section. Table 1. Object types within two ‘mode of action’ categories Resultative Effectual Experiential Communicative

Activity

Accomplishment

John was painting portraits In Baghdad some groups will kill people for years He was listening to music The boss kept yelling at him

John painted a portrait The sheriff killed the gunman in a split second He listened to our song The boss scolded him twice

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The second problem concerns the difference between actions and processes. It is true that the control element is crucial in drawing the distinction. Thus, because of the control component actions may have beneficiaries, instruments, and intended results or unintended outcomes. Processes do not typically have beneficiaries (e.g. *The wind blows for me; *The tree fell down for me) or instruments e.g. (*The tree fell down with an axe), and a process may have a natural outcome (e.g. if wood catches fire it burns to ashes). According to this description, processes may be regarded as subdomains of an action frame where the “resultative” component is parametrized differently. However, not all kinds of process are subdomains of the action frame. A process can be regarded as part of an action frame only to the extent that it is possible to retrieve an implicit agent (e.g. ‘dying’ may simply happen or it may be a caused event, which is not necessarily the case with sleeping or dreaming). This feature of action frames makes it possible to create metonymic shifts between actions and processes.

5.2 High-level metaphor and transitivity Consider now the following sentences:

(6) Peter kicked John out of the office. (7) Peter laughed John out of the office.

These sentences illustrate the caused-motion construction (cf. Goldberg 1995). The construction conflates the roles of ‘affected object’ and ‘actor’ into one element of structure (“John” in the examples). It also conflates into one single predicate (‘kick,’ ‘laugh’) two predicate values: causing motion and manner of causing motion. However, (7) differs from (6) in that ‘laugh’ has undergone subcategorial conversion from a verb with a prepositional complement (“laugh at someone”) to a purely transitive verb (“laugh someone”). In our view, the conversion process is licensed by a high-level metaphor whereby we partially map one form of transitive structure onto another form of transitive structure. In this metaphor, the source has an ‘effector’ and an ‘affected object’ that map respectively onto a ‘doer’ and an ‘experiencer’ in the target. As a result of this mapping between different ways of construing the ‘actor-goal’ transitive relationship, we understand an action that has no direct effect on the goal participant as if it did have such a direct effect. We may label this metaphor, following our previous classification of object types within modes of action, experiential action is effectual action. . Lack of space prevents a detailed discussion of semantic functions and their labels in connection to the action frame. Note, however, that actors in effectual actions are different from actors in other kinds of action. We refer to the former as “effectors” and to the latter as “doers”.

High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction

The reason why this mapping takes place is a consequence of the constraints imposed by the caused-motion construction, which is operational on the basis of effector-affected object relationships, as in (6), but not of doer-experiencer relationships. Michaelis (2003) has discussed a host of cases of lexical adaptation to constructional requirements in terms of the notion of coercion and the related Override Principle, according to which the meaning of a lexical item conforms to the meaning of the structure in which it is embedded. In the case of ‘laugh’ above, this principle predicts that the arguments of the verb have to be re-construed according to semantic coherence constraints. However, this explanation misses the important fact that the adaptation process is grounded in a high-level metaphor. Thus, the full meaning impact of (7) may not be understood independently of the metaphorical mapping: we understand one form of being affected by an action (as an experiencer) in terms of another form of being affected by an action (as an affected object). This mapping is licensed by the combined activity of the Extended Invariance and Correlation principles. In fact, the possibility of correlating the affected object and the experiencer is enhanced by the fact that both generic-level elements share relevant implicational structure (both are goals of an actor’s action). However, we do not map all possible elements of the transitive structure. The role ‘instrument’ from the source is discarded in accordance with the Extended Invariance Principle since the target domain (the goal-oriented activity of laughing at someone) only requires correspondences for the actor/doer and the goal/experiencer of the action but there is no instrument (cf. *John laughed at Peter with his mouth). Let us now take another case of high-level metaphor within the area of transitivity:

(8) He talked me into it.

Here ‘talk someone (into)’ results from a metaphorically-grounded subcategorial conversion process whereby a goal-directed intransitive expression (‘talk to someone’) is transitivized. In the metaphor (communicative action is effectual action) the receiver of the message is seen as if directly affected by the action of talking rather than as the goal of the message. Noting this correlation is essential to understanding all the meaning implications of the sentence. As with (7), the metaphor in (8) is sensitive to all the principles and constraints that we have identified for metaphor. All relevant target elements, through the application of the Extended Invariance Principle, find corresponding elements in the source: He talked me into it with persuasive words (instrument) just for John’s sake (beneficiary). The receiver-affected object mapping is licensed by the Correlation Principle since both elements are goals of an actor’s action. Finally, in (8) caused motion is metaphorical and maps onto the notion of persuasion (being persuaded is being introduced into a container). This metaphorical process is unrelated to

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the underlying high-level mapping that correlates the receiver and affected object elements. Another possible high-level metaphorical mapping, a (non-effectual) activity is an effectual accomplishment, is illustrated by examples (9) and (10): (9) He drank himself into a stupor daily. (10) She collapsed and laughed herself out to silence. These sentences are examples of the resultative construction. As with caused motion, this construction often forces subcategorial conversion of intransitive and pseudo-transitive verbs into transitive predicates. In (9) the originally intransitive ‘drink’ is understood in terms of a transitive structure of the reflexive actor- object kind, in order to make it compatible with the caused-motion structure underlying the resultative construction. In (10), “laugh (out)” is transitivized differently from (7) since ‘herself ’ is not treated as an affected object but as the object of a change. In resultatives the caused element is the result of a process, whether seen in figurative terms or not. In caused-motion constructions, the caused element is always a process (of going to a different place). Note that ‘talk someone into’ is not a resultative expression, since it focuses on the process of being persuaded rather than on the result of the process. However, ‘drank himself into a stupor’ and ‘laughed herself out to silence’ focus on the resultant state, which is explicitly invoked by the linguistic expression and cues the constructional choice. To conclude this section, consider a more complex example of high-level metaphor, metaphorical communicative action is effectual action, within the domain of transitivity: (11) The speaker addressed a few introductory remarks to the audience. (12) The speaker addressed the audience with a few introductory remarks. As is well known from the literature on constructional alternations, (11) and (12) are alternative forms of construing the same event. Both are metaphorical, each in a different way. While (11) is a case of the low-level communicating is giving metaphor, (12) departs from the construal in (11) to make use of high-level metaphor communicative action is effectual action. The metaphor in (11) is a cultural model about the transmission of meaning that has been explored by cognitive linguists in terms of the so-called conduit metaphor (according to which ideas are objects, words are containers for these objects, and communication is sending and receiving these containers through a conduit; Reddy 1979). As a cultural model, although metaphorical, it may be taken as the default version of how we understand communication. A sentence like (12) is a departure from the default model, which allows us to think of ‘addressed the audience’ as the result of a conversion process in very much the same way as has been postulated for

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examples (7)–(10). Thus, sentence (12) makes use of a purely transitive construction where the audience, which is the goal (seen as receiver) of a communicative action, is metaphorically presented as the affected object of an instrumental action. This has obvious meaning effects: while in (11) the focus is on the members of the audience receiving the remarks, in (12) the focus is upon the effect of the remarks on the audience. There are other alternations within the action frame which we have not explored here whose activity is internal to the effectual action type and do not seem to involve high-level metaphor. Compare, for example, John hit the wall with a stick and John hit a stick against the wall. The second sentence provides us with an alternate construal of the canonical event where someone uses a stick to hit a wall. In the alternate construal the true object of the action (the wall, an affected object) is seen as a targeted location, while the instrument is seen as an object that is moved into contact with the target location. The interpretation of the second sentence may not involve metaphor since “the wall” is actually both the object of the action and also the place where the stick hits.

5.3 High-level metonymy and transitivity There are verbs that can take part in different constructions thus giving rise to constructional alternations, such as the causative-inchoative and the middle alternations (Levin 1993). We now explore the two alternations and argue that they are grounded in high-level metonymy, since they exploit different aspects of the ‘action’ high-level propositional model (or ‘action’ frame). However, high-level metaphor plays no role in the types of subcategorial conversion involved in these constructional alternations. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that these processes are domain-internal. Unlike the case of the conversion of ‘laugh at’ into ‘laugh,’ we are not dealing with two different kinds of transitivity relationship here, but with different (highlighted) aspects of one kind of transitivity. Compare the following sentences, which seem to share some properties while keeping clear differences:

(13) The door closed well thanks to her instructions. (14) This bread cuts easily/well [cf. It is easy/*well to cut this bread]. (15) This soap powder washes whiter. bread cuts. (16) *This *This soap powder washes. (17)

A sentence like This bread cuts easily is usually regarded as a case of the middle construction that can be paraphrased in terms of a preparatory subject structure where the evaluative adverb is converted into a predicative adjective with the anticipat-

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ACTION

PROCESS

Figure 3. process for action

ACTION

PROCESS

RESULT

Figure 4. process for action for result

ed predication under its scope (i.e. It is easy to cut this bread). This kind of analysis would seem to call for an underlying metonymic shift of the process for action kind (Figure 3). However, in The door closed the manner adverb expressing assessment is optional, while in (14) it is compulsory. This suggests that we have completely different processes within the action frame. In order to capture the full range of meaning implications of This bread cuts easily in compliance with the Mapping Enforcement Principle we need to postulate a double metonymy. process for action for result (Figure 4), is based on our previous construal of an action (cutting bread) as if it were a process (the bread “cuts”) that is assessed in terms of the inherent difficulty in achieving a result (the bread gets cut without difficulty). In this complex metonymic shift, the process of getting cut is linguistically presented as central, while the result remains in the domain of implicit meaning. This situation differs slightly from one in which we use the adverb “well” in (14), as revealed by the impossibility of making a paraphrase in terms of the preparatory subject construction (cf. *It is well to cut this bread). The reason for this lies in the fact that this adverb explicitly focuses on the result of the action, while “easily” focuses on the process. The metonymic process is essentially the same, but each adverb gives prominence to a different aspect of the underlying action, as evidenced by the preparatory “it” test. A sentence like This soap powder washes whiter, on the other hand, also exploits the ‘result’ part of the process for action for result metonymy, just like This bread cuts well, but in a different way. While (14) bases its assessment on the properties of the object of the action, in (15) the focus is on the instrument of the action. Note that, whichever the case may be, we assess neither the object nor the instrument but the outcome of acting on the object or of making use of the instrument to perform the action. This kind of analysis has the advantage of emphasizing

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the characteristics that the so-called ‘middle’ and ‘characteristic property of instrument’ constructions have in common. Finally, (16) and (17) are odd because, in the absence of any overt indication that process for action for result is to be invoked, we tend to interpret the predicate in terms of process for action; this interpretation runs counter to intuition since, while it is easy to envisage a door opening without focusing on the agent (e.g. when the wind blows), it is difficult to think of bread or soap powder performing any action by themselves.

6. Conclusion In this chapter we have given evidence that lexical and constructional representations interact in predictable ways and that many of the resulting processes are grounded in high-level metaphor and metonymy, i.e. metaphoric and metonymic operations performed on high-level (or generic) non-situational cognitive models such as action, process, cause, perception, etc. We have discussed some of the constraints that apply to metaphor and metonymy and observed the way in which such constraints allow us to account for a relevant part of the meaning implications of a number of grammatical phenomena, including several cases of subcategorial conversion and constructional alternation. In our discussion it has become evident that high-level metaphor and metonymy regulate the way constructional coercion, as described by Michaelis, overrides lexical meaning in the part of meaning construction that pertains to the adaptation of verbal predicates to generic constructions, such as caused-motion. Such meaning implications are an essential part of meaning construction processes, in the sense given to this term by Panther (2005).

References Barcelona, Antonio. 2002. Clarifying and applying the notions of metaphor and metonymy within Cognitive Linguistics: An update. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds.), 207- 277. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Dik, Simon C. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part 1: The Structure of the Clause (Edited by Kees Hengeveld). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd. ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Hopper, Paul J. and Thompson, Sandra. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56(2): 251–99.

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Kövecses, Zoltán and Radden, Günter. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York NY: Basic Books. Lakoff, George. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought (2nd. ed.), Andrew Ortony (ed.), 202–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Michaelis, Laura. 2003. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, Hubert Cuykens, René Dirven and John R. Taylor (eds), 93–122. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 1999 The potentiality for actuality metonymy in English and Hungarian. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds.), 333–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2000. The effect for cause metonymy in English grammar. In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, Antonio Barcelona (ed.), 215–32. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 2005 The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. In Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and M. Sandra Peña (eds.), 353–86. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Radden, Günter. 2002. How metonymic are metaphors? In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds.), 407–34. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed.), 284–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. and Díez Velasco, Olga. 2002. Patterns of conceptual interaction. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds.), 489–532. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. and Pérez Hernández, Lorena. 2001. Metonymy and the grammar: Motivation, constraints, and interaction. Language and Communication 21: 321– 57. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. and Santibáñez Sáenz, Francisco. 2003. Content and formal cognitive operations in construing meaning. Italian Journal of Linguistics 15(2): 293– 320. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. 1998. On the nature of blending as a cognitive phenomenon. Journal of Pragmatics 30(3): 259–74. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. 2000. The role of mappings and domains in understanding metonymy. In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, Antonio Barcelona (ed.), 109– 32. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. 2005a. High level cognitive models: In search of a unified framework for inferential and grammatical behavior. In Perspectives on Metonymy, Krzysztof Kosecki (ed.). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

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Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. 2005b. Construing meaning through conceptual mappings. In Lengua y Sociedad: Aportaciones Recientes en Lingüística Cognitiva, Lingüística del Corpus, Lenguajes de Especialidad y Lenguas en Contacto, Pedro Fuertes (ed.), 19–38. Valladolid: University of Valladolid. Thornburg, Linda, Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Barcelona, Antonio (eds.). 2006. Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

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chapter 3

The role of metonymy in meaning construction at discourse level A case study* Antonio Barcelona University of Murcia

The process of meaning construction, as understood by Panther and Thornburg (Panther 2005), namely the determination of both explicit and implicit meaning, is to a large extent guided or facilitated by conceptual metonymy. The previously published research of the author of this chapter on the function of metonymy in guiding text-level implicatures has been mostly confined to the study of brief written dialogues. The present chapter reports on a case study dealing with this function of metonymy in a relatively extended portion of a narrative text. The findings in the study confirm the hypothesis that metonymy is also the main conceptual mechanism guiding the implicatures invited by this type of text. The study also shows that the metonymies guiding the implicatures respond to a finite set of generic types. Keywords: cognitive linguistics, conceptual metonymy, discourse-pragmatic inferencing, meaning construction, text-level implicature

1. Introduction Metonymy has been shown to be ubiquitous in language and cognition (Barcelona 2002b; Radden 2005). One of the main areas of language where metonymy is particularly relevant as a “guiding” or “triggering” factor is what has recently been referred to as meaning construction . This notion of meaning construction (Panther 2005: 353, reflecting work by Panther and Thornburg) denotes the pragmatic reasoning processes which lead to the determination of explicit pragmatic meaning (i.e. ‘explicatures’; see Sperber and Wilson 1995: 182) and implicit pragmatic meaning (i.e. conversational implicatures). In this chapter I will present some selected parts of a case study devoted to the investigation of the role of conceptual metonymy in an aspect of meaning construc * The research reported on in this chapter has been funded in part by a grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (McyT) to research project no. BFF2003–07300 (Project leader: Antonio Barcelona).

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tion, namely the derivation of text-level implicatures. This case study is a small part of a much larger, ongoing research project investigating the multilevel operation of metonymy in authentic texts which will include more case studies and analyses (initial results in Barcelona 2005; final results to appear in Barcelona, in preparation). What are here called ‘text-level implicatures’ are implicatures that are instrumental in the reader’s apprehension of the pragmatic connections across several sentences in the text (a written text in this case study) or in the comprehension of the text as a whole, not just of one particular sentence or a part thereof. Some examples of text-level implicatures are those which lead the hearer or reader to identify in the preceding text the antecedent of an anaphorical expression, or those enabling the hearer/reader to identify or hypothesize the purpose of the whole text or text portion, or to anticipate the sort of information provided by the immediately following co-text. Therefore, those implicatures that do not seem to be relevant for the appreciation of text-internal cross-sentence connections or that do not seem to be invited by the text as a whole are not considered text-level implicatures and are not included in the case study. The research hypothesis in the case study is that all or most of the text-level implicatures invited by the text portion chosen for the study will be “guided” or “facilitated,” together with contextual factors and general pragmatic principles, by one or more conceptual metonymies. The hypothesis should not be interpreted as implying that metonymy is the only or even the most important factor triggering the derivation of implicatures. As stated above, metonymy acts in conjunction with contextual factors and with general pragmatic principles (among them, the Relevance Principle and Grice’s maxims). This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 includes the cognitive linguistic notion of metonymy that I adhere to and briefly discusses the relation between metonymy and pragmatic inferencing; Section 3 is devoted to the discussion of the relevant parts of the case study; and Section 4 briefly presents the conclusions.

2. Metonymy Cognitive linguists regard metonymy as a cognitive mechanism (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff 1987), not merely as a figure of speech, as claimed by traditional rhetoric, nor as a mere “contextual effect,” as claimed by relevance theorists (Papafragou 1996). However, there is not a uniform notion of metonymy in modern linguistics, not even within cognitive linguistics (the general theoretical framework which I follow), and this is why it is necessary to clarify this notion. Some cognitive linguists (e.g. Croft 1993) seem to require every metonymy to be connected

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to an act of reference, whereas for most others (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), metonymy is primarily referential, which implies that there can also be non-referential metonymies. Most explicit or implicit definitions of metonymy regard it as a mapping within the same domain (Lakoff and Turner 1989). Some others (Langacker 1993; Kövecses and Radden 1998) instead draw attention to the fact that the source provides “mental access to” or “activates” the target. As we can see, the term ‘metonymy’ is used in cognitive linguistics to cover some very different phenomena, but all cognitive linguists agree on stressing its primarily conceptual nature. It would take a long article to discuss at length the particular variants of this basic conceptual approach to metonymy that are found in the cognitive linguistic literature (see Barcelona 2003a). Given the limitation of space, I will only present and briefly discuss here my own cognitive-linguistic notion of metonymy – schematic metonymy –, which is the type of metonymy exhibiting the properties that, in my view, must be shared by every metonymy: Metonymy is an asymmetrical mapping of a conceptual domain, the source, onto another domain, the target. Source and target are in the same functional domain and are linked by a pragmatic function, so that the target is mentally activated. (Barcelona 2001, 2002a: 246)

The first point to note is that metonymy does not have to be referential. Examples of non-referential metonymies have often been noted in the literature. The term mental activation means that the source is a reference point providing mental access to the target (Langacker 1993; Kövecses and Radden 1998). Mapping refers to the fact that the source domain is connected to the target domain by imposing a perspective on it, not by projecting its structure onto it, as in metaphor. The mapping in metonymy is unidirectional and asymmetrical, whereas the one in metaphor is unidirectional and symmetrical. By “symmetrical” I mean that each element in the source plays a role that is structurally equivalent to the one played by its counterpart in the target. Functional domain (Barcelona n.d., 2002a, 2003a) is equivalent to Fillmore’s (1985) term frame and to Lakoff ’s (1987) term icm (Idealized Cognitive Model). . As Kövecses and Radden (1998) have pointed out, we often find reverse metonymies; but this does not mean that in a given metonymy the mapping proceeds simultaneously in both directions. . In the sentence Picasso is not easy to understand, picasso’s artistic work is a metonymic target, and its activation is carried out from the source picasso, in his role as artist, with the result that the hearer/reader is invited to conceptualize this artistic work primarily as the outcome of Picasso’s artistic genius — as an extension of his personality — other aspects of this work being backgrounded (more details in Barcelona 2003a). But the conceptual structure of the source, picasso, is not systematically and symmetrically projected via this metonymy onto that of the target (as in conceptual metaphor) so that, for example, the artist’s head would correspond to an aspect of his work, his brain to another aspect, etc.

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As regards the term pragmatic function, it designates a fundamental property of metonymy, namely the fact that the source maps onto, and activates, the target in virtue of the experiential (hence pragmatic) link between the roles each of them performs in the same functional domain. This is why Fauconnier (1997: 11) regards metonymy as a “pragmatic function mapping.” A pragmatic function (term borrowed from Fauconnier 1997) is a strong built-in experiential connection between roles in a frame or icm (cause-effect, author-work, agent-action, etc.). In Barcelona (2003a), a set of additional specific definitions (which, for lack of space, cannot be discussed here) are proposed for the other general kinds of metonymy represented by each of the various different phenomena which are covered by the above schematic definition. This is still a very broad definition of metonymy that would cover prototypical, or at least other undoubted instances of metonymy, as well as other less central, even “marginal,” instances of it. The metonymies operating in the area of meaning construction investigated in the present chapter (textlevel implicature) are all, however, undoubted, uncontroversial instances of metonymy, as will be evident from the ensuing discussion. The role of metonymy in discourse-pragmatic inferencing has already been studied by a number of cognitive linguists, though much more still has to be done. Lakoff ’s (1987: 78–9) discussion of the role of metonymy in certain conversational conventions of Ojibwa and English was one of the earliest contributions in this direction. Gibbs (1994: Chapter 7 and this volume) reviews the psychological reality of the role of metonymy in a number of inferential phenomena such as conceptual anaphors, conceptual tautologies, the mental reconstruction of texts previously read or heard, indirect speech acts, interpretation and reasoning in terms of eponymous verb phrases, film, drama and art conventions and techniques, even literary styles, like that of most nineteenth-century historians, which, according to him, can be defined as metonymic. Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg are the two cognitive linguists that have devoted the most attention in the past decade to the role of metonymy in various types of pragmatic inferencing. Apart from their important papers on the issue (e.g. Panther and Thornburg 1998; Thornburg and Panther 1997), they have recently edited an important collection of essays devoted to this topic (Panther and Thornburg 2003). In that volume, the essay by Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez Hernández (2003) argues that metonymic mappings are activated in explicature derivation, and the one by Barcelona (2003b; see also Barcelona 2002b and 2005) investigates the pervasive operation of metonymy in the triggering of implicatures. . As claimed in Barcelona (2002a, 2003a), metonymy is a prototype category in which peripheral and non-prototypical instances occupy various positions on a continuum linking them to prototypical instances. See Peirsman and Geeraerts (2006), for a different prototype view of metonymy.

Metonymy in discourse-level meaning construction

3. Discussion of some relevant parts of the case study 3.1 Goal and methodology As anticipated in the introduction, I present below some selected parts of a case study investigating the role of conceptual metonymy in one aspect of meaning construction, namely the derivation of text-level implicatures throughout a relatively long portion of a text. In a few recent papers, I reported on studies where I had found that metonymy regulated all the implicatures required for the comprehension of brief written renderings of conversational exchanges consisting of two brief, normally one-sentence utterances (see the studies reported in Barcelona 2003b, 2002b, 2005). But a natural question was whether this metonymic guidance of implicature is only restricted to brief written dialogues or whether it also occurs in other types of written discourse, especially in longer texts. In the present chapter, the text-level implicatures invited by the various sentences in a relatively extended piece of discourse (namely, a six-sentence paragraph of a long written narrative text) are examined carefully with the purpose of checking the correctness of the research hypothesis mentioned in Section 1, namely, that all or most of the text-level implicatures invited by this longer piece of discourse can also be claimed to be “guided,” together with contextual factors and general pragmatic principles, by one or more conceptual metonymies. Given space limitation, I can only present a detailed discussion of the metonymic guidance or facilitation of some of the implicatures invited by the portion selected for the analysis (see below). The methodology applied in the investigation consisted in the following steps: 1. First a text was chosen at random from a number of texts gathered by a colleague in my research group (http://www.um.es/~lincoing) for a different purpose (the study of spatial language). This particular text had not yet been analyzed by me or by anyone else for that nor for any other purpose. This choice was made to avoid the bias that would result from choosing a text already used previously by me or by someone else to investigate metonymy. 2. Within the text, I arbitrarily chose, before even reading it, the very first paragraph as the portion to be subjected to the study. Again, the aim was to avoid selecting a text portion already known to be rich in metonymy. . Therefore, contrary to the views expressed by one of my anonymous reviewers, this chapter is a cognitive-linguistic exercise, and not simply an essay in text linguistics, because its main thrust is the identification and characterization not just of the inferences invited by the text, but also, and fundamentally, of the conceptual metonymies guiding these inferences. The study of conceptual metonymyis a fundamental aspect of cognitive linguistics, since conceptual metonymy is here regarded as a basic cognitive mechanism.

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3. I then read that portion, the rest of the text and the contextual information on the purpose of the text (namely that it is a hiking report intended as a guide for prospective hikers), which is provided in the website from which it had been downloaded. 4. I made a list of the text-level implicatures that seemed to me to be invited by the portion. 5. Following a suggestion by an anonymous reviewer, I then conducted a small informal experiment in which I asked a group of seven native speakers of English to confirm or reject these inferences, in order to leave out those inferences that may be due to the fact that I am not a native speaker of English, or to other highly subjective factors. The purpose was to examine only implicatures that most native speakers of English reading the same text might have drawn, too. The experiment is included in the second section of the appendix. 6. Finally, I analyzed the implicatures selected in order to find out whether or not they could have been guided by one or more metonymies (in conjunction with general pragmatic principles and contextual factors). The presentation of some of the results of this analysis constitutes the bulk of this section (sub-section 3.3).

3.2 Text under analysis As stated above, the case study is concerned with the analysis of the first paragraph of an authentic narrative-descriptive text randomly chosen from the web (http:// hikingincolorado.org/beth.html). In order to facilitate later cross-reference, I have added a number in square brackets to each of the sentences in the first paragraph, which is reproduced below with no further additions or deletions on my part: [1] If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel. [2] Several miles (???) before approaching the exit for Hwy. 6 which leads to Loveland Pass you will see a pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate. [3] This roadway icon stands out like a sore thumb (cliché ?) due to it’s prominence and near perfect triangular shape. [4] As you pass the base of this peak on the highway you will notice two very steep avalanche chutes which lead directly to the summit. [5] This is the route I chose for my ascent. [6] I pulled off the highway to begin my hike from where it looked as though there once may have been a parking area at the base of the western-most avalanche chute and well off the highway right-of-way.

The complete text is reproduced in the Appendix exactly as it appears on the web. The text initiated by this paragraph is a report of a trip to a Colorado mountain with the purpose of hiking on it. The text forms part of a series of reports on . However, no presumption of the existence of a completely predictable set of implicatures derivable from one and the same text portion underlies this experiment (see Brown and Yule 1983: 266 against such a presumption). It is simply meant to avoid taking into account those inferences that none or only very few native speakers would draw.

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similar trips to other Colorado mountains, available at http://hikingincolorado.org. This series is intended as a source of information for prospective hikers in the area. Therefore, the reader of this text can expect it to be about Mt Bethel (which figures prominently in the title of the report), to situate geographically this mountain and at least the beginning of the hiking route, to provide a brief description of the shape and general appearance of the mountain and, of course, to provide a story of the arrival and the subsequent hiking experience of the narrator. In this trip report, the mountain and the initial point of the hiking route are situated geographically for the reader throughout the first four sentences in the first paragraph. This is done indirectly, in the form of a brief set of arrival instructions which guide the reader on a mental highway journey to the hiking area. That is, sentence 1 situates the reader in a mental westbound journey on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Rocky Mountains, which continues through sentences 2, 3 and 4 of the first paragraph. The rest of the report, from sentence (5) onwards, is a direct narrative of the actual hiking experience combined with the description, when relevant, of several features of the area.

3.3 The implicatures and the metonymies guiding them The text-level implicatures drawn on the basis of my own reading are listed below, enclosed in double quotation marks. They are grouped in terms of the sentences that (I believe) invite their derivation. The results of the informal experiment referred to in Section 3.1 are presented next to each implicature by indicating its confirmation ratio (e.g. a 6:1 ratio means that six subjects confirmed the implicature and that one did not confirm it; a 7:0 ratio means that all subjects confirmed the implicature). Only those implicatures confirmed by at least six native speakers or implicit in another implicature accepted by six native speakers were selected for analysis. This eliminates six of the implicatures that I had drawn on the basis of my own reading of the passage; they are also listed below. Before actually discussing the role of metonymy in the derivation of these implicatures, I would like to emphasize once more the fact that metonymy is by no means the only major factor involved in implicature. A fundamental factor which cooperates with metonymy and with general pragmatic principles (such as Rele. This mental journey may be entirely imaginary, if the reader has never actually traveled on that route, or it may consist of the invitation to recollect an earlier real journey undertaken by the reader on the same freeway between Denver and the Rockies (this mountain range is metonymically referred to as the Continental Divide). . This is the case with implicature c of sentence 1, which is implicit in implicature d of the same sentence (see below).

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vance) to invite these implicatures is knowledge of the nature and the topic of the text (Graesser, Wiemer-Hastings and Wiemer-Hastings 2001). This knowledge creates a number of expectations that facilitate the operation of pragmatic principles and metonymy in the reader’s derivation of certain implicatures, even from a small stretch of language. These expectations very often include those concerning the author’s communicative intentions (Gibbs 1999: Ch. 7). Another obvious facilitating factor is the preceding co-text.

3.3.1 Sentence 1 (If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel). This discourse-initial sentence is particularly important because it invites implicatures that reflect the main expectations regarding the kind of information to be provided by the rest of the text. These implicatures seem to be connected to each other, so that the first one seems to invite the second one and so forth. Therefore, while I will be able to include in this chapter only some of the implicatures derived from the rest of the text portion subjected to this study the discussion of the metonymic basis of all of these implicatures in the first sentence has been included in it. (a) “Mt Bethel is located somewhere close to Interstate 70.” Confirmation rate: 6:1. The writer states that if Traveler (T) has driven west from Denver to the Continental Divide on Interstate 70 (I–70), this is sufficient condition for concluding that T has seen Mt Bethel (MB), while driving along I–70. On the basis of this statement, the reader can draw the further inference (which is the inference the writer actually expects to suggest) that MB lies somewhere close to I–70. On what basis does the reader arrive at this inference? On the basis of his experiential knowledge of the seeing frame, which contains this “knowledge unit”: “For Viewer V (= T) to see Percept P (= MB) from the Viewer’s Vantage Point VP (= some point on I–70), P must be visible by V from VP. The basic condition for its visibility is that P should be relatively close to VP.”

An event for precondition metonymy, operating within the seeing frame on the basis of this knowledge unit, seems to trigger this part of the inference: v seeing p (event) for p being relatively close to vp (precondition). In other words, the fact that traveler/viewer T has seen percept MB activates the precondition that percept MB must be relatively close to T’s vantage point, I–70. That is, Mt Bethel must be relatively close to Interstate 70 for the reader (which is the imaginary traveler/ viewer) to be able to see it. . The insistence on the use of the modifier relatively in this case is due to the common knowledge that certain geographical features that are seen as being close may actually be very far from the viewer in terms of travelling distance; however, in these cases, they are necessarily close enough to be visible.

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(b) “A description of Mt Bethel may be coming up.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. This inference is certainly facilitated by the reader’s awareness of the nature of the text initiated by this sentence. A natural expectation in this kind of texts is that the mountain appearing in the title of the hiking report will be the mountain where the hiking experience took place and that some description of its relevant features will be provided by the ensuing text. Therefore, the mention of Mt Bethel in the very first sentence does not simply implicate that this mountain has general, undifferentiated relevance for the rest of the text: the type of text already creates a strong bias as to what to expect from it. Apart from this general textual basis, implicature (b) is guided by a cause for effect metonymy whereby the conventional introduction to a description (initial event/cause) activates an expectation of the actual description (subsequent event/effect). A frequent, conventional way of announcing or introducing the actual description of an entity or event is to mention a perceptual experience of it. Examples are:

(1) I have seen Mt Bethel. It’s an interesting place. It has a perfect pyramid shape. Have you ever met Mary Smith? Oh, she’s the most attractive girl I’ve ever met. You would fall in love with her immediately. You have probably seen Mt Bethel. It’s a pyramid-shaped peak.

In these examples, the speaker first mentions to his/her addressee a real or imaginary perceptual experience of an entity, thus indirectly announcing the ensuing description of that entity, which will normally follow. This conventional introduction to the act of description thus causes and activates the expectation that the immediately following discourse units may include the actual description of the entity or event involved. In the text introduced by the sentence under analysis, the description of a number of identifying features of Mt Bethel is actually provided by sentences 2, 3 and 4. (c) “A series of travel or arrival instructions to Mt Bethel may be coming up.” Confirmation rate: 5:2. This implicature was only confirmed by five informants, but since it is implicit in implicature (d), which was accepted by six subjects, I have kept it as a valid inference. It is based on inferences (a) and (b) via metonymy and is also facilitated by the reader’s awareness of the type of text. By means of inference (a), the reader realizes that the first sentence provides a rough geographical location of Mt Bethel. By means of inference (b), the more or less conscious expectation is created in the reader that some description of Mt Bethel may be coming up. These two actions (namely, providing a rough geographical location of the destination and a general

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description of it) are two important elements in any regular set of travel instructions. But these are not the only typical travel instructions indirectly provided by this sentence. The general travel route is also provided (westwards on Interstate 70 from Denver on the route to the Rockies) and the transport means is suggested (a motor vehicle, probably a car). All of these elements constitute the “preliminary travel information” section of what might be called the travel instructions frame. The ideal travel instructions frame contains at least the following basic types of instructions: a. preliminary travel information 1. Information on the general geographical location and a general description of the destination. 2. Instructions for choosing the correct general route. 3. Instructions for choosing the right means of transport. b. instructions for the central part of the journey 1. Instructions for initiating the journey. 2. Instructions for following the set route (which include taking into account important road signs, specific features of the area leading to the destination, etc.). c. instructions for the final part of the journey 1. Instructions for identifying the destination when approaching it and for accessing it. 2. Instructions for leaving the vehicle. The preliminary travel information section, as a salient part, is capable of metonymically evoking the whole travel instructions frame (part of frame for whole frame). This metonymy, thus, guides inference (c), again in cooperation with the reader’s awareness of the nature of the text. (d) “These travel instructions may be given in order to locate exactly the point at which the hiking experience reported in this text began.” Confirmation rate: 6:1. This overall inference may arise in the reader’s mind right after reading sentence 1, or it may arise later, perhaps after some or all of the remaining arrival instructions are given throughout the first paragraph of the text. Anyway, it is quite likely to arise right after reading sentence 1, given the reader’s knowledge of the nature of the text, which, as a guide for prospective hikers, already creates the strong expectation that the exact point where the hiking began is the specific destination of the mental journey on Interstate 70 and that this point will be located exactly for the reader (it is actually located explicitly by sentence 5 in conjunction with sentence 4). This expectation is activated and reinforced metonymically by the first sentence.

Metonymy in discourse-level meaning construction

The use of an imaginary journey to Mt Bethel is an indirect strategy used to deliver a set of instructions for traveling to Mt Bethel. In the typical hiking report, the travel or arrival instructions are supposed to guide the reader to the initial point of the hiking route. By virtue of the metonymic connection between an action and its usual purpose, the mental activation of the action may lead to the mental activation of the purpose. Thus, the metonymy giving travel instructions (action) for guiding the traveler to the exact starting point of the hike (purpose) triggers, within what might be called the hiking report frame, the inference under discussion. The rest of the first paragraph, being longer, invites a larger number of text-level implicatures. Nearly all of these implicatures are directly guided or at least facilitated by metonymy. I will only have enough space to comment in some detail on the metonymic guidance/facilitation of a handful of the implicatures confirmed by my native speaker informants, and simply to indicate the metonymic basis of the rest. It must be borne in mind that, though partly guided or facilitated by metonymy, each of these implicatures also builds on those invited by previous sentences and is also facilitated by the awareness of the type of text.

3.3.2 Sentence 2 (Several miles (?) before approaching the exit for Hwy. 6 which leads to Loveland Pass you will see a pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate) (a–1) “The writer assumes that I (the reader) know and/or must be able to identify the location on Interstate 70 of the exit for Highway 6 which leads to Loveland Pass.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. This implicature is mainly based on a grammatical clue (the definiteness of the NP the exit [. . .] Loveland Pass). Therefore, it is apparently not guided by metonymy. (a–2) “The writer instructs me to travel mentally along Interstate 70 to the exit for Highway 6 and then to travel mentally back from this point for several miles.” Confirmation rate: 3:4. Rejected. (a–3) “The pyramid-shaped peak is probably very close to the endpoint of this backward path.” Confirmation rate: 3:4. Rejected. (a–4)

“The peak that has been described as a pyramid-shaped peak is probably Mt Bethel.” Confirmation rate: 7:0.

. However, the mention of Loveland Pass as the endpoint of a trajectory may be argued to constitute a metonymic reference point facilitating the activation (for those readers that have some knowledge of the area) of the initial point of the trajectory, namely the exact location of the entry to Highway 6.

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This inference seems to be guided in part by the metonymic connection between a peak and a mountain. One of the major senses of the noun peak is “the pointed top of a mountain” (Oxford English Dictionary, henceforth abbreviated as OED, first part of sense 5 in the entry for this noun). A metonymic extension from this sense (also registered by the OED in the second part of sense 5) is “a mountain or hill having a more or less pointed summit, or of conical form.” Both senses are also registered in Webster’s. In sentence 2, it is not clear which of these two senses is being activated, but, in neutral contexts, basic senses (the “summit sense” in this case) are normally activated in preference to extended senses. If so, this activation is in turn the source for the metonymic activation of the mountain notion. That is, peak, as a part, metonymically activates mountain, as the whole. This metonymy is chained to another metonymy: category (mountain) for (contextually salient) member (mt bethel). The hypothetical identification between the pyramidshaped peak and Mt Bethel is thus guided in part by a metonymic chain: peak for mountain for mount bethel. This metonymic chain is prompted or at least facilitated by the text type (a mountain-hiking report) and by the previous sentence, where Mt Bethel has been mentioned. Further down in the text, in sentence 4, the noun peak is clearly used in the extended sense, i.e., as referring to a mountain with a pointed top. This sense is primed by the linguistic context, specifically the words As you pass the base of this peak on the highway. A driver cannot normally drive on a highway going by the base of the summit of a mountain, but he can quite frequently drive by the base (the foot) of a mountain. Therefore, the initial metonymy-based provisional inference that the pyramid shaped peak mentioned in sentence 2 is Mt Bethel is further reinforced in sentence 4. This reinforcement is also the result of the anaphorical connections between this peak (sentence 4), this roadway icon (sentence 3), and a pyramid shaped peak (sentence 2); some of these anaphorical connections are also facilitated in part by metonymy, as we see below in our comment on sentence 4. The valid inferences in the series (a–1)-(a–4) jointly lead to overall inference (a): (a) “The series of travel instructions continues, apparently with the purpose of locating exactly the point in Mt Bethel at which the hiking experience reported in this text began.” Confirmation rate: 6:1. This implicature builds on the two previous implicatures (a–1) and (a–4). It is guided in part by the metonymy part of frame for whole frame. The “Instructions for following the set route” section (represented here by the instructions for paying attention to the reference point consisting of the exit for Highway 6 (a–1)) and the “Instructions for identifying the destination” part (represented by the clues implicitly given to identify Mt Bethel (a–4)) are two sequential parts of the travel instruction frame (see above), both capable of evoking it.

Metonymy in discourse-level meaning construction

Overall inference (a) leads (in my own reading) to overall inference (b): (b) “If so, the description of Mt Bethel begins now.” Confirmation rate: 3:4. Rejected.10

3.3.3 Sentence 3 (This roadway icon stands out like a sore thumb (cliché’) due to it’s prominence and near perfect triangular shape.) (a) “The roadway icon is the pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate.” Confirmation rate: 6:0.11 The sentence is connected to the preceding sentence, among other links, by means of the anaphorical noun phase This roadway icon, so that the reader automatically infers that this noun phrase refers to the same entity as the indefinite noun phrase a pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate in the previous sentence. The inference of this co-referential anaphorical connection is thus not fundamentally metonymy-guided. However, this roadway icon, without any further contextual support, might in principle also refer to other closely preceding NPs: the exit for Hwy. 6 which leads to Loveland Pass; Loveland Pass; and Hwy 6 – these might all in principle be metaphorically treated as “roadway icons.” The co-reference with a pyramid shaped peak is confirmed by the mention of two properties which metonymically activate the pyramid notion: salient property (triangular shape) for category (pyramid) and salient property (prominence) for category (icons). (b) “You can’t help noticing this peak.”12 Confirmation rate: 6:0. This implicature is invited by the sentence as a whole, and necessitates the previous identification of the peak just north of the Interstate as the referent of the NP this roadway icon. Therefore, it depends on the previous implicature invited by this sentence, namely (a). 10. One of the subjects entered a “???” symbol in this and in other YES slots for other inferences (see the relevant appendix), probably to indicate hesitation or surprise. These reactions are counted as disconfirmations of the implicature. 11. One of the subjects (distinct from the one entering ???) left blank the answer slots for the implicatures corresponding to sentence 3. He probably overlooked them, because he filled out all the slots for the implicatures derived from other sentences. This fact explains why the confirmation rates for the implicatures derived from this sentence affect six and not seven subjects. 12. According to one of my anonymous reviewers, a very similar implicature might also be invited by the first sentence, which, according to him, implicates that Mt Bethel is such a salient landmark that, if one travels west along Interstate 70 between Denver and the Rockies, one cannot help noticing it. Unfortunately, I had not realized this possible inference and did not test it with my informants. But if that reviewer were right, then that inference would now be reinforced by sentence 3 via implicature (b).

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Implicature (b) is prompted by the attribution of the property prominent to this peak. The explicit attribution of this property is first carried out metaphorically by means of the fixed expression (which the author himself regards as a cliché) ‘stand out like a sore thumb’ and later literally by means of the expression thanks to it’s [sic]13 prominence and near perfect triangular shape. A prominent physical entity (irrespective of the dimension in which it is prominent) constitutes the “figure” in contrast with its physical environment, which constitutes the “ground” (Langacker 1987: 120–2). As such, it is very likely to be noticed (i.e. to be both perceived and consciously focused on) by an outside observer situated at a convenient vantage point (Langacker 1987: 123–6). There exists, then, a strong causal link between the prominence of an object and its very high likelihood (which in fact amounts to inevitability) of being noticed. When the assertion that entity X is prominent implicates that it is very likely, in fact inevitable, that it will be noticed, this implicature may be said to be facilitated by a metonymy: prominence of an entity (cause) for high likelihood for the entity to be noticed (effect). A consequence of this inference is the further provisional inference that the reader–imaginary traveler cannot help noticing Mt Bethel on the one hand due to the provisional identification of this mountain with the “pyramid shaped peak,” on the basis of sentence 2 (implicature a–4), and, on the other hand, the provisional identification of the “pyramid shaped peak” with the “roadway icon,” on the basis of sentence 3 (implicature a). (c) “The description of Mt Bethel apparently carries on.” Confirmation rate: 3:3. Rejected.

3.3.4 Sentence 4 (As you pass the base of this peak on the highway you will notice two very steep avalanche chutes which lead directly to the summit.) (a) “The words this roadway icon definitely refer to the same thing as the words a pyramid shaped peak.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. The anaphorical noun phrase this peak confirms the identification of the referent of the NP this roadway icon in sentence 3 with the referent of the NP a pyramid shaped peak occurring in sentence 2, which had in turn been provisionally identified with the referent of the NP Mt Bethel occurring in sentence 1. The immediate grammat13. The implicature that the writer is a less educated person is invited exclusively by the wrong spelling of the determiner ‘its’. This implicature does not seem to be relevant for the appreciation of text-internal cross-sentence connections nor does it seem to be invited by the text as a whole. Therefore it is not a text-level implicature and for this reason it has not been included in this study. The important role of metonymy in this and other sentence-internal implicatures in this passage is studied in Barcelona (2005) and in Barcelona (in preparation).

Metonymy in discourse-level meaning construction

ical antecedent of this peak (metonymically a mountain) is this roadway icon. The anaphorical connection this peak – this roadway icon hinges not only on the use of the anaphorical definite determiner this, but also on the use of the term base, which metonymically evokes the notion of a triangle (part for whole). Since the “roadway icon” had been said to be triangular, talking now about the base of this peak-mountain implies that this peak-mountain is triangular and confirms that it is the same “thing” as the “roadway icon,” which had been said in sentence 3 to be triangular. Thus, the initial identification of the “roadway icon” with the “pyramid shaped peak” is now fully confirmed. (b) “The avalanche chutes are located on the mountain topped by this peak.” Confirmation rate: 6:1. This implicature has been treated as a text-level implicature because the avalanche chutes are mentioned again in sentence 6 and the identification of their location with respect to the peak mentioned earlier in the text affects the overall comprehension of the passage, not just of sentence 4. The inference is connected to the metonymic sense “mountain” of the lexeme peak and it is guided in part by two metonymies. Many mountains, especially very high ones, have avalanche chutes, which thus constitute a salient element that can metonymically activate the notion of a mountain: avalanche chute (salient part) for mountain (whole). A similar metonymy, prompted by the word summit, connects summit (salient part) to mountain (whole). Both metonymies activate the only mountain available in the immediate discourse space as the only likely location of the avalanche chutes: the mountain topped by the pyramid shaped peak, provisionally identified with Mt Bethel. Thus it can also be provisionally concluded that the avalanche chutes are located in Mt Bethel.

3.3.5 Sentence 5 (This is the route I chose for my ascent). (a) “The story of the writer’s climbing of the mountain may be about to begin.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. This inference is grounded on the statement that the writer chose the route consisting of the avalanche chutes anaphorically referred to by this. If a person tells someone else who has not asked specifically about it which route he chose to climb a mountain, he normally does so because he intends to tell his interlocutor the whole story of his ascent. The implicature is thus guided by the metonymy action (telling someone the route chosen for the ascent) for typical purpose (telling the story of the ascent). And, given the connection between the typical initial part of a story and the whole story, another metonymy probably also leading to the implicature is salient initial subevent (telling the route chosen for

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the ascent) for complex event (telling the whole story of the ascent) (Kövecses and Radden 1998: 52). (b) “The writer intended to climb the peak immediately and he actually climbed it.” Confirmation rate: 5:2. Rejected. (c) “The peak is now definitely confirmed to be Mt Bethel.” Confirmation rate: 6:1. The initial inference drawn from sentence 2 that identified the “pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate” with Mt Bethel had received additional support from further inferences drawn from sentences 3 and 4. Sentence 5 definitively confirms this initial guess. Curiously enough, the name Mt Bethel is encountered, apart from the title, only once in the whole report, namely in sentence 1. If the text is, as stated in the web page frame, formally a report on a hike in Mt Bethel and if the author has been telling us that it is easy to get to Mt Bethel, and that at a certain point of our imaginary journey on Interstate 70 we will see a certain peak with certain features, etc... why should he bother to begin to tell us the story of his ascent to this peak if this peak were not actually Mt Bethel, i.e. the mountain that, according to the title of the hiking report, is the object of the hike? In other words, we apply the Principle of Relevance here to conclude that the mention of the writer’s past intention to climb the peak can only be relevant to the discourse topic if this peak is actually Mt Bethel. The inference is, then, prompted by this pragmatic principle. But the application of this principle is doubtless guided or at least facilitated by the metonymic connection between an event (an action in this case, namely, telling the story of a mountain hike) and its normal precondition, namely that the object of the hike can safely be identified as the mountain announced in the title of the report and in sentence 1: Mt Bethel. This metonymy may be called event for precondition. (d) “The earlier inference that these travel instructions are given in order to locate precisely the point on Mt Bethel at which the hiking experience reported in this text began is now confirmed or at least greatly reinforced.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. The confirmation by sentence 5 that the peak is Mt Bethel, and the information provided by this sentence that the hike followed a certain route on Mt Bethel (the two very steep avalanche chutes) jointly confirm the earlier implicature arrived at after sentence 1 that the travel instructions provided in the initial paragraph obey the purpose of (mentally) situating the reader at the exact point in Mt Bethel where the hiking experience began. This overall implicature is not directly guided by metonymy, but it is based on other implicatures which are guided or facilitated by metonymy. The exact point on Mt Bethel (i.e. the precise point on one of the avalanche chutes) from which the

Metonymy in discourse-level meaning construction

hike began is specified in sentence 6 and in the second paragraph.

3.3.6 Sentence 6 (I pulled off the highway to begin my hike from where it looked as though there once may have been a parking area at the base of the westernmost avalanche chute and well off the highway right-of-way.) (a) “The writer got out of the vehicle in which he was traveling.” Confirmation rate: 5:2. Rejected. (b) “The story of the writer’s hike to the summit definitely begins now.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. The description of the place where the writer pulled off the highway and got off the car14 to begin his climb (“hike”) announces the story of the rest of the climb. This inference is guided by the metonymy sub-event (describing the place where he pulled off the highway and got out of the car in order to begin the hike) for subsequent complex event (telling the whole story of the climb). (c) “The purpose of this story is to provide a set of instructions for hiking in Mt Bethel.” Confirmation rate: 7:0. The inference occurs against the background of what might be called the mountain hiking instructions icm/frame. This cognitive model, like the travel instructions frame, has a number of basic parts (instructions for choosing at least an initial route for the hiking, instructions for getting to the initial point of that route, instructions for starting the hike, information on the obstacles and difficulties along the route and instructions to surmount them, information about the final destination of the hike and how to solve any possible problems there, and instructions for leaving the hiking area and getting to the initial point of the trip back home). Given the circumstances affecting the ascent reported in this text, which required the hiker to travel in a motor car to the hiking area, the “instructions for getting to the initial point of that route” include instructions on where to park the vehicle so as to be able to walk to the initial point of the hike. The mention of two of the sets of instructions included in the frame acts as a metonymic source for the whole frame. The instructions mentioned are those regarding where to park and leave the car and those for starting the hike (it should begin at the base of the western-most avalanche chute). The metonymy at work is part of a frame for the whole frame. 14. Surprisingly, this implicature (implicature (a) from this sentence) was confirmed by only five informants. Though implicit in implicature (b), I have not discussed its metonymic basis here for lack of space. It may described as initial sub-event (driving the car out of the highway) for whole event sequence (stopping or causing someone else to stop the vehicle and getting out of it)

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From sentence 6 onwards, the rest of the story can be interpreted in part as delivering the rest of the set of instructions required by the mountain hiking frame.

3.4 Main metonymic types encountered in the study An interesting observation is the recurrence of certain generic types of conceptual metonymies as guides or facilitators of textual implicatures. In the present case study, these types are: event for precondition (imp (“implicature”) a, st (“sentence”) 1; imp c, st 5), cause for effect (imp b, st 1; imp b, st 3), part for whole (imp c, st 1; imp a–4, st 2; imp a, st 2; imp a, st 4; imp b, st 4; imp a, st 5; imp b, st 6; imp c, st 6), action for purpose (imp d, st 1; imp a, st 5), category for member (imp a–4, st 2), salient property for category (imp a; st 3). As can be seen, some of these generic types operate more than once even in the derivation of implicature in just one paragraph. In my earlier studies (Barcelona 2002b, 2003b, 2005), I have observed similar patterns of recurrence, not only in implicature derivation, but also in other types of meaning construction. The existence of all of these metonymies can be justified on independent grounds. They have been attested (under the same or a similar label, and either at a lexical-semantic level or at other levels) in my own published work on metonymy (e.g. Barcelona 2003b, 2005) and also in that of many other authors (e.g. Kövecses and Radden 1998; Fass 1997; Panther and Thornburg 2003).

4. Conclusions In this chapter, evidence has been presented for the fundamental role of metonymy in text-level implicature derivation. As stated in section 1, the research hypothesis of the case study reported in this chapter is that all or most of the text-level implicatures invited by the text portion chosen for the study are “guided” or “facilitated,” along with contextual factors and general pragmatic principles, by one or more conceptual metonymies; in other words, that metonymy is a fundamental factor in this type of meaning construction. Besides testing this hypothesis, another goal of the study was to investigate whether the ubiquitous role of metonymy in the derivation of textual implicatures that I had found in my previous studies of brief twosentence dialogues also occurred in a comparatively extended piece of narrative discourse like the text portion in this study. Both hypotheses have been fully confirmed by the present case study. Out of 16 textual implicatures confirmed by my informants, 14 can be claimed to be guided by metonymy, always in cooperation with general pragmatic principles, with the co-text, and with the reader’s awareness of the nature of the text. I had found in my

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earlier case studies on dialogues (as reported in Barcelona 2002b, 2003b and 2005) a similar prevalence of metonymy in this implicature-guiding function. A distinctive mark of serious research is falsifiability. The results of this study can be falsified by showing that (i) the implicatures considered in it cannot in any case be derived, even considering the nature of the text chosen, from the text portion studied in it; and (ii) that the conceptual metonymies claimed to guide or facilitate the implicatures are proposed on an ad hoc basis (i.e. that they cannot be found in other areas) and that they are not consistent with my own definition of metonymy. However, the methodology followed ensured an unbiased selection both of the portion subjected to the study and of the implicatures under examination, and the metonymy types invoked in the analysis have been repeatedly invoked by other analysts and are consistent with my definition. Therefore, these results can be regarded as reliable and, in principle, representative for a portion (at least for the initial portion) of a relatively long narrative text. Therefore, this case study confirms the research hypothesis that, at least from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, metonymy is as powerful an implicature-guiding tool in relatively long written narrative texts as in short written dialogues. In Boroditsky’s (2000: 2) words, “strictly linguistic evidence can have only limited import for theories of mental representation as it would be scientifically imprudent to assume that patterns in language are necessarily a reflection of patterns in thought.” The investigation of the psychological reality of the results of this study and of others along the same lines would require extensive detailed psycholinguistic and cognitive-psychological experimentation, which is beyond my ability and means, but which would constitute a fascinating object of inquiry for experimental psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists.15

References Barcelona, Antonio. 2002a. Clarifying and applying the notions of metaphor and metonymy in cognitive linguistics: An update. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds), 207–77. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Barcelona, Antonio. 2002b. On the ubiquity and multiple-level operation of metonymy. In Cognitive Linguistics Today [Łódż Studies in Language], Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Kamila Turewicz (eds) 207–24. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 15. Gibbs (1994: 328–31) states that all the research on script-based language processing in psychology and artificial intelligence unknowingly illustrates the importance of metonymy in implicature. But no systematic psycholinguistic research of the role of metonymy in pragmatic inferencing has ever to my knowledge been carried out. An interesting piece of research in this direction is Gezgin (2006).

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Barcelona, Antonio. 2003a. Metonymy in cognitive linguistics. An analysis and a few modest proposals. In Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden, Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven, and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds), 223–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barcelona, Antonio. 2003b. The case for a metonymic basis of pragmatic inferencing: Evidence from jokes and funny anecdotes. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 81–102. Barcelona, Antonio. 2005. The multilevel operation of metonymy in grammar and discourse with particular attention to metonymic chains. In Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Sandra Peña Cervel (eds), 313–52. Barcelona, Antonio. n.d. “The distinction between metaphor and metonymy: A question of (a)symmetry?”. Paper presented at the Fourth RAAM (Researching And Applying Metaphor) Conference. University of Manouba, Tunisia, 5–7 Apr. 2001. Barcelona, Antonio (in preparation). On the Pervasive Role of Metonymy in Constructional Meaning and Form and in Discourse Comprehension: A Corpus-Based Study from a Cognitive-Linguistic Perspective. (Provisional title.) Boroditsky, Lera. 2000. Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 17: 1–28. Brown, Gillian and Yule, George. 1983. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, Wiliam. 1993. The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphor and metonymy. Cognitive Linguistics 4(4): 335–70. Fass, Dan. 1997. Processing Metonymy and Metaphor [Contemporary Studies in Cognitive Science and Technology 1]. Greenwich, Connecticut and London: Ablex. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fillmore, Charles. 1985. Frames and the Semantics of Understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6(2): 222–54. Gezgin, Ulas Basar. 2006. Relationship of Bodily Communication with Cognitive and Personality Variables. PhD dissertation, Middle East Technical University, Laboratory for Computational Studies of Language. (Full text available at http://cogprints.org/4902/). Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. 1999. Intentions in the Experience of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graesser, Arthur C., Wiemer-Hastings, Pieter and Wiemer-Hastings, Katja. 2001. Constructing inferences and relations during text comprehension. In Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects, Ted Sanders, Joost Schiperoord and Wilbert Spooren (eds), 249– 71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kövecses, Zoltán, and Radden, Günter. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9(1): 37–77. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York NY: Basic Books.

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Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol.1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1993. Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38. Oxford English Dictionary. 2002. CD–ROM edition of Second Edition (1989), and of Additions Series (1993–1997). T. J. Benbow, Main Editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 2005. The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. In Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Peña Cervel (eds), 353–86. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda (eds). 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Papafragou, Anna. 1996. On Metonymy. Lingua 99(4): 169–95. Peirsman, Yves and Geeraerts, Dirk. 2006. Metonomy as a prototypical category. Cognitive Linguistics 17(3): 269–316. Radden, Günter. 2005. The ubiquity of metonymy. In Cognitive and Discourse Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, José Luis Otal Campo, Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando and Begoña Bellés Fortuño (eds), 11–28. Castellón: Jaume I University. Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco José and Pérez Hernández, Lorena. 2003. Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 23–49. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Thornburg, Linda and Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 1997. Speech act metonymies. In Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics [Current Issues in linguistic theory 151], Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Gisela Redeker and Linda Waugh (eds), 205–19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Appendix 1. Complete text downloaded from http://hikingincolorado.org/beth.html: MOUNT BETHEL If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel. Several miles (?) before approaching the exit for Hwy. 6 which leads to Loveland Pass you will see a pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate. This roadway icon stands out like a sore thumb (cliché’) due to it’s prominence and near perfect triangular shape. As you pass the base of this peak on the highway you will notice two very steep avalanche chutes which lead directly to the summit. This is the route I chose for my ascent. I pulled off the highway to begin my hike from where it looked as though there once may have been a parking area at the base of the western-most avalanche chute and well off the highway right-of-way. As I was following no trail I began by heading straight up this (western) chute (on the north face). Footing was good and I had no problem bushwhacking my way towards tree line. About two-thirds of the way to the tree line I found a game trail which proved to be helpful, yet steep. I followed this game trail up through a rocky area just below tree line. Once through this rocky area the slope temporarily leveled out looking somewhat like an alluvial fan.

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This is about where the previous week’s snow began to cling to the shady areas and in the deeper ravines. I still had no problem with my footing and continued to climb towards the summit. About 400 feet from the summit I was forced to head to the east so that I could bypass a short but very steep technical climb. I found hiking this ridge to the summit to be relatively effortless (no snow, good footing, stable rocks, some grass) although steep. I reached what I thought to be the summit overlooking the highway only to find the actual summit was 4 peaks and several hundred yards of flat walking to the north - away from the highway. This is where I found a special guest book reserved exclusively for obscure summits! The view from the top included (in my neighborhood) Paiute Peak, Hag Mountain, The Loveland Loop, Loveland Pass and Torreys-Peak. Also visible were Mount Evans (to the southeast) and Berthoud Pass to the north-northeast. As it was late September with new snow around me, ominous clouds about a thousand feet over my head, and chilly temperatures magnified by intermittent gusts of wind, I decided to begin my journey back to the car and the highway below. Note Regarding Sounds and the Highway: For the better part of my journey the sound (loud near the bottom and muffled near the top) of the Interstate was a constant reminder of civilization. Once over the top and away from the highway these sounds disappeared. I chose a slightly different route down (for safety reasons). This included descending further down the northeast ridge to a point lower than where I originally accessed this line. This took me to the easternmost avalanche chute on north face of the mountain. Well below tree line I found myself in the remains of what must have been an avalanche from last season. There was loose dirt, whole trees ripped out of the ground and pieces of trees that must have broken like match sticks (I know - another cliché´). From this point it was an easy trek back to my car. During this entire hike I encountered no other people and limited wildlife. I saw only Pica, Marmot and lots of Mule Deer scat. Overall this was a steep and moderately difficult hike but it was also very accessible as I was only away from Denver for around 6 hours! At this time I cannot give you an accurate measurement of the elevation gain but I’m guessing that it was around 2,500 feet. Along on this hike with me: No one.

2. Informal experiment with native speakers The experiment consisted of administering the questionnaire below to seven native speakers of English (four of them British, one of them Irish, and two American). As can be seen, the questionnaire already directs their attention to the implicatures. Therefore the experiment is not supposed to find out the implicatures they would have drawn if only the contextual information had been suggested to them. The purpose of the questionnaire is to find out which ones of my own set of implicatures they would find consistent with the text.

Contextual information given to subjects You are going to answer a few brief questions on the various sentences of the first paragraph in a text. The text is a report of a trip to a Colorado mountain with the purpose of hiking in it. The text forms part of a series of reports of similar trips to other Colorado mountains, available at (http://hikingincolorado.org/beth.html) (PLEASE DON’T OPEN THAT PAGE YET). This series is intended to be a source of information for prospective hikers in the area. So the reader can

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naturally expect this text to be about Mt Bethel (which figures prominently in the title of the report), to situate this mountain and at least the beginning of the hiking route geographically, to provide a brief description of the shape and general appearance of the mountain and, of course, to provide a story of the arrival and the subsequent hiking experience of the narrator.

Instructions Please read the following sentence (the first sentence in the paragraph under examination). Don’t look at the rest of the paragraph yet: [1] If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel. Now imagine you are a frequent reader of this sort of texts (as explained above, hiking reports), and confirm (put an X under “YES”) or disconfirm (put an X under “NO”) whether you would draw the following inferences (that is, the “ideas” that “come to your mind”) right after this sentence, taking into account the nature of the text and the sentence itself: INFERENCES

YES NO

a. “Mt Bethel is located somewhere close to Interstate 70.” b. “A description of Mt Bethel may be coming up.” c. “A series of travel or arrival instructions to Mt Bethel may be coming up.” d. “These travel instructions may be given in order to locate exactly the point at which the hiking experience reported in this text began.” Now read the whole paragraph under analysis (which is part of the larger text that you can read after the “experiment” at the website mentioned above). The spelling errors are in the original paragraph (I have numbered the sentences for ease of reference): [1] If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70 from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel. [2] Several miles (?) before approaching the exit for Hwy. 6 which leads to Loveland Pass you will see a pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate. [3] This roadway icon stands out like a sore thumb (cliché’) due to it’s prominence and near perfect triangular shape. [4] As you pass the base of this peak on the highway you will notice two very steep avalanche chutes which lead directly to the summit. [5] This is the route I chose for my ascent. [6] I pulled off the highway to begin my hike from where it looked as though there once may have been a parking area at the base of the western-most avalanche chute and well off the highway right-of –way. Take a look again at sentence 2, and confirm or disconfirm whether you would draw (among others) these inferences from this sentence, taking into account the previous sentence and the nature of the text:

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INFERENCES

YES NO

a-1. “The writer assumes that I (the reader) know and / or must be able to identify the location on Interstate 70 of the exit for Highway 6 which leads to Loveland Pass.” a-2. “The writer instructs me to travel mentally along Interstate 70 to the exit for Highway 6 and then to travel mentally back from this point for several miles”. a-3. “The pyramid-shaped peak is probably very close to the endpoint of this backward path”. a-4. “The peak that has been described as a pyramid-shaped peak is probably Mt Bethel a. “The series of travel instructions continues, apparently with the purpose of locating exactly the point in Mt Bethel at which the hiking experience reported in this text began.” b. “If so, the description of Mt Bethel begins now.” Take a look again at sentence 3, and confirm or disconfirm whether you would draw (among others) these inferences from this sentence, taking into account the previous sentences and the nature of the text: INFERENCES

YES NO

a. “The roadway icon is the pyramid shaped peak just to the north of the Interstate”. b. “You can’t help noticing this peak”. c. “The description of Mt Bethel apparently carries on.” Take a look again at sentence 4, and confirm or disconfirm whether you would draw (among others) these inferences from this sentence, taking into account the previous sentences and the nature of the text: INFERENCES

YES NO

a. “The words this roadway icon definitely refer to the same thing as the words a pyramid shaped peak” b. “The avalanche chutes are located on the mountain topped by this peak.” Take a look again at sentence 5, and confirm or disconfirm whether you would draw (among others) these inferences from this sentence, taking into account the previous sentences and the nature of the text: INFERENCES a. “The story of the writer’s climbing of the mountain may be about to begin”. b. “The writer intended to climb the peak immediately and he actually climbed it”. c. “The peak is now confirmed to be Mt Bethel.”

YES NO

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d. “The earlier inference that these travel instructions are given in order to locate precisely the point on Mt Bethel at which the hiking experience reported in this text began is now confirmed or at least greatly reinforced.” Take a look again at sentence 6, and confirm or disconfirm whether you would draw (among others) these inferences from this sentence, taking into account the previous sentences and the nature of the text: INFERENCES a. “The writer got off the vehicle in which he was traveling.” b. “The story of the writer’s hike to the summit definitely begins now.” c. “The purpose of this story is now confirmed to be that of providing a set of instructions for hiking in Mt Bethel.”

YES NO

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chapter 4

Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar A cross-linguistic perspective on body part terms* Martin Hilpert Rice University

This chapter investigates chained metonymies, which are metonymies that involve multiple conceptual shifts. Drawing on a survey of body part terms in a large balanced sample of languages, it explores which types of conceptual shifts give rise to extended lexical meanings, and which types are involved in the development of more schematic, grammatical meaning. It is shown that for body part terms, chained metonymies mostly lead to lexical extensions, while serial extensions that are rooted in metaphor are cross-linguistically common in the development of grammatical meaning. Keywords: body part terms, chained metonymies, cross-linguistic comparisons, grammaticalization, interaction of metaphor and metonymy, lexicalization, metaphor, metonymy

1. Introduction This chapter investigates the construction of meaning through chained metonymies, which are metonymies that involve multiple conceptual shifts. Interest in the serial nature of metonymy goes back at least to Reddy (1979), who observed that expressions such as example (1) involve several metonymic mappings.

(1) You’ll find better ideas than that in the library. (Reddy 1979: 309) ideas → words → pages → books

Reddy argues that hearers understand sentence (1) by inferring that ideas are expressed in words, printed on pages within books, which are found in libraries. More recently, several studies have taken up Reddy’s observation (Nerlich and Clarke 2001; Geeraerts 2002; Ruiz de Mendoza and Diéz 2002; Barcelona 2003), show * I wish to thank Thomas Berg and Günter Radden for their many helpful comments and their patience. Thanks are also due to the DAAD. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Klaus-Uwe Panther, who fostered my interest in the topic of this chapter. . Linguistic examples in this chapter are cited along with their published source. If such a reference is absent, the example has been constructed by the author.

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ing its continuing relevance for cognitive linguistics. While these studies mostly focus on lexical chained metonymies as found in idioms and other figurative expressions, a different strand of cognitively oriented work investigates the role of chained metonymies in grammar (Heine et al.1991; Bybee et al. 1994; Traugott and Dasher 2002). For example, Heine and Kuteva (2002: 129) suggest that Bambara nyέ ‘eye’ has grammaticalized into the temporal deictic marker ‘before’ through a chain of semantic shifts, as shown in (2).

né nyέ (2) à nà-na 3sg come-past 1sg before ‘She arrived before me.’ (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 129) eye → face → front → before

This chapter aims to integrate the two approaches and analyzes chained metonymies as a phenomenon that pertains to both lexicalization and grammaticalization. Such an approach needs to ask whether there are systematic differences between semantic extensions that lead to lexical meaning and those extensions that lead to grammatical meaning. It is argued that such differences do in fact exist. The present analysis addresses the above question by using data from dictionaries to explore semantic extensions of body part terms across languages. Mappings that give rise to lexical and grammatical meaning respectively are collected from different languages, which are then compared. Body part terms are investigated in this chapter because they have been identified as a productive source of extensions, both lexical (Niemeier 2000; Deignan and Potter 2004; Hilpert 2006a, inter alia) and grammatical (Heine et al. 1991; Hollenbach 1995; Matsumoto 1999; Svorou 1994, inter alia). For example, in languages such as Khwe (Kilian-Hatz 2003), the equivalent of the English word back has secondary senses such as ‘behind’ and ‘after’ which illustrate well-known grammaticalization processes. Lexical semantic extensions are exemplified by the Kanuri equivalent of English arm, which has the secondary sense ‘elephant trunk’ (Cyffer and Hutchison 1990). In Wardaman, belly can denote ‘kangaroo pouch’ (Merlan 1994). Most meaning extensions of body part terms can be shown to have a clear motivation through either metaphor or metonymy, as has been argued in many studies before (Allan 1995; Bowden 1991; MacLaury 1989, inter alia), which makes body lexis a fruitful point of departure for the study of chained metonymies. Through the case study of body part terms, this chapter also addresses the question whether, given a sequence of conceptual mappings, different mappings tend to occur in different positions. Previous analyses (Goossens 2002; Taylor 2002) . The last step in the semantic development is actually not metonymic, as it involves the conceptual metaphor time is space (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

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have argued on the basis of English data that metonymic mappings tend to precede metaphoric mappings, but as yet these claims have not been empirically tested against cross-linguistic data. This chapter is thus also intended as a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the interplay of metonymy and metaphor in the construction of meaning. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 2 introduces the notion of chained metonymies. Section 3.1 outlines the cross-linguistic methodology adopted here, 3.2 reports on the collected serial extensions that map body part terms onto lexical meanings, 3.3 presents the extensions that involve grammatical meanings, and 3.4 organizes these findings into generalizations regarding common sequences of metaphors and metonymies. Section four concludes that the claims of Goossens (2002) and Taylor (2002) hold true for lexical extensions, but need qualification for grammatical extensions.

2. Chained metonymies To introduce the notion of chained metonymies, a brief definition of metonymy is in order. In cognitive linguistics, metonymy is viewed as a conceptual phenomenon, rather than a mere substitution of one word for another. Radden and Kövecses (1999: 21) thus define metonymy as the conceptual link between two entities in the same frame of reference: “Metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model.” This chapter uses the taxonomy of metonymic relationships proposed by Radden and Kövecses to analyze meaning extensions. The aim of the analysis is to find regularities in cross-linguistically common sequences of conceptual steps that lead to lexical and grammatical meaning. Much like metaphor, metonymy is ubiquitous in language, and in fact in general reasoning (Gibbs 1999; Panther 2005). Common metonymic mappings such as part for whole or cause for effect underlie everyday expressions like (3) and (4), which mean more than they literally state.

(3) We need some new faces around here. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) body part → person (4) General Motors had to stop production. (Panther and Thornburg 2003: 11) obligation to act → action

In (3), a body part stands for an entire person. Example (4) means that production was actually stopped, hence the obligation to carry out an action stands for the action itself. These conceptual shifts are achieved by metonymic mappings, which

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Panther and Thornburg view as “reasoning principles in utterance interpretation” (2004: 94). Metonymic mappings can thus be understood as conceptual routines that guide the construction of meaning, on a par with pragmatic inference-guiding principles (e.g. Levinson 2000). Chained metonymies involve more than one conceptual shift. In example (5), one single metonymic mapping seems insufficient to account for the meaning that is constructed from the utterance. A rough paraphrase of (5) would be that Bob presented some interesting ideas.

(5) Bob gave an interesting paper. material → writing → ideas

Nothing in principle disallows a single metonymic mapping that has the material ‘paper’ directly stand for ‘ideas’. However, the chained metonymy suggested in (5), which maps ‘paper’ onto ‘writing’, which in turn stands for the expressed ‘ideas’, has several theoretical and empirical advantages (Hilpert 2006b). A theoretical argument in favor of chained metonymies is that these chains break up complex conceptual mappings into simple, well-motivated mappings with a strong experiential basis. The associations of ‘paper’ with ‘writing’ and ‘writing’ with ‘ideas’ emerge from everyday experience. Conversely, the association of ‘paper’ and ‘ideas’ is indirect, mediated only through the experience of reading and writing. A similar point is made by Grady (1997: 287), who advocates the decomposition of complex – and hence fairly abstract – metaphors into basic metaphors with a stronger experiential motivation. Whenever a metaphor is posited, Grady argues, it needs to be experientially motivated. This constrains the types of conceptual relationships that can be posited, and thereby enhances their explanatory power. While these theoretical considerations motivate an analysis in terms of chained metonymies, they do not satisfactorily answer the question of how many links there should be in a chained metonymy. To justify intermediate links between vehicle and target, empirical evidence needs to be taken into consideration. The first empirical constraint is that all intermediate links should represent attested, authentic expressions. The chained metonymy in (5) presupposes the existence of examples such as (6), in which paper stands for ‘writing’.

(6) Bob found a typo in his paper. material → writing

The constraint of productive intermediate links thus requires independent evidence for each metonymic mapping that is posited. If such evidence is sparse or absent, a single metonymic mapping should be preferred as the more parsimonious analysis. A second empirical constraint concerns the polysemy that is found with certain metonymic expressions. The chained model predicts that polysemous expressions

Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar

convey meanings that correspond to adjacent links in the chained metonymy. Consider the following examples.

(7) ‘Where do you come from?’ asked Betty with an eye on Lydia. (BNC G0X) eye → vision

(8) Chief executive Paul Hanson, with an eye on falling consumer demand in the UK, hopes to double exports by the end of the financial year. (BNC A7T) eye → vision → attention

(9) Two American companies with an eye on available and inexpensive manpower have set up software export units in the city of Bangalore, India’s own Silicon Valley. (BNC A8R) eye → vision → attention → desire

The English expression with an eye on NP is polysemous, conveying ‘vision’ in (7), ‘attention’ in (8), and ‘desire’ in (9). The chained model naturally accounts for this polysemy, since people are watching the things they pay attention to, and pay attention to the things they desire. An analysis in terms of three individual metonymic mappings would fail to capture this generalization. Again, experiential motivation favors the chained model. A third empirical constraint on chained metonymies is particularly relevant to the methodology of this chapter. The chained metonymy in (9) predicts a cross-linguistic implicational hierarchy. Specifically, it makes the prediction that if a language has a meaning extension of a body part term such as eye to the concept ‘desire’, the body part term should also have been extended to the meanings of ‘vision’ and ‘attention’. We should thus find expressions in that language in which eye is used to convey ‘vision’ and ‘attention’, respectively. If such expressions cannot be found, or sound unacceptable to native speakers, the analysis in terms of a chained metonymy is doubtful. To summarize, while there is broad agreement that chained metonymies do in fact exist, the respective analyses need to be constrained. Experiential motivation, productivity of intermediate links, polysemy across adjacent links, and cross-linguistic attestation of intermediate links are the constraints that guide the present analysis.

3. Body part terms and their chained metonymies 3.1 Methodology This study explores semantic extensions of body part terms with the aim of identifying cross-linguistically common serial metonymic mappings. Special interest is

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devoted to the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning, and how different mappings may give rise to each respective type. It goes without saying that the distinction between lexical and grammatical is not categorical, but is inherently gradient (Hopper 1987). The continuum from lexical to grammatical meaning can be understood as a cline of increasing schematicity (Langacker 1987). For the present purposes, grammatical meaning is defined as the instantiation of a functional category such as aspect or modality, as well as deictic reference to temporal, spatial, and interpersonal relations (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 15). By exclusion, lexical meaning is defined as the remaining semantic space. The starting point of the study is the list of sixteen body part terms given in (10). (10) arm, back, belly, buttocks, ear, eye, face, finger, foot, forehead, hand, head, heart, jaw, mouth, tongue The equivalents of these English terms were looked up in bilingual dictionaries of 76 languages which represent a stratified probability sample of the world’s languages. The sample represents all known language families and subbranches in proportion to their respective sizes. This chapter adopts the general sampling scheme of Bybee et al. (1994: 311), but exchanges languages from the same language family subbranches (such as Niger-Kordofian or Aztec-Tanoan), wherever this leads to a more comprehensive dictionary resource. These replacements retain the weighed representation of the language families and therefore do not distort the balance of the sample. For each lexical entry, it was determined whether the body part term was used to convey secondary senses, which were then pooled in a database. To illustrate, a dictionary entry from Ma’di (Blackings 2000: 68) is shown in (11).

. As a typographical convention, body part terms such as back or eye are rendered in italics when they refer to a linguistic form of either English or some other language. Semantic extensions of body part terms, such as ‘behind’ or ‘attention’ are rendered in ‘single quotes.’ . The languages sampled are: Aitchin, Alabama, Anejom, Anywa, Awa, Balti, Bantawa, Basque, Bokobaru, Busa, Carolinian, Cayuga, Chantyal, Chechen, Danish, Delaware, Efik, Finnish, Ge’ez, Greek, Guaraní, Hani, Hausa, Hiri Motu, Hopi, Ilocano, Inuktitut, Iraqw, Kanuri, Karok, Kayardild, Khwe, Koiari, Kolami, Kongo, Koyukon Athabaskan, Kristang, Krongo, Kurdish, Kwoma, Kyaka Enga, Lushai, Ma’di, Maidu, Mandarin, Mara, Marshallese, Nandi, Nez Perce, Ngizim, Oneida, Pahlavi, Piro, Puget Salish, Rendille, Rhade, Sedang, Selepet, Senoi, Shona, Southern Sierra Miwok, Spanish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Thao, Tohono O’odham, Tümpisa Shoshone, Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Wardaman, Yir-Yoront, Yogad, Yoruba, Yugambeh, and Zapotec. Full bibliographical reference to the dictionaries and a key to the genetic affiliations of the above languages can be found at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~hilpert /metonymy.doc. The reference section of this chapter only includes sources that are cited in the body of the text.

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(11) mī noun 1. eye, 2. a haunting spirit: mī nā ká nyì ko rá the spirits will haunt or afflict you, mī àko blind, mī āko blindness, mī ‘bí eyelash, mī īnggwε flirtation, mī īnì seriousness. From this entry, the semantic extensions of eye for Ma’di are entered in the database as ‘spirit,’ ‘blind,’ ‘flirtation,’ and ‘seriousness.’ The meaning ‘eyelash’ is disregarded because its component parts are semantically transparent. By contrast, the component parts of mī àko ‘blind’ literally mean ‘without eyes,’ such that the targeted meaning is more specific than what is literally stated. Likewise, the component parts of mī īnggwε ‘flirtation’ literally mean ‘bright eyes,’ which also underspecifies the targeted meaning. While these secondary senses are metonymically motivated, none of them appear to be related to each other through a chained metonymy. Also, none of them convey grammatical or functional meaning. The Ma’di term for back (Blackings 2000: 81), however, exhibits grammatical meaning extensions that suggests a chain of semantic extensions. The lexical entry is given in (12). (12) ògū ‘bārá nikā ògū gá ògū nā opí ‘i ògū ògū

noun the back of a thing; back. carrying a child on the back, Opi was born after her. postposition behind, at the back. adverb next to come; after this or that.

From this entry, the semantic extensions ‘back part,’ ‘behind,’ and ‘after’ are entered into the database. Arguably, these senses are closely related. It has been argued repeatedly that body part terms such as back first develop into object part lexemes, then grammaticalize into deictic spatial markers, and from there on acquire temporal meaning (Heine et al.1991: 66, Matsumoto 1999: 22, Svorou 1994: 90). The proposed sequence of meaning extensions is shown in (13). (13) ògū nā opí ‘i (Blackings 2000: 81) ‘Opi was born after her.’ back → back part → behind → after These semantic changes are motivated by metaphor and metonymy. The first step involves the metaphor objects are humans, such that inanimate objects can be said to have a back. This conceptual metaphor is traditionally known as personi. Svorou (1994) also discusses developments in which environmental landmarks such as sky or earth and animal body parts (as opposed to human body parts) develop into deictic spatial categories. For an alternative account see Wilkins (1993: 11), who presents semantic developments from objects to body parts (such as bag → belly in Bantu languages), i.e. in the reverse direction.

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fication. The next step is metonymic, being based on the contiguity relationship between a part of an object and an adjacent region towards which it is oriented. This mapping can be called the part for region metonymy. The final step in the chain is again metaphoric, drawing on the metaphor time is space. The chain of meanings in (13) suggests that if a language has a meaning extension of the body part term back to the temporal concept ‘after,’ the meanings of ‘behind’ and ‘back part’ should also be present. The lexical entry from Ma’di dovetails with the sense development as proposed by Heine and colleagues, but it is an empirical question whether all languages with a temporal meaning of back display the same polysemy, or whether some languages actually derive the meanings ‘behind’ or ‘after’ directly from the human body part. While data from dictionaries provide much useful information, they cannot replace knowledge of a language’s history. It is hence beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss grammaticalization processes that were accompanied by morphophonological reduction. Cases in which the morphological substance of a body part term has been altered, or in which it has been reduced to a grammatical affix go unnoticed by the current methodology unless the dictionary compilers included a reference under the entry of the full lexical form. Another caveat concerns the fact that dictionary compilers may have left out a secondary sense which actually exists in the language. Since this is a realistic possibility, generalizations in this chapter will not be made from the singular presence or absence of entries in individual dictionaries, but preferably from convergent evidence that reflects the characteristics of more than one language. As a last qualification, dictionaries do not offer much information about the syntactic behavior of their entries. Corpus-based studies of figurative language (Deignan and Potter 2004; Hilpert 2006a) have shown that collocation and colligation patterns are instrumental in the disambiguation of lexical items. Information of this kind is not provided here. Despite these caveats, a comprehensive collection of meaning extensions of body part terms yields potentially instructive insights in three ways. First, it makes it possible to determine what lexical and grammatical concepts are typically targeted, and which of these targets tend to be co-present in the languages investigated. Second, the observed implicational hierarchies show that some metonymic extensions are semantically dependent on other extensions, thereby suggesting a chained me. Heine et al. (1991: 123) characterize the mapping of body part terms onto locative meaning as metaphorical, and invoke an ‘object to space metaphor’ as the underlying motivation. This study takes the viewpoint of Svorou (1994: 90), who advances an analysis in terms of metonymy. The relationship of an object part and its adjacent regions is based on contiguity rather than similarity, which motivates an account in terms of metonymy. Svorou proposes a chain of meaning extensions from ‘human body part’ to ‘relational part of object’ to ‘location adjacent to object part’ to ‘location in region of object part’.

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tonymy. Finally, the pool of different chained metonymies encountered in the database can be used to draw generalizations about the nature of serial metonymy and meaning extension in general.

3.2 Extensions onto lexical meanings Virtually every language investigated in the survey exhibits a rich set of semantic extensions of body part terms, underscoring the importance of the human body for lexical structure (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Most extensions are readily motivated through metaphor and metonymy. Very frequently, the term for eye refers to ‘vision’ through the instrument for action metonymy, and arm refers to ‘branch’ through the plants are humans metaphor. With some body parts, it cannot be easily decided whether a secondary sense is truly an extension, or whether the term is simply vague to begin with. In twenty-six languages of the sample, the term for hand can refer to ‘arm’ and vice versa. In another twenty, the term for finger also means ‘toe.’ In forty languages, the term for foot can refer to a ‘leg.’ While this kind of polysemy can be explained in terms of metonymy, it is hard to determine which sense is more basic and which is the extension. For the present purposes, these body part terms are thus assumed to be vague. Table 1 presents the most frequent semantic extensions of body part terms onto lexical concepts. Table 1. The most frequent lexical extensions from body part terms body part

extension (in number of languages)

arm back belly buttocks ear eye face finger foot forehead hand head heart jaw mouth tongue

hand (31), sleeve (12), branch (11), wing (9), handle (7), shoulder (5), strength (5) back part (42), spine (8), to turn (7), support (7), last (5) pregnancy (15), inside part (9), defecate (4), diarrhea (4), character (4) anus (15), back part (7), bottom part (4), hip (4) hearing (30), deaf (24), handle (6), attention (6), ignore (6), mushroom (5) vision (39), blind (17), attention (14), glasses (7), tear (7), jealous (6), knot (5) front (15), countenance (7), appearance (6), expression (5) toe (20), hand (10), to point (5), ring (4), arm (3), measure (3) leg (40), measure (11), footprints (10), walk (9), base (8), wheel (6), step (6) front (10), brow (6), face (5), top (3), cliff (3) arm (26), handle (7), finger (7), power (6), sleeve (6), help (5) top part (19), hair (11), intellect (10), beginning (10), chief (10), summit (8) emotions (26), character (8), core part (7), center (6), courage (6), mind (6) chin (17), cheek (8), slope (2) speech (32), opening (19), edge (11), speech act (9), entrance (8), beak (7) speech (26), lick (7), speech act (6), blade (2), word (2)

. This conceptual metaphor is one of the few which are reversible. An English example of human beings are plants would be I have my roots in the Chicago area.

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Not all extensions in Table 1 involve a series of conceptual mappings. The following sections narrow the focus to four conceptual mappings that are productive first steps for serial meaning extensions. First, body parts are frequently associated with their perceptual function. As a further extension of that, different aspects of perception may be targeted. A second common extension views body parts as instruments that are used for a particular action. Again, different aspects of this action are highlighted in subsequent extensions. A third strategy is the conceptualization of body parts as containers, which also allows further extension. Lastly, body parts often serve as a model to conceptualize the parts of physical objects. This, in turn, often leads to further extensions.

3.2.1 The organ of perception for perception metonymy The organ of perception for perception metonymy is frequently found with the terms for ear and eye. After being extended onto ‘hearing’ and ‘vision’ respectively, both are mapped onto the target ‘attention,’ as well as a range of other concepts. Thirty languages of the sample map ear onto ‘hearing.’ Many of these further extend the meaning onto more specific lexical concepts that stand in contiguity relationships with auditory perception. In eighteen languages, the body part term ear stands for the concept of ‘attention.’ This is arguably more specific than ‘hearing,’ since it involves deliberate action on the part of the perceiver. Sweetser (1990) has shown that perception verbs regularly develop into verbs of cognition, as well as into the lexical concepts of obedience, likes, and dislikes. The concept of ‘paying attention’ needs to be viewed as a semantic extension, since it need not actually involve auditory perception. In English, one can lend an ear to the needs of the community without necessarily being able to hear. The perception for attention metonymy thus maps an involuntary process onto an action which is deliberate and controlled. The mirror image of this meaning extension is the target ‘disregard,’ which is precisely the absence of attention. It is found in Hausa, Kristang, Lushai and Tagalog. The same metonymies apply, but the interpretation is inversed. An alternative possibility to derive this meaning would be from the common lexical extension ‘deaf,’ which occurs in twenty-four languages. However, of the four languages mentioned only Lushai has this sense of ear, which makes this derivation an unlikely possibility. The languages Balti, Hani, Kyaka Enga, and Selepet map ear onto ‘obedience,’ which is motivated through the cause for effect metonymy. The result of ‘obedi. The languages that extend ear to ‘attention’ are Balti, Busa, Chechen, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hani, Hausa, Ilocano, Iraqw, Khwe, Kristang, Kurdish, Piro, Rendille, Tagalog, Turkish, and Yogad.

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ence’ shows that the perception of a command has a tangible effect (Sweetser 1990). In five languages, ‘hearing’ is further extended to mean ‘hearsay.’ Here, an action stands for an associated object, which in this case is that which is perceived . The action for object metonymy (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 37) underlies for example English de-verbal nouns such as a drink or a bite, and can be viewed as the motivation for this particular extension. A schema of the chained metonymies discussed above is shown in (14). (14) ear → hearing → {attention, disregard, obedience, hearsay} Thirty-nine languages of the sample associate eye with ‘vision’ through the organ of perception for perception metonymy. Two lexical extensions appear to be conceptually dependent on this mapping, extending it to ‘attention’ and ‘beauty’ respectively. In fourteen languages, the term for eye stands for ‘attention.’10 As in the example of auditory perception, the concept of ‘vision’ maps onto ‘attention’ through the perception for attention metonymy. There is considerable overlap between the languages that target this meaning via either of the two perceptual organs. Eleven languages use both ear and eye to denote ‘attention.’ In Basque, Bokobaru, and Busa, expressions with eye convey the meaning ‘beauty.’ The English expression eye candy may serve as a comparison here. The notion of a perceived quality presupposes the idea of perception, and hence the perception for thing perceived metonymy (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 38). These chained metonymies are schematized in (15). (15) eye → vision → {attention, beauty} Cross-linguistically, lexical extensions from eye to emotional and dispositional concepts are often encountered. Twenty languages of the sample associate eye with concepts such as ‘jealousy,’ ‘desire,’ ‘hate,’ or the proverbial ‘evil eye.’11 Since only eleven of these languages extend eye to mean ‘vision,’ the evidence does not permit an analysis of these mappings as chained metonymies.

3.2.2 The instrument for action metonymy The body parts arm, finger, foot, and hand are frequently extended onto lexic . The languages that extend ear to ‘hearsay’ are Chechen, Danish, Hausa, Kristang, and Turkish. 10. The languages that extend eye to ‘attention’ are Busa, Chechen, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Guaraní, Hani, Hausa, Ilocano, Kurdish, Kyaka Enga, Rendille, Spanish, and Yogad. 11. The languages that extend eye to emotional and dispositional concepts are Basque, Bokobaru, Chechen, Ge’ez, Greek, Hani, Ilocano, Iraqw, Kristang, Kyaka Enga, Ma’di, Pahlavi, Sedang, Selepet, Thao, Turkish, Wardaman, Yoruba, and Yugambeh.

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al meanings that denote actions involving them. However, these mappings do not tend to be further extended. By contrast, the body parts mouth and tongue serve as sources for several chained metonymies. Both mouth and tongue are tightly associated with language cross-linguistically (as are lips and teeth, which are not investigated here), and the conceptual association is metonymic in nature (Radden 2004). Since language is a multifaceted phenomenon that comprises both speech, writing, and meaning, it cannot be precisely determined what individual dictionary entries mean by language. In order not to overinterpret the dictionary compilers, the sense ‘language’ has been reduced to the sense ‘speech’ in the present analysis. Thirty-two languages of the sample extend mouth to the lexical concept ‘speech’ through the instrument for action metonymy. Of these, nine languages have secondary targets of various speech acts, such as ‘agreement’ (Basque), ‘gossip’ (Maidu), or ‘exaggeration’ (Efik).12 The relation between speech in general and these speech acts in particular is captured by the means for action metonymy (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 37). Speech is the means to accomplish a wide range of social activities, so the metonymy has a strong experiential motivation. The body part term tongue undergoes exactly the same developments with comparable frequency. Twenty-six languages have the extension of ‘speech,’ and six of these have the additional meanings of different speech acts. A less frequent lexical extension of both mouth and tongue is ‘word,’ which is also dependent on the intermediate step of ‘speech.’ Efik and Sedang derive the concept from mouth, while Inuktitut and Zapotec derive it from tongue. Like the idea of language, the idea of a word is fairly complex. For the present purposes, it is taken to mean a recognizable stretch of speech that is associated with a concept. The mapping of ‘speech’ onto ‘word’ thus instantiates a whole for part metonymy. In (16), the chained metonymies based on mouth and tongue are shown. (16) {mouth, tongue} → speech → {speech act, word}

3.2.3 The container for contained metonymy A cross-linguistically common lexical extension of belly is ‘pregnancy,’ often in expressions that literally mean ‘big belly.’ Of the fifteen languages that have this extension, Basque and Tahitian extend this meaning further to ‘offspring.’ These senses appear to be conceptually dependent; no language without the first extension exhibits the second. The first step in the chain is motivated by the container for 12. The languages that extend mouth to speech act meanings are Balti, Basque, Busa, Efik, Kurdish, Kyaka Enga, Ma’di, Maidu, and Mandarin. The languages that extend tongue to speech act meanings are Basque, Iraqw, Koyukon Athabaskan, Marshallese, Turkish, and Nez Perce. The dictionary of Nez Perce does not list the prior extension to ‘speech.’

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contained metonymy, as the womb contains the fetus. Since offspring is the end result of pregnancy, the second step can be viewed as a cause for effect metonymy. The chained metonymy is schematized in (17). (17) belly → pregnancy → offspring

3.2.4 The objects are humans metaphor Cross-linguistically, body parts such as arm, back, belly, face, foot, forehead, and head tend to become extended to refer to object parts. Through such extensions, body part terms are rendered more abstract and often grammaticalize into spatial markers. By contrast, the developments discussed below illustrate how these meanings are mapped onto lexical meanings. Twenty languages of the sample generalize head to ‘top part’ through the objects are humans metaphor. The subsequently targeted lexical concepts ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ are observed in eleven and eight languages, respectively.13 The extension of head to mean any extreme object part regardless of spatial orientation is accomplished through the member of a category for the category metonymy (Radden and Kövecses 1999: 34). This chain is shown in (18). (18) head → top part → {beginning, end} Another lexicalization chain involves the extension from back onto the grammatical meanings ‘back part’ and ‘behind,’ which will be discussed in more detail in section 3.3. Interestingly, five languages extend this chain further to the activity follow.14 This development is intriguing from a theoretical perspective, since it appears to map a grammatical meaning back onto a lexical target. A number of authors (Heine et al. 1991; Lehmann 1995) explicitly reject the notion of degrammaticalization, but several counterexamples to strict unidirectionality challenge strong versions of this position (Campbell 2001: 127). The present example suggests that grammatical forms may indeed spawn off new lexical forms, while the grammatical form itself can stay grammatical. Similar changes can be observed to occur in English (e.g. no ifs, ands, or buts, cf. Heine 2003: 166). However, whether or not these are true instances of degrammaticalization will be left to future debate. The extension from ‘behind’ to ‘follow’ maps a spatial region onto an associated activity through (what may be called) the place for action metonymy. The me13. The languages that extend head to ‘beginning’ are Aitchin, Efik, Hausa, Kristang, Kurdish, Mandarin, Pahlavi, Turkish, and Uzbek. Awa and Balti have this extension despite no indication of the extension ‘top part’ in the respective dictionaries. The languages that extend head to ‘end’ are Aitchin, Finnish, Khwe, Kolami, Kongo, Mandarin, Pahlavi, and Turkish. 14. The languages that extend back to ‘follow’ are Bantawa, Chantyal, Hausa, Kolami, and Lushai.

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tonymy is experientially motivated, as certain places and positions are associated with matching activities. People who lead are in the front, whereas people who follow are behind. Radden and Kövecses (1999: 42) point out that this metonymy is reflected in the English expression I was behind the wheel all day. Of the five languages that exhibit the described chained metonymy, four also have the extension from ‘behind’ to ‘after.’ Despite the close connection of spatial and temporal sequence, the cross-linguistic evidence suggests that these extensions are in fact independent because a number of languages have just one of them. In a similar vein, the extension from back to ‘behind’ leads to the meaning of ‘support’ in seven languages.15 Like the above example, this chain re-lexicalizes a grammaticalized form. The semantic extension from ‘behind ‘to ‘support’ is again motivated through the place for action metonymy. The presence of supporting people from behind in a situation of conflict can be readily extended to the notion of help and support in other contexts. Walsh (1994: 360) identifies this extension in expressions from Murrin-Patha and compares them to English examples such as You have to back your mates, underscoring the wide currency of this sense development. For both this chain and the previous one, a direct mapping of ‘back part’ onto the respective activities would make them ordinary instances of lexicalization, rather than putative examples of degrammaticalization. However, in both cases the deictic position of the followers and supporters seems to be an integral semantic component. In addition, in all languages with these extensions the meaning of ‘behind’ is a conventionalized sense of back, which constitutes independent evidence for the latter view. Thus, we can schematize the chain of conceptual extensions as in (19). (19) back → back part → behind → {follow, support}

3.3 Extensions onto grammatical meanings The extensions of body part terms onto grammatical meanings that were encountered in the database all have in common that they rely on the objects are humans metaphor as a first conceptual mapping. From there on, body part terms are extended to become markers of spatial and temporal relations. Table 2 shows that extensions onto grammatical meanings are encountered less commonly in the database than extensions onto lexical meanings. Only the body parts back, belly, buttocks, face, forehead, hand, and head are found to be extended onto grammatical meanings. In contrast to lexical meanings, most extensions onto grammatical meaning can be shown to consist of several mappings. 15. The languages that extend back to ‘support’ are Danish, Efik, Hausa, Kurdish, Oneida, Pahlavi, and Turkish.

Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar

Table 2. The most frequent grammatical extensions from body part terms body part

extension (in number of languages)

back belly buttocks face forehead hand

behind (32), after (12) inside (8) behind (5) in front of (8) in front of (3), before (2) five (6)

A chain of extensions from back to ‘back part’ and further onto the grammatical meaning ‘behind’ is found in thirty-seven languages of the sample.16 This number reflects the generality of this well-known grammaticalization process. Fourteen of those languages extend the meaning of ‘behind’ further to ‘after.’17 Most dictionaries specifically list the extension ‘back part’ or refer to senses such as ‘edge,’ or ‘stern,’ while others just give the entry ‘back.’ Since this English gloss can refer to human beings as well as objects, we cannot count this as sufficient evidence against the prediction of Heine et al. (1991) and Matsumoto (1999), who judge the extension ‘back part’ to be a necessary conceptual step. By analogy with the meaning extensions that were discussed above with example (13) from Ma’di, this chain begins with the image-schematic mapping of a human body part onto a relational object part (Svorou 1994: 90). This mapping can be motivated through the metaphor objects are humans . The chain continues with the part for region metonymy, which maps the object part onto an adjacent region of space. The subsequent mapping onto the temporal domain is achieved through the metaphor time is space. Radden (2006) shows that the conception of time in terms of a spatial front-back orientation is crossculturally very common, but that there are differences with respect to the specific mappings. While most Western cultures map the future onto the front, this is not universally so, as evidenced by the conflicting extensions of face and forehead (see below). A semantic development that unfolds parallel to the above chain starts with the term for buttocks, and proceeds in the same steps as above. This process is not as frequently observed as the extension of back. Only five languages of the sample have the extension from buttocks to ‘behind,’ one of which further extends it to ‘after.’18 16. The languages that extend back to ‘behind’ are Balti, Bantawa, Bokobaru, Busa, Chantyal, Danish, Efik, Ge’ez, Guaraní, Hausa, Ilocano, Inuktitut, Kayardild, Khwe, Koiari, Kolami, Kongo, Kurdish, Kyaka Enga, Lushai, Ma’di, Maidu, Mandarin, Marshallese, Nez Perce, Oneida, Pahlavi, Sedang, Selepet, Tagalog, Thao, Turkish, Wardaman, Yir-Yoront, Yogad, Yoruba, and Zapotec. 17. The languages that extend back to ‘after’ are Busa, Chantyal, Hausa, Khwe, Kolami, Kurdish, Kyaka Enga, Lushai, Ma’di, Marshallese, Nez Perce, Selepet, Thao, and Zapotec. 18. The languages that extend buttocks to ‘behind’ are Aitchin, Danish, Koyukon Athabaskan,

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These two related chains are schematized in (20). (20) {back, buttocks} → back part → behind → after The body part term face develops similarly to back, but the orientation is of course reversed. The development from face to spatial and temporal adpositions is a recognized grammaticalization path. However, the data suggests that it is less common than the extension of back, as proposed by Heine et al. (1991: 130). While twenty languages of the sample extend face to ‘front’ via the objects are humans metaphor, only nine languages further apply the part for region metonymy to derive the spatial meaning ‘in front of.’19 With back, the analogous process was observed in thirty-seven languages. Interestingly, the subsequent mapping via the time is space metaphor in six languages yields the interpretations of either ‘before’ or ‘after.’ While the languages Guaraní and Lushai map the space in front onto anteriority, the reverse happens in Bokobaru, Hiri Motu, Karok, and Ma’di. The body part term forehead also serves as a source for the developments discussed above, albeit less frequently so. Only Ge’ez, Hausa, and Kongo derive a spatial adposition from forehead. All three languages further extend it to a temporal meaning. In Ge’ez and Hausa we find the meaning ‘before,’ whereas Kongo has the meaning ‘after.’ In (21), these meaning developments are summarized. (21) {face, forehead} → front → in front of → {before, after} Body part terms are not only used to indicate directions away from the body, but can also encode containment. An extension from belly to the grammatical meaning ‘inside’ is found in nine languages of the sample.20 Like the extension of back, this change maps a body part term onto a location. It is first extended to denote the ‘inside part’ of not only humans but also objects, and from there on assumes the function of a spatial adposition. Again, the objects are humans metaphor and part for region metonymy motivate the semantic extension. As suggested by Heine et al. (1991: 130) and Svorou (1994: 71), the extension of belly onto a spatial concept is less frequent than the extension of back. In the languages Hausa and Ngizim, belly has further grammaticalized into an inclusive marker, meaning ‘one member within a set.’ This meaning is motivated through the metaphor categories are containers (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Example (22) illustrates this meaning. Oneida, and Rhade. Koyukon Athabaskan also has the extension to ‘after.’ 19. The languages that extend face to ‘in front of ’ are Balti, Bokobaru, Busa, Guaran, Hiri Motu, Karok, Lushai, Ma’di, and Sedang. 20. The languages that extend belly to ‘inside’ are Guaraní, Hausa, Kanuri, Kayardild, Kurdish, Ma’di, Ngizim, Tohono O’odham, and Zapotec.

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(22) gayi da kunu-k mainaucin Ngwajin one from belly-link prince-pl Ngwajin ‘one of the princes of Ngwajin’ (Schuh 1981: 98) belly → inside → inclusive Another extension found in Ngizim gives belly a temporal interpretation, which is rendered by Schuh (1981: 99) as ‘be engaged in.’ The element functions as a temporal preposition that co-occurs with nouns that denote activities, as illustrated in example (23). (23) jàa kunu tlәri 1pl belly battle ‘We were engaged in battle.’ (Schuh 1981: 99) belly → inside → during While found only once in the sample, this mapping is well motivated through the very wide-spread metaphor time is space (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Heine and Kuteva (2002: 179) report numerous cases of extensions from spatial to temporal containment in different languages, in which a body part is mapped metaphorically onto a temporal region. The chain in (24) schematizes the observed extensions. (24) belly → inside part → inside → {inclusive, during} The cross-linguistically common lexical extensions from belly to ‘emotions’ and ‘character’ seem to be independent from the conceptualization of this body part as a container. Languages such as Rendille or Selepet associate ‘anger’ with the belly, but do not seem to conceptualize this emotion as a contained fluid (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Basque and Nandi attribute the character trait ‘greed’ to the belly, but lack the extension ‘inside.’ As a final example, twenty languages of the sample generalize head to ‘top part’ through the objects are human beings metaphor. From there on, head takes on the grammatical meaning of ‘over’ through the part for orientation metonymy, but this development is restricted to Finnish, Kurdish, and Ma’di. There is no temporal extension of this spatial concept, as is shown in (25). (25) head → top part → over

3.3 Results and discussion In the introduction it was asked whether systematic differences obtain between serial conceptual mappings that lead to lexical and grammatical meaning respectively. The survey of body part terms shows that most serial extensions begin with one of three conceptual steps, namely, the organ of perception for percep-

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Table 3. Serial extensions onto lexical meanings organ of perception for perception > perception for attention ear (76) → hearing (30) → attention (18) ear (76) → hearing (30) → disregard (4) eye (76) → vision (39) → attention (14) organ of perception for perception > cause for effect ear (76) → hearing (30) → obedience (5) organ of perception for perception > perception for thing perceived ear (76) → hearing (30) → hearsay (5) eye (76) → vision (39) → beauty (3) instrument for action > means for action mouth (76) → speech (32) → speech act (9) tongue (76) → speech (26) → speech act (6) instrument for action > whole for part mouth (76) → speech (32) → word (2) tongue (76) → speech (26) → word (2) objects are humans > member of a category for the category head (76) → top part (20) → {beginning (11), end (8)} objects are humans > part for region > place for action back (76) → back part (39) → behind (37) → {follow (5), support (7)} container for contained > cause for effect belly (76) → pregnancy (15) → offspring (2)

tion metonymy, the instrument for action metonymy or the the objects are humans metaphor. The container for contained metonymy is observed in just one chained metonymy. Subsequently, semantic extensions are motivated by a wider variety of metonymic and metaphorical mappings. The main difference between lexical and grammatical targets in the database concerns their initial conceptual mappings. Table 3 shows that the organ of perception for perception metonymy is a particularly productive first step for serial conceptual extension. Less frequent starting points for lexical extensions are the objects are humans metaphor and the container for contained metonymy. As is well-known, body part terms frequently develop into grammatical markers of spatial relations. Semantically, this development is dependent on the personifying metaphor objects are humans. Table 4 shows that in fact all targeted grammatical meanings make use of this metaphor in a first conceptual step. Of equal importance is the part for region metonymy, which maps the meaning of object parts onto projected areas. The resulting spatial meaning may be further extended metaphorically. The difference between the two tables illustrates how body parts can be conceptualized in two basic ways. On the one hand they metaphorically evoke spatial relations, on the other, they metonymically stand for activities and their associated

Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar

Table 4. Serial extensions onto grammatical meanings objects are human beings > part for region > time is space back (76) → back part (39) → behind (37) → after (14) belly (76) → inside part (9) → inside (9) → during (1) face (76) → front part (20) → in front of (9) → {before (2), after (4)} forehead (76) → front part (3) → in front of (3) → {before (2), after (1)} objects are human beings > part for region > categories are containers belly (76) → inside part (9) → inside (9) → inclusive (2) objects are human beings > part for region head (76) → top part (20) → over (3)

concepts. It is worth noting that also the secondary extensions in Table 3 are exclusively metonymic in nature. While the metaphorical conceptualization of body part terms thus commonly leads to grammatical, highly schematic meaning, the metonymic conceptualization accounts for a wide range of more concrete lexical concepts.

4. Conclusion Semantic analyses of body part terms in cognitive linguistics have yielded a plentitude of insights, to which the present analysis makes a small contribution with respect to serial conceptual mappings. While the importance of metaphorical and image-schematic extensions has been widely acknowledged (Johnson 1987; Sweetser 1990), this study presents evidence that metonymy is an important strategy in serial conceptual extension that pertains to the entire continuum from lexical to grammatical meaning. The results of this study confirm earlier observations (Goossens 2002; Hilpert 2006b) that simple extensions are much more frequent than serial ones. In the sample of languages investigated, body part terms such as foot, hand, and heart give rise to a wealth of figurative meanings, but interestingly do not project serial extensions. A possible explanation for the behavior of items like foot is that extended meanings such as ‘walk,’ ‘step,’ or ‘footprints’ still evoke the original lexical meaning, and thereby prevent further extensions. By contrast, an item like eye has extended meanings like ‘attention,’ which are sufficiently general to invite further extensions. With respect to serial conceptual mappings, both Taylor (2002: 342) and Goossens (2002: 367) report that metonymies based on metaphor are rare in their data, which comprises English dictionaries and corpora. The present analysis confirms this finding for conceptual mappings onto lexical targets, but suggests a different view for extensions of body part terms onto grammatical targets. The mapping of

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body part terms onto more schematic, spatio-temporal relations appears to be metaphor-based. Since this semantic development is attested cross-linguistically, it is probably not the purported exception. A characteristic difference between the mappings of body part terms onto lexical and grammatical meanings consists of the preference that the latter show for an initial metaphorical extension. Metaphor is used as a strategy to make body part terms more schematic and generally applicable, which allows for more frequent usage and ultimately leads to grammaticalization. Since a number of grammaticalization processes are clearly not driven by metaphor (Traugott and Dasher 2002), it is worth asking whether other lexical source domains exhibit the same tendencies as body part terms. Serial extensions onto lexical meanings, by contrast, favor mainly metonymic mappings. Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not render the meaning of a body part term more schematic, but allows it to be mapped on a contiguous activity or event. In accordance with Goossens (2002) and Taylor (2002), chained metonymies can thus be viewed as a phenomenon that primarily serves to enrich the lexicon.

References Allan, Keith. 1995. The anthropocentricity of the English word(s) back. Cognitive Linguistics 6: 11–31. Barcelona, Antonio. 2005. The multilevel operation on metonymy in grammar and discourse, with particular attention to metonymic chains. In Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez and Sandra Peña Cerval (eds.), 313–52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Blackings, Mairi J. 2000. Ma’di English – English Ma’di Dictionary. München: Lincom. Bowden, John. 1991. Behind the Preposition: Grammaticalization of Locatives in Oceanic Languages [Pacific Linguistics B–107]. Canberra: Australian National University. Bybee, Joan L., Perkins, Revere D. and Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Mood in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23: 113–61. Cyffer, Norbert and Hutchinson, John. 1990. Dictionary of the Kanuri Language. Dordrecht: Foris. Deignan, Alice and Potter, Liz. 2004. A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 1231–1252. Geeraerts, Dirk. 2002. The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in composite expressions. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Pörings and Ralf Dirven (eds), 435–65. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gibbs, Ray W. 1999. Speaking and Thinking with Metonymy. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 61–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar

Goossens, Louis. 2002. Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds), 349–77. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grady, Joseph E. 1997. Theories are buildings revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 267–90. Heine, Bernd. 2003. On degrammaticalization. In Historical Linguistics 2001, Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge and Jo Taylor (eds), 163–79. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd, Claudi, Ulrike and Hünnemeyer, Friederike. 1991. Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Heine, Bernd and Kuteva, Tania. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilpert, Martin. 2006a. Keeping an eye on the data: Metonymies and their patterns. In Corpusbased Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan T. Gries (eds), 123–51. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hilpert, Martin. 2006b. Chained metonymies. In Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive/Functional Research, John Newman and Sally Rice (eds). Stanford CA: CSLI. Hollenbach, Barbara E. 1995. Semantic and syntactic extensions of body-part terms in Mixtecan: The case of ‘face’ and ‘foot’. International Journal of American Linguistics 61(2): 168–90. Hopper, Paul. 1987. Emergent grammar. BLS 13: 139–57. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Kilian-Hatz, Christa. 2003. Khwe Dictionary. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York NY: Basic Books. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. I. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. München: Lincom. Leslau, Wolf. 1991. A Comparative Dictionary of Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Levinson, Steven C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. MacLaury, Robert E. 1989. Zapotec body-part locatives: Prototypes and metaphoric extensions. International Journal of American Linguistics 61: 119–54. Matsumoto, Yo. 1999. On the extension of body-part nouns to object-part nouns and spatial adpositions. In Cognition and Function in Language, Barbara Fox, Dan Jurafsky and Laura A. Michaelis (eds), 15–28. Stanford CA: CSLI. Merlan, Francesca C. 1994. A Grammar of Wardaman. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nerlich, Brigitte and Clarke, David. 2001. Serial metonymy: A study of reference-based polysemisation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2: 245–72. Niemeier, Susanne. 2000. Straight from the heart — metonymic and metaphorical explorations. In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, Antonio Barcelona (ed.), 195–213. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 2005. Metonymic reasoning inside and outside language. In LACUS Forum XXXI: Interconnections, Adam Makkai, William J. Sullivan, and Arle R. Lommel (eds), 13–32. Houston TX: LACUS.

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Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda (eds). 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2004. The Role of Conceptual Metonymy in Meaning Construction. Metaphorik.de 6:2004. Radden, Günter. 2004. The metonymic folk model of language. In Imagery in Language: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ronald W. Langacker, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Alina Kwiatkowska (eds), 543–65. Frankfurt: Lang. Radden, Günter. 2006. The metaphor time is space across languages. In Metonymy – Metaphor Collage, Elżbieta Górska and Günter Radden (eds), 99–120. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press. Radden, Günter and Kövecses, Zoltán. 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 17–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed.), 164–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez, Francisco J. and Diéz Velasco, Olga I. 2002. Patterns of conceptual interaction. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Pörings and Ralf Dirven (eds), 501–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schuh, Russell G. 1981. A dictionary of Ngizim. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Svorou, Soteria. 1994. The Grammar of Space. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John. 2002. Category extension by metonymy and metaphor. In Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Pörings and Ralf Dirven (eds), 323–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Dasher, Richard B. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walsh, Michael. 1994. Body parts in Murrinh-Patha: Incorporation, grammar, and metaphor. In The Grammar of Inalienability: A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part–Whole Relation, Hilary Chapell and William McGregor (eds), 327–80. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wilkins, David. 1993. From part to person: Natural tendencies of semantic change and the search for cognates. Working paper No. 23. Cognitive Anthropology Research Group. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

chapter 5

Arguing the case against coercion Debra Ziegeler National Coalition of Independent Scholars

Recent work in cognitive linguistics has hired the term coercion which was formerly associated with computational linguistics to apply to a number of instances in the study of natural language in which there is an incongruity between the semantics of a syntactic frame and the semantics of lexical items found in it. Some of these instances illustrate areas which could well be described as extensions of aspectual boundaries in which the harmony between lexical and grammatical aspect has been penetrated; others illustrate mismatch in nominal phrases, in which the usual parameters that apply have been violated. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyse three individual cases as they have been presented in recent accounts, and to investigate whether such cases could be explained either by pragmatic factors such as metonymic inferencing, or by considering them in the light of their diachronic development. It will then be questioned whether or not a unique phenomenon of coercion can be justified in the context of natural language at all. Keywords: construction-based grammars, indefinite articles, metonymy, mismatch, progressive aspect, subject-complement coercion, type-shifting

Introduction Recent studies in the syntax–semantics interface, and also in areas of research broadly known as unification grammars (e.g. Michaelis 2003, 2004), have isolated a unique phenomenon to account for apparent inconsistencies of grammatical form and function, known as coercion. Although the term seems to have had its origins in artificial intelligence (Levinson 2000: 246), it is increasingly being discussed in relation to natural language and its usage. In particular, it seems to have increased its application to almost any type of inexplicable incongruity between what is de * The preliminary work on this chapter has benefited from the input of a number of colleagues, including David Denison, Martina Faller, John Payne, and the audience of the Language Sandwidge postgraduate students’ seminar series at the University of Manchester, May 17, 2005. I am grateful also to Elizabeth Traugott for many valuable and constructive comments on earlier versions of this chapter, and to the useful suggestions and criticisms of two anonymous referees for the present volume. A longer, more detailed version has been accepted for Journal of Pragmatics (to appear).

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manded or anticipated in the syntactic environment of a structure and what is actually found to be possible in language use. The recent upsurge of interest in such a phenomenon and its increasingly wide-ranging attribution to a diversity of linguistic features lead one to believe that the application of the term as an explanatory device may require a more succinct definition than it is presently afforded. The fact that the phenomenon first emerged in the computational domains of linguistic research makes it necessary to consider investigating it further in natural language usage. The numbers of questions which must arise, then, are many. Issues include the actual use by participants in discourse, and how it contributes to the construction of meaning. Another question which arises is that of the actual processes involved in coercing, and why they should be different from any form of pragmatic reasoning; further puzzles emerge as to when coercion ceases to be coercion - some of the examples provided in the literature, such as those involving the aspectual category of semelfactives (e.g. Piñango 2003), seem to be almost conventionalised to the point of no longer appearing to be coerced in any way. Furthermore, the developmental aspect of coercion is not taken into account in any of the studies so far: can coercion be considered a by-product or a contributor of grammatical change in language? A cursory glance at some of the examples of coercion in the recent literature (e.g. Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997) creates the impression, finally, that, in the face of a huge pragmatics enterprise, the introduction of such a notion may be rendered superfluous and that it could well be accommodated within what is already known about historical change or metonymic extension in general. Although many of these questions may require a more intensive study to investigate, the present chapter examines some of the disparate range of examples mentioned in the literature, and offers possible alternative explanations in terms of either metonymy or historical development, or both. The question whether the introduction of a new concept such as coercion enables a better understanding of the construction of meaning, or whether the same type of meaning construction can be obtained within existing pragmatic parameters, will also be addressed in the sections to follow.

1. Defining terms 1.1 Mismatch, coercion and type-shifting The terms ‘mismatch’ and ‘type-shifting’ have also become associated with the topic of coercion in general, and it is necessary to distinguish such concepts within the existing theoretical framework. Much of the recent work on coercion has arisen as the result of extended theories of constructions as the minimal linguistic units from which grammatical analysis may proceed; e.g., the introduction of terms such as

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the Plural construction (Michaelis 2003) to replace earlier categorial distinctions referring to morphological classes only. Mismatch has thus been used to refer to the situation of conflict between the constructional syntax and the lexical filler, or form-function mappings (Francis and Michaelis 2003: 2, cited by Traugott 2006), often creating situations parallel to those that may arise in, for example, the grammaticalisation of a morphological category to new functional domains. In section 2, more specific definitions are provided; for the moment it is sufficient to suggest that coercion is essentially the resolution of mismatch. Thus the form-function incongruity expressed in, for example, Did you eat a pudding? (Michaelis 2003: 270), has been labelled mismatch between the Indefinite Determination construction and the lexical items with which it may prototypically combine; i.e. count nouns. In order to resolve such mismatches, a principle known as the Override Principle is called upon (Michaelis 2003: 268), which determines that if the lexical item is incongruent with the syntactic environment, it is the meaning of the syntactic environment of the construction that wins out over the lexical meaning with which it is combined; i.e. pudding in the above example will take on count-noun status. This is known as Implicit type-shifting and is associated with coercion effects. Explicit type-shifting, on the other hand, shifts the designation of the lexical item when the construction type is conventionally associated with that item (Michaelis 2003: 272), so that the type-shifting is derived from unification of constructions with their arguments; e.g. the Partitive Construction a piece of bread, explicitly shifts the mass noun type (bread) to be construed as a bounded part, via unification with a construction referring to a bounded entity, but the mismatch is still between the construction and its open-class argument (Traugott 2006). The latter is not usually associated with coercion, because the association between the construction type and the lexical argument is conventional.

1.2 Coercion and metonymy In the argument that follows, it will be demonstrated that metonymy may play an important role in explaining the architecture so described in the coercion literature. In artificial intelligence, coercion has often been linked to metonymy, and metonymy has been associated with coercion when constraints are imposed on predicate arguments and the constraints are violated - metonymic resolution seems to . In an example of the transitive construction in English, Traugott (2006) illustrates that coercion is related to the way in which syntactic structure may attract by analogy new component parts. . The level of incongruity may, of course, vary from speaker to speaker. Evidence for such variation may provide justification for the gradualness of degrees of conventionalisation of such incongruities.

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serve as the means by which coercion is invoked (Hobbs, Stickel, Appelt and Martin 1993). Thus, in such labelling, there is essentially no difference between metonymy and coercion; however, in the area of aspectual coercion discussed below, the relationship between metonymy and coercion is not so clear-cut, and does not always involve just predicate arguments. Jackendoff (1997) discusses examples of coercion as enriched composition, which also include the subcategory of reference transfer expressions, essentially, referential metonymies, as in The ham sandwich is waiting for his check (from Nunberg 1978). In his account, then, there is little difference between metonymy and coercion. The transferred reference of Jackendoff ’s (1997) examples is only one facet of an entire research field of metonymy. Kövecses and Radden (1998), and Hopper and Traugott (2003) indicate that such a definition is too narrow for most purposes in cognitive research, and propose that the relationships existing in metonymy exist between concepts, and are not just related to the lexical forms traditionally associated with referential metonymy (1998: 38). However, even amongst lexical items, the ‘transferred reference’ definition can be demonstrated to be a part of a wider conceptual sphere which would embrace a number of unrelated lexical items of a similar type, e.g., the ham sandwich above might fall into the category of a part for whole metonymy. Kövecses and Radden (1998: 39) maintain that the use of metonymy is not just a matter of simple substitution, and that language users are endeavouring to access one mental entity through another, in using a sophisticated operation. This operation can be related to a type of Gricean Quantity 2 implicature, in which the speaker communicates less than what is inferred from the message (what Levinson (2000: 37) re-labels an I-based implicature — i.e. ‘Minimal specifications get maximally informative or stereotypical interpretations’). If the means of achieving metonymic shifts in natural language is by Gricean Quantity implicatures, then coercion is no different from a form of conversational inferencing. It appears, then, that the term coercion is being extended way beyond its original uses as a simple computational explanation for the processes involved in metonymy. There are other ways besides metonymy of accessing one mental entity through another, including metaphor, but metaphor differs from metonymy in that the relationship between the two mental entities is analogical, while in the case of metonymy, it is contiguous (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 87–8). In Kövecses and Radden’s account, contiguity of meaning in metonymy can be attributed to the location of the entities within an Idealized Cognitive Model (1998: 39), discussed in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Turner (1989), and Croft (1993). In . Michaelis (2004: 2) also equates ‘enriched composition’ with coercion. . Barcelona (2003a) describes such metonymies as PART FOR PART metonymies, the sub-domain of FOOD standing for the sub-domain of CUSTOMER, both within the domain of RESTAURANT.

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such models the source and target concepts belong to a domain of wider knowledge brought to bear upon the situation, i.e. it is a cognitive domain in which specific entities are located in connective relationships. For this reason Kövecses and Radden (1998: 39) develop their own definition of metonymy as “[. . .] a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same domain, or ICM”. Such a definition is designed to be more inclusive than previous ones which discussed only reference transfer between lexical items, or partial structural ellipsis, and refers instead to the entire reasoning process associated with metonymy. Barcelona (2003a: 245) builds on Kövecses and Radden’s (1998) definition in the following way: “A schematic metonymy is a mapping, within one cognitive domain, of a cognitive (sub)domain, the source, onto another cognitive (sub)domain, the target, so that the target is mentally activated,” preferring the use of the term ‘mapping’ to ‘process,’ ‘source’ to ‘vehicle,’ and ‘mental activation’ to ‘mental access.’ Such definitions allow for non-referential metonymy, such as the possibility of metonymy as a device linking the concepts produced in indirect speech acts, e.g. (Kövecses and Radden 1998: 73):

(1) Can you pass the salt?

in which an ability for action metonymy, in the form of a question about one’s ability, stands for a request for the salt to be passed. Such metonymies are in the form of entire constructions, and do not arise solely out of the substitution of one lexical form for another. Stefanowitsch (2003) discusses similar phenomena in relation to cognitive approaches to metonymy. Another type which involves metonymic processes of a non-lexical nature is a predication metonymy, as in the following (Kövecses and Radden 1998: 73):

(2) She was able to pass the driver’s test.

which is described as a potentiality for actuality metonymy in Panther and Thornburg (1999); the assertion of the subject’s ability to pass the test standing for the actual passing of the test (via a Gricean Quantity 2 implicature, an I-implicature of Levinson (2000), or an R-based implicature of Horn (1984)). A similar type which has been isolated as relevant to the historical development of modal verbs is the potentiality for non-actuality metonymy (Ziegeler 2003), as found in the following example:

(3) She had the ability to pass the driver’s test.

in which the inference obtained instead is that the event was not actualised rather than that it was; this is due to the operation of a Gricean Quantity 1 implicature (Levinson’s 2000 and Horn’s 1984 Q-implicature). Again, it is the subject’s ability only that is expressed, but the use of an expression which is more complex

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and more prolix than is necessary (when a less complex means is available, e.g. (3)) leads to the interpretation that the content of such an expression represents the limits of the speaker’s knowledge. The resolution of such metonymies is thus interwoven with both the Quantity maxims of Grice (1975) (and his revisionist successors, e.g. Horn 1984 and Levinson 2000). Panther and Thornburg (2003a: 7) note that the relation between the source concept (i.e. the vehicle) and the target concept (i.e. the intended meaning) is defeasible and contingent, thus alluding to the relevant pragmatic processes of conversational implicature. Barcelona (2003b: 98) cites Papafragou (1996) as also suggesting that the interpretation of a metonym often involves pragmatic principles. Barcelona (2003a: 244) notes the ability for metonymies to become socially conventionalised; i.e. a painting by Picasso is referred to as a Picasso. Such conventions are indicative of the pragmatic strengthening of a conversational implicature. Predication metonymies as illustrated in (2–3) do not reflect mismatch or coercion since such effects are associated more restrictively with ‘ungrammatical’ consequences. However, it can be hypothesised from the above discussion that coercion may well be accommodated within a broader theory of metonymy, and can therefore be also discussed in terms of pragmatic inferencing, the mechanics by which metonymic extensions are created. If it can also be seen that a minimal expression (such as the ham sandwich) can stand for a maximal interpretation (such as ‘the ham sandwich orderer’ — the food for customer metonymy of Barcelona (2003a)), then we are invoking an implicature based on Levinson’s (2000) I-heuristic, or Grice’s Quantity 2 maxim, as noted above; similar examples described in the literature as coercion might be explained in the same way. The only distinction perceptible at this stage is that the field in which coercion metonymy operates may often be more limited than that of other metonymies; i.e. to occurrences at the syntax–semantics interface. Whether this distinction is universal to all types of coercion metonymy, though, will be discussed below.

2. Examples of coercion in recent studies De Swart (1998: 360) describes coercion as syntactically and morphologically invisible, and triggered by the need to resolve semantic conflict in contexts which require particular reinterpretation mechanisms to be fully processed. What she means by this is simply that the evidence of coercion is not found in any given grammatical form; it is derived from what the interpreter normally creates from the association of a lexical item in a specific grammatical environment combined with any additional extra-world knowledge that may be resorted to in the process of interpretation. Interpretation, therefore, is not automated, but is calculated on the basis

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of additional relevant information brought to bear upon the situation of utterance. Michaelis (2004: 7) assigns coercion to the interpretation of particular construction meanings, and defines it as occurring “[. . .] when the interpreter must reconcile the meaning of a morphosyntactic construction with the meaning of a lexical filler”. Croft (1991) also refers to coercion, suggesting that it occurs when the lexical items of a construction take on the construction semantics, thus proposing a similar definition to that of Michaelis (2003, 2004), while not referring specifically to construction-based grammars. In general, though, the possibility of pragmatic inferencing is not considered in most coercion accounts, which tend to pass over the role of language users in the interpretive process. Obviously, if the term of reference known as coercion is to endure in its natural language application, it must be identifiable as a unique phenomenon distinct from all other possible means of describing the linguistic processes concerned. In (4) are listed three representative cases discussed in recent literature:

(4) a. Nominal coercion (e.g. Michaelis 2003). b. Complement or subject coercion (e.g. Pustejovsky 1995). c. Aspectual coercion triggered by aspectual conflict; e.g. the English progressive (Michaelis 2004).

The phenomena selected in (4) are a small sample of some of the instances discussed in the literature to date. Scope does not permit a full discussion of every type available, but the three selected are interesting for the fact that they represent three completely different instances of coercion, taking place at different syntactic levels and involving different grammatical phenomena. The constructions associated with (4a) may be discussed with regard to type-selecting, while the progressive in (4c) is referred to as a type-shifting example (Michaelis 2003). According to Michaelis (2003: 266), typeselecting constructions express concord relations, that is, they denote the same kind of values as the lexical features of the items with which they are combined (2003: 272), such as boundedness, configuration and number (as in the Indefinite Determination construction). Type-shifting constructions, on the other hand, perform derivations, according to Michaelis (and also Traugott 2006). The type of coercion referred to in (4b), though, is quite different from the other two and will be examined alongside (4a) and (4c) as a means of determining whether there is any commonality to the phenomena described. Each of these cases will be briefly reviewed in turn below and alternative suggestions will be offered by way of explanation. . It is clear from the literature that the tendency has been in most cases to use decontextualised, constructed examples, which in many ways, are self-fulfilling to the objectives of the studies that use them. In the present study, the same examples have been discussed throughout in most cases, since they are the data representing the claims under investigation. In a more intensive study, it would be obviously necessary to use more examples derived from actual usage.

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2.1 Nominal coercion In nominal coercion, the most frequent examples cited include discussion of mass nouns co-occurring with indefinite articles and count nouns occurring as bare nouns, unmarked by a determiner, for example (Michaelis 2003):

(5) She had a beer. (6) You have apple on your shirt.

Michaelis (2003: 261) refers to the introduction of a mass noun into the environment of a count noun (in (5)) as seen from the point of view that the incongruity is the result of the misplacing of lexical items. The syntax (i.e. the Indefinite Determination construction) is thus perceived as basic, and prior, and may be considered under such an analysis to ask for new lexical items with which it may be compatible (Michaelis 2004: 22). If this is the case, it may be further questioned why the lexical items are attracted to occur in inappropriate syntactic configurations, when they are incompatible with the syntactic environment in the first place. In (6) the coercion is claimed to be due to the requirement of the Verb Phrase construction for arguments which are maximal categories, i.e. in the case of NPs, that they have reference (to the existence of a quantified entity) or are linked anaphorically to a maximal category (Michaelis 2003: 269). (7), however, shows that bare NP arguments are not restricted to co-occurrence with verb phrases alone:

(7) Top this first layer of apple with more apples slices [sic] arranged across the others like ripples in a pond. www.marthastewart.com/page. jhtml?type=content&id=tvs5030 (www.google.co.uk: 10/5/06)

In other words, they can appear as arguments of prepositions as well. This may not affect the claims made, but Michaelis (2003: 269) also states that the only lexical nouns unmarked for maximality are mass types. However, mass types can also refer (e.g. The apple was all over his shirt), and non-mass types can also be unquantified, e.g. There were apples all over the ground. It may be clearer, perhaps, to suggest that grammatical morphology marking countability on nominals is normally applied to count nouns, except when there is a need to indicate that the entity referred to by the noun is decomposed or degraded to the point at which it is no longer identifiable as a singular entity, or when there is no specific reference. Such instances may therefore omit the article indicating individuation and be interpreted in the same way as mass nouns. . Specificity may be considered to be, under some interpretations, a discourse-level equivalent to lexical boundedness or individuation.

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The incompatibility of lexical with syntactic environment is discussed by Michaelis (2003, 2004) as resolved by a procedure in which the meaning of the syntax wins out over the lexical meaning of the item to be coerced into the environment; i.e. the principle referred to in 1.1 as the Override Principle. The coercion effects of mass to count noun coercion are seen to be produced by either of two operators, (implicit) type-shifting operators (e.g. the Plural construction in two beers, where the mass-noun ‘type’ shifts to count noun status in unification with the Plural construction), or type-sensitive operators, e.g. in (5), where the indefinite article is sensitive to co-occurrence with count nouns (see Michaelis 2003: 263). Most of the cases of coercion described are accounted for by such procedures; thus, beer in (5) acquires count-noun status.

2.2 Alternative explanations: grammaticalisation of the indefinite article A grammaticalisation account may propose instead that the indefinite article is generalising to an extended range of uses, and that coercion is just a representation of such extensions. According to Hopper (1987) and Quirk and Wrenn (1969), the indefinite article was rare in Old English, even rarer than the definite article, according to Quirk and Wrenn (1969: 71). The original form of the indefinite article was an, ‘one,’ which shared with the determiner sum ‘a certain’ the function of marking only specific, or referential noun phrases in the discourse (though there were distributional differences between the two forms (Hopper and Martin 1987)). Thus, non-specific indefinites could be left unmarked, as in the following Old English example (Hopper 1987: 143):

(8) Đeodric was Cristen. ‘Theodric was a Christian.’

As suggested by Hopper and Martin (1987), the indefinite article has gradually spread into domains which were formerly marked with zero (or other, non-specific) determiners. This change appears to begin to take place in Middle English, as both zero marking and indefinite articles may be found interchangeably in similar non-specific or non-referential environments in the same text:

(9) a. For ðat it ilimpð ofte ðat godd sant ane man an oðer to helpe. ‘For it often happens that God sends a man to help another man.’

. According to Traugott (2006) all diachronic innovations can be hypothesised to involve mismatch or incongruities initially. . Hopper does not provide the source of this example.

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b. ʒif rihtwis mann habbe swo ʒedon te-fore ðe, ʒif ðat holi writ ne wiðseið ðe naht […] ‘If a righteous man has done so before thee, and if that holy Writ does not contradict thee (…).’ (1150–1250) Vices and Virtues, (ed. Holthausen), p. 101. In (9a) the use of ane is glossed as an indefinite article, even though no specific man is being referred to. The same reference to a singular non-specific man is left unmarked in (9b), suggesting that the indefinite article may have been grammaticalising from this time, and used with a certain amount of variability. The movement of the indefinite article into non-referential domains was thus accompanied by a decrease in the referential specificity of the article form and a gradual loss of semantic substance over time, so that in present-day English, it may be used anywhere, even now encroaching into domains formerly reserved for mass nouns (as in (5)). If such examples are the result of diachronic developments, this may be considered an indication of the reduction of the semantic transparency associated with original meanings of marking numerals. However, the meaning rendered by examples such as (5) is that it refers to a measure unit of beer, and if the semantics of marking singularity were completely lost at this stage, we should not be able to derive the count noun semantics at all. The act of coercion is thus based on analogy with conventional uses of the indefinite article, though the interpretation of the coercion may involve different processes.

2.3 Alternative explanations: metonymy 2.3.1 Mass-to-count coercion If mass-to-count coercion were simply a case of generalisation in grammaticalisation, it would also have to be restricted to the use of the indefinite article - thus marking for plurality on a mass noun type (e.g. three beers please) would be considered as a separate case. The Indefinite Determination construction and the Plural constructions are both said to ‘require’ the features of boundedness, configuration, and number (Michaelis 2003: 271) in their lexical arguments. In (5) it could be argued instead that the interpretation is metonymically derived, and involves a substitutive relationship (a beer standing for ‘a glass of beer’ — this could be perhaps labelled a contained for container metonymy — see Kövecses and Radden (1998: 58)). However, it is not always guaranteed that the target form is so readily retrievable, as it is in similar metonymies supplied by Kövecses and Radden (1998: 58), and if it were, the indefinite article should be more productive in such circumstances. Moreover, the following examples (from Jackendoff 1997: 53) could be construed as a little confusing:

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(10) a. *He poured three cements today. b. *There’s some vitamin pill on the counter for you. Jackendoff (1997) discusses count-mass coercion of nouns as examples of enriched composition, claiming that it is not always possible in some cases, as shown in (10), and suggesting that there may be selection restrictions on what is possible and what is not possible in coercive operations. The reasons suggested are that in such novel cases, as in (10b)), it is not entirely clear what the substance in the composition of vitamin pills actually refers to, since there is generally no extra-linguistic world knowledge that can be brought to bear upon the situation. Similarly, (10a) would only have relevance, perhaps, for someone working in the building trade. Perhaps such examples might fall outside of what Barcelona (2003a) has referred to as socially conventionalised metonymies, as noted above, and if it is not possible to conventionalise them, they may not be acceptable as coercions. Similar examples are discussed by Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández (2001) as material for entity containing/holding the material metonymies, as in I would like three butters please which they suggest to indicate ‘three slices (of toast, etc.) with butter’. (This would be open to construal too, though, as at first glance three butters might instead be construed to mean ‘three pats of butter.’) Thus it is considered that it is not a case of generalisation in grammaticalisation which is motivating such uses; it is hypothesised that appearance in particular circumstances may motivate instead the use of a metonymic device in which the source, a beer, stands for the target, ‘a glass of beer’ or ‘a minimal measure of beer’ (depending on what is considered ‘minimal’ in a given set of circumstances) and that the readily-recoverable target of the metonymy is related to frequency of use or situation (social conventionalisation) rather than to any degree of coercion: the examples are simply examples of transferred conceptual reference in the form of developing metonymies. The overall outcome of these metonymies is an analogy with compatible forms in such contexts, i.e. count nouns, creating the appearance of a grammatically-based metaphor; the process by which the analogy is obtained, though, is retrievable as a metonymy, created by the exploitation of Quantity 2 (Levinson’s (2000) I-inferences), i.e. invited inferences.

2.3.2 Count-to-mass coercion In the case of the count-to-mass operation though, we may have more reason to recourse to grammaticalisation as an explanation. As seen in (8–9), the use of the indefinite article with non-specific referents was not obligatory in earlier stages of English and would have been an added feature, to be placed before a noun as required, when the speaker wished to express singularity as against specificity; that is, non-specific singular count nouns were conceptually comparable to mass nouns.

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Unmarked count nouns which are used in a mass sense, then, would never have required marking for individuation. The noun apple in environments such as (6) could therefore have always remained unmarked since no quantification need be expressed (it is unimportant how many apples were involved); there is no specific reference required. If any coercion need be invoked at all, it might only be perceived in the absence of the indefinite determiner some, which also expanded its range of functions to introduce non-specific NPs as well as specific. While it could not be claimed that the historical changes that took place during this period have any bearing on today’s uses of the indefinite article, it can be seen that its original function was to quantify, and thus it applied to count nouns only. Langacker (2002: 72) refers to the ability for count nouns to be replicable as distinguishing them from mass nouns, and suggests that in circumstances in which the boundaries of the replicable noun are irrelevant or cannot be perceived, any count noun can be construed as a mass noun. Amongst the examples he provides are: I don’t like shelf — I’d rather eat table, said by one termite to another, for whom the boundaries of the shelf or the table fall outside the termite’s domain of experience (2002: 78). However, this explains why count nouns can be construed as mass nouns, not how. In the case of (6–7), we cannot claim without an intensive survey of the use of apple since Old English times that the noun had continuously remained unmarked whenever boundary quantification was not required, down through the history of its use until present-day English. However, we can claim that the presentday use of the indefinite article is affected by its earlier associations with marking singular quantity, and therefore retains the inferences of boundedness that Langacker discusses, as an additional meaning besides its grammatical function of marking indefiniteness on count nouns. That is, the indefinite article selects a singular, bounded, portion from the otherwise unbounded mass representing the nominal conception of the generic world of ‘apple.’ As a marker of boundedness, the interpretation produced when it is not used is that the noun is unbounded and unquantified. Kövecses and Radden (1998: 51), however, describe such instances as metonymies, suggesting that they are the result of the use of the constitution ICM, in which substances are conceived of as parts making up whole physical objects, and resulting in the switch between construals of bounded entities and unbounded ones, for example: (11)

There was rat all over the road.

This is described as an object for material constituting that object type of metonymy; i.e., the object rat has been metonymically shifted to refer to rat substance or remains, the material constituting a rat (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández (2001) also agree on this metonymic description for similar ex-

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amples). The apparent semantic conflict is perhaps due only to the fact that bounded, replicable entities are most frequently used with such determiners, and that when they are not, they derive a pragmatic inference Quantity 1 from the absence of count noun determiners of replicability, suggesting that they are unbounded or non-replicable, as noted above, while at the same time the object for material constituting that object metonymy operates at the lexical level of referential metonymy, and refers directly to the shift from count noun (object) status to mass noun (material) status, albeit with the grammatical consequence of zero determination. It could be argued that referential metonymies can be derived independently of their syntactic environment, though in some circumstances there are grammatical effects, and this is what appears as coercion. It could also be argued that the loss of determination is due to the loss of the specific or referential nature of the rat material, otherwise the determiner some would be used instead. The same bare NP may occur with non-specific reference to an unbounded quantity of count noun objects (as mentioned above); e.g. There were apples all over the road, the unbounded quantity rendering the reference pragmatically non-specific. Perhaps, then, as in Old English, the bare NP marks non-specific reference, but in today’s English only when the NP is not a singular count noun (indefinite articles having long since grammaticalised to mark non-specific, as well as specific, singular count nouns). Thus in both the count-to-mass coercion and the mass-to-count coercion the construction of new meaning can be seen to result from the exploitation of invited inferences of Quantity: in mass-to-count noun coercion, the metonymic adjustments of the source form (e.g. a beer) construct the additional meaning (e.g. a glass/pint of beer), creating new uses for mass nouns via Quantity 2 inferences, while in countto-mass coercion, metonymy associated with Quantity 1 inferences creates the construction of mass construals of count nouns due to the absence of determiners indicating specificity and boundedness. In the following section, it will be seen how extensions of meaning are constructed through the coercion of complement clauses.

2.4 Complement and subject coercion As with coercion of mass nouns to count noun status, the coercion of complements is clearly also a matter of simple metonymic inferencing. The coercion of verb complements has been associated with what is known as the qualia structure of noun phrases, as described by Pustejovsky (1995). Qualia structure, on the surface, appears like a type of argument structure for noun phrases, and involves the consideration of certain aspects of inherent semantic knowledge which are encyclopaedically associated with nouns; e.g. for a noun referring to an object, its purpose or use, its formal structure and the method by which such an object comes into being. Pustejovsky (1995: 77) also maintains that the qualia structure contributes to oper-

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ations such as type-shifting. In (12), Pustejovsky has supplied a means of recovering the ellipted material: (12) John began the book in which the so-called qualia structure corresponds to extra-linguistic knowledge about the function and nature of the source (vehicle) of the metonymy, the book; i.e. books are for reading or writing, so what John does with the book is in accord with what is found in the qualia structure. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández (2001: 340) also discuss similar examples to (12), suggesting that, rather than examples of ‘enriched composition,’ as described by Jackendoff (1997), they are better described as examples of contextual parametrization of the unrealised generic value of the generic selection restriction provided by the verb. Although Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández are not clear on the meaning of generic in this use, they do invoke the presence of a metonymy in such cases, without referring to any particular type of ‘qualia structure’ of the kind referred to by Pustejovsky; it is referred to by them as the object for an action in which the object is involved metonymy. Such labelling focuses on the representation of an action or an event as an entity in itself, in that it can be readily substituted with a more concrete entity. However, they also suggest that context plays an important role in the parametrization process; if the usual activities of John in (12), for example, were to bind books, rather than reading or writing them, the ellipted material would not be as prototypical as could be assumed at first glance. Perhaps this aspect of ‘metonymic reconstruction’ associated with the qualia structure of Pustejovsky (1995: 199–200) can be otherwise described as reflecting the content of an ICM and that it would not be used if there were no extra-linguistic world knowledge available for its retrieval in the first place. Pustejovsky (1995) also discusses the coercion of subjects, as in (13): (13) a. Books bore me. b. The movie frightened Mary. to which another example may be added: c. The food delighted Mary. (Schlesinger 1992: 326) This type of metonymy is not detailed in Kövecses and Radden’s (1998) typology, though it might well be added, since many of those listed in that account are structural in nature rather than lexical. Pustejovsky (1995) indicates again that the qualia structure associated with movies (i.e. ‘watching movies’) and books (‘reading books’) enables a metonymic reconstruction to take place, in which the action of watching movies or reading books has the effect that it does have on the experiencer objects in (13). Similarly, it could be suggested that the qualia structure associated typically with food in (13c) (‘eating the food’) enables the reconstruction of a

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similar metonymy. Kövecses and Radden (1998: 54) discuss the use of the instrument for action metonymy in examples such as to shampoo one’s hair. In such examples the instrument is standing for the action verb itself, while in (13) the logical object (e.g. books) of the implied experiencing event (e.g. reading books) is the surface subject (Pustejovsky 1995). In such cases, though, it could be said that the instrument is equivalent to the stimulus of the experiencing event, and the action is equivalent to the experiencing event; the stimulus is therefore standing for the entire experiencing event; thus a parallel metonymy of the type: stimulus for experiencing event could be proposed to account for such shifts. One does not need to resort to the additional mechanics of coercion operations to explain the pragmatic relations that are underlying such metonymies. One perceivable difference, however, between complement/subject coercion and the NP types discussed above is that the level at which the metonymic reconstruction can take place is different is either case. In the nominal types (2.1), the syntactic level remains the same, the reconstruction of missing meaning taking place within the NP itself. In the complement or subject coercion, the metonymic reconstruction of meaning takes place across syntactic boundaries, so that a nominal entity may stand for an entire (non-finite) clause. In this way, the metonymic adjustments illustrated by coercion examples are seen to cover a wide range of grammatical phenomena, and thus may be defined in different terms in each case. These differences will be discussed in section 3. New meanings are constructed in such examples by the adjustments in the semantic roles represented in the subject NPs. With particular reference to examples such as (13c), Schlesinger (1992) found in one study that there were differences in the amount of agentivity accorded to the subjects of the verbs in comparison to the objects of the verbs by native speaker informants; i.e. the subjects were assigned with more agentive senses of control and cause than the objects, even when they referred to an inanimate entity. In the same way the subjects of (13a–b) could be hypothesised to take on the prototypical semantics of subjects, which are causative or agentive. Thus the exploitation of a metonymy in such examples may contribute to the construction of new meaning in the stimulus subjects. In (12), the object NP is less likely to be affected in this way; though in such examples, the semantics of the verb are enriched to account for the qualia structure surrounding the use of the object NP. Meaning is therefore constructed metonymically on the basis of the accessibility of the target concepts in each case, accessed through what Pustejovsky terms qualia structure.

2.5 Aspectual coercion due to aspectual conflict The other type of aspectual coercion noted by Michaelis (2004) and De Swart (1998) was the type of aspectual coercion found in cases in which there is either a clash of

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aspectual types (labelled by Michaelis (2004) as ‘endocentric,’ i.e. coercion relating to heads of phrases, as opposed to the ‘exocentric’ nature of frame adverbial aspectual coercion, which relates to non-heads). In aspectual conflict either a perfective lexical aspect (such as is associated with verbs expressing events, or Vendler’s (1967) Achievements and Accomplishments) is used in an imperfective grammatical aspectual environment (e.g. progressives or habituals in English), or an imperfective lexical aspect (verbs referring to processes or states) is coerced into an environment in which the central aspectual tendencies are perfective (as in the use of the past tense in English). Logically, a lexical aspectual category will be attracted to a compatible grammatical aspectual category in the first instance; this has been shown for studies of child language acquisition (Anderson 1991), and can be accounted for by a Principle of Relevance (Bybee 1985) whereby developing grammatical morphemes become first attracted to lexical environments which are relevant to the meanings of the morphemes. English does not distinguish grammatical perfectivity from imperfectivity morphologically; i.e. there is no one-to-one correspondence between lexical and grammatical aspect, the use of the past tense being a stage of grammaticalisation further than that of grammatical perfectives (see Bybee et al. 1994), and grammatical imperfectivity expressed using the Progressive may co-occur with lexically perfective types. Thus grammatical aspectual divisions are less clear-cut than in other languages (such as the Slavic and Chinese languages) where this is concerned (see, e.g. Comrie 1976). However, the consequences of aspectual conflict are seen in the creation of modal inferences, such as counterfactuality (see Ziegeler 1995, 2000), and in the apparently overgeneralised uses of the progressive aspect found in second-language English dialects (see, e.g. Ho and Platt 1993). An example of aspectual conflict coercion discussed at length by Michaelis (2004) is that of the progressive aspect. The coercion of lexically stative verbs used in the progressive provides much cause for concern, especially since, as noted by Michaelis (2004: 36–7), the effect of the progressive, when used with non-stative verb types, is to produce a state-like grammatical situation. In most examples so far, the coercion is brought about by conflict between the lexical entry and its syntactic environment. However, the cooccurrence of states with progressives appears anomalous due to aspectual harmony, rather than aspectual conflict, as shown here: (14) Peter is believing in ghosts these days. where the stative verb, believe, is held to be incompatible with the stativity of the progressive aspect. Thus, if aspectual harmony creates coercion, then it must be the case that aspectual conflict is the preferred situation, as in (15): (15) She was winning the race when she got tripped.

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However, both are cases of coercion, according to Michaelis’ (2004) account. It has been said that stative verbs appearing in progressives are not acceptable because the progressive already has a stativising effect on non-stative verbs, and they are therefore redundant (e.g. Vlach 1981: 274). Thus, it is questionable why they represent an instance of coercion. Michaelis accounts for this by suggesting that an operator hold must be added to the causal representation of the input state, yielding an Activity representation, whatever the lexical aspect of the main verb (2004: 37). However, this only describes what happens; it cannot account for what speakers do, nor can it explain why it happens. The basis for a coercion account with some progressives and their lexical input is paradoxical, in the face of other accounts in which the lexical input and the construction are in discord. The progressive obviously requires a participle with an aspectual property of a different type from the stative auxiliary head, i.e. an Activity participle, for the construction to stativise it. There is already semantic conflict in that the participle required is of a different aspectual type from the head. So when a participle of the same aspectual type as the head is introduced into the construction, it becomes questionable why there is still semantic conflict. There could only be a possibility of mismatch, then, if the conflict were at different levels — the stative form of the participle in conflict with the construction’s stativising function (though the function has not even been created until the right form comes along). This is puzzling, not least because Achievements and Accomplishments similarly involve coercion (Michaelis 2004: 17–18), and they are also of aspectual types in conflict with the stativising head verb. However, the coercion involved in the latter cases is not due to the fact that a stative form is in conflict with the expected stativising function, and so the coercion is not created by the (assumed) functional requirements of the construction, but simply because the participle type is not an Activity. Thus, there seem to be two different levels of coercion represented here, one which refers to form-tofunction coercion, and the other which refers to form-to-form coercion. It looks very much as though coercion is involved in one case when the participle is of the same aspectual type as the auxiliary, and in another case when the participle is of a different aspectual type from the auxiliary. The evidence from diachronic investigations of the history of the progressive in English, though, can lend a lot of clarity to this discussion, and it would be an oversight not to take them into consideration There are various accounts of the history of the Progressive construction, some which date the construction from Old English times (e.g. Ziegeler 1999) and others which trace it back only to Middle English (e.g. Bybee, Pagliuca and Perkins 1994). In the Old English construction there existed a form similar to the progressive, the agent-noun, which has been noted in some examples from Old English as ambiguous with the sources of the present-day progressive (e.g. Scheffer 1975). The earliest verb types to co-occur with the progressive in Old English texts have been re-

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ported to be most often intransitive verbs expressing duration (Traugott 1992), i.e. those referred to as the Activities of Vendler (1967). Denison (1993) found that the Old English form was rarely used with an accusative object, thus excluding aspectual types such as Accomplishments and some Achievements, and when there was an accusative object, the genitive form of the object was always used with the progressive. Stative verbs were also found co-occurring with the progressive, as in the following fifteenth-century example, cited from Mustanoja (1960: 595): (16) a. [. . .] we holden on the Crysten feyth and are bylevyng in Jhesu Cryste. Caxton, Blanchardyne and Eglantine Another example from the same text uses a non-volitional stative verb in the progressive: b. They sayd thre men ansuerd them with grete fere that the paleyce and the ysle was belongynge unto the Kynge of Fryse. Caxton, Blanchardyne and Eglantine The reason that it could have occurred so readily with stative verbs is possibly due to the fact that in its Old English uses, the progressive was often used to refer to situations of a more permanent or generic nature. The function of the participle form, if a continuity with the Old English form is maintained, would thus be adjectival in nature, and attributive of the subject, as a passive participle is today (Ziegeler 1999: 79). This is because the construction appeared to express meanings which were often more time-stable and less verb-like than today’s uses are, i.e. it had a generalised imperfective function. Thus, rather than a grammmaticalisation account, the development of the progressive was seen to emerge as a reanalysis out of an agent noun and along a continuum towards a verb (Ziegeler 1999, in press), in much the same way as is proposed by Haspelmath (1994) for participles crosslinguistically: noun > adjective > participle > verb. The anomaly of states with the present-day progressive may therefore be due more to the possibility that they are recessive, and declining in use relative to increasingly dynamic verb types. The spread of the progressive to more dynamic, perfective verb types, such as Accomplishments and Achievements, was seen to co-occur with the rise in transitive types, especially after 1600 (Ziegeler 1999: 93), and this was shown in small samples from the Helsinki Corpus (which showed a 9% rise in Accomplishments), and a larger sample from Visser (1969–73, which showed a 38% rise in Accomplishments after that time). The sudden rise in Accomplishments co-occurring with the progressive in the beginning of the Early Modern English period indicates that these environments were atypical, and, if any coercion were to be associated with the use of the progressive, it must have been in effect at that time. Historically, however, the progressive was primarily aligned with marking durative aspect on durative verbs,

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and the shift towards marking perfective, punctual, or telic verb types must have correlated with a reanalysis of the participle towards the verb-end of the noun-toverb continuum. It could be predicted that the reduction of the auxiliary to an enclitic in some instances accompanies this shift. Coercion, therefore, in such cases, is simply the synchronic recognition of a prolonged and developing diachronic process which involves the increasing accommodation of new lexical environments into an expanding historical pattern of reanalysis.

3. Coercion in the construction of meaning While it can be seen from the above three examples that the cases of coercion illustrated can be pinned down to an explanation derived from the cognitive processes of metonymy or historical change and reanalysis, there are still a number of questions arising from the study. The most important are: i. Are all the examples of coercion metonymy illustrated so far identifiable by their occurrence at the syntax–semantics interface? ii. Does the metonymy resolve mismatch, or create it? iii. How does the study of coercion metonymy contribute to the construction of meaning? In answer to (i), there are many types of metonymy which can be considered independently of coercion, so there is no two-way relationship between coercion and metonymy. The classic referential metonymies of the restaurant ICM provide examples, e.g.: (17) Table One’s movin’ upstairs which could be labelled a table for customer metonymy, in which there is no coercion suggested since the derivation of the metonymy does not involve type-shifting, or any kind of form-function incongruity. Instead it involves a violation of semantic selection restrictions occurring between subject and verb, as tables cannot move on their own. The incongruity, then, is found in anomalous lexical combinations: the intransitive verb move selects for a mobile, and often volitional being as subject. Speakers allow for such incompatibilities because they are able to retrieve a possible target reference of the metonymy, e.g. ‘The customers on Table One are moving upstairs.’ On the other hand, a coercion metonymy such as is illustrated in (5), now repeated in (18), displays incongruities at the syntax–semantics interface because of the . Personal observation, Manchester fish and chips café, 26 November 2004.

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appearance of grammatical functors marking boundedness, quantity and singularity co-occurring with items that they do not otherwise select for: (18) She had a beer Speakers similarly allow for such incongruities to fit the paradigm simply because they are able to retrieve the target of the metonymy quite readily; e.g. ‘a glass of beer’ or ‘a bottle of beer.’ The process of recovering the target of the metonymy is no different from that of recovering the target of any other referential metonymy, and the pragmatic processes may be no different from those already described, i.e. Gricean Quantity 2 implicatures, or the I-inferences of Levinson (2000). The only difference is that, unlike referential metonymies like (17) which affect only selection restrictions, the expression of the metonymy has consequences for the syntax of the construction it creates. However, it is the metonymic retrieval which permits the co-occurrence of the mass noun with the indefinite article. If it is possible to break down the processes involved in what is believed to be coercion, we may find that it may be triggered in such instances first by Zipf ’s (1949) rule of Speaker’s Economy, the source form a beer standing for a glass of beer, producing the metonymy contained for container, as described above. If the target is not easily retrievable, it is questionable whether the metonymic derivation will take place, as seen above in examples such as (10). However, with time and frequency of use, it is likely that examples such as (18) will conventionalise socially, and their co-occurrence with a mass noun will appear as a grammatical analogy. Eventually, it may be the case that the target is no longer consciously retrievable, as in (19) I had an ice cream at intermission. http://www.granta.com/extracts/2094 (www.google.co.uk; 23/05/06) where the measure unit referring to the portion of ice cream is no longer of any relevance, and any metonymic derivation therefore under-specifies the unit of measure. Examples such as (19) may have started out life as mismatches, but the effects of such incongruities are no longer visible. It is possible that once such mismatch has become semantically ‘bleached’ then coercion has taken place, but while the metonymic reconstruction is still live, there are still pragmatic (I-based) inferences involved in the interpretation — this would mean that coercion may be equated with conventionalisation of metonymy. The noun ice cream now appears polysemous expressing either of two senses according to context: (i) a portion of ice cream and (ii) the substance of ice cream. However, simply placing incongruent construction items in juxtaposition does not imply that they are always coerced into co-occurrence and eventual conventionalisation (as shown in (10)). Thus, question (ii) can be answered, and metonymy often acts to create mismatch which can be resolved by reconstructing the target of the metonymy.

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It can also be seen that not all of the examples illustrated so far involve coercion at the syntax–semantics interface, and coercion, if it exists, must take place at different levels. Pustejovsky’s (1995) examples, illustrated in 2.4, demonstrate coercion taking place between a clausal entity and a phrasal one; eg. in (13), repeated as (20): (20) Books bore me. There is no incongruity between the construction and the lexical filler in such examples; books stands for reading books and is quite harmonious with the syntactic demands of the argument slot. The example is simply one of metonymy or enriched composition, and does not create mismatch; the source form simply provides lexical access to an extended meaning. If (20) illustrates coercion, the definition of coercion will therefore need to be expanded to include examples where mismatch is not involved, as well as where it is. The reconstruction, furthermore, takes place across syntactic boundaries and is not simply restricted to the internal syntax of a noun phrase. The final example, the Progressive construction, is another case in point. Any reference to coercion as an online processing strategy must take into account the historical factors wherein the developing aspectual form gradually absorbed nonprototypical lexical aspectual categories such as Achievements and Accomplishments into its expanding paradigm. This was a process of reanalysis taking place over a prolonged time period during which the imperfective (associated mainly with Activities) slowly extended its functions to all aspectual classes of verbs. If such examples were included in a definition of coercion, then they would have to include conventionalised diachronic innovations as well, which are reflected in historically expanding grammatical distributions. It is difficult to determine, on such accounts, exactly when coercion takes place, and whether it is a psychological process activated in processing or simply a present-day recognition of a now conventionalised historical change. The inconsistencies over such definitions present problems for a theory of coercion. In answer to (iii), meaning is constructed, therefore, simply in the enrichment of the semantic composition (to use Jackendoff ’s (1997) terms) of the lexical forms with which the syntactic structures are combined, a process taking place by analogy with existing type-specific semantic constraints. If the syntactic environment lends additional meaning to the arguments contained within it, then items such as beer will be less restricted in terms of their boundedness distinctions in the environment of a count noun, eventually becoming socially conventionalised in the same way as Barcelona (2003a) describes a Picasso to refer to a work of art. However, in the construction of meaning in examples of metonymy, or enriched composition, the limits of constructing meaning depend on the facility with which the target of the metonymy may be retrieved, as examples such as (10) reveal. Once the retrieval is no longer salient to the meaning of the metonymy, the source form acquires an ex-

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tended grammatical meaning of boundedness (as in (19)), or additional role-related nuances, as in (20) and (12–13). The construction of meaning in examples such as the development of the English progressive aspect allows punctual aspectual events to be subject to a durative interpretation. This may also be simply a matter of construal, as examples such as She is winning the race can only be reasonably understood with regard to a predictive interpretation; i.e. the event referred to may not actually be in progress at the moment of speaking, but the prediction of it may be uppermost in the speaker’s mind, and so imminent that it is expressed as though it were in progress. The situation of mismatch discussed in the present study leaves open the question, if lexical meaning is enriched through the extended syntactic domains in which it may occur, for example in (18–19), then what happens to the source meaning of the constructions themselves (in this case, the Indefinite Determination construction)? It would seem that the expansion of functions of the developing construction may result in a weakening of the source semantics with which it was originally associated. In the case of the Indefinite Determination construction, there is no loss in the semantics of marking singularity and countability (replicability), though the additional inferences of boundedness are only implied as a pragmatic inference when co-occurrence is with mass nouns. In the case of the developing progressive, the historically prior significance of a general imperfective aspectual function becomes less associated with the progressive as it extends to transitive domains, though new meaning is constructed at the same time in the form of pragmatic enrichment and speaker-subjective functions such as prediction, mentioned above. Further investigation into such questions calls for a more in-depth theoretical analysis of the semantics of mismatch situations in order for them to be resolved.

4. Conclusions It has been demonstrated in a handful of examples above that the notion of coercion is a superfluous explanatory tool in accounting for the resolution of anomalies and mismatches at the syntax–semantics interface, and the fact that its use is not limited to apply to the resolution of mismatch, e.g. in 2.4, leads to the belief that the processes described above are no different from cognitive-pragmatic processes already well-known to most accounts. If there is a need to introduce a new label to describe the processes involved, then it must refer to a concept which can be logically isolated as a unique phenomenon. In the examples discussed in the present study, the term is seen to apply to three different types of situations, two of which can be explained by metonymy, and the other attributable to diachronic development and expansion of grammatical functions. However, coercion cannot describe the pro-

Arguing the case against coercion

cesses used in interpreting metonymy either, as they involve most often the pragmatics of conversational implicature associated with Grice’s Quantity 2 maxim. As such, the term becomes redundant in natural language domains of usage. The advantage of the alternative explanations provided above is that they do not merely describe a process, but they explain it in terms of the use made by speakers in the construction of meaning. Metonymical adaptation takes place either for the benefit of ease of productive effort on the part of the speaker; to reduce the amount of encoding needed to convey the illocution, or for politeness effects in speech act metonymies in order to encode a confrontational message in a less confrontational manner; (e.g. the use of independent if-clauses (If you will come to order . . .) to encode directives — Panther and Thornburg 2003b). Innovation of new metonymies may sometimes affect the grammatical environment, but the reconstruction of the target of the metonymy permits such mismatches and enables the source form to develop new polysemies according to context. The pragmatic inferencing process of metonymy is associated with two of the three coercion examples discussed, whether involving syntax-semantics mismatch or not, and in the third, the progressive aspect, aspectual mismatch is a by-product of diachronic development and is resolved by historical reanalysis. The evidence thus presented indicates that the challenge remains open to future investigations to isolate a definition of coercion that may be useful to all such examples.

References Andersen, Roger W. 1991. Developmental sequences: The emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition. In Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories, Thom Huebner and Charles A. Ferguson (eds), 305–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barcelona, Antonio. 2003a. Metonymy in cognitive linguistics: An analysis and a few modest proposals. In Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden, Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds), 223–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barcelona, Antonio. 2003b. The case for a metonymic basis of pragmatic inferencing: Evidence from jokes and funny anecdotes. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 81–102. Bybee, Joan, 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan, Pagliuca, Williamand Perkins, Revere D. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Croft, William. 1993. The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and metonymies. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 335–70.

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Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London: Longman. De Swart, Henrietta. 1998. Aspect shift and coercion. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16: 347–85. Francis, Elaine and Michaelis, Laura. 2003. Mismatch: A crucible for linguistic theory. In Francis and Michaelis (eds), 1–27. Francis, Elaine and Michaelis, Laura (eds). 2003. Mismatch: Form–Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. Stanford CA: CSLI. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Speech Acts, Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan (eds), 41–58. New York NY: Academic Press. Ho, Mian-Lian and Platt, John. T. 1993. Dynamics of a Contact Continuum: Singaporean English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobbs, Jerry R., Stickel, Mark E., Appelt, Douglas E. and Martin, Paul, 1993. Interpretation as abduction. Artificial Intelligence 63: 69–142. Hopper, Paul J. 1987. Emergent grammar. Proceedings of the13th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 139–57. Hopper, Paul J. and Martin, Janice. 1987. Structuralism and diachrony: The development of the indefinite article in English. In Ramat, Carruba and Bernini (eds), 295–304. Hopper, Paul J. and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and Rbased implicature. In Meaning, Form and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, Deborah Schiffrin (ed.), 11–42. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Jackendoff, Ray, 1997. The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Kövecses, Zoltán and Radden, Günter. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 2002. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Levinson, Stephen. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Michaelis, Laura. 2003. Headless constructions and coercion by construction. In Francis and Michaelis (eds), 259–310. Michaelis, Laura. 2004. Type shifting in construction grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15: 1–67. Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1978. The Pragmatics of Reference. Bloomington IN.: Indiana University Linguistics Club (Reprint of Ph.D. dissertation, 1977, City University of New York). Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 1999. The potentiality for actuality metonymy in English and Hungarian. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 333–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2003a. Introduction: On the nature of conceptual metonymy. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 1–20.

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Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2003b. Metonymies as natural inference and activation schemas. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 127–47. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg (eds) 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 113]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Papafragou, Anna. 1996. On metonymy. Lingua 99: 169–95. Piñango, Maria Mercedes. 2003. Dynamic properties of enriched composition. In Francis and Michaelis (eds), 311–30. Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Quirk, Randolph and Wrenn, Charles L. 1969. An Old English Grammar. London: Methuen. Ramat, Anna G., Carruba, Onofrio and Bernini, Giuliano (eds). 1987. Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco and Pérez Hernández, Lorena. 2001. Metonymy and grammar: Motivation, constraints and interaction. Language and Communication 21: 321–57. Scheffer, Johannes. 1975. The Progressive in English. Amsterdam: North Holland. Schlesinger, Izchak M. 1992. The experiencer as an agent. Journal of Memory and Language 31: 315–32. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2003. A construction-based approach to indirect speech acts. In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 105–26. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1992. Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 1, Riachard M. Hogg (ed.), 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth. 2006. The concepts of constructional mismatch and type-shifting from the perspective of grammaticalization. TS. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Visser, Frederikus Th. 1969–73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Parts I–III. Leiden: EJ Brill. Vlach, Frank. 1981. The semantics of the progressive. In Tense and Aspect [Syntax and Semantics 14], Philip J. Tedeschi and Annie Zaenan (eds), 271–92. New York NY: Academic Press. Ziegeler, Debra P. 1995. Diachronic factors in the grammaticalization of counterfactual implicatures in Singaporean English. Language Sciences 17: 305–28. Ziegeler, Debra P. 1999. Agentivity and the history of the English progressive. Transactions of the Philological Society 97: 53–101. Ziegeler, Debra P. 2000. Hypothetical Modality: Grammaticalisation in an L2 Dialect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ziegeler, Debra P. 2003. The development of counterfactual implicatures in English: A case of metonymy or M-inference? In Panther and Thornburg (eds), 169–203. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ziegeler, Debra P. In press. Interfaces with English Aspect: Diachronic and Empirical Studies [SLCS 82]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zipf, George K. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. New York NY: Hafner.

chapter 6

When Zidane is not simply Zidane, and Bill Gates is not just Bill Gates Some thoughts on the construction of metaphtonymic meanings of proper names Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek/Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

The present chapter deals with the problem of the construction of meaning of figuratively used personal names in the basic constructional schema Det + Xpersonal name + of Y. After a brief overview of two currently dominant philosophical approaches to problems of reference that are at odds with cognitive linguistic views, we proceed to outline a path along which their meaning is developed in several successive steps. The starting point is the enlistment of our total encyclopedic knowledge about the bearers of proper names organized in complex matrixes of domains. We outline how figurative meanings arise in a step by step fashion, involving tiers of metonymic mappings interspersed with metaphoric mappings. In doing so we also demonstrate that the paragon model can be elaborated in such a way that specific mappings become well motivated. The process of the construction of figurative meaning is shown to be complex, dynamic and flexible. Its output can be revised at every step, further enriched with information, or subsequently depleted of it, depending on the cognitive operations employed. Keywords: active zone, meaning construction, metaphor, metonymy, paragon, proper names

1. Introduction Proper names have always been of great interest to almost anyone concerned with language. A whole range of more or less related issues have been raised and various proposals and/or claims put forward. Some of these issues are quite philosophical in nature, e.g. when it is suggested that names are outside language proper, that they are untranslatable, or even that they are inherently empty of reference, i.e. that they do not have meaning. On the other hand, in more linguistically minded contributions, we also find that discussions of the grammatical structure and behaviour of proper names are interwoven with thoughts on their reference. That this topic is genuinely evergreen can be shown by referring to a whole series of recent linguistic

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articles dealing with one or the other aspect of proper names, such as Lehrer (1999), Anderson (2003, 2004), Barcelona (2003, 2004), Kleiber (2004), to name just a few. Our starting point will be the fact of the figurative use of proper nouns evident in examples such as those below.

(1) a. Steven has a bag of tricks, a good passer, can operate in confined areas and is the Zidane of Villa whose left foot is nearly as good as his right. b. Sarkozy is described by MEDEF, French CBI, as ‘the Zidane of Finance.’ c. Toni Morrison lives in the ‘Champions League’ of literature. She is the Zidane of language, beguiling, intoxicating and deadly in front of goal. (2) a. He has been called the ‘Bill Gates of Africa.’ b. “He wants to be the Bill Gates of cloning technology.”

The phenomenon is wide spread, the basic constructional schema Det + Xpersonal name + of Y, (or alternatively also Y’s Xpersonal name, if Y happens to denote an area/ location or temporal period) more or less the same cross-linguistically, or varying only slightly depending on the structural resources of the language in question. Barcelona (2003 and 2004) adds to the studies of English, his own discussions of equivalent examples of this construction type in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. By way of example cf. a similar example from German:

(3) Hegel der Bundesrepublik [Headline in a newspaper article] Hegel of Federal Republic Der Gegenwartsklassiker Habermas ist auch ein wenig zum the current-classic Habermas is also a bit into-det Staatsphilosophen geworden, zum Hegel der Bundesrepublik state-philosopher become into Hegel det-gen Federal Republic.of Deutschland. Germany ‘The present-day classic Habermas has turned into somewhat of a state philosopher, into the Hegel of the Federal Republic of Germany.’

In this chapter we focus on a fairly specific phenomenon: the construction of metonymic and metaphoric meanings of proper nouns denoting humans. Specifically, we attempt to identify possible metonymic and metaphoric steps in this process of meaning construction. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 is a brief overview of the inadequacies of two objectivist philosophical approaches to the problems of reference that are at odds with cognitive linguistic views. In Section 3 we proceed to outline a path along which the meaning of a proper name is developed in several succes-

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sive steps, involving several layers of metonymic and metaphorical mappings. In particular, we argue for a refinement of paragon as a metonymic model, involving several metonymic tiers and capable of accounting for the axiological dimension of paragons. In the concluding section we list some open questions for further research following from our findings, but also sketch some possible solutions to some of these questions.

2. Objectivist theories of reference vs. cognitive approach to the figurative use of proper names There are two objectivist philosophical theories of meaning that currently enjoy the status of classics, both of which were also intended to account for proper nouns. In Fregean (Frege 1952) tradition (cf. Russell 1956) proper nouns are assumed to be uniquely identifying descriptions. On the other hand, in the Millian (Mill 1843/1949) tradition, more recently represented by Kripke (1972), proper names are considered to be semantically empty. The former has been referred to as the descriptivist view of reference or reference-via-meaning doctrine, while the latter has been dubbed the causal-historical view or direct-reference doctrine. The general inadequacies of both of these theories have been discussed at great length in Lakoff (1987: 168ff) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 98ff), but we are concerned here with some special problems that arise when we consider figurative uses of proper names. In order to understand these, let us first sum up the essence of the two theories. As far as proper names are concerned, the descriptivist view of reference relies on two basic assumptions: i. every proper name is associated with a description; ii. an object is the referent of a proper name if and only if it uniquely or best satisfies the description associated with it. The description is uniquely satisfied when it is true of an object and only of it. If, on the other hand, no object entirely satisfies the description, it is assumed that it refers to the unique individual that satisfies most of the description. If the description is not satisfied at all or if many objects appear to satisfy it, it is concluded that the name does not refer. Bearing in mind that reference and (linguistic) meanings are not quite the same phenomena, it is nevertheless easy to see that the descriptivist view of reference is beset with a host of problems when it comes to the figurative use of proper names. It is more than obvious that for either Zidane or Bill Gates, there are cases in which there is no single referent that uniquely or best fits the description (whatever it may be). What is more, some of our examples analysed below, such as (10–11), show that

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practically any object may be claimed to appear to satisfy the description. At the same time it is also clear that these names are not semantically empty. According to the causal-historical view, a proper name is introduced into the linguistic community more or less ostensibly. It is an act of pointing that indicates the fixing of its reference by a historical individual at a certain point for the purpose of referring to a given individual, and continues to refer to that individual as long as speakers are linked to the initial referring act by means of a causal chain of successive acts of reference. In other words, a speaker who uses a name acquired it from another speaker who in turn acquired it from another speaker, and so forth, up to the first speaker using that name. The reference of the name remains thus fixed through history. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 99) rightly point out, “[i]t is not explained how mere pointing and naming can establish a ‘rigid’ symbol-to-world designation or how that ‘rigid designation’ is able to remain in place over millennia.” But we might also turn the table and ask ourselves: how is that ‘rigid designation’ able to change in order to accommodate figurative uses of proper names? In other words, the doctrine, as it stands with its too stable and rigid designations, does not allow for such figurative uses with a reference that is different from the original. One might claim that such figurative uses of proper names are not linked any longer via a causal chain to their original literal uses but constitute new acts of naming and thus start new causal chains. But even if we adopt this view (although it is clear that the figurative uses are not totally severed from their literal uses), we still face the same problem that we faced before: how is it possible that their meanings arise so to speak ex nihilo? But even worse, how are speakers of a language able to keep record of such cases of ‘homonymy’ and use the names correctly if they do not possess a telepathic ability and log on to a mental network tracking constant shifts in meaning? Considering the range of the combinations of figurative meanings that we claim below to be attached to one and the same name, the burden of keeping such cases of ‘multiple homonymy’ in check might become intolerable. One might also claim that the figurative uses of proper names are unlike their normal uses because the real naming takes place in the subject position. Because in the examples in (1–2) we have figuratively used names in the predicative position, it may be said that these are just ways of assigning properties or attributes to subjects. Again, this does not solve the problem, as many of these names, together with their determiners and modifiers, can also be easily used in the subject position, where allegedly genuine naming takes place. Such analytical pitfalls can be avoided by adopting the cognitive linguistic stance that proper names are not some odd extra-linguistic expressions and that they cannot be without meaning or reference. Further, by assuming that their meanings are not fixed rigidly in advance and outside the context of language use, and that they

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can be worked out only by enlisting our total encyclopedic knowledge organized in complex matrices of domains, we are able to show below why it is possible to arrive at the meanings of figuratively used proper nouns at all, and we also suggest some ways in which this is done. The process of such online construction of figurative meaning is bound to be complex, dynamic and flexible, and its output can be revised at every step, further enriched with information, or subsequently depleted of it, depending on the cognitive mechanisms employed, mainly metonymy and metaphor. According to Panther and Thornburg (2004: 113), metonymy (and we may also add metaphor here as well) “not only makes target meanings accessible but also available for further elaboration in discourse.” This is precisely what we intend to demonstrate in this chapter by analyzing a series of metonymic and metaphoric mappings taking place at various tiers, one tier feeding the next. The starting point is, as we pointed out earlier, an ICM-like knowledge base containing our total encyclopedic knowledge about the bearers of individual names, which can be just (barely) familiar or even famous.

3. Metonymy and metaphor in the construction of the meaning of figuratively used proper names 3.1 Tiers of figurative meaning It is relatively easy to see that the figurative use of proper names is often patently metaphtonymic, i.e. it combines both metaphorical and metonymic mappings (cf. Goossens 1990). Let us consider some more examples and see how such figurative meanings are constructed:

(4) a. Yes, I am the Bill Clinton of the blogosphere. b. The Bill Clinton of Hollywood maintains his reputation as Mr. Good Time Genius while wallowing in oceans of slime.

(5) a. Questions for the Mick Jagger of Gardening… b. Actually, I always wanted to be the Mick Jagger of cinema but I think I’m the Keith Richards, by force of habit, perhaps.

(6) a. “I call him the Einstein of horses.” b. The Einsteins of the Deep [the title of an article about dolphins]

The central questions we have to address are how the metonymy and metaphor interact here, and how the two processes bring about the suspension of the inherent grounding of proper names. To begin with, we must make it clear that metonymy is at the base of all these expressions (cf., however, Thurmair 2002, who complete-

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ly leaves out metonymy in the analysis of her German examples analogous to our data and analyses her examples solely in terms of metaphor), and that the metaphorical layer follows metonymy. In Goossens’ terms, these expressions count as metonymy within metaphor. Metaphorical mappings are made conspicuous by the of-postmodification. Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger are typically associated with the domains of politics and rock music, respectively. When someone is said to be the Bill Clinton of the blogosphere or of Hollywood, this is a clear case of applying these labels to very different domains. On the other hand, what it means to be the Bill Clinton of the blogosphere or of Hollywood, or the Mick Jagger of gardening or of cinema, can only be worked out if we know how the two names relate to their respective primary domains. These basic pieces of information on them, we claim, are provided by several tiers of metonymic mappings. An analysis of this construction type with proper names has been advanced in Barcelona (2003 and 2004). He accounts for expressions such as: (7)

Lope de Vega was not the Spanish Shakespeare.

by assuming that they are motivated by two metonymies crucially resting on the concept of paragon. According to Barcelona, first a stereotypical model of the proper name’s referent is activated as a paragon, in the course of which we arrive at a characteristic property by means of a metonymic mapping. In this specific example, Shakespeare is “a writer endowed with immense literary talent,” and it is claimed that Shakespeare as a writer endowed with characteristic properties is mapped “onto the rest of our knowledge about him” (Barcelona 2004: 364). An essential element of his Shakespeare network is an ICM-like class or collection of individuals comprising “individuals characterized by one or more of the relation and properties imported from the conceptual model” (Barcelona 2004: 364) created by the above metonymy. In the case of his example given in (7), “the common relation in which all the members of the class participate is having immense literary talent.” Finally, Barcelona postulates a second metonymy, ideal member of the class, connecting the model in which Shakespeare is conceptualized as a writer endowed with immense literary talent as a source domain with the class of individuals with immense literary talent as the target domain. Note that Barcelona does not explicitly mention the metaphorical nature of such expressions in spite of his talking about source and target domains. First of all, it is not immediately obvious that metaphor is involved at all, i.e. it is not so clear whether Spain should count here as a markedly distinct domain. Secondly, his network is designed in such a way as to circumvent any need of metaphorical mappings in this particular example, as the class of individuals with immense literary talent above is a world literature class, i.e. has members from all over the world.

When Zidane is not simply Zidane

3.2 The paragon as a metonymic model While there is no doubt that metonymies are followed in some cases by metaphor in this construction type, our data indicate that there are also some cases where metaphor is completely missing, and that there are also many less than clear-cut cases implying a metonymy-metaphor continuum rather than a sharp dividing line between them. More importantly, we propose on the basis of our data an alternative analysis of the construction with more than just two metonymic tiers. The reasons motivating the refinement we propose have to do with the concept of paragon as a metonymic model, which in its original formulation (cf. Lakoff 1987) is very much like a blackbox. Paragons as metonymic models, just like generators, ideal cases, social stereotypes, etc., are said to operate on the basis of the same single metonymic process, which is called category for defining property by Kövecses and Radden (1998: 54). What we see as the most conspicuous problem with it is that it is not clear where the axiological notion of representing “either an ideal or its opposite” (Lakoff 1987: 87) comes from. We concur with Barcelona that the process of the construction of meaning in the case of such figuratively used proper names is of basically metonymic nature. Metonymy is used here like an extremely precise tool, almost like a conceptual scalpel, to cut out just the right amount of information about the people in question from our knowledge base (on this function of metonymy cf. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó’s 2001 discussion of the interaction of metonymy and metaphor, as well as Buljan and Gradečak-Erdeljić 2003 and Belaj 2005 on the role of metonymy in conceptual blending). However, as pointed out above, we think that Barcelona’s first metonymic tier, the one based on the notion of paragon, is not sufficiently motivated. Specifically, the mapping from Shakespeare to Shakespeare as a writer endowed with immense literary talent can be elaborated so as not to appear so abrupt. The problem may not show up in all the data, specifically it is not conspicuously apparent in the data analysed by Barcelona, as his examples are compatible with the assumption of an ICM-like class or collection of individuals comprising “individuals characterized by one or more of the relation and properties imported from the conceptual model” (2004: 364). The clearer the case for a final tier with metaphorical mappings linking two quite distinct domains, the more difficult it becomes to maintain such a class: it would really be a rag-tag collection of individuals. This is why Barcelona’s analysis and ours are alternative and even complementary. In some cases the paragon model may work as a compressed shortcut model, but if it is analysed, we claim, our additional metonymic tiers will show up. A possibility that should be contemplated is whether perhaps by assuming these additional metonymic tiers we eliminate any need for the other ICM-like class or collection of individuals with a speci-

131

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fied property. In other words, the specific properties need not be duplicated in two models. Expressions such as Zidane or Bill Gates in our initial sets of examples are multiple metonymies where some tiers might easily go unnoticed. First of all, Zidane in the examples in (1) must be interpreted as ‘Zidane the footballer,’ i.e. we have a whole for part mapping taking place here. The whole of our encyclopedic knowledge that we have about the person labelled by the proper name referring to a particular real person, i.e. Zidane, must constitute a domain of its own. This claim need not meet with unanimous approval, but note that it is not unusual, as Barcelona (2004) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (this volume) speak of Shakespeare and Proust, respectively, as domains. This domain must be allowed to intersect with the football domain, as part (if not most) of our knowledge about Zidane has to do with football. ‘Zidane the footballer,’ as the metonymic target, is the intersection of the holistic Zidane domain with this general football domain. Zidane as a whole has many properties, and some of these, in fact the most salient ones, are the subdomain of ‘Zidane the footballer’ within the football domain. When we talk about the whole for part mapping here, we mean that the personal name Zidane as a metonymic vehicle, normally used to cover all our knowledge about Zidane, organized in a single domain or domain matrix, actually comes to mean something much more precise. It is reduced to ‘Zidane the footballer’ as the metonymic target, defocusing or almost totally obliterating other elements of knowledge about him. The highlighted portions of the domain become so prominent as to overwrite the whole structure of the original knowledge base (be it a domain or matrix). This is what we intend to indicate by the arrow. The arrow direction may at first appear confusing: if we talk about the linguistic form as the vehicle, the arrow should of course go in the other direction, indicating that Zidane stands

Zidane

Zidane the footballer

football

Figure 1. Domain intersection as target of entity for active zone metonymy

When Zidane is not simply Zidane 133

for something more specific, i.e. ‘Zidane the footballer.’ We use the arrow just the way it is used in Barcelona (2004), which we take as our starting point. A quote from Barcelona (2004: 364–6) may explain this: Box (a) represents the mapping of Shakespeare as endowed with his characteristic properties onto the rest of our knowledge network about him. This mapping results in a stereotypical model of Shakespeare as primarily, in fact exclusively, a writer with immense literary talent. Box (b) represents the mapping of this stererotypical view of Shakespeare onto the class of writers with immense literary talent. Both are metonymic mappings and are symbolized by the arrows.

Of course we are aware that, as Panther (2005: 2) puts it, one domain does not obliterate the other, i.e. both are “still, to some degree, conceptually salient or activated.” One might be tempted to approach ‘Zidane the footballer’ in an alternative way: not as a metonymy in a strict sense, as defined in Panther and Thornburg (2004), but as a process of construal of salience operating on facets as readings within senses, or facetization for short (cf. Paradis 2004). However, what we see as being involved in this metonymic mapping in the Zidane case cannot be considered relationally autonomous senses. They do not stand in hyponymic or hyperonymic relations to other senses that would be incompatible in coordination, they are not compositionally autonomous, as predicates do not apply independently to facets, etc. Facets of meaning call up more than one set of qualia roles, and it is not immediately obvious that this is the case in what Barcelona and we would still be inclined to consider a case of metonymy. This type of metonymy with proper names, briefly mentioned in Barcelona (2004: 360 and 370ff), is discussed in some detail in Barcelona (2003) under the rubric entity for active zone, but is treated separately from examples like (7). The metonymy in question effects the conceptual division of an otherwise unitary domain (Barcelona 2003: 29). We think that the process in question, regardless of whether we consider it some type of whole for part metonymy, or as facetization, should be postulated as basic input for any further metonymic and metaphorical mappings. Let us now demonstrate the need to postulate such a metonymic mapping. It may be considered a “lean” metonymy when compared with Barcelona’s metonymy, i.e. it does not yet map more specific bits of the type “X endowed with immense talent as far as Y is concerned” by contrasting them with some other examples. Against the background of our encyclopedic knowledge of Zidane as a football player we know that his performance during the World Cup 1998 in France was one of the highlights in his career. Knowing that example (8a) is indeed about Zidane and not someone else, we could safely assume that this is a statement in which his extremely good performance is meant, along the lines of Barcelona’s analysis of Shakespeare above.

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(8) a. He is one of the players that I would pay any amount of money to watch but he is not the Zidane of 1998.

This also accounts for an interview in October 2004 in which Zidane refers to his best period in Real Madrid in the following way:

(8) b. – If you review your career at the Club, what mark would you give it? – Lately I cannot say that I see myself very well, let say I have been playing normally. But I would choose the Zidane of the first two years. It’s logical because during these years we have won many things and I want to carry on. That’s why I’m here.

At the same time, against this background, an expression like:

(8) c. the Zidane of 2004

cannot possibly be interpreted in the same way. It is a construal in which his performance is average or normal. We could also isolate the worst period in his career so far, full of crises and bad performance, and use the same construction to refer to it. What is more, we can also refer to his future performance, as in:

(8) d. the Zidane of 2010 e. the Zidane of 2020

in which case it is impossible to foresee whether his performance will still be excellent or not. This shows that the assumption that a paragon interpretation is activated right at the start is not founded on solid facts. Consider also the possibility of referring to the Zidane of 2040, when he is not very likely to be playing football professionally. This may be interpreted as being about Zidane’s potential career as a football coach (successful or not), or some other aspects of his life with more or less glorious moments, say his problems with old age, his family situation in the future (perhaps alluding to his future role as a caring and beloved grandfather), etc. Consider finally the following batch of examples highlighting various stages in the life of Ronald Reagan, two of which certainly do not lend themselves to any paragon analysis:

(9) a. The Ronald Reagan he depicts is a man utterly inconsistent in his beliefs and different from his earlier political days. b. And that’s when we got to know the Ronald Reagan he had now become. c. At times, the past and present got confused, as if the speaker could not decide whether the Ronald Reagan he knew still existed.

When Zidane is not simply Zidane

The first two of the Reagan examples, (9a) and (9b), are certainly different, there is no paragon idea at all. And of course, if it were not a famous person, but, say, John Smith of 1999, no one would see any trace of paragon here at all. This means that the interpretation we need for (2a) and (2b) is not necessarily posterior to the paragon interpretation—it can obtain with ordinary names not susceptible to any paragon analysis. The examples in (8) and (9) may alternatively be interpreted as cases of setting up new mental spaces by means of space-building of-phrases, with a projection link between the current or parent space and the newly setup space. But such links do not in any way preclude a metonymic mapping between a whole and its parts. Another possibility would be to treat these examples, and indeed most of our examples in the present chapter, as cases of conceptual integration. Our objective here was quite similar to Barcelona’s (2004: 373)—to demonstrate the metonymic motivation of the construction under investigation, and not to “represent in a detailed elaborate model the web of connections resulting from these special uses” of personal names. We also share with Barcelona the view that metonymy has a crucial role in blending, i.e. that considerable portions of such webs in blends can be unpacked and linearized into a series of metonymies. These come to be presented in a more compressed and holistic form of blending. Metonymic mappings may stop here, but they may also continue. In order to come closer to an appropriate interpretation of expressions like (1) and (2), we must assume further tiers of metonymic mappings that narrow down the information available in the domain intersection in Figure 1 and modify it. First, within this domain intersection, comprising all the information about Zidane that is relevant to conceptualizing him as a footballer, we suppress the majority of elements that are shared by all football players, and highlight those elements that make him different, even search for his unique traits, such as precise passes, scoring from free shots, etc. In other words, we activate the bearer of property for characteristic property metonymy that brings us closer to the “X endowed with immense talent/skill as far as Y is concerned” meaning, but yet not right down to it, as shown in Figure 2. The evidence for this metonymic tier, admittedly indirect, comes from some unusual examples in which metonymies are topped with a metaphorical tier. Consider now the following examples: (10) a. Described, to his slight embarrassment, as the “Michael Jordan of rugby league” Lauitiiti has arrived at Leeds with a reputation of being the most exciting ball-handling forward in the world. b. Humboldt is the Shakespeare of travelers – as much superior in genius to other travellers as Shakespeare to other poets. Note that in these cases, which clearly involve metaphor, we get some contextual clues as to what correspondences between the source and target domain are intend-

135

136 Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó

Zidane

Zidane the footballer

football

Figure 2. Contrastive properties as the target of the bearer of property for characteristic property metonymy narrowing down the interpretation of Zidane as the ultimate metonymic vehicle via zidane the footballer

ed. Shakespeare as a source domain in (10b) is narrowed down prior to metaphoric mappings to a poet superior in genius to other poets. Example (10a) is perhaps even more interesting, it does not specify directly that Michael Jordan played basketball, it only hints at his being the most exciting ball-handling forward in the world via the target domain. Most of the time, however, the intended (or used) correspondences are not explicitly mentioned, but nevertheless the figuratively used proper names are interpreted in that fashion. However, in a number of our examples retrieved from Google in which human proper names are used to metaphorically designate various physical objects, places or concepts, the intended correspondences are mentioned somewhere in the context as a rule. Consider some such examples: (11) a. Indeed, this is the Monica Lewinsky of burgers: oversized, juicy, a little messy, a burger that you know you should resist, but you simply can’t. b. While John Sprung, television executive at Paramount studios said: “This has turned out to be the Monica Lewinsky of digital television. Everybody knows the truth; nobody cares enough to do anything about it.” (12) a. But carrots? They’re just out there, shrieking, “Hi, we’re some carrots! Love us for it!” They never have to prove themselves. They are the Gwyneth Paltrow of the food world. They’d make the most stylish vegetable list, even wearing a pink ballgown three sizes too big. b. The mushroom-stuffed ravioli was the Gwyneth Paltrow of pastas: smooth, blond and lightweight, paired with white asparagus spears, poached quail eggs...

When Zidane is not simply Zidane 137

c. Heartbeat is simple, sophisticated and cool. It’s the Gwyneth Paltrow of handbags. d. Small Car. BMW Mini Cooper. The Gwyneth Paltrow of small cars: racy, stylish, and oh, so fashionable. (13) He insisted, however, that he was just the drummer, and Ulysses was the neurotic one. “I’m the Woody Allen of techno,” quipped Ulysses. As shown by these examples, the mention of the properties serving as utilized correspondences (Kövecses 2002: 79ff) in metaphorical mappings may do two kinds of jobs. Firstly, we may single out some central properties in the frame of the metaphorical source (our figuratively used proper name) which the bearer of these properties may possess to an extreme degree, as actually happens in the two examples in (10). The greater the conceptual distance between the two domains, the more useful the explicit mention of the utilized correspondences becomes, and the less we can rely on the paragon model. While the properties linked in the paragon model belong to the same frame, with metaphorical mappings between more distant domains, the properties linked by the utilized correspondences are not exactly the same. At best they are analogous, as in the Michael Jordan example, but may be quite different, as in the Shakespeare example. Secondly, the properties serving as utilized correspondences that are mentioned in the examples in (11–13) are certainly less central. They are additional, ancillary bits of information, often seen from a very subjective perspective, and they can be even ephemeral, e.g. something that has to do with only one episode in the life of the person whose name is used figuratively. For instance, Gwyneth Paltrow is of course not the only actress that can be characterized as smooth, blond and lightweight, but the speaker may perceive them as being sufficiently contrastive and relevant, and perhaps even outstanding, in the link established between the two domains. However, there is no implication in this group of examples that all or any of the properties in question are necessarily outstanding in the sense of being exhibited to the maximum degree. In fact, we may assume that it is quite likely that the properties in question will not be exhibited to the maximum, if there is need to explicitly specify them in the context, and that specifying such utilized correspondences will usually effect the cancellation of the correspondences compatible with the paragon model that we would have otherwise tried to establish. The axiological notions ‘best of ’ and ‘worst of ’ that we pointed out above as the most problematical in the paragon model arise in the final metonymic tier due to the imposition of a scalar model (Israel 1997, 1998) on these contrastive properties. The scalar model allows the metonymic mappings of the type whole scale for upper/lower end of scale (cf. Radden and Kövecses 1999: 32), whereby the property is interpreted as being exhibited to the maximum, either in the positive

138 Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó

Zidane

Zidane the footballer

football

Figure 3. Scalar model imposed on contrastive properties and the metonymic mappings of the type whole scale for upper/lower end of scale

or negative sense. The scalar model and this type of metonymy have been shown to motivate a number of hyperbolic expressions in Brdar-Szabó and Brdar (2005). In Figure 3, the scalar model is indicated by the double arrow, while the cylindershaped figure represents the ICM containing the contrastive properties of Zidane the footballer, on which the scalar model is imposed. Typically, the utilized correspondences, if central in the frame, are left implicit. It appears that when the outcome of this final metonymic tier is used as input for metaphoric mappings, the more distant the two domains, the more likely it becomes that the axiological elements ‘best of ’ and ‘worst of ’ will become more dominant, occasionally so much so that the more objective standards of metaphorical comparison may become practically obliterated. Returning to the paragon-like outcome of the series of metonymic tiers ending with the whole scale for upper/lower end of scale metonymy, we observe that it is available for further elaboration, presumably metonymic mappings are involved in producing an instance of the metonymic type, as shown by the following examples: (14) a. It doesn’t take an Einstein to understand that this is a very important game for us… b. Soft-liners like Senator Joe Biden and consterned scientists will grump, but their ranks are thinned by the growing prospect of a Saddam or independent terrorist buying or building a nuke that could take out a U.S. city. c. Like all Bush women, she winks that she’s pro-choice. She explains how the president is actually for stem-cell research despite not being for it. She describes a Gary Cooper, not a John Wayne, pacing the South Lawn, agonizing over his decision to go to war.

When Zidane is not simply Zidane 139

d. In this short comedy by Cambridge’s Julian Joslin, poor Max is a miniWoody Allen, trudging lovelorn through the Harvard Square snow, sneaking peeks at Cosmo Girl! magazine,… The series of metonymic mappings summarized in Figure 3 can eventually form the input for metaphorical mappings, as illustrated in examples in (6), (10b), and (11– 13). In (6a) and (6b) we have metaphorical mappings between two conceptually relatively distant domains, although they are somewhat unusual because they proceed from the domain of humans to the domain of animals. Examples in (10b) and (11), (12) and (13) are similar in that respect. However, in (10a) it is not immediately clear that we have a metaphor: two domains are involved that are fairly closely related, we might even say, conceptually parallel and equally abstract or concrete. The question is whether this is also a case of metaphor, since this would be a sportto-another-sport type of mapping, which is odd, because in metaphors we typically have two distinct domains, both in terms of domain sort and domain concreteness or abstractness. Such examples abound in the domain of sports: (15) Gasquet will be the Zidane of French tennis. We would like to claim that these should also count as metaphors because we have distinct domains brought into correlation. The domains of basketball and rugby in (10a), and of French football and of French tennis in (15), are brought into correlation by another round of metonymic mapping taking as its input the result of yet another tier of metonymic mappings. In this tier, excellent qualities with respect to a given sport may be generalized (i.e. quite depleted in terms of meaning) by means of the high-level conceptual metonymy specific for generic (discussed in Radden and Kövecses 1999: 34). The target of this metonymic tier is something like ‘excellent qualities in general,’ and consequently the proper name comes to refer to a type of person rather than an actual person. The distance between the two domains is even smaller in the following example: (16) Micoud is the Zidane of the Bundesliga. If names of countries in the following examples are also taken as metonymies of a kind, viz. Spain and Israel seen as standing for Spanish football and Israeli corporate business life, respectively, then they are comparable to (10a): (17) a. The ‘Zidane of Spain’, as some dub Valeron, was perhaps destined to be a ‘super substitute’, brought on only when in desperate need of… b. Gil Shwed—the Bill Gates of Israel—made his fortune trading on corporate paranoia. Figuratively used proper names can also be applied within the primary domains of reference with postmodifiers making reference to time, as in (18):

140 Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó

(18) a. His keepy-uppies have become one of Scottish footballs greatest memories. The Zidane of the 60s, he has the ability to be the best player in this team. b. I call him “Little Bill” because I think this kid is maybe going to be the Bill Gates of this millennium. c. Edison was the Bill Gates of his day. Assuming that time is not a distinct domain in such cases but a dimension inherent in encyclopedic domains of Zidane and Bill Gates, respectively, we can easily imagine a different type of knowledge base resolution, i.e. along the time axis, which can be projected beyond the present time as well, i.e. into the as yet virtual section of the future. Although similar to examples (8–9), these clearly involve a metaphoric tier as well, which is then again followed by a metonymic conceptual partition of the sort we witness in (8–9). Regardless of whether we consider constructions in (15–18) as involving a metaphor topping a number of metonymic tiers or as involving another metonymic tier, all these expressions are again available for further elaboration, paralleling the examples in (14), the outcome now being an indefinite instance of the metonymic/ metaphtonymic type, as shown by the following examples: (19) a. It will take a Bill Gates of cars to solve our energy and transportation issues. b. Today, Naismith would be universally recognized as a genius, a Bill Gates of sport. c. Sonny is an Andy Warhol or Ted Turner or perhaps a Bill Gates of the literary world. d. the figure of Thomas Krens, the aggressive director of the Guggenheim Museum, who became somewhat of a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates of the museum world.

4. Conclusions and prospects for further research In the present chapter we have attempted to shed some light on the process of the construction of figurative meanings of proper nouns denoting humans. We have indicated why objectivist philosophical theories of meaning are doomed to fail in such an enterprise. By assuming that their meanings are not rigidly fixed in advance and outside the context of language use, and that they can be worked out only by enlisting our total encyclopedic knowledge organized in complex matrixes of domains, we have been able to show how it is possible to arrive at the various shades of meanings found with figuratively used proper nouns.

When Zidane is not simply Zidane 141

The process of such online construction of figurative meaning has been shown to be complex, dynamic and flexible, and its output can be revised at every step, further enriched with information, or subsequently depleted of it, depending on the cognitive operations employed. We have outlined how figurative meanings arise in a step by step fashion, involving tiers of metonymic mappings interspersed with metaphoric mappings. In doing so we have also demonstrated that the paragon model can be elaborated in such a way that specific mappings become well motivated.

References Anderson, John Mathieson. 2003. On the structure of names. Folia Linguistica 37: 347–98. Anderson, John Mathieson. 2004. On the grammatical status of names. Language 80(3): 435– 74. Barcelona, Antonio. 2003. Names: A metonymic ‘return ticket’ in five languages. Jezikoslovlje 4(1): 11–41. Barcelona, Antonio. 2004. Metonymy behind grammar: The motivation of the seemingly ‘irregular’ grammatical behavior of English paragon names. In Studies in Linguistic Motivation, Günter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds), 357–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Belaj, Branimir. 2005. On the cognitive status of mental spaces and of some types of metonymy within Conceptual Integration Theory. Jezikoslovlje 6(2): 119–44. Brdar, Mario and Brdar-Szabó, Rita. 2001. Vlastita imena između metonimijske Scile i meta foričke Haribde. Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje 27: 31–48. Brdar-Szabó, Rita and Brdar, Mario. 2005. Scalar models in a cognitive approach to hyperbolic expressions: With a little help from metonymy. In Pragmatics Today [Łódź Studies in Language 12], Piotr Cap (ed.), 75–94. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Buljan, Gabrijela and Gradečak-Erdeljić, Tanja. 2003. The role of blending in some Croatian and English idiomatic structures. Paper read at the 8th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Logroño, La Rioja, July 20–5, 2003. Frege, Gottlob. 1952. On sense and reference. In Translations of the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Peter Geach and Max Black (eds), 56–78. Oxford: Blackwell. Goossens, Louis. 1990. Metaphtonymy: the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics 1: 323–40. Israel, Michael. 1997. The scalar model of polarity sensitivity. In Negation and Polarity: Syntax and Semantics, Danielle Forget et al. (eds), 209–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Israel, Michael. 1998. The Rhetoric of Grammar: Scalar Reasoning and Polarity Sensitivity. PhD dissertation, UCSD. Kleiber, Georges. 2004. Peut-on sauver un sens de denomination pour les noms propres? Functions of Language 11(1): 115–45. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán and Radden, Günter. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9(1): 37–77. Kripke, Saul. 1972/1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

142 Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York NY: Basic Books. Lehrer, Adrienne. 1999. Proper names: Linguistic aspects. In Concise Encylopedia of Grammatical Categories, Keith Brown and John Miller (eds), 311–13. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Mill, John Stuart. 1843. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and Methods of Scientific Investigations. London: Parker. Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 2005. Metonymic reasoning inside and outside language. LACUS Forum XXXI: Interconnections. Adam Makkai, William J. Sullivan, and Arle R. Lommel (eds), 15– 32. Houston TX: The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2004. The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. metaphorik.de 6: 91–116. Paradis, Carita. 2004. Where does metonymy stop? Senses, facets, and active zones? Metaphor and Symbol 19(4): 245–64. Radden, Günter and Kövecses, Zoltán. 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 17–5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Russell, Bertrand. 1956. The philosophy of logical atomism. In Logic and Knowledge, Robert Marsh, (ed.), 177–281. London: George Allen and Unwin. Thurmair, Maria. 2002. Der Harald Juhnke der Sprachwissenschaft: Metaphorische Eigennamenverwendungen. Deutsche Sprache 30(1): 1–27.

chapter 7

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation* Anatol Stefanowitsch University of Bremen

In this chapter, I argue that information about properties that are metaphorically projected between semantic domains is accessible in the form of collocational overlap between lexical items representing these domains. This shows that the statistical properties of natural language can guide human language users (and potentially any language-processing device) in constructing metaphorical meaning. Keywords: quantitative corpus linguistics, statistical language processing, metaphor, collocational overlap, meaning construction

1. Introduction It is by now widely accepted that metaphor is fundamental to natural language and that the interpretation of metaphorical expressions constitutes a core aspect of meaning construction. In this chapter, I argue that some of the information necessary to construct metaphorical meanings is present in the collocational overlap between literally and metaphorically used lexical items cooccurring in metaphorical expressions. This information can guide the human language user as well as non-human language processing devices in assigning interpretations to metaphorical statements. Linguistic theories of metaphor typically derive the motivation for individual metaphorical expressions from large-scale connections between entire semantic domains. Generally, these theories assume projections from one semantic domain (variously referred to as source domain, image donor, secondary subject, etc.) onto another (the target domain, image recipient, primary subject, etc.) (see, for example, * I would like to thank, first of all, Klaus-Uwe Panther, who, for obvious reasons, never saw this paper before it was published but without whose encouragement and guidance I would not be a linguist, let alone a cognitively oriented linguist, today. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume, especially Thomas Berg, for their valuable input and their gentle but unyielding insistence that I include an elicitation experiment, thus making the paper more “cognitive,” and, hopefully, more substantial. I alone am responsible for any conceptual or methodological shortcomings of my implementation of their suggestions or any other aspect of this chapter.

144 Anatol Stefanowitsch

Black 1962, 1993[1979]; Weinrich 1976; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). Such projections manifest themselves most obviously in equative statements such as the following, which may thus serve to illustrate some basic aspects of the interpretation of metaphorical language (or, to put it differently, of the construction of metaphorical meaning):

(1) a. Man is a wolf (Black 1993[1979]: 20) b. Richard is a gorilla (Searle1993 [1979]: 92) c. Sam is a pig (Searle 1993[1979]: 83)

The interpretation of such statements requires at least two kinds of (declarative) knowledge from the language user, one of which this chapter will discuss in detail. First, the language user must have some sort of knowledge of the metaphorical mappings that exist in the language in question. For example, the interpretation of (1a–c) involves, among others, the mapping human behavior is animal behavior. The extent and nature of this metaphorical knowledge has been extensively (but far from conclusively) addressed in the cognitive linguistic literature over the past twenty-five years and continues to be a major concern to this day. I will have little to say about this issue here (but cf. Stefanowitsch 2005 for an initial corpusbased exploration). Second, and crucially in the context of this chapter, the language user must know which aspect(s) of the source domain (e.g. wolf, pig, etc.) are projected onto the target domain (e.g. human beings; in Ungerer and Schmid’s (2006) terms, they must have information about the mapping scope). Clearly, not every aspect can be (or is likely to be) projected. For example, the interpretation of (1a) involves the knowledge that it is the (supposedly) evil or dangerous nature of wolves that is projected onto human beings, rather than their social behavior, their mating habits or the fact that they are an endangered species. This issue has not been dealt with anywhere near as extensively in the literature as has the nature of metaphorical knowledge (but see further below). In addition, the language user must have procedural knowledge as to how the declarative knowledge is to be applied in the actual process of on-line meaning construction. There seem to be two major theories concerning this issue, one that gives primacy to pragmatic inferencing (e.g. Searle 1993[1979]) and one that gives primacy to the activation of cognitive models (e.g. Gibbs 1994; cf. also Panther and Thornburg 1998 on metonymy). As far as I can tell, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but I will not pursue this issue. The suggestions I develop below are certainly compatible with both views. In this chapter, I will suggest a collocational overlap model of metaphor interpretation. As its name suggests, the overlap model is based on the idea that the process of metaphor interpretation can be guided by knowledge concerning the colloca-

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 145

tional overlap displayed by central lexical items from the source and target domains. By collocational overlap of two lexical items I mean the set of (significant) collocates shared by these items (cf. e.g. Gries 2004; Wulff 2006), rank-ordered in such a way that the collocates most important to both items score highest. Specifically, I assume that any language processor (whether human or machine) can deduce from prior exposure to the language the probability with which a given collocate occurs with a given node word. Upon hearing an utterance linking lexical items from two domains such that one item is predicated of the other, the processor activates the collocates of both lexical items and computes for each collocate its combined probability of occurrence with both items. Such an utterance may be an equative statement such as those presented in (1a–c), but it may also take a range of other forms (cf. below). Those collocates with the highest combined probability then offer crucial clues as to which aspects of the source domain are likely to be transferred to the target domain. Let me stress two points, so as not to be misinterpreted concerning the scope of this model. First, I do not claim that metaphor interpretation can be exclusively accounted for in terms of collocational overlap. If psychologically oriented theories of metaphor are right, as I assume they are, metaphorical mappings transfer entire networks of world knowledge from one domain to another, rather than just individual words. However, I argue that this transfer can be guided by the identification of collocational overlap such that this overlap provides a clue as to which aspects of the source domain are most relevant to the mapping as a whole. Second, I do not claim that it is only the properties referred to by the shared (or most strongly shared) collocates that are transferred from the source to the target domain. If this were the case, there would be not much point in using metaphorical expressions at all. However, I argue that the shared properties may constitute the conceptual core that makes the mapping possible in the first place. I will present three variants of the collocational overlap model: (i) a symmetrical variant that gives equal weight to the source and the target domain, (ii) a ‘sourcedominant’ asymmetrical variant that gives more weight to the source-domain collocates, and (iii) a ‘target-dominant’ asymmetrical variant that gives more weight to the target-domain collocates. The symmetrical variant is intended to demonstrate the basic plausibility of the overlap model, making a minimum of additional assumptions. The two asymmetrical variants are intended to correspond very roughly to two proposals from the literature concerning the way in which properties relevant for a mapping are distinguished from irrelevant ones. The source-dominant version reflects the idea that the source domain is in its entirety mapped onto the target domain, but that there are ‘target-domain overrides’ that filter out those properties of the source domain that are simply not applicable in the target domain (cf. Lakoff 1993). The target-dominant version reflects the idea that metaphorical map-

146 Anatol Stefanowitsch

pings are interactive processes by which relevant target-domain properties are first selectively projected onto the source domain, and then transferred back to the target domain (cf. Black 1962, 1979). Clearly, the various versions of the overlap model do not capture the theories proposed by Lakoff and Black in their full complexity; they are simply different implementations of the overlap model in light of these theories. Before I turn to the collocational overlap model in more detail, let me briefly return to the issue of the form of metaphorical utterances hinted at above. Clearly, metaphorical utterances take all kinds of forms, and equative statements like those in (1a–c) may not even be among the most frequent of these forms. Some other formal realizations of the metaphorical mappings manifest in the expressions in (1a– c) are shown in (2):

(2) a. b. c.

He grinned wolfishly (TD as subject, SD as adverb modifying the predicate) He has gorilla arms (TD as subject, SD as noun modifying the predicate noun) He pigged out on ice cream (TD as subject, SD as predicate)

The model developed below applies to the interpretation of metaphorical expressions of all kinds, those in (1a–c) just as well as those in (2a–c). The expressions in (1a–c) are simply used as a shorthand way of referring to all metaphorical expressions that explicitly combine source and target-domain vocabulary (such expressions are referred to as metaphorical patterns in Stefanowitsch 2004, 2005, 2006). The chapter is structured as follows. In Section 2, I present a simple, frequencybased implementation of the overlap model and apply it to the statements in (1a–c). In Section 3, I present a slightly more sophisticated implementation based not on the simple frequency of collocates but on their association strength relative to the node. Finally, in Section 4, I present a simple elicitation study aimed, first, at assessing the quality of the models in terms of the way in which speakers actually interpret statements such as (1a–c), and second, at determining whether the overlap model can predict the interpretation assigned to non-conventionalized metaphorical expressions, such as Sam is a dolphin.

2. A frequency-based model of collocational overlap 2.1 Developing the model Aims. In this section, I will introduce a simple method for calculating the collocational overlap between two node words, more precisely, for identifying the shared collocates and the degree to which they are relevant within the overlap.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 147

I will assume a simple, frequency-based definition of collocation: a word is considered to be a collocate of the node word to the degree that it occurs frequently in the context of this node word. Such a definition is known to be problematic (see Section 3), but it is mathematically simple and does not require any theoretical assumptions beyond the notion that there are frequency effects in language. Data and method. The most obvious choice of word class for the collocates denoting properties of a noun is, of course, the class of adjectives. There are two potentially promising grammatical contexts in which to look for adjectives: preceding the head noun (attributive position, as in bad wolf, endangered wolves) or following a copula with the head noun as subject (predicative position, as in the wolf is bad, wolves are endangered). Theoretically, it should not make any difference which of these positions is chosen, but in practice there are at least two reasons for choosing the latter. First, we can expect the number of relevant hits in an untagged corpus (see below) to be much higher for search strings like wolf is or wolves are than for search strings like wolf or wolves. For example, the British National Corpus (BNC) contains 778 hits for wolf/wolves, only 121 (i.e. 15.5%) of which are preceded by an adjective, and 8 hits for wolf is/wolves are, 3 (i.e. 37.5%) of which are followed by an adjective). Second, strings instantiating patterns like [Adj + wolf] are relatively likely to be metaphorical uses, as in [M]ultinational corporations ... are big bad wolves (more than a quarter of all hits in the BNC are of this type), whereas strings instantiating [wolf BE Adj] are unlikely to be metaphorical uses (all hits in the BNC are literal). Clearly, metaphorical uses would contaminate a fair assessment of the properties associated with real wolves. Thus, although the problems with attributive uses are clearly not insurmountable, I will limit myself to the predicative context for the present study. I further decided to limit the context to plural nouns and to statements using the simple present tense, in both cases in order to maximize the number of hits with generic reference. Choosing a suitable corpus proved to be the most problematic aspect of the research design. As will have become clear, the largest balanced corpus currently available, the 100-million-word BNC, contains far too few occurrences in the relevant context (for example, only 5 hits for wolves are). The only larger corpora currently available are newspaper corpora such as the North American News corpus and the Reuters corpus, which also do not contain enough occurrences, presumably due to the limited range of text types they include. I therefore decided to use the Internet as a corpus. In order to maximize the number of hits produced by native speakers of English, only websites with the country suffixes <.uk> (for Great Britain) and <.us> (for the United States of America) were used. The websites were accessed via the search engine Google. The search patterns followed the format [“wolves are” site:uk OR site:us] and the results were then manually post-edited to extract only those hits where the search string was followed by an adjective modifying the noun in ques-

148 Anatol Stefanowitsch Table 1. Frequency list of adjectives occurring in the pattern [men are ADJ] Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

happy aware reluctant able involved prone dangerous

0.0279 0.0279 0.0244 0.0209 0.0209 0.0209 0.0174

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

old free strong good at different equal bad

0.0174 0.0174 0.0100 0.0139 0.0139 0.0105 0.0105

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

concerned tall good violent crap

0.0105 0.0105 0.0105 0.0105 0.0105

Table 2. Frequency list of adjectives occurring in the pattern [wolves are ADJ] Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

social large intelligent endangered hungry dangerous extinct shy

0.0426 0.0398 0.0313 0.0313 0.0284 0.0284 0.0256 0.0227 .

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

afraid strong interesting wild bad protected beautiful good

0.0199 0.0199 0.0199 0.0170 0.0170 0.0170 0.0170 0.0142 .

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

cool evil mean small common gray big smart

0.0114 0.0114 0.0114 0.0114 0.0114 0.0114 0.0114 0.0114

tion. An adjective was considered to fulfill this requirement (i) if it headed a subject complement AP, as in wolves are endangered, wolves are very intelligent and social; or (ii) if it modified the head noun of a subject complement NP where the head noun constitutes a superordinate term of the subject NP, such as wolves are very intelligent animals or wolves are an endangered species (animal and species are superordinates of wolf ) but not wolves are good hunters (hunter is not a superordinate of wolf ). Tables 1 and 2 list the most frequent adjectives occurring in the pattern [men are ADJ] and [wolves are ADJ] respectively, where passoc is simply the likelihood that (or relative frequency with which) an adjective occurs in the pattern in question. Note, first of all, that the adjectives in Table 2 show quite clearly that a definition of metaphorical mappings as all-encompassing one-way projections from a source to a target domain would lead to the wrong predictions concerning the meaning of Man is a wolf. If metaphorical mappings were such one-way projections, a simple source-domain frequency list like that in Table 1 should have adjectives denoting the mapped properties in top positions. In other words, if all properties associated with wolf were simply projected onto man in order to interpret this utterance, then we would expect it to mean ‘Man is social, large, intelligent, and/or endangered, etc.’ However, the properties actually ascribed to men via this utterance are those referred to by adjectives like fierce, predatory, rapacious, evil, dangerous, and their near synonyms (these are the adjectives used in defining the metaphorical meaning

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 149

of wolf in five major dictionaries of British or American English, cf. LDE, CALD, NHD, MWO, AHD, s.v. wolf ). Notice that these adjectives and their synonyms do in fact occur on the sourcedomain frequency list for [wolves are ADJ] (e.g. dangerous, bad, evil, mean, and perhaps also large, wild, and big; cf. Table 2) and on the target-domain frequency list for [men are ADJ] (e.g. dangerous, bad, violent, and perhaps strong; Table 1). However, they are not among the most frequent adjectival collocates for either of the two words. If the overlap model is right, however, they should be among the highestranking overlapping collocates, i.e. the collocates shared by men and wolves. The simplest way of modeling the way in which a language processor might identify the overlap between the collocates of the two words is by combining the individual probabilities, as shown in (3):

(3) Symmetrical overlap pcombined =P (adj|man) × P (adj|wolf )

This formula is a straightforward translation of the collocational overlap model described in the introduction: upon hearing an utterance like man is a wolf (or the man grinned wolfishly, etc.), the processor simply computes for each adjective the combined probability of occurrence with both nouns. Those adjectives with the highest combined probabilities are the most likely candidates for encoding the relevant properties. Note that this formula also ensures that only those collocates that occur with both node words are included in the overlap; all other collocates will automatically have a combined probability of zero. This symmetrical version of the overlap model is overly simple in one fundamental respect. Metaphorical mappings and the expressions instantiating them are not semantically symmetrical: man is a wolf does not mean the same thing as wolf is a man. The formula in (3) simply does not allow us to distinguish between these two statements. We can take this asymmetry into account, however, by weighting one set of probabilities more heavily than the other. As mentioned, Black’s interaction theory seems to attribute a more important role to the target domain, with the source domain acting more or less like a filter: properties that are highly relevant to the target domain are projected onto the source domain and then back. Conversely, Lakoff ’s theory of target-domain overrides seems to attribute a more important role to the source domain: properties associated with the source domain are projected onto the target domain, which filters out only those properties that do not apply in the target domain. Since we are dealing with probabilities (i.e. decimal fractions), a relatively straightforward way of increasing the weight of one of the probabilities is to take its square root (e.g. √0.9 = 0.9487). Unlike simpler mechanisms conceivable, such as multiplication by 2, using the square root will ensure that the probability stays in

150 Anatol Stefanowitsch

Table 3. Frequency-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [wolves are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Adjective dangerous strong intelligent bad good free smart afraid numerous old sensitive good at common tall powerful scary similar noble aggressive dead active useless stupid close nice quiet satisfied brave restless present wise

Source-Dominant pcomnbined 4.95E–04 2.77E–04 2.18E–04 1.78E–04 1.48E–04 9.90E–05 7.92E–05 6.93E–05 5.94E–05 4.95E–05 3.96E–05 3.96E–05 3.96E–05 2.97E–05 2.97E–05 2.97E–05 2.97E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 1.98E–05 9.90E–06 9.90E–06 9.90E–06 9.90E–06 9.90E–06 9.90E–06 9.90E–06

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Adjective dangerous intelligent strong bad good afraid smart free numerous common powerful similar scary sensitive old active good at aggressive noble tall stupid useless close dead nice restless present wise quiet satisfied brave

Target-Dominant pcomnbined 3.75E–03 2.61E–03 2.35E–03 1.74E–03 1.45E–03 1.17E–03 9.49E–04 7.50E–04 7.11E–04 6.71E–04 5.03E–04 5.03E–04 5.03E–04 4.74E–04 3.75E–04 3.35E–04 3.35E–04 3.35E–04 3.35E–04 2.90E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04 1.68E–04

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Adjective dangerous strong bad free good intelligent old good at smart numerous tall sensitive afraid stupid common useless dead close similar scary powerful noble aggressive active nice quiet satisfied brave restless present wise

pcomnbined 2.94E–03 1.97E–03 1.36E–03 1.31E–03 1.25E–03 1.23E–03 9.29E–04 7.43E–04 7.43E–04 6.43E–04 5.57E–04 5.25E–04 4.91E–04 3.71E–04 3.71E–04 3.71E–04 3.71E–04 3.71E–04 3.22E–04 3.22E–04 3.22E–04 2.63E–04 2.63E–04 2.63E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04 1.86E–04

the range between 0 and 1. This strategy will give us the following two formulas:

(4) Source-domain-dominant overlap (‘Target domain overrides’) pcombined = P (adj|man) × √P (adj|wolf )

(5) Target-domain dominant overlap (‘Interaction theory’) pcombined = √P (adj|man) × P (adj|wolf )

. Of course, taking the square root increases the weight of smaller fractions more strongly than that of larger fractions; it remains to be seen whether this is a problem.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation

It must be emphasized once again that I am not attempting to reduce Black’s and Lakoff ’s theories to the model proposed here or the formulas in (4) and (5). It is obvious that there is more to these theories than is captured by the overlap model, let alone by the formulas given here. Instead, the formulas should simply be understood as one of several ways of operationalizing the theories from a corpus-based perspective. Results. The results of the procedure described above are shown in Table 3. For each of the three versions, the overlapping adjectival collocates are listed in decreasing order of combined probability. Discussion. All three versions of the method seem promising. The top five overlapping collocates now include adjectives highly relevant to the interpretation of man is a wolf: dangerous, strong, and bad. The adjective intelligent can at least be said not to contradict the intended interpretation: Man is a wolf does seem to refer to an intelligent kind of badness (in contrast to, e.g. that guy is a gorilla). Of course, the presence of the adjective good among the top five collocates spoils this picture to a certain extent, although it is ranked below bad by all three methods. Also, some relevant adjectives are very far down the list (for example, scary and aggressive). This is not a major problem, as one would certainly not expect all potentially relevant collocates to end up among the top five or ten, but clearly the larger the proportion of relevant adjectives among the top collocates, the more convincing the model will appear. If we want to rank the different versions of the model informally, the target-domain dominant version seems to fare best: it places three of the most clearly relevant adjectives in the top three positions (as opposed to two for the other two versions), and bad is ranked most clearly above good (two places above, as opposed to one place above in the other two models). Interestingly, it also ranks free among the top five collocates. This may at first glance seem problematic, but in fact there is a metaphorical use of wolf that is associated with freedom: He is a lone wolf.

2.2 Testing the model Aims. In order to test the generalizability of the model developed above, I will apply it to the other two source domain items in (1): gorilla and pig (cf. examples (1b–c) . I will hold the target domain (man) constant. Data and Method. The corpus again consisted of <.uk> and <.us> websites accessed via the search engine Google. The search strings were gorillas are, pigs are, and ice is. The same rules as before were applied in order to extract the relevant adjectives, and the formulas in (3), (4), and (5) were applied. Results. The most frequent adjectives in the pattern [gorillas are ADJ] are shown in Table 4. The relevant adjectives, according to the dictionaries mentioned above, are large, violent, ugly, brutal, brutish, or their near synonyms. Intuitively, we might add stupid to this list. Almost no relevant adjectives occur among the top twen-

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Table 4. Most frequent adjectives occurring in the pattern [gorillas are ADJ] Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

endangered large big strong gentle threatened shy

0.0763 0.0678 0.0424 0.0381 0.0339 0.0297 0.0297

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

peaceful sensitive intelligent social dangerous vegetarian stupid

0.0254 0.0254 0.0254 0.0212 0.0212 0.0169 0.0127

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

smart dark interesting close black plant-eating protected

0.0127 0.0127 0.0127 0.0127 0.0127 0.0127 0.0127

ty adjectival collocates of gorillas are, which again shows that a simple projection model could not predict the right interpretation. Table 5 shows the overlapping collocates of [men are ADJ] and [gorillas are ADJ]. Again, the results are promising if we compare them to the frequency list in Table 4. The top ten overlapping collocates for each version of the model include the relevant adjectives strong, dangerous, and stupid, with the former two occupying the top two positions. However, the results are clearly less convincing than in the case of wolf: the top ten collocates also contain adjectives that are completely contrary to the right interpretation: sensitive, intelligent and smart. Intelligent and (in the case of the target-dominant method) smart are even ranked above stupid. Table 5. Frequency-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [gorillas are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Adjective strong dangerous sensitive intelligent reluctant close stupid smart different susceptible capable active powerful aggressive quiet present protective intellectual scary insensitive nice

Source-dominant pcombined 5.32E–04 3.69E–04 1.77E–04 1.77E–04 1.03E–04 8.86E–05 8.86E–05 8.86E–05 5.91E–05 5.91E–05 5.91E–05 2.95E–05 2.95E–05 2.95E–05 2.95E–05 1.48E–05 1.48E–05 1.48E–05 1.48E–05 1.48E–05 1.48E–05

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Adjective strong dangerous reluctant intelligent sensitive different stupid smart close susceptible capable aggressive active powerful quiet present protective scary insensitive intellectual nice

Target-dominant pcombined 2.72E–03 2.54E–03 1.59E–03 1.11E–03 1.11E–03 9.07E–04 7.86E–04 7.86E–04 7.86E–04 6.42E–04 6.42E–04 3.21E–04 3.21E–04 3.21E–04 3.21E–04 2.27E–04 2.27E–04 2.27E–04 2.27E–04 2.27E–04 2.27E–04

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Adjective strong dangerous intelligent sensitive smart stupid close capable susceptible reluctant active quiet different aggressive powerful insensitive intellectual nice present protective scary

pcombined 4.50E–03 2.80E–03 2.12E–03 2.12E–03 1.06E–03 1.06E–03 1.06E–03 7.07E–04 7.07E–04 6.62E–04 5.00E–04 5.00E–04 5.00E–04 5.00E–04 5.00E–04 2.50E–04 2.50E–04 2.50E–04 2.50E–04 2.50E–04 2.50E–04

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation

Table 6. Most frequent adjectives occurring in the pattern [pigs are ADJ] Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

Rank

Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

susceptible clean intelligent pink fat healthy dirty

0.0415 0.0415 0.0369 0.0276 0.0276 0.0230 0.0230

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

able smart equal small aggressive present happy

0.0230 0.0184 0.0184 0.0138 0.0138 0.0138 0.0138

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

common clever close popular cute

0.0138 0.0138 0.0138 0.0138 0.0138

Next, the most frequent adjectives in the pattern [pigs are ADJ] are shown in Table 6. The relevant properties, according to the dictionaries mentioned above, are fat, greedy, gross, impolite, offensive, unpleasant, difficult to deal with, unkind, untidy, and their synonyms. It must be noted that the metaphorical use of pig seems less consistent than in the case of wolf and gorilla: there are at least three semantic groups: excessive eating, antisocial behavior and messiness. Further evidence of this inconsistency comes from various specialized uses of pig to refer to immoral women, sexist or racist members of the establishment (sexist pig, racist pig), and (in some varieties) police officers. Finally, although none of the dictionaries mention this, the property happy may also be associated with pig (happy as a pig). This range of possible interpretations must, of course, be kept in mind. Three relevant adjectives occur among the top twenty adjectival collocates of [pigs are ADJ]: dirty, aggressive, and happy. These do not, however, occur in very high positions on the list, so that a simple projection model would again make incorrect predictions concerning the interpretation of men are pigs. Table 7 (p. 154) shows the overlapping collocates of [men are ADJ] and [pigs are ADJ]. Again, the results are promising compared to the simple frequency list but, as in the case of gorilla, they are not quite as convincing as in the case of wolf. The top ten overlapping collocates contain a number of relevant adjectives: happy, healthy, fat, and, in the case of the target-dominant method, dirty. Thus, the target-dominant method is once more slightly better than the other two. However, the top ten collocates also contain words that are contrary to, or at least irrelevant for, the correct interpretations. Concentrating on the target-domain dominant version, there are intelligent, smart, susceptible, able, equal, and close. What is especially problematic is that the top two collocates are irrelevant to the correct interpretation and that the most relevant adjectives do not occur among the top five collocates. In addition, some of the clearly relevant adjectives occur in relatively low positions (difficult, lazy, messy, and heavy). Discussion. In general, the results provide support for the collocational overlap model as compared to a simple source-domain frequency model. In all cases, adjec-

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Table 7. Frequency-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [pigs are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Adjective able happy susceptible intelligent equal healthy smart aware fat close dirty free dangerous different aggressive bad common present clever active lazy cold sensitive same available difficult capable funny heavy lean lost messy nice similar responsive noble young

Source-dominant pcombined 4.82E–04 3.85E–04 2.89E–04 2.57E–04 1.93E–04 1.61E–04 1.28E–04 1.28E–04 9.63E–05 9.63E–05 8.03E–05 8.03E–05 8.03E–05 6.42E–05 4.82E–05 4.82E–05 4.82E–05 4.82E–05 4.82E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 3.21E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05 1.61E–05

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Adjective happy able aware susceptible equal intelligent free dangerous healthy different smart close bad fat dirty sensitive cold difficult lazy capable common aggressive present clever available active same heavy lost funny lean young responsive messy similar noble nice

Target-dominant pcombined 3.28E–03 3.17E–03 1.89E–03 1.42E–03 1.42E–03 1.34E–03 1.18E–03 1.18E–03 1.06E–03 9.46E–04 9.46E–04 8.19E–04 7.10E–04 5.79E–04 5.29E–04 4.73E–04 4.73E–04 4.73E–04 4.73E–04 4.73E–04 4.10E–04 4.10E–04 4.10E–04 4.10E–04 3.35E–04 3.35E–04 3.35E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04 2.37E–04

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Adjective susceptible able intelligent happy healthy equal fat smart dirty close clever common present aggressive aware free dangerous same different active available bad cold sensitive capable difficult lazy similar messy nice noble responsive funny lost young lean heavy

pcombined 3.46E–03 3.33E–03 3.08E–03 2.31E–03 1.92E–03 1.88E–03 1.63E–03 1.54E–03 1.36E–03 1.15E–03 8.16E–04 8.16E–04 8.16E–04 8.16E–04 7.69E–04 6.08E–04 6.08E–04 5.44E–04 5.44E–04 5.44E–04 5.44E–04 4.71E–04 3.85E–04 3.85E–04 3.85E–04 3.85E–04 3.85E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04 2.72E–04

tives referring to the properties relevant to the interpretation feature prominently among the overlapping collocates, but not among the collocates of the source-domain expression by itself. In all four case studies, the target-domain dominant version of the model fared best, which may be interpreted as support for Black’s interaction theory.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation

Clearly, however, the picture is far from perfect. In all cases, there are individual adjectives among the top collocates which are either irrelevant to the conventional interpretation, or even contradict it (good for wolf, intelligent/smart for gorilla and pig). There are several possible reasons for this. First, the overlap model may simply be wrong. Of course, this possibility always exists and can certainly not be excluded on the basis of a single study. However, this possibility does not immediately suggest itself in light of the generally encouraging nature of the results. Second, the data may consist of text types that are not representative of the way we usually talk about the source domains in question. Given the fact that an unbalanced and uncontrollable corpus (the Internet) was used, this is certainly a possibility which must be taken seriously, but which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of the present study. Finally, the simple frequency-based definition of collocation and of collocational overlap may not be a realistic operationalization of the overlap model. I will investigate this possibility in the next section.

3. An association-based model of collocational overlap 3.1 Developing the model Aims. In this section, I will refine the overlap model by using a more sophisticated definition of collocation, based on association strength rather than on frequency. The problem with a frequency-based definition is that it does not take into account the base frequency of the linguistic items in question and thus does not allow us to assess whether an item occurs more or less frequently with the node word than would be expected by chance alone (see e.g. Church and Hanks 1990, see also Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003). This means that collocates that are fairly highly ranked in terms of frequency may actually occur in the context of the node word simply because they are frequent in general, not because they are particularly strongly associated with the node word as such. For example, good is the sixteenth most frequent adjective in the frame wolves are ADJ, and in the collocational overlap with men are ADJ it ends up in fifth position, although it is contrary to the correct metaphorical interpretation of wolf. When we compare its observed frequency in wolves are ADJ with its expected frequency, however, we find that good occurs significantly less frequently in this frame than its base frequency would lead us to expect. Thus, an analysis that takes into account base frequencies would have identified good as an ‘anticollocate’ of wolf, and thus removed it from the list. Data and Method. The data were the same as before. The association-based probabilities were derived on the basis of the binomial test, which measures the likelihood that the deviation of an observed frequency of occurrence from its expected frequency is due to chance. In particular, I used the formula in (6), where b is the

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cumulative binomial p-value for the occurrence of a given word in the critical context given its overall probability of occurrence, and where the sign of the logarithm is set to plus if the word occurs more frequently than expected and to minus if it occurs less frequently than expected: (6) Association-based probability ±log bi passoc = n ±log bi

Σ j=1

Taking the logarithm of the binomial p-value turns an exponential scale into a linear scale and dividing the value of a given adjective by the sum of the values of all adjectives in the critical context ensures that the values for passoc fall between 0 and 1 and that their sum is 1. The binomial p-value is used here because the overall probabilities of occurrence for the words could not be derived from the same data set as their probabilities of occurrence in the critical context (there is no straightforward way of determining the frequency of all adjectives on <.uk>/<.us> websites). Instead, they were derived from Leech et al.’s (2001) lemmatized frequency list of the British National Corpus and then treated as a priori probabilities. In theory, of course, any p-value of an exact test (e.g. the Fisher-Yates exact test) could be used in the formula. Using frequencies from one corpus in order to derive base-line expectations about another corpus is of course not without problems, but since the BNC is a large and diverse corpus, expected frequencies derived from it should not be entirely off the mark. Tables 8 and 9 show the most strongly associated collocates for [men are ADJ], and [wolves are ADJ] respectively. Clearly, the rankings are similar to the frequency-based rankings in some details and different in others; for our purposes, what is most important is that, again, the collocates of wolf by itself cannot correctly predict its metaphorical interpretation. Table 8. Strongest adjectival collocates in the pattern [men are ADJ] Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

3.34E–02 3.22E-02 3.10E-02 2.17E-02 2.00E-02 2.00E-02 1.55E-02 1.50E-02 1.44E–02 1.44E–02

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

1.44E–02 1.17E-02 1.10E-02 1.10E-02 1.10E-02 1.10E-02 1.10E-02 1.03E-02 1.00E-02 1.00E-02

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

9.60E–03 9.30E–03 9.30E–03 9.00E–03 8.50E–03 8.10E–03 8.10E–03 8.00E–03

prone reluctant good at aware crap happy involved dangerous good in reticent

promiscuous macho mortal sexist vain overweight disposable violent damaged affected

susceptible lazy rotten terrified ashamed tall useless free

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 157

Table 9. Strongest adjectival collocates in the pattern [wolves are ADJ] Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

5.82E-02 4.61E-02 4.18E-02 3.72E-02 3.25E-02 2.67E-02 2.65E-02 2.34E–02 1.81E-02 1.70E-02

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

1.65E-02 1.50E-02 1.50E-02 1.49E-02 1.40E-02 1.35E-02 1.30E-02 1.28E-02 1.18E-02 1.15E-02

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

1.10E-02 1.08E-02 1.08E-02 1.08E-02 1.07E-02 1.00E-02 9.10E–03 8.20E–03 8.20E–03

endangered extinct intelligent hungry shy dangerous protected gray social misunderstood

afraid scary adaptable large wild interesting evil smart abundant beautiful

mean socialised carnivorous sneaky vicious cool strong treacherous threatened

The passoc values from Tables 8 and 9 were then treated exactly analogously to the relative frequencies used in the preceding sections, i.e. the formulas in (3), (4), and (5) were applied. Results. The results of the procedure described above are shown in Table 10. Again, for each of the three versions of the overlap model, the overlapping adjectival collocates are listed in decreasing order of combined probability. Table 10. Association-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [wolves are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Adjective dangerous intelligent good at smart scary strong numerous afraid sensitive noble useless bad aggressive restless tall stupid free powerful brave wise satisfied active

Source-dominant

Target-dominant

pcombined Rank Adjective pcombined Rank Adjective 4.01E–04 1. dangerous 2.45E–03 1. intelligent 3.01E–04 2. good at 2.21E–03 2. dangerous 1.58E–04 3. intelligent 1.47E–03 3. scary 9.73E–05 4. smart 8.60E–04 4. smart 8.85E–05 5. scary 7.23E–04 5. good at 5.28E–05 6. strong 5.53E–04 6. afraid 4.26E–05 7. numerous 5.06E–04 7. strong 3.14E–05 8. useless 4.13E–04 8. numerous 2.34E–05 9. sensitive 3.65E–04 9. noble 2.12E–05 10. tall 3.03E–04 10. bad 2.11E–05 11. free 2.88E–04 11. sensitive 1.68E–05 12. noble 2.77E–04 12. aggressive 1.66E–05 13. stupid 2.50E–04 13. useless 1.41E–05 14. restless 2.49E–04 14. restless 1.13E–05 15. afraid 2.44E–04 15. powerful 1.06E–05 16. aggressive 2.31E–04 16. stupid 1.04E–05 17. bad 2.21E–04 17. brave 8.33E-06 18. brave 1.58E–04 18. tall 7.59E-06 19. wise 1.33E–04 19. common 6.09E-06 20. powerful 1.19E–04 20. free 4.94E-06 21. satisfied 1.13E–04 21. active 4.76E-06 22. active 9.00E–05 22. wise

pcombined 3.55E–03 3.27E–03 1.15E–03 1.12E–03 8.98E–04 7.19E–04 6.93E–04 5.50E–04 3.54E–04 3.12E–04 3.10E–04 2.94E–04 2.34E–04 2.12E–04 2.02E–04 1.38E–04 1.32E–04 1.26E–04 1.16E–04 1.16E–04 1.15E–04 1.13E–04

158 Anatol Stefanowitsch

Table 10. (cond.) Symmetrical

Source-dominant

Target-dominant

Rank Adjective

pcombined

Rank Adjective

pcombined

Rank Adjective

pcombined

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

3.28E-06 2.48E-06 2.16E-06 2.08E-06 1.50E–06 7.70E-07 6.00E-07

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

8.77E–05 6.24E–05 6.12E–05 5.12E–05 4.08E–05 2.91E–05 2.45E–05

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

9.69E-05 7.35E–05 5.09E-05 4.45E–05 3.00E–05 2.32E–05 1.90E–05

common dead quiet similar close nice present

dead quiet close common similar nice present

satisfied similar quiet dead close nice present

Discussion. As with the frequency-based method, the results are encouraging for all three versions, which rank some of the most relevant adjectives among the top ten overlapping collocates, e.g. intelligent, dangerous, scary, strong, and, in the case of the target-domain dominant version, bad. The latter version again seems best, not only because it includes bad, which has disappeared from the top ten in the other two versions, but also because it ranks the highly relevant scary highest. Note also, that some positive ‘lone wolf ’ attributes are again mixed in with the negative ones (noble, sensitive, restless, free). Crucially, the problematic adjective good has disappeared completely from the list.

3.2 Testing the model Aims. In this section, I will once again apply the model developed above to other source domain items in order to test its generalizability. Data and Method. The same data as in Section 1 were used. The method used was the same as that just demonstrated for wolf. Table 11. Strongest adjectival collocates in the pattern [gorillas are ADJ] Rank Adjective 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Rank Adjective

passoc

endangered 1.36E-01

passoc

11.

strong

2.04E–02 21.

threatened shy gentle large peaceful intelligent vegetarian sensitive planteating

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

big protected dangerous sociable vegetarians monogamous polygynous habituated folivorous

1.77E-02 1.60E-02 1.55E-02 1.43E-02 1.43E-02 1.43E-02 1.43E-02 1.43E-02 1.43E-02

4.58E-02 3.75E-02 3.48E-02 2.98E-02 2.82E-02 2.74E–02 2.42E-02 2.29E-02 2.23E-02

Rank Adjective

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

familyoriented smart cute ferocious stupid susceptible fierce aggressive

passoc 1.43E-02 1.25E-02 1.17E-02 1.17E-02 1.00E-02 9.70E–03 7.60E–03 7.40E–03

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 159

Table 12. Association-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [gorillas are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Adjective dangerous intelligent sensitive strong reluctant smart susceptible stupid scary insensitive capable aggressive protective close intellectual quiet powerful active nice present

Source-dominant pcombined 2.33E–04 1.97E–04 1.31E–04 1.18E–04 1.03E–04 9.50E–05 9.31E–05 5.90E–05 3.48E–05 2.92E–05 2.60E–05 2.37E–05 1.33E–05 1.23E–05 8.70E–06 8.28E-06 7.48E-06 7.31E-06 1.32E-06 1.10E–06

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Adjective dangerous reluctant intelligent susceptible sensitive smart strong stupid scary insensitive capable aggressive protective close intellectual quiet powerful active nice present

Target-dominant pcombined 1.87E–03 1.82E–03 1.19E–03 9.45E–04 8.63E–04 8.50E–04 8.28E–04 5.90E–04 4.53E–04 3.97E–04 3.61E–04 2.75E–04 2.19E–04 1.75E–04 1.59E–04 1.22E–04 1.13E–04 1.11E–04 3.81E–05 3.32E–05

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Adjective intelligent dangerous sensitive strong smart susceptible stupid reluctant scary aggressive insensitive capable close protective quiet powerful active intellectual nice present

pcombined 2.32E–03 1.90E–03 1.73E–03 1.55E–03 1.09E–03 9.50E–04 7.68E–04 5.74E–04 4.53E–04 4.19E–04 3.97E–04 3.68E–04 2.45E–04 2.22E–04 1.95E–04 1.81E–04 1.77E–04 1.62E–04 3.98E–05 3.48E–05

Results. The strongest adjectival collocates for the pattern [gorillas are ADJ] are shown in Table 11. Unlike in the case of the frequency-based analysis, some relevant adjectives for the metaphorical interpretation of gorilla now occur among the top twenty adjectival collocates, but not in very high positions. Table 12 shows the overlapping collocates of [men are ADJ] and [gorillas are ADJ]. As with the frequency-based method, the results are promising if compared to the individual collocates for gorilla. Many relevant adjectives appear among the top ten: dangerous, strong, stupid, scary, insensitive (in the symmetrical and sourcedominant versions) and aggressive (in the target-dominant version). However, again the results are less encouraging than for wolves because a number of incorrect adjectives occupy high positions, most importantly, intelligent, smart, and sensitive. It seems that the association-based method was not able to remove these as it removed good for wolves. It is difficult to distinguish between the different versions. If anything, we can say that the target-domain dominant version is slightly worse since it contains the incorrect intelligent in first position. Next, the most strongly associated adjectives in the pattern [pigs are ADJ] are shown in Table 13. As before, these individual collocates would not lead to the right metaphorical interpretation of pig. Table 14 shows the overlapping collocates for [men are ADJ] and [pigs are ADJ]The results are similarly mixed as they were in the

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Table 13. Strongest adjectival collocates in the pattern [pigs are ADJ] Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

Rank Adjective

passoc

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

6.58E-02 4.64E–02 4.10E-02 2.97E-02 2.91E-02 2.40E-02 2.20E-02 2.13E-02

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

2.12E-02 1.70E-02 1.70E-02 1.70E-02 1.51E-02 1.43E-02 1.39E-02 1.32E-02

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

1.32E-02 1.32E-02 1.25E-02 1.25E-02 1.16E-02 9.70E–03 8.20E–03

susceptible intelligent clean fat pink dirty cute healthy

smart spoilt important same inquisitive aggressive equal hardy

prolific clever plump greedy filthy ugly able

case of the frequency-based analysis. The rankings are in some ways an improvement over the individual collocates of pigs are ADJ (for example, the counterintuitive clean is removed from the list), in other ways they are worse (the highly relevant fat and dirty occur in lower positions). Overall, the results are slightly better than those for the frequency-based model: the relevant adjectives fat and dirty are ranked higher by the association-based model in all three versions. However, in both cases, there are a number of irrelevant or counterintuitive adjectives among the top-ranked collocates. As discussed in Section 1, the metaphorical interpretation of pig is less homogeneous than that of the other words treated here; this may be a reason for the somewhat unconvincing results of both the frequency-based and the association-based model. Discussion. Overall, we can say that the association-based model offers a slight improvement over the frequency-based model: in all cases, some irrelevant or counterintuitive adjectives were removed or demoted by the model. However, a number of irrelevant or counterintuitive collocates remain. There are three possible reasons for this. First, the association-based model may not be sufficiently sophisticated. Future research could test different statistical methods to determine whether some are better than others. However, I would venture the guess that this is not the main problem. Second, the association strengths may have been calculated on an insufficiently comparable basis, i.e. the base frequencies derived from the BNC may not reflect the base frequencies on the Internet closely enough. The obvious solution would be to use a different corpus (which is currently impossible, since no suitable corpora are available) or to use Internet-derived frequencies as a baseline (which is also impossible, since there is no straightforward way of identifying, retrieving and counting all adjectives from the Internet). However, advances in natural language processing and the availability of larger annotated corpora may help to solve these problems within the next few years. Third, the problem of unrepresentative text types, already mentioned in connection with the frequency-based model exists for the associationbased model just as it does for the frequency-based model. However, the advances just mentioned will also help to solve this problem at some point in the near future.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 161

Table 14. Association-based overlap between [men are ADJ] and [pigs are ADJ] Symmetrical Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Adjective susceptible intelligent smart happy same healthy equal fat dirty able lazy aggressive clever dangerous aware messy responsive lean sensitive noble close capable lost active free present cold funny common heavy bad difficult nice available similar young

Source-dominant pcombined 6.32E–04 3.34E–04 1.61E–04 1.34E–04 1.16E–04 1.15E–04 1.06E–04 8.02E–05 6.72E–05 6.40E–05 4.74E–05 4.58E–05 3.83E–05 3.75E–05 3.69E-05 3.11E–05 2.53E–05 2.33E–05 1.77E–05 1.62E–05 1.53E–05 1.35E–05 1.04E–05 9.01E-06 8.80E–06 6.20E–06 5.94E-06 5.88E-06 4.40E–06 2.34E-06 2.32E-06 1.80E–06 1.65E-06 1.10E–06 9.60E-07 4.80E-07

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Adjective susceptible happy intelligent smart equal aware same healthy dangerous able lazy fat dirty messy aggressive responsive clever lean sensitive free capable noble close lost cold active funny bad present common difficult heavy nice similar available young

Target-dominant pcombined 2.46E–03 1.64E–03 1.55E–03 1.11E–03 8.96E–04 8.95E–04 8.87E–04 7.88E–04 7.50E–04 7.06E–04 6.64E–04 4.65E–04 4.34E–04 3.98E–04 3.83E–04 3.41E–04 3.33E–04 3.20E–04 3.17E–04 2.65E–04 2.60E–04 2.41E–04 1.95E–04 1.74E–04 1.40E–04 1.24E–04 1.11E–04 8.20E–05 7.87E–05 5.93E–05 5.69E-05 5.52E–05 4.26E–05 2.77E–05 2.35E–05 1.96E–05

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Adjective susceptible intelligent smart healthy fat same dirty equal happy aggressive able clever lazy messy responsive lean dangerous close noble aware sensitive active present lost capable common funny cold free heavy nice available bad difficult similar young

pcombined 6.45E–03 3.94E–03 1.85E–03 1.57E–03 1.54E–03 1.40E–03 1.27E–03 1.21E–03 9.48E–04 8.09E–04 7.24E–04 7.11E–04 4.92E–04 4.36E–04 3.73E–04 3.52E–04 3.06E–04 3.05E–04 2.70E–04 2.50E–04 2.34E–04 2.19E–04 1.96E–04 1.94E–04 1.91E–04 1.56E–04 1.28E–04 1.03E–04 9.84E–05 6.49E-05 4.97E–05 4.92E–05 4.31E–05 4.24E–05 3.39E-05 1.70E–05

4. Evaluation of the model against native-speaker interpretations Aims. In introducing the overlap model, I was deliberately vague as to the nature of the language processor. The collocational overlap model of metaphor interpretation would, in my view, be useful even if it were merely interpreted as a suggestion for the unsupervised deduction of metaphorical interpretations by a machine-

162 Anatol Stefanowitsch

learning system, with no claims of psychological reality for human speakers. However, the model would, of course, be more interesting from a theoretical perspective if it could be shown that it is psychologically real, i.e. that collocational overlap in fact does contribute to the interpretation of metaphorical expressions by human speakers. Even if we were to limit ourselves to an applied machine-learning interpretation of the overlap model, we would still have to ensure that it actually identifies the same attributes as would human speakers. Therefore, I decided to perform a simple elicitation study confronting native speakers with the three metaphorical statements discussed above in order to evaluate the performance of the overlap model in predicting native-speaker interpretations of conventionalized metaphors. I also included one additional statement exemplifying a non-conventionalized metaphor in order to test whether the model could predict the interpretation of novel metaphorical statements. The non-conventionalized metaphorical statement was That man is a dolphin. This statement was constructed to be maximally parallel to the other three in that it also involves a target concept from the domain of animals. Dolphin was chosen because (i) there is no conventionalized interpretation attached to it, (ii) dolphins are popular animals and hence likely to be familiar enough to native speakers of English to have stereotyical attributes associated with them, and (iii), dolphins are talked about frequently enough to allow a corpus analysis analogous to those performed above. Data and methods. There seem to be at least two possible ways of testing the results of the corpus analysis against native-speaker interpretations. The first, and perhaps best way would be to confront speakers with statements such as Richard is a wolf (conventionalized) or Sam is a dolphin (non-conventionalized) and ask them to list properties that they would associate with Richard and Sam. These lists could then be concatenated and compared to the frequency lists of adjectives associated with man and wolf/dolphin, as well as the lists yielded by the various versions of the collocational overlap model. However, especially with novel metaphors, this would require a large number of native-speaker responses to ensure the reliability of the patterns that would – hopefully – emerge. The second possibility would be to confront speakers with the lists resulting from the corpus analysis and ask them to choose the list(s) that fit best their interpretation of these sentences. Here, the number of choices could be limited and thus focused comparisons between different lists could be elicited even with a comparatively small number of native speakers. Since I only had 12 native speakers of English available, I settled on the second possibility. Due to the limited number of native speakers available, it was clear that I could test two conditions at most before the subjects would no longer approach the data on the basis of their spontaneous native-speaker interpretations. I therefore decided on the following two comparisons:

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 163

Condition 1: SD-node frequency list (man) vs. TD-node frequency list (wolf, gorilla, pig, dolphin) vs. Frequency-based symmetrical overlap. Condition 2: Frequency-based symmetrical overlap vs. Association-based symmetrical overlap. The first condition was intended to test whether the overlap model would outperform the simple source-domain frequency model. The second condition was meant to test whether the association-based overlap model would outperform the frequency-based one. These questions seem more fundamental than the issue of distinguishing between the source-dominant and the target-dominant versions. Only the top five adjectives of the respective lists were used in the experiment. This limitation is rather strict in view of the discussion of the corpus results above, which shows that important adjectives as well as important differences between the lists often occur a little further down the list. However, the limitation was necessary to ensure that the task would not become too complex for the subjects. For the three sentences discussed in the preceding sections, the lists for the two conditions can be read off the tables presented in the preceding sections and will not be repeated here. For the sentence That man is a dolphin, the lists are shown in Table 15. The subjects were 12 exchange students from English-speaking countries at the University of Bremen (six from the United States, five from Britain, and one from Ireland). They were tested individually or in small groups. Subjects sat at desks facing a large computer screen. Before the experiment began, they were given the following instruction: You will see a series of statements of the form “That man is a giant.” You will then be presented with a number of lists naming properties. In each case, choose the list that contains the properties most relevant to your interpretation of the sentence. If more than one list contains the same relevant property, choose the list on which that property occurs closer to the top of the list. The lists for each condition were then shown side by side in random order on the computer screen using Table 15. Adjective lists for That man is a dolphin Simple frequenciesa Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. a

Adjective intelligent common social able large

Frequency overlapb p 8.53e-02 8.19e-02 3.09e-02 2.75e-02 2.41e-02

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Adjective intelligent happy able free common

Association overlapc p 5.94E–04 5.71E–04 5.71E–04 2.97E–04 2.85E–04

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Most frequent adjectives in the frame [dolphins are ADJ] Frequency-based overlap between [men are ADJ] vs. [dolphins are ADJ] c Association-based overlap between [men are ADJ] vs. [dolphins are ADJ] b

Adjective intelligent happy smart able free

p 1.07E–03 2.76E–04 2.67E–04 9.83E–05 6.56E–05

164 Anatol Stefanowitsch

a white font against a black background. Each list was enclosed by a box and had an identification number appearing directly below the list. At the top of each screen, the relevant sentence was displayed. Subjects then recorded their responses on a paper questionnaire by checking boxes corresponding to the identification number of their chosen list. Results. The results for the first condition are shown in Table 16. In the case of wolf, there is a clear preference for the frequency-based overlap model compared to the two simple frequency lists. This difference is very significant (χ2=11.64 (df=2), p < 0.01). In the case of gorilla, the frequency list for man is clearly disfavored as would be expected, but there is no clear preference for either the frequency list for gorilla or the overlap list (χ2=6.5 (df=2), p < 0.05). For pig, there is no significant preference at all (χ2=4.5 (df=2), p > 0.1, n.s.). These differences between the three mappings reflect to a large extent differences already discussed in the corpus analyses above: the evidence in favor of the frequency-based overlap model were most convincing for wolf and least convincing for pig, with gorilla somewhere in between. The problem with pig was that none of the clearly relevant properties made it to the top of any of the lists, and the uncertainty of the subjects reflects this. The weak preference for the simple frequency list is presumably due to the fact that the adjective fat appears among the top five, albeit in fourth position below the clearly counterintuitive clean. Crucially for our purposes, in the case of the novel metaphor That man is a dolphin, the subjects showed a clear preference for the frequency-based overlap list as compared to both simple frequency lists (χ2=7.82 (df=2), p < 0.05). The results for condition 2 are shown in Table 17. In the case of wolf there is a clear preference for the association-based list (χ2=8.33 (df=1), p < 0.01). In the case of gorilla, the preference is for the frequency-based list (χ2=4.45 (df=1), p < 0.05) and in Table 16. Choices in Condition 1 (expected frequencies are given in parentheses) wolf gorilla pig dolphin

TD freq.list

SD freq.list

Freq. Overlap

Total

1 (3.67) 7 (4) 7 (4) 2 (3.67)

1 (3.67) — (4) 4 (4) 1 (3.67)

9 (3.67) 5 (4) 2 (4) 8 (3.67)

11 12 12 11

Table 17. Choices in Condition 2 (expected frequencies are given in parentheses) wolf gorilla pig dolphin

Freq. overlap

Assoc. overlap

Total

1 (6) 9 (5.5) 7 (6) 2 (5.5)

11 (6) 2 (5.5) 5 (6) 9 (5.5)

12 11 12 11

Note: n=12, missing or unclear responses were omitted from the analysis.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 165

the case of pig there is, again, no clear preference (χ2=0.33 (df=1), p > 0.5). The results for the novel metaphor with dolphin show a clear preference for the list based on the association-based overlap model (χ2=4.45 (df=1), p < 0.05). Discussion. This small-scale elicitation study provides evidence relevant to the overlap model in two ways. First, it presents a somewhat mixed picture with respect to the conventional metaphors discussed in the preceding sections. The results are clearly in favor of the overlap model in the case of wolf and rather unclear in the case of gorilla (where the simple frequency model and the overlap model perform equally well) and pig (where no significant result emerged). Similarly, in the case of wolf, speakers quite clearly favor the results of the association-based overlap model, while in the case of gorilla they favor the frequency-based model, and in the case of pig, no clear difference emerges. Thus, the study can be taken as initial encouragement for the overlap model, but not for any specific version of it. There are several potential reasons for this mixed picture. Most of these have already been discussed (insufficiently representative corpus-data, distorted association strengths, etc.). However, an additional reason suggests itself: in the case of conventionalized metaphors, the lexical items in question will develop their own semantic trajectory independently of the original motivation as might be reflected in the overlapping collocates. In other words, conventionalized metaphorical interpretations of animal names might be quite far removed from our beliefs about the animals themselves. This would explain why speakers very clearly favor the results of the overlap model over the simple source-domain frequency model and the results of the association-based overlap model over the frequency-based one in the case of the novel metaphor That man is a dolphin. For such novel metaphors, no conventionalized interpretations exist and speakers most clearly rely on overlap to construct an appropriate interpretation.

5. General discussion Taken together, the results of the three studies presented in this chapter provide sufficient support for the collocational overlap model of metaphor interpretation to encourage further investigation. Collocational overlap yields a significant amount of information about the intended interpretation of metaphorical expressions that can be utilized by a statistical language processor or language learning mechanism such as a human child or a computer. A number of methodological problems remain to be solved, most importantly, the lack of sufficiently large and balanced corpora. While this is a relatively trivial problem from a theoretical perspective, it has practical consequences that compromise the reliability of the results. First, it forces the researcher to resort to a corpus

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whose validity as a representative sample of language in use is questionable. The problem is not that the Internet is skewed towards certain text types — the same is true of any imaginable corpus — but that the degree and direction of this skew are almost impossible to assess objectively. Second, it forces the researcher to establish base frequencies on the basis of a corpus that is not the same as that from which the data are extracted. Again, it is difficult to determine the magnitude and direction of the resulting skew. There are ways of working around this problem. For example, it may be possible to come up with lexico-grammatical frames that may allow us to extract relevant base-frequencies from the Internet. Alternatively, we could extend the range of patterns from which to extract relevant collocates for each node word (for example, we could include attributive adjectives, or even all words in a given span). This might allow us to extract sufficiently large data sets from smaller corpora, such as the BNC. In turn, this would mean that base-line frequencies and data could come from the same corpus. A second, more substantial methodological problem concerns the formulas used here to operationalize the overlap model. Note that these formulas rely to some extent on the fact that the data set they are applied to is limited in size: they automatically exclude collocates that do not occur with one of the two node words since the result of a multiplication by zero is always zero. However, as the data set increases, so will the number of collocates that occur at least once with both node words. This could increasingly distort the data by including collocates that are extremely frequent with one of the nodes even though they occur only once or twice with the other. Up to a certain point, this problem may be circumvented by adjusting the weightings given to source and target domain, but ultimately, a more sophisticated model of collocational overlap will be needed. However, none of these methodological and theoretical problems should distract us from the fact that the results achieved here are extremely encouraging. This is all the more surprising precisely because of the problems mentioned here — a method which yields good results even on the basis of such problematic data promises to fare even better when confronted with better data. Of course, the results presented here only suggest that collocational overlap can guide the interpretation of metaphorical expressions – they do not allow us to make substantial claims about the psychological reality of the model. Only more sophisticated psycholinguistic research can address the issue of whether collocational overlap does guide metaphorical interpretation in human language processors. Whether the model turns out to be psychologically real or not, it certainly suggests promising applications in the domain of machine language processing. The model could be applied to develop plausible interpretations of metaphorical expressions from raw text without supervision or prior knowledge of metaphorical mappings in a given language.

Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 167

References AHD. 2000. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin (Online at http://www.bartleby.com/am, last access: January 2006). Black, Max. 1962. Metaphor. In Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Max Black (ed.), 25–47. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Black, Max. 1993 [1979]. More about metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed.), Andrew Ortony (ed.), 20–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BNC British National Corpus, World Edition. CALD. 2003. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Church, Kenneth W. and Hanks, Patrick. 1990. Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics 16: 22–9. Gibbs, Raymond. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gries, Stefan Th. 2004.Testing the sub-test: A collocational-overlap analysis of English -ic and ‑ical adjectives. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8: 31–61. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed.), Andrew Ortony (ed.), 202–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LDE. 2003. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Harlow: Pearson. Leech, Geoffrey, Rayson, Paul and Wilson, Andrew. 2001. Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. London: Longman. MWO. 2006. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Online at http://www.m–w.com/dictionary, last access: January 2006. NHD. 2004. Heinle’s Newbury House Dictionary of American English (4th ed.). Boston MA: Monroe Allen Publishers. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Searle, John 1993 [1979]. Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed.), Andrew Ortony (ed.), 83–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004. Happiness in English and German: A metaphorical-pattern analysis. In Language, Culture, and Mind, Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (eds), 134–49. Stanford CA: CSLI. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2005. A corpus-based approach to the function of metaphor. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10: 161–98. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2006. Words and their metaphors: A corpus-based approach. In Corpusbased Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan T. Gries (eds), 63–105. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Gries, Stefan T. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209–43. Ungerer, Friedrich and Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2006. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (2nd ed.). London: Longman. Weinrich, Harald. 1976. Sprache in Texten. Stuttgart: Klett. Wulff, Stefanie. 2006. Go–V vs. go-and-V in English: A case of constructional synonymy? In Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: The Syntax–Lexis Interface, Stefan T. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds), 101–29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

part 2

Mental spaces and conceptual blending

chapter 8

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns Ronald W. Langacker University of California, San Diego

The meanings of personal pronouns are described using basic notions of Cognitive Linguistics. Among these notions are subjective vs. objective construal, profiling, grounding, intersubjectivity, paths of mental access, and conceptual blending. Pronouns are situated with respect to other strategies of nominal grounding. It is explained how personal pronouns can be used impersonally, and the meaning of impersonal it is characterized. Special attention is devoted to I and you. Their abstracted conceptual meanings invoke very basic cognitive models pertaining to the ground, a speech event, and subject vs. object of conception. With these models as inputs, the pronouns’ meanings are constructed through successive levels of blending. The crucial factor is intersubjectivity. Keywords: blending, definiteness, delimitation, grounding, impersonal, intersubjectivity, nominal structure, pronoun, proper name, reference point, subject/object of conception, vantage point

My goal is to sketch a conceptual characterization of the meanings of personal pronouns, especially I and you. At one level of analysis, describing their meanings is relatively straightforward: I designates the speaker, you the hearer, they a group which excludes the interlocutors, and so on. Such descriptions may not be wrong, but they are certainly superficial. The role of speaker, for instance, is hardly sufficient to characterize the privileged conceptual position of the person referred to by the pronoun I. The person who occupies that position (from my own perspective) will now attempt a slightly less superficial description of personal pronouns in the context of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1990, 1991, 1999a). Relevant to their description are certain basic features of human conceptualization. We must first acknowledge the asymmetry between the subject and the object of conception. As suggested by the dashed-line circle in Figure 1, the subject of conception (S) lies at the very margin of awareness. It is thus implicit and non-salient. Lying at the opposite pole, the object of conception (O) is the focus of explicit awareness. It is thereby rendered salient within the general locus of attention, which I refer to metaphorically as the “onstage region” (OS). I describe an entity as being subjectively construed to the extent that it approximates the role of S in this

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OS S

O

Figure 1. Subject and object of conception

configuration, and objectively construed to the extent that it approximates the role of O (Langacker 1985, 1997a). Each of us—at every waking moment—occupies the position of S in our ongoing conceptual experience. There is no escaping it. To be sure, the conceptualizer can also be the target of conception, but then it has the onstage role of O in addition to the offstage role of S. There is likewise no escaping the fact that each of us represents a distinct instantiation of S. We can imagine what it is like to be a different conceptualizer, in position S′, but the experience falls short of actually occupying S′, if only because the simulation occurs at S. Another basic feature of conceptualization is dynamicity (Langacker 1997b, 2001a, 2005). Because it consists in processing activity, conceptualization occurs through time. How it develops through time—the time course of a conception—is an important dimension of its characterization. I presume, for example, that any conception of ordering or directionality at the experiential level is constituted by seriality at some level of cognitive processing (Langacker 1986: 455). Certainly there are many linguistic phenomena where, as shown in Figure 2(a), the conceptualizer (C) follows a mental path by successively invoking a series of entities (E1, E2, E3, etc.), each providing access to the next. One example of sequential access is the navigation of mental spaces in discourse processing (Fauconnier 1985; Cutrer 1994; Sweetser and Fauconnier 1996). A special case of sequenced mental access is a reference point relationship (Langacker 1993) involving successive foci of attention: by first invoking a reference point (R), the conceptualizer gains access to a range of associated entities—R’s dominion (D)—one of which is selected as target (T). There

a.

C

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Figure 2. Sequential access

...

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Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 173

is often a chain of reference point relationships, as in Figure 2(b), where the target in one functions as reference point in the next. An example would be a possessive chain like Jill’s mother’s cousin’s granddaughter. If we cannot escape our identity as a specific subject of conception, always at our current location at the present moment, at least our conceptual abilities afford a degree of emancipation from the I-here-now of immediate experience. One device is memory, the partial replay of previous experience. Another is abstraction, based on the reinforcement of what is common to multiple experiences. Through abstraction we can deal with the world at the level of types, exploiting regularities which transcend the immediate apprehension of particular instances. A third device is imagination, where conceptual integration produces structures not actually experienced. Among these are the products of metaphor and blending, and the invocation of fictive entities for myriad purposes (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Langacker 1999b, 2005; Talmy 1996). As a special case, we can imagine experience at some other I-here-now. The extent to which we do so ranges from merely realizing that there is such an experience to vicariously enjoying it by simulation. But that too is an aspect of our experience at the actual I-herenow, from which we can never completely escape. This leads to a further basic feature of conceptualization, namely its intersubjective nature. Rightly or wrongly, each of us believes that there are other conceptualizing individuals, each of whom also functions as S and apprehends the world at their own I-here-now. In imagining their mental experience, we are adept at assessing what they know, surmising what they are currently attending to, and reading their intentions (Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993; Tomasello 2003). This is both due to and responsible for the fact that our conceptual abilities and knowledge of the world develop interactively in a sociocultural context. And language, of course, is both the product and a primary vehicle of this interaction. With communicative interaction comes the need for conceptual coordination. Linguistic interaction rests on the supposition that the interlocutors are conceptualizing the “same world” (in a discourse-relevant sense), though they each apprehend it somewhat differently and from their own perspective. For communication to be successful, they must have some means of ensuring that they direct their attention to the same conceived entities. In particular, the successful use of a nominal (i.e. a “noun phrase”) implies that both interlocutors interpret it as having the same referent. Achieving this coordinated mental reference is the function of nominal grounding (Langacker 2004a). Personal pronouns have a special place in the nominal grounding system. Grounding is the grammaticized means of indicating the epistemic status of the thing profiled by a nominal or the process profiled by a finite clause. The ground consists of the speech event, the interlocutors, and their immediate circumstances.

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It thus includes the speaker and the addressee, who apprehend the nominal or clausal content, as well as the vantage point from which they do so. As narrowly defined, a grounding element has the special property that the ground and grounding relationship are offstage and subjectively construed—it is only the grounded entity (the profiled thing or process) that is onstage as the focus of attention (Langacker 2002). In other words, grounding elements embody the viewing asymmetry in Figure 1, with both interlocutors functioning as subjects of conception, and the profiled thing or process as the object of conception. I have often represented this in the manner of Figure 3(a), indicating that the profiled entity is apprehended from the ground (G). Here it is useful to show the ground in slightly more detail. In Figure 3(b), dashed arrows indicate that the speaker (S) and the hearer (H) apprehend one another in the context of a speech event, as well as directing their attention to the profiled entity onstage. Nominal grounding elements of English include the articles, demonstratives, and certain quantifiers (all, most, some, no, every, each, any). As evidence that they profile the thing grounded (not the grounding relationship), observe that some of these can stand alone as full nominal expressions: That is disgusting; I like this; Most were defective; etc. More typically, however, they are used in combination with a lexical noun: a tree; this paragraph; most elephants; every politician. This canonical pattern reflects a natural division of labor in the overall task of directing attention to the intended nominal referent. By itself, a lexical noun merely specifies a type of thing; as such, it represents an established category useful enough in dealing with the world to have conventional means of expression. Due to grounding, on the other hand, a full nominal singles out and profiles an instance of that type. Out of all conceivable instances, it identifies just one as the nominal referent for immediate discourse purposes. Canonically, then, a lexical noun specifies a type without identifying any particular referent, whereas a grounding element does just the opposite. The type speOS

a.

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Figure 3. Grounding

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 175

cifications of grounding elements are highly schematic, being limited to properties like bounding, plurality, animacy, and gender. Their primary import resides instead in the presumption that their appropriate discourse use results in the conceptual coordination shown in Figure 3(b): out of all conceivable candidates, the interlocutors momentarily direct attention to the same nominal referent. Grounding elements differ as to how this result is achieved. A fundamental distinction in this regard is the contrast traditionally known as definite vs. indefinite. Definiteness pertains to the status of the nominal referent at a particular level of discourse processing: the status it has based solely on the content of the grounded nominal, prior to its integration with the content of the clause containing it (cf. Verhagen 1986). In and of itself, an indefinite nominal constitutes an instruction for the hearer to imagine (or “conjure up”) an instance of the specified type. From the hearer’s standpoint, the referent thereby established is virtual (or fictive) in nature, pending the further information supplied by the clausal content. The clause and the larger discourse context then determine whether the referent remains virtual or is identified as an actual entity. For example, She has a dog establishes the dog in question as an actual instance of that type. On the other hand, She doesn’t have a dog fails to override its virtuality—the dog referred to is a fictive one, conjured up just to characterize a non-actual situation. But in either case the clause introduces and identifies a discourse referent: it can subsequently be described as the dog she has or the dog she doesn’t have. Here we are more concerned with definites. The basic import of definiteness is that, in the current discourse state, the content of the grounded nominal is itself sufficient to identify the intended referent. Instead of conjuring up an instance, its status to be determined by the clause containing the nominal, the hearer need only direct attention to an instance already available and identifiable independently of the clausal content. Definite grounding elements represent alternate ways of singling out the intended referent from among the candidate instances available in the current scope of discourse. Possessive grounding (e.g. Linda’s computer) evokes the possessor as a reference point and thereby directs attention to the instance found in its dominion (Langacker 2004b). Very roughly speaking, demonstratives “point to” an instance, whether through a physical pointing gesture (I want that [→] one) or simply via the proximal/distal distinction (this–these vs. that–those). A definite article represents the limiting case, where pointing is superfluous: there being just one salient instance in the relevant scope of discourse, directing attention to it does not involve distinguishing it from other available candidates. Though greatly oversimplified, the foregoing description of nominal organization provides a baseline for discussing less canonical structures. The pattern I take as canonical is for grounding to be effected by a separate overt element, which cooccurs with a description (comprising a lexical noun and various modifiers) serv-

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ing to delimit the range of candidates for reference. Two noteworthy departures from this pattern are proper names and personal pronouns. They represent alternate strategies for singling out a nominal referent directly, i.e. without invoking a separate description that substantially narrows the range of candidates from which a particular instance must then be chosen. In effect, the functions of grounding and description are conflated in a single form. As the crucial aspect of its meaning, a proper name (e.g. Klaus-Uwe Panther) incorporates an idealized cognitive model pertaining to the role of that name in the relevant speech community. The model portrays it as one member of a set of names, each associated with a distinct individual, such that using a particular name is sufficient—for members of the community—to single out the unique intended referent. The very fact of having that name, in accordance with the model, is thus a primary facet of the referent’s lexical description, which may of course include other specifications (e.g. human, male, German, prominent cognitive linguist, und so weiter). Effectively, this property defines a type conceived as having just a single instance, with the consequence that evoking the type itself amounts to grounding. Personal pronouns represent the opposite extreme, in the sense that a given pronoun is usable for an open-ended set of possible referents. Their schematic type specifications—limited to the kinds of properties characteristic of grounding elements (e.g. singular animate female for she)—do less than most lexical nouns by way of shrinking the pool of candidates for reference. The main factor in singling out a referent is of course their person specifications: roughly, first person for (a group that includes) the speaker; second person for (a group that includes) the hearer; and third person for non-interlocutors. Reference is therefore tied to a particular speech event. And since everyone in a speech community has occasion to function as a speaker, as an addressee, or as a non-interlocutor, a given pronoun is applicable to indefinitely many different referents. Still, on any single occasion a pronoun is intended as having one particular referent (possibly plural). Important in this respect is the oft-noted distinction between first and second person pronouns on the one hand, and third person forms on the other. Canonically there is just a single speaker and a single addressee, so the referents of I and singular you are uniquely determined in the context of a given speech event. Even with the plurals we and you the intended referent is normally quite apparent. But in contrast to the interlocutors, the set of non-interlocutors we might have occasion to talk about is very large, even allowing for contextual delimitation. The potential universe of discourse at any one moment harbors any number of entities that could in principle be referred to by a pronoun like he, she, it, or they. Third person pronouns have certain similarities (and are often related historically) to demonstratives and definite articles. They are of course definite. Moreover, person distinctions are analogous to—and often correlated with—the distance

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 177

parameter for demonstratives. With a two-way contrast, the proximal and distal regions are generally those associated with the speaker vs. everybody else, or alternatively, with the speaker and hearer vs. everybody else. In systems with a threeway contrast, there is a tendency for proximal, medial, and distal to correlate with speaker, hearer, and other. A further affinity is that demonstratives commonly develop anaphoric uses. In such uses they “point” only in the sense of referring back to something mentioned previously in the discourse. As noted, the definite article can be viewed as a “bleached out” demonstrative employed when pointing is superfluous. There being just one salient instance of the specified type in the relevant scope of discourse, unique reference need not be established by pointing or an indication of distance, but is merely registered. In this respect demonstratives are analogous to first and second person pronouns, and the definite article to third person pronouns. That is, just as demonstratives rely on a distance specification to single out their referent, pronouns like I and you effect this through their person specification. By contrast, a third person pronoun resembles the definite article in that it merely registers uniqueness of reference. Whereas I and you uniquely identify the interlocutors as their referents, a specification of third person does nothing more than exclude the interlocutors as candidates. By itself, then, a pronoun like he, she, it, or they fails to indicate which potential referent is intended. It implies unique identification but does not itself provide the means to achieve it. A basic difference is that definite articles occur with lexical nouns as well as more elaborate descriptions, while third person pronouns stand alone. In some cases the description accompanying a definite article ensures uniqueness (e.g. the current ICLA president). More commonly, it sufficiently narrows the range of candidates that only one is likely to be present in the relevant scope of discourse (The cat wants out). And of course, a nominal grounded by the definite article can also be used anaphorically, referring back to something previously mentioned. With third person pronouns, on the other hand, the absence of descriptions has the consequence that the set of candidates for reference is always open-ended. Only one person can be the current ICLA president, but innumerable entities can be referred to as he, she, it, or they. Nonetheless, these pronouns carry the presumption that their minimal descriptive content is sufficient to single out the intended referent. They rely on the context for this purpose. As an inherent aspect of its meaning, a third person pronoun presupposes that its referent can be identified with a particular entity sufficiently salient in the linguistic or extralinguistic context to offer itself as the only obvious candidate with the appropriate specifications. And because the specifications of it, for example, are more schematic than those of the cat, a higher degree of contextual salience is required than with the definite article. Pronouns therefore rank higher on a scale of “accessibility” (Ariel 1988) or “givenness” (Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski 1993).

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A personal pronoun thus instantiates the general structure sketched in Figure 4 (Langacker 1996). It profiles a thing (bold circle) characterized only schematically by specifications for gender, number, etc. It further incorporates a reference point relationship in which its profile functions as target (T). The reference point (R) is a salient entity within the current discourse space (CDS), defined as everything presumed available to both interlocutors as the basis for communication at a given moment in the flow of discourse. A dotted correspondence line indicates that R and T are the same. The import of this arrangement is that the pronoun is presumed to be interpretable in R’s dominion (D), specifically in the sense of R being taken as its referent. R is a salient entity in either the linguistic or the extralinguistic context. In the latter case, where the interlocutors are obvious candidates, they (or groups containing them) are invoked as R by the first and second person pronouns. With third person pronouns, R can be identified with an unmentioned entity clearly established as a shared focus of attention in the interactive context (Hankamer and Sag 1976). When used anaphorically, R is the referent of an antecedent nominal. The problem then arises of finding the proper antecedent among the numerous nominals that occur in the ongoing discourse. A key factor in resolving the issue are conventional grammatical patterns (in the form of constructional schemas) specifying allowable positions of a pronoun and its antecedent relative to one another. The constraints embodied in these patterns have been worked out in great detail by van Hoek (1995, 1997) in the context of Cognitive Grammar. For purposes of pronominal anaphora, the reference point’s dominion—D in Figure 4—comprises the stretch of discourse within which a compatible pronoun is interpretable as being coreferential with the antecedent nominal. As discourse unfolds, nominals offer themselves as possible reference points. Their likelihood of being invoked as such correlates with their prominence, largely determined by matters like profiling, trajector/landmark alignment, and viewpoint. The extent of a reference point’s dominion—whether a pronoun will or will not invoke a potential antecedent for its

CDS T R

gender, number, etc.

D C Figure 4. Semantic structure of a pronoun

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 179

interpretation—depends on the closeness of their conceptual connection, as determined by grammatical and discourse factors. For example, an especially close connection is established when R and T both function as complements to the same relational element. Van Hoek shows in exquisite detail how these various considerations interact to accommodate the complex distributional patterns. In certain uses, a pronoun’s referent cannot be identified with that of an antecedent nominal, nor with a uniquely salient entity in the extralinguistic context. These are the uses which are said to be impersonal, as the forms do not refer to any specific individual or sets of individuals. While the term seems quite appropriate, it raises a serious question: How can a personal pronoun function as an impersonal pronoun? Or more fundamentally, what sorts of meanings do impersonal pronouns have? At least in the case of it (as exemplified by the following word), it is often claimed that they have no meaning at all, being inserted for purely grammatical purposes. They do of course serve grammatical functions. This does not however entail their meaninglessness—quite the contrary, for in the Cognitive Grammar perspective, grammar itself is meaningful. Indeed, I suggest that the impersonal pronouns of English display essentially the same meanings they have in personal uses (Langacker To appear). A key notion is delimitation, a matter of how a linguistic expression projects to the world. Let us first consider place, which—as a count noun—profiles a bounded region in space. It has this meaning irrespective of how large or small this region might be. With respect to the world overall, it can be a highly delimited area (This would be a good place for the painting), intermediate in size (Hamburg is a nice place to live), or wholly undelimited (The universe is a very big place). Observe that deictic anchoring does not prevent a form from exhibiting the full range of options in this regard. Thus here has the same basic meaning, designating a region centered on the speaker, in all of the following: I’m right here; Immigrants come here for a better life; Everything in the universe has a reason for being here. By the same token, plural pronouns have the same basic meaning whatever their degree of delimitation with respect to the set of all people. We designates a group that includes the speaker whether it consists of just two individuals, all the inhabitants of a state, or all of mankind: We just had a one-on-one chat; We have a lot of earthquakes in California; We are not alone [i.e. there is other intelligent life in the universe]. Likewise, you designates a group of any size that includes the hearer but not the speaker, and they a group that excludes them both. With a low degree of delimitation, the plural pronouns are effectively impersonal, referring to people as an undifferentiated mass instead of as identified individuals. In {We/You/They} have a lot of earthquakes in California, the pronoun designates all the people in California, but no one in particular—the import is that anyone living there is subject to earthquakes. The choice among we, you, and they serves mainly to indicate whether the

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speaker or the hearer is included in the designated populace. Representing the extreme case of non-delimitation are full impersonal uses like the following, supposedly describing the collective knowledge or wisdom of all mankind: We know the earth is gradually warming; They say you can’t be too thin or too rich. Turning now to impersonal it, we cannot much improve on Bolinger’s classic characterization: “a ‘definite’ nominal with almost the greatest possible generality of meaning, limited only in the sense that it is ‘neuter’ ... it embraces weather, time, circumstance, whatever is obvious by the nature of reality or the implications of context” (1977: 84–5). Also relevant is the observation by Gensler (1977) that it is often quite vague in reference, even when it clearly refers to something. Suppose, for example, that a teenage girl is denied permission to go to the movies with her boyfriend. She might very well complain It’s just not fair. What, precisely, does it refer to in this context? The parents’ decision? The fact that they made this decision? The fact that she has to stay home on Saturday night? The powerlessness of her situation? The general misery of being a teenager? It could be some, any, or all of the above. The point, though, is that even the speaker may not know. It refers to some aspect of the overall situation, or even the situation overall, but just what it designates may simply be indeterminate. Such vagueness is very common and clearly useful. In its various impersonal uses, it has its normal value as a third person singular neuter personal pronoun. It (i.e. it) is impersonal simply by being construed with maximal vagueness and non-delimitation (Langacker To appear). We can reasonably think of it as designating the relevant scope of awareness for whatever is at issue. With meteorological predicates (e.g. It’s raining or It’s hot), it tends to be interpreted as the surrounding atmospheric environment. With predicates of propositional attitude (e.g. It’s obvious the president is conscientious), the relevant scope is construed more abstractly, subsuming everything brought to bear as the basis for judgment (observed actions, background knowledge, inference, and so on). But regardless of the nature of the predicate, the referent of it cannot be specified with any precision, precisely because it represents the extreme case of vagueness and non-delimitation. Rather than being a discrete element within the scope of awareness, it encompasses the entire scope apprehended as an undifferentiated whole. Because they designate individual people, the singular pronouns I, you, he, and she do not lend themselves to either sort of impersonal construal. (The impersonal use of singular you, as in You should never underestimate yourself, involves additional factors not considered here.) One issue that deserves more comment is the special status of I and you. As the interlocutors in the standard speech scenario, the speaker and hearer are the primary conceptualizers for the meanings of linguistic expressions. And in their conceptualizing capacity, they are offstage and subjectively construed—the subjects (rather than the objects) of conception. In canonic-

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns

al circumstances, they have this implicit role as part of the overall meaning of every expression. To the extent that this is their only role, they occupy the very margins of awareness, for as such the subject of conception is not itself conceived. Typically, though, the speaker and hearer figure more extensively in an expression’s overall meaning. Since people like to talk about themselves and each other, the interlocutors are often part of an expression’s objective content, notably as the profiled referents of I and you. But even when implicit, they generally have more than just a conceptualizing role. Grounding elements evoke them to specify the status of the profiled entity onstage (Figure 3). More broadly, their relationship and interaction are essential to the conceptual substrate that shapes and supports an expression’s meaning (Langacker 2003). One aspect of this substrate, for example, comprises the actions and understandings that constitute an expression’s speech act value. Consider imperatives, as in Figure 5. In addition to their basic conceptualizing role (not indicated) and their apprehension of one another (dashed arrows), the interlocutors participate in an act of ordering, whereby the speaker, through verbal means, exerts social force (double arrow) intended to cause the hearer to do something (single arrow). The speech act may of course be put onstage as the profiled event, resulting in a performative. More commonly it is left implicit as part of the supporting conceptual substrate. Being offstage and subjectively construed, it is then an aspect of clausal grounding (mutually exclusive with other grounding elements). Here there are two options for the addressee, who has a dual role: its usual subjective role as interlocutor and subject of conception; and its objective role as trajector of the profiled process. The presence or absence of you is a matter of which role is linguistically encoded. When the hearer is put onstage, its presence heightens the distance between the interlocutors, so the order is perceived as being more formal or more forceful. Being left implicit reinforces the hearer’s interactive role as interlocutor and co-conceptualizer. But the difference is only one of emphasis—in either case the hearer functions in both capacities. Because the interlocutors are also the main conceptualizers, I and you do not construe their referents with maximal objectivity. They retain their conceptualiz-

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a. I order you to leave!

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ing role even when put in profile as the focused object of conception. I suggest that this ambivalence in regard to subject vs. object of conception is basic to the meanings of the first and second person pronouns. Their full semantic characterization involves several related dimensions (or cognitive domains). One is the speech event scenario, representing the canonical circumstances of a two-participant interaction. Another—which could hardly be more fundamental—is the subject–object asymmetry inherent in any “ceptual” experience (Talmy 1996), as sketched in Figure 1. Other dimensions, not explored here, are those pertaining to the sociocultural construction of the self in a given society. It is commonly observed—often as a criticism of Cognitive Linguistics—that an adequate description of language has to reflect its intersubjective nature. I would counter, however, that only a cognitive approach makes it possible to explicate this aspect of linguistic structure in any depth or detail. A central if not a defining feature of intersubjectivity is the apprehension of other minds and what they apprehend, so in describing it one is necessarily describing a cognitive phenomenon. In the case of I and you, the mutual apprehension of other minds is not just central but pivotal. One facet of the canonical speech event scenario is that the interlocutors alternate in the roles of speaker and hearer. The realization that this is so involves the conception of two speech events, in each of which S says something to H and H listens to S. This is shown at the top in Figure 6, where the grounds in successive speech events function as input spaces for a blend (Fauconier and Turner 2002). Correspondence lines indicate that the speaker in one event plays the role of hearer in the next, and conversely. Consequently, the blended space—representing the canonical speech event scenario—shows each interlocutor as having a dual role: the current speaker (S) is also a potential hearer (H′), while the current hearer (H) is also a potential speaker (S′).

Input spaces

S

H

H

G

Blend

S G

S/H′

S′/H G

Figure 6. Dual role as speaker and hearer

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 183

OS Input spaces

S

O

O

S/O′

Blend OS′

OS S

O/S′

OS

Figure 7. Dual role as subject and object of conception

The roles of subject and object of conception are likewise reversible. When one person (S) conceives of another (O), the former usually recognizes the possibility of being conceptualized by the latter as well. This too is describable in terms of blending, as shown in Figure 7, where the input spaces represent two instances of conceptualization. By virtue of apprehending other minds, a subject of conception is cognizant of being a potential object (O′), while the object is also a potential subject (S′). As a special case—the one most relevant for I and you—the two individuals have these inverse roles with respect to one another. This is indicated by the correspondence lines between the two input spaces. In the blend that results, each individual has a dual role, one actual (S or O) and the other potential (O′ or S′). An actual instance of one individual conceptualizing another carries with it the realization that the inverse relationship may also obtain. As noted, the first and second person pronouns incorporate both the speech event scenario and the general viewing scenario. They can be analyzed as products of higher-order blending, where the blends in Figures 6 and 7 function as input spaces. More specifically, they result from imposing the subject–object asymmetry inherent in profiling on the schematic conceptual content of the speech event scenario. The pronoun you is sketched in Figure 8. It is simply a matter of identifying the speaker with the subject of conception, and the hearer with the object of conception. The latter is therefore profiled in the higher-order blend, but is further apprehended as a potential speaker and subject of conception (i.e. as an interlocutor). Naturally, the pronoun I results from identifying the speaker with the object of conception, and the hearer with the subject. This produces the seemingly incon-

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OS′ Input spaces

S/H′

H/S′

S/O′

OS O/S′

G

Blend

S/H′

H/S′ G

OS′

OS

Figure 8. You

sistent situation in Figure 9, where the speaker—in spite of being the primary subject of conception—is put onstage as its focused object. Is this problematic? Can we coherently maintain that the speaker functions simultaneously as both the subject and the focused object of conception? The inconsistency should not bother us, if only because blends—by their very nature—incorporate incompatible specifications. Despite their inconsistent properties, for example, a theory is metaphorically conceptualized as a building. From another perspective, however, there is no inconsistency at all. In the blend of Figure 9, the speaker does still function as a subject of conception, as indicated by the dashed arrow leading from it to the hearer. This is quite consistent with the speaker also being an object of conception vis-à-vis the hearer, as indicated by the arrow going in the opposite direction. But we can push things even further by noting that the speaker also functions as object of conception in relation to itself. This is a consequence of the apprehension of other minds and the mental simulation of how they appear from their vantage points. In particular, the speaker apprehends the hearer and how things appear from the hearer’s vantage point, and from the hearer’s standpoint the speaker is indeed an onstage object of conception (Langacker 2001b). Through this simulation of the hearer’s experience, the speaker lies at the end of a path of mental access (Figure 2a) that originates with the speaker itself. The path is represented diagrammatically by the dashed arrows in the blend leading from S/H′ to H/S′ and back again. It is of course a truism that pronouns like I and you derive their specific reference from the context of the utterance. From this it is sometimes concluded that they lack conceptual meaning, being pragmatic rather than semantic. I have instead proposed that they do have abstracted conceptual meanings. Moreover, their

Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 185

OS′ Input spaces

S/H′

H/S′

S/O′

OS O/S′

G

Blend

S/H′

H/S′ G

OS

OS′

Figure 9. I

description requires the same theoretical apparatus employed in cognitive semantics for the meanings of other expressions: cognitive domains (e.g. the conception of a speaker-hearer interaction), profiling, vantage point, subjective vs. objective construal, and elaborate mental constructions based on blending. Although the descriptions proposed are neither complete nor definitive, they do at least make it clear that the pronoun I does not simply designate the speaker. This attempt to explicate its import from a cognitive linguistic perspective has led to a surprising but welcome conclusion: instead of egocentricity, the crucial factor in its meaning is intersubjectivity.

References Ariel, Mira. 1988. Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24: 65–87. Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and Form. London: Longman. Cutrer, Michelle L. 1994. Time and Tense in Narrative and in Everyday Language. PhD dissertation, UCSD. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge MA: MIT Press/Bradford. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York NY: Basic Books. Gensler, Orin D. 1977. Non-syntactic antecedents and frame semantics. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 3: 321–34. Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy and Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69: 274–307. Hankamer, Jorge and Sag, Ivan A. 1976. Deep and surface anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7: 391– 428.

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Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1985. Observations and speculations on subjectivity. In Iconicity in Syntax [Typological Studies in Language 6], John Haiman (ed.), 109–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. 1986. Abstract motion. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 12: 455–71. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol.1, Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1990. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar [Cognitive Linguistics Research 1]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2, Descriptive Application. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1993. Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38. Langacker, Ronald W. 1996. Conceptual grouping and pronominal anaphora. In Studies in Anaphora [Typological Studies in Language 33], Barbara A. Fox (ed.), 333–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. 1997a. Consciousness, construal, and subjectivity. In Language Structure, Discourse and the Access to Consciousness [Advances in Consciousness Research 12], Maxim I. Stamenov (ed.), 49–75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. 1997b. A dynamic account of grammatical function. In Essays on Language Function and Language Type. Dedicated to T. Givón, Joan Bybee, John Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 249–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999a. Grammar and Conceptualization [Cognitive Linguistics Research 14]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999b. Virtual reality. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29(2): 77–103. Langacker, Ronald W. 2001a. Dynamicity in grammar. Axiomathes 12: 7–33. Langacker, Ronald W. 2001b. Viewing and experiential reporting in cognitive grammar. In Linguagem e Cognição: A Perspectiva da Linguística Cognitiva, Augusto Soares da Silva (ed.), 19–49. Braga: Associação Portuguesa de Linguística and Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Faculdade de Filosofia de Braga. Langacker, Ronald W. 2002. Deixis and subjectivity. In Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference [Cognitive Linguistics Research 21], Frank Brisard (ed.), 1–28. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2003. Context, cognition, and semantics: A unified dynamic approach. In Job 28: Cognition in Context [Biblical Interpretation Series 64], Ellen van Wolde (ed.), 179–230. Leiden: Brill. Langacker, Ronald W. 2004a. Remarks on nominal grounding. Functions of Language 11: 77– 113. Langacker, Ronald W. 2004b. Possession, location, and existence. In Linguagem, Cultura e Cognição: Estudios de Linguística Cognitiva, Augusto Soares da Silva, Amadeu Torres and Miguel Gonçalves (eds), Vol. 1, 85–120. Coimbra: Almedina. Langacker, Ronald W. 2005. Dynamicity, fictivity, and scanning: The imaginative basis of logic and linguistic meaning. In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and Thinking, Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (eds), 164–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Langacker, Ronald W. To appear. On the subject of impersonals. Sweetser, Eve and Fauconnier, Gilles. 1996. Cognitive links and domains: Basic aspects of mental space theory. In Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (eds), 1–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talmy, Leonard. 1996. Fictive motion in language and ‘ception’. In Language and Space, Paul Bloom et al. (eds), 211–76. Cambridge MA: MIT Press/Bradford. Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael, Kruger, Ann Cale and Ratner, Hilary H. 1993. Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495–552. van Hoek, Karen. 1995. Conceptual reference points: A cognitive grammar account of pronominal anaphora constraints. Language 71: 310–40. van Hoek, Karen. 1997. Anaphora and Conceptual Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Verhagen, Arie. 1986. Linguistic Theory and the Function of Word Order in Dutch: A Study on Interpretive Aspects of the Order of Adverbials and Noun Phrases. Dordrecht: Foris.

chapter 9

The construction of meaning in relative clauses Indeterminacy and constraints* Kiki Nikiforidou University of Athens

Greek relative clauses introduced by pu have been described as structurally determined constructions in which interpretation is precisely guided by the syntax of the clause. In contrast to this oversimplified view, I show that pu relatives regularly underspecify the intended interpretation, incorporating instead a great deal of indeterminacy (in the sense of Langacker) in the way(s) the meaning of the head is integrated with the content of the relative clause. The factors which influence the construction of meaning include the lexical (in frame semantic terms) and constructional properties of the head and the relative clause predicate, but extend further to completely pragmatic and context-specific motivations; in the latter case, the head and the overt constituents in the relative clause function simply as clues for the final interpretation. The inherent indeterminacy of the relative construction can be captured in terms of conceptual integration theory, where the blended space may be shown to contain more structure than that in the input spaces and/or the alternate construals of a sentence may yield more than one blend. Finally I suggest that, while indeterminate, the interpretation of pu relatives is sensitive to constraints deriving from the prototypical meaning of restrictive relatives and from conceptual structure as such. Keywords: blending (conceptual integration), Cognitive Grammar, construal, frames, gapless relatives, Greek relative clauses, indeterminacy, metonymy, optimality constraints (on blending)

1. Introduction A recurrent theme in much of the recent literature has been the construction of meaning out of linguistic clues rather than from fully specified, discrete, and welldefined elements combining with one another in precisely determined ways. Indeed, many grammatical constructions have been analyzed as simply providing prompts for particular types of conceptual integration relying to a significant extent on general and/or context-specific knowledge for their actual interpretation. The implications of such an approach, which acknowledges the inherent indeterminacy in gram * I would like to thank Eleni Antonopoulou, Thomas Berg, Sophia Marmaridou, and Günter Radden for their comments. Errors and omissions are entirely my own.

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matical relations and meaning construction, have been explored in parallel in at least three lines of research in cognitive linguistics. First, in Cognitive Grammar and primarily in Langacker’s work (see selectively Langacker 1987, 1991, 1997, 1998, to appear), the analysis of active-zone or more generally reference-point constructions, anaphora, and many other phenomena incorporates the inherent indeterminacy in the meaning of the component parts as well as in the way(s) these may combine. Secondly, in the context of blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 1996, 1998, 2002; Fauconnier and Sweetser 1996; Sweetser 1999, 2005, and others), even syntactically straightforward and fully productive constructions, such as the ‘subject-predicative nominal’ or the ‘adjective-nominal’ patterns, have been shown to require fairly creative blending, even if the skeletal mapping schemes (dictated by the particular constructions) are repeated and predictable. The resulting blends are shown to contain a great deal of emergent structure not present in the input spaces, confirming again the construction of meaning out of inherently underspecified linguistic elements. Finally, the indeterminacy of meaning and its grammatical ramifications have been systematically explored in the literature on metaphor and, even more prominently, metonymy (Croft 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Kövecses and Radden 1998; Panther and Radden 1999; Panther and Thornburg 2004). In such models of analysis, the various metaphorical and metonymic relations analyzed at both the lexical and the grammatical level are taken consistently as having much more conceptual import than that explicitly denoted by the ‘source’ or ‘vehicle’ expression. In a cognitive linguistic perspective, the indeterminacy inherent in semantic and grammatical relations is hardly refutable. In Langacker’s (1998, to appear) approach, indeterminacy refers to the lack of precise determinate specification of the elements connected to one another in a particular construction as well as to the lack of precise connections between them. Grammar is in this sense metonymic since the information provided explicitly and conventionally by the relevant linguistic elements underspecifies the precise connections on the basis of which the speaker and hearer construct the intended meaning. As a result, a particular construction may in principle support multiple interpretations, depending on how language users interpret the missing elements. As Langacker notes, indeterminacy in semantics follows directly from the conceptual nature of linguistic meaning adopted in Cognitive Linguistics, and the concomitant ability to construe a situation in alternate ways. This is precisely the common thread underlying the work on metaphor, metonymy, blending, etc. mentioned earlier. At the same time, the prag. As far as I know, the term “indeterminacy” was first used by Langacker (1998), although in an obvious sense it applies to all of the phenomena mentioned in the preceding paragraph. . In arguing that the distinction between polysemy and vagueness is not clear-cut, Geeraerts (1993: 263) arrives at a similar conclusion: “Lexical meanings are not to be thought of as prepackaged chunks of information, but as moving searchlights that may variously highlight sub-

The construction of meaning in relatives 191

matic or encyclopedic nature of meaning, established early in the context of frame semantics (Fillmore 1985, and elsewhere), also precludes the possibility of clearly delimited meanings. Indeterminacy in grammar follows from the indeterminacy in semantics, since the former incorporates the latter in the semantic pole of any construction and “semantic composition is an aspect of grammatical composition” (Langacker to appear). Naturally, research adhering to the consequences of indeterminacy has begun exploring the ways in which it is constrained. Optimality principles on blending, for instance, can be thought of as constraining indeterminacy by priming certain interpretations as opposed to others and making predictions about uninterpretable blends. This is one route that has been explored to some extent and needs to be explored even further, since such constraints are relevant to conceptual integration in all languages and all constructions (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 1999; Fauconnier and Turner 2002, ch. 16). Such constraints can be characterized as “conceptual” because they pertain to the complexity of the factors involved in conceptual integration and apply across different constructions. At the same time, language-specific constraints imposed by particular constructions need also to be looked at in detail. “Constructional” constraints derive from the conventional meaning(s) of the constructions at hand and/or the range of possible interpretations. While such constraints may also have a conceptual motivation (stemming from prototype and/or radial category structure, or an abstract meaning overarching possible uses), they will tend to be language specific and useful for determining constructional boundaries and diachronic trends. In Langacker’s (to appear) terms, if a construction is indeterminate in some respect, we still have to describe the construction, and we still want our characterization to be explicit and precise, even in regard to the nature and extent of the indeterminacy. In this chapter, I focus on relative-clause modification in Greek, showing that relative constructions may incorporate a great deal of indeterminacy in the semantic contribution of their component parts and in the way their parts combine to yield the interpretation of particular utterances. The analysis presented here argues against any view holding that Greek relatives are structurally and interpretationally fixed constructions in which semantic composition is guided precisely by the syntax of the clause. The indeterminacy inherent in relatives can be adequately captured in blending terms, since (a) the blended space (representing the intended interpretation) may contain more structure than the sum of the input spaces, and/or (b) the different interpretations can be shown to result in different blends. At the same time I attempt to show that, while inherent, this indeterminacy is sensitive to both types of constraints mentioned before, namely conceptual and constructional. domains of the range of application of the lexical item in question.”

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2. The construction of meaning in relative clauses Greek relatives may regularly underspecify the relationship of the head to the relative clause predicate. Examples (2) to (5) illustrate instances of underspecification as well as some of the factors that guide the assignment of a semantic role to the head (see also Nikiforidou 2005).

δen ftiaxnete efkola (1) to paraθiro pu espases the window that break-p-2sg Neg be.fixed-pr-3sg easily ‘The window that you broke cannot be easily fixed.’

i jineka pu ejine o kavγas (2) eγo ime I be-pr-1sg the woman that occur-p-3sg the fight ‘I am the woman that the fight took place (for).’

(3) i fili mu pu taksiδevame siniθos itan arosti the friend my that travel-p-1pl usually be-p-3sg sick ‘My friend that we usually traveled (with) was sick.’

(4) meta θa ftjaksis ena stilaki anatolitiko pu vjenan ke then fut make-np-2sg one style oriental that go.out-p-3pl and kitaγane balkonaki δilaδi klismeno omos look-p-3pl balcony that.is closed however ‘And then you will make an oriental style that they would go out and look, a balcony that is, but closed.’ (i.e. ‘And then you will create (something) in oriental style (like the sort of thing) people would go out on and look, a balcony that is, but closed.’)

stin kuzina kati fajita pu trelenese (5) etimazi prepare-pr-3sg in-the kitchen some dishes that be.crazy-pr-2sg ‘She’s preparing in the kitchen some dishes that you are crazy (for).’

In examples like (1) the head corresponds to the object slot of the relative clause predicate, and in this sense its semantic role is determined by the structural requirements of the sentence. This is the type of example discussed regularly in all formal treatments of Greek relatives (selectively Alexiadou 1998; Varlokosta and Armon-Lotem 1998, Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki 1997), falsely implying that in relatives introduced by pu the missing argument is always a subcategorized constituent of the predicate in the relative, or at least a constituent syntactically and semantically determined by it. In an example like (2), however, the relativizer pu marks what would be expressed as a prepositional complement of the relative clause predicate, whose exact interpretation requires some degree of semantic-pragmatic (re)construction. ‘For,’ ‘over,’ ‘with’ and ‘against’ are some of the semantic rela-

The construction of meaning in relatives 193

tionships reconstructible for the head noun in (2) (fight for someone, over someone, with someone, against someone). Even though the difference between ‘for’ and ‘over’ may not be captured as a difference in the thematic role assigned to the head (since both are likely to assign “reason”), it is still a difference in construal in a cognitive linguistic perspective where every difference in form entails a difference in meaning. Regarding present concerns on the inherent indeterminacy of the relative construction, we may therefore conclude that examples like (2) are already indeterminate, even if the understood constituent can be still characterized as a complement of the relative clause predicate. Importantly, such examples are not ambiguous in context; (2) was intended with a ‘for’ or ‘over’ interpretation, not with a ‘with’ or ‘against’ one, even if the indeterminacy between ‘for’ and ‘over’ may remain unresolved for the hearer. The interpretation of such examples, which are typical of informal speech, depends on the possibility of assigning a semantic role to the head noun, or, more generally, constructing some sort of relationship between the head and the relative clause predicate. This assignment may in turn be guided by factors such as the lexical frame of the verb or some other word in the relative clause (as was the case in (2)), which provides for certain roles. The primacy of certain roles with respect to a particular frame is naturally of importance in the interpretability of such examples — (2) for instance is very unlikely to have been intended with the interpretation ‘I’m the woman against the wishes of whom the fight occurred’ (see also the discussion of (10) and (11) in the next section). In addition, there are certain constructional environments which may independently create a semantic role for the relativized complement. This is the case in (3), where the presence of the first person plural marking on the relative clause verb implicitly creates the semantic role of accompaniment for the head noun. Even though the intended interpretation in (3) . I leave aside the “beneficiary” reading which is also possible for this example (‘fight for the sake of someone’), and adds to indeterminacy. . This particular example was uttered in a TV news report on a bar fight with a lethal outcome between two male adults over a woman. When interviewed, she uttered (2) which, given the gravity of the circumstances and the intensity of the interview, would lead me (as a hearer) towards a ‘for’ rather than ‘over’ interpretation (the former implying more directness and involvement than the latter). . In informal contexts (oral and written), examples where pu stands for underspecified prepositional complements tend to replace the alternative with a case-marked relative pronoun (e.g. eγo ime i jineka ja tin opia ejine o kavγas ‘I am the woman for whom-FEM–ACC-SG the fight took place’ — see also Nicholas 1999). Theophanopoulou (1985) was among the first to notice such cases, although she attempted to treat them exclusively in terms of subcategorization requirements. In Nikiforidou (2005) I argue against this proposal which, in any event, cannot account for cases of more distant relations between the head and the relative (cf. examples (4), (5) and (10)).

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Input 1

Input 2

Input 1

Input 2

There is a woman (= speaker)

time place Fight occurred

There is a woman (= speaker)

Fight occurred

cause opponent

Fight occurred for the woman

time place cause opponent

Fight occurred with the woman Blend 2 (fight with)

Blend 1 (fight for)

Figure 1.

is supported by the semantics of the plural construction and strongly primed by the continuation of the clause (i.e. in order for the ‘she was sick’ part to be relevant, an accompaniment interpretation is required), the example can be still said to be indeterminate in the sense that the relative underspecifies the resulting interpretation. In blending terms, the relative construction can be seen as issuing an instruction to conceptually integrate the meaning of the head with that of the relative. The indeterminacy inherent in examples like (2) and (3) can be therefore captured in an integration scheme where the blended space contains invariably more information than that provided by the input spaces, and/or may in principle result in at least two different blends, as is the case for (2) (see Figure 1). The conceptual integration scheme underlying the interpretation of example (3) is already fairly complex. The space set up by the head noun simply contains an individual (X) who is in a friendly relationship with another individual (Y), the speaker. The second input space set up by the first person plural verb taksiδevame ‘we traveled’ gives only the information that certain people, one of whom is the speaker, traveled (Figure 2). The interpretation that the two individuals X and Y in the first input were actually traveling together is meaning created in the blend by mapping X, X’ and Y onto the travelers and by compressing the two journeys into one (under . In Langacker’s (1993) approach, relatives are reference-point constructions. Reference-point phenomena involve our image-schematic ability to invoke the conception of one entity as a cognitive reference point for purposes of establishing mental contact with another (Langacker 1993: 1). This essentially asymmetric relationship has been claimed to underlie the semantics of such diverse phenomena as topic constructions, pronoun-antecedent relationships, metonymy, and profile-active zone discrepancies. As topic constructions, relative clauses involve our reference-point ability, with the head noun serving as reference point. In this perspective, conceptually integrating the meaning of the head with that of the relative can be thought of as finding an interpretation in which the relative can be seen as fitting in the dominion of the head.

The construction of meaning in relatives 195

Input 1

Input 2

X friend of speaker (Y)

journey 1 (X′) journey 2 (speaker)

(Y+X)

Blend

Figure 2.

the influence, as noted, of the plural construction). Already in this apparently simple case the conceptual integration network can be argued to be a “double-scope” one (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 131); both inputs contribute to the blend, which however has emergent structure of its own (albeit very little in this example).

3. Pragmatically and contextually driven interpretations Greek also allows for constructions in which the head does not correspond to any (syntactic) complement of the relative clause predicate. Such cases have been completely ignored in the literature, on the assumption that Greek relative clauses, just like English ones, require a clearly defined “gap,” interpreted as coreferential with the head noun. So the existence of examples like (4) and (5), instances of casual . Besides the input spaces and the blend, blending schemas normally contain a generic space as well, which contains what the inputs have in common. In all the diagrams here, the generic space has been omitted either because its content is trivially obvious (e.g. ‘people travel’ in example (3) — cf. Figure 2) or too general (e.g. ‘houses can have an architectural style’ in (4) — cf. Figure 3). What makes, in fact, such examples interesting is the “amount” of structure that has to be created in the blend, exactly because the common structure in the generic space tends to be very little or trivial. . Apparently English, at least in some dialects, also allows for “gapless relatives.” Example (i) is cited as an utterance by a speaker of Scottish English (Comrie 2002) and (ii) as an attested example from a speaker of American English (Matsumoto 1997).

(i) I haven’t been to a party yet that I haven’t got home the same night. (ii) You come to a group that you have to eat certain foods.

Comrie (1998) concludes in fact that the cross-linguistic spread of such constructions forces us to reconsider the typology of relatives and recognize the contribution of pragmatic criteria to acceptability.

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conversation among educated adults, has in general gone unnoticed. While they are clearly excluded from the category of relative constructions on the basis of any syntactically-driven definition of relatives, in a very obvious sense they are relative clauses, i.e. clausal modifiers of a nominal constituent restricting the set of possible referents of the head noun (cf. Comrie 1981). They further conform to Lambrecht’s (1988) defining criteria for the relative clause construction to the effect that there is a topic-comment relationship between the antecedent NP and the relative clause and that the relativizer is necessarily co-construed with the preceding NP. In such cases, computing the intended interpretation starts, so to speak, one step below, since the syntax of the clause gives even fewer clues. We may therefore expect the indeterminacy inherent in the pu relative construction to increase. The increase is reflected either in the completely context-dependent, pragmatically motivated nature of the interpretation (as in (4)), or in the multiplicity of the available interpretations (even if, in context, a particular utterance is unambiguously intended as one of those — cf. the discussion of (5) further on). In blending terms, the former is realized as a blend characterized by structure which is not in any way predictable given the content of the input spaces. In this it is unlike examples (2) and (3) for which, although underspecified, the interpretation is lexically or constructionally anchored to the relative; the latter as several different blends all deriving from the same input spaces. Example (4) is an instance of a context-driven interpretation resulting in a blend with rich emergent structure, which relies on the speaker’s assumption that the listener shares his understanding of what the oriental style in buildings is (for example, closed balconies on which the residents could stand and watch the street below). It is not necessarily the case that these characteristics are the only or even the main aspects of what constitutes an oriental style or that they are part of the architecturally appropriate frame of “oriental style”. But they are the characteristics that must be taken as the relevant ones in order to construct the blend on the basis of the vital relation of “property”:10 an oriental style is one that has the “property” of closed balconies where people stand watching the street below (Figure 3). What is made evident by this example is the inadequacy of a lexically-based explanation for such . Examples (3), (4), (5) and (10) come from the HNC (Hellenic National Corpus) and the APN corpus of oral discourse which includes both child and adult speech. 10. Property is one of the vital relations connecting mental spaces; it is an inner-space vital relation (e.g. in the space of “the blue cup”, the cup is intrinsically blue) but across-spaces links (e.g. cause-effect) can also be compressed into property relations in the blend (e.g. a warm coat is not something that is warm itself — it causes you to be warm — but in the blend it has the property ‘warm’). Fauconnier and Turner (2002: chapter 6) discuss in detail some of the most important vital relations which include cause-effect, change, time, space, part-whole, representation, role, analogy and disanalogy, similarity, category, intentionality and uniqueness.

The construction of meaning in relatives 197 Input 1 Oriental style

Property

Input 2

– Closed balconies – People standing – People looking down

– Closed balconies Oriental → – People standing style – People looking down

Blend

Figure 3.

cases; no matter how stretched, the predicates vjenan ekso ‘went out’ and kitaγane ‘look’ cannot possibly provide a semantic role for the head noun as part of their conventional semantic frames. I now turn to example (5) whose indeterminacy can be shown to depend not only on the inherent polysemy of the constituents to the left and to the right of pu and the underspecified relation between them, but also on the inherent looseness of the pu relative construction per se. While in an example like (2) the possible interpretations (i.e., ‘over/for’ and ‘against/with’) are those that are already available to ‘fight’ and its associated frame (i.e. they are the primary roles in the frame — cf. Fillmore and Atkins 1992), in (5) the interpretations available to the particular utterance are more than those independently associated with the relative predicate and the head in constructional environments other than the pu one. To start with, the middle verb trelenome is associated with three syntactic frames and (at least) three interpretations listed in (6):

(6) trelenome (intransitive) = ‘to lose one’s mind, to go crazy’ trelenome me ‘with’ = a. ‘to really like something, to be crazy for/about something’ b. ‘to dislike, to be really upset with/over something’ trelenome ja ‘for/about’ = ‘to really like something, to be crazy about something’

As evidenced by the gloss, (5) was intended with the interpretation ‘foods/dishes that you really like, you are crazy for,’ pu standing for a me or ja complement. Any of the other interpretations is however also possible, including the literal one ‘to lose one’s mind.’ In the latter case, the head noun fajita is construed as some sort of cause for the intransitive event, in the same way that any one-participant event

198 Kiki Nikiforidou

can support a general cause role not specific to its frame (e.g. rixni mia vroxi pu jinese muskema ‘there is such a rain that you become drenched’). Similarly, the other metaphorical interpretation is also possible, i.e. ‘she’s preparing food that you dislike, that drives you crazy,’ in which case pu stands for a me complement. Adding to the indeterminacy caused by the availability of all three readings of trelenome, the head noun, building on any of the three interpretations, can metonymically stand for any aspect of food preparing, liking, or disliking, so that any of the interpretations below are (in context) equally possible readings for (5):11

(7) a. She’s preparing dishes that [the resulting chaos in the kitchen] can drive you crazy. b. She’s preparing dishes that [the imagination that goes in them] you’ll be crazy about. c. She’s preparing dishes that drive you crazy [with their smell]. d. She’s preparing dishes that [just looking at them] drives you crazy (because you like them/because you hate them). e. She’s preparing dishes that [thinking of the trouble she’s gone to] drives you crazy.

Interestingly, such metonymic extensions are not readily available to the relative construction with an explicit ja or me complement and a case-marked relative pronoun, e.g. (8) and (9):

stin kuzina kati fajita ja ta opia (8) etimazi prepare-pr-3sg in-the kitchen some dishes for the which-acc-pl trelenese be.crazy-pr-2sg ‘She’s preparing in the kitchen some dishes for which you are crazy.’

stin kuzina kati fajita me ta opia (9) etimazi prepare-pr-3sg in-the kitchen some dishes with the which-acc-pl trelenese be.crazy-pr-2sg ‘She’s preparing in the kitchen some dishes with which you get crazy.’

Here the prepositional constituent, by explicitly highlighting the relationship between the dishes and the liking or disliking, primes so strongly the convention11. The availability of any such metonymically triggered meaning and its concomitant cancelability in context ties in nicely with the property of contingence as described in Panther and Thornburg (2004). Metonymy is argued to be a contingent, i.e. a conceptually non-necessary, relation between two concepts, even if in a particular linguistic or communicative context the target meaning may not be cancelable.

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al interpretations of “object of liking/(direct) cause of desire” or “object of dislike/ (direct) cause of dislike” (cf. (6)) that activation of other parts of the frame is no longer equally available. Thus, if the speaker intended any of the interpretations in (7), s/he would have to be explicit (e.g. “She’s preparing some dishes the imagination of which drives you crazy”). The availability of such readings in the pu construction is, I suggest, precisely due to the underspecification of the relationship but also to the concomitant semantic loosening or distancing of the two parts of the construction, which results in pu functioning simply as a metalinguistic instruction to the hearer to the effect that there must be some relationship. This is fully evident in an example such as (5) where real-world and context-specific knowledge is compatible with, and may therefore support, all possible interpretations.

4. Conceptual and constructional constraints in the interpretation of relatives In light of constructing meaning in a highly underspecified context and, further, constraining the possible interpretations, consider example (10): ta ekanes ta lefta pu ekanes tosa xronja (10) ti what them do-p-2sg the money that do-p-2sg so-many years ιδjetera? private.lessons ‘What did you do with the money that you gave private lessons all these years?’ (i.e. ‘. . . that you got from giving private lessons’) In context, example (10) was used with a relative clause interpretation, the speaker trying to identify for the hearer (who had been complaining about her tight finances) the particular money she is talking about. Once again, arriving at such an interpretation requires the construction of a blend with a rich emergent structure. The relative clause predicate “give private lessons” is only by pragmatic association linked to the predicate “earn money,” which is the one providing an appropriate semantic slot for the head noun. Therefore, it is only as part of the dynamic interpretation in the blend that conceptual integration is successfully achieved (Figure 4). In such cases, coreference is therefore effected with a pragmatically evoked term no part of which is actually present in the relative clause. In an obvious way, this in itself is a source of indeterminacy since it precludes the possibility of predicting the whole range of interpretable relatives and setting a clear cut-off point between possible and impossible ones. Equally plausible, however, is that interpretability constraints are bound to affect the acceptability of particular utterances once the relationship between the head and an explicit or implied predicate in the relative starts

200 Kiki Nikiforidou Input 1

Input 2

You did something with money

You gave private lessons

Private lessons ⇒ earned money

Blend

Figure 4.

getting more distant. Compare for instance example (10) with its bad (or at least worse) version in (11): (11)

??

ti ta ekanes ta ruxa pu ekanes tosa xronja what them do-p-2sg the clothes that do-p-2sg so-many years ιδjetera? private.lessons ‘What did you do with the clothes that you gave private lessons all these years?’

The awkwardness of (11) makes evident the role of the relative entrenchment of inbetween frame links and the (correlate) degree of conventionalization. In (10), even if “earn money” is not part of the same frame as “giving private lessons,” it is certainly part of the more general frame of “earning one’s living with work” whose relationship with the “giving private lessons” frame is fairly entrenched.12 The activation of the relevant link is, therefore, relatively easy and the interpretation straightforward. In (11), however, the relationship is, so to speak, twice removed (you gave private lessons → you earned money → you bought clothes), making it harder to arrive at the intended interpretation. Expectedly, such constraints, which rely on the relative entrenchment of in-between frame links and the layering of frames, may in context be relaxed. In this sense, the well-formedness conditions on the pu construction are really conditions on interpretability, and cannot be captured as syntactic constraints. We may think of conditions that rely on the entrenchment and the conventionalization of frames and of the pragmatic links between them as conceptual, simply because they are motivated both by the (conventional) conceptual structure 12. It may be argued that earning money is (perhaps a backgrounded) part of the conventional frame of “giving private lessons” (and to some extent, this is a matter of analysis). Even so, it is still the case that the head noun “money” does not directly receive a semantic role (from among the usual range of semantic roles) in this frame, which again points to the necessarily emergent meaning in the blended space.

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and the contextual dynamic construal of frames as being (more or less) relevant to each other. Importantly, such conditions may ultimately be recast as constraints on blending. Some work has already been done in this direction and general conditions on conceptual integration have been stated in the form of governing principles (Fauconnier and Turner 1999, 2002). These are optimality rather than all-ornothing principles, which interact and compete with each other and “characterize strategies for optimizing emergent structure” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 311). It is well beyond our scope to discuss such principles exhaustively. Suffice it to point out that principles like those of “unpacking” and “good reason” pertain directly to the interpretability of (10) as opposed to the relative difficulty of (11). The principle of “unpacking” says that it is optimal for the blend alone to allow reconstruction of the inputs, the cross-space mapping, the generic space, and the network of connections between all these spaces. “Good reason” says that all things being equal, if an element appears in the blend, there will be pressure to find significance for this element. Significance includes relevant links to other spaces and relevant functions in running the blend (Fauconnier and Turner 1999). In an obvious sense, (10) allows for an easier reconstruction of the inputs, the cross-space mapping and the generic space (in this case, something like “earning money from a job”) than (11) (i.e., money is more directly linked to giving private lessons than clothes are). Similarly, it is easier to find significance for ‘money’ as an element of the blended space than for ‘clothes’ since the former is an explicit element in the first input. Needless to say, it is fully consistent with the nature of these principles that they do not make any strict predictions for acceptability. Example (10) can further illustrate another type of constraint on the indeterminacy of relatives, one we may describe as constructional. Although, as noted, (10) was uttered with a relative clause interpretation, it can have a non-relative reading as well, with pu functioning as a connective.13 This could occur, for instance, in a context, where the addressee has been complaining not about lack of money but about being overworked (the point in this case would be discussing the benefits of slaving away in order to save money). The interpretation in question can be rendered as in (12): 13. Pu is a highly polysemous morpheme in Greek. Besides working as a relativizer, it can also function as a connective with various meanings (e.g. causal, resultative, adversative) and, further, as a complementizer. These three functions of pu are standardly treated as homonyms (cf. Joseph and Philippaki 1987; Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki 1997) and examined separately as instances of completely unrelated constructions. An exception to this view is Christidis (1986), who argues that (at least) the relativizer and the complementizer are synchronically related in that they both introduce clauses with “definite” (and in this sense given) content. Traditional grammars, taking into account the common etymological source of all three pu’s (i.e. the spatial anaphoric adverb όπου), also tend to view them as related and discuss possible paths of development from one to the other (cf. Tzartzanos 1963).

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(12) What have you really gained from the money? After all, you’ve been giving private lessons for so many years (i.e., What is your benefit from working so hard for so many years?) It is clear that in this reading pu no longer corresponds to a nominal (even if pragmatically reconstructed) element in the clause it introduces and in this sense the pronominal function is weakened or lost. In the restrictive relative reading of (10), pu is linked to the head noun lefta ‘money’ which fills a particular semantic role with respect to the understood predicate “earn” (and in this respect (10) is an answer to the question “which money are you talking about?”). In the reading in (12), if pu is still tied to anything it is to the whole speech-act expressed in the first clause, and more precisely to its negative implications, i.e., it is not obvious that you have actually benefited. The blending instruction that pu issues in the connective reading is therefore different from the restrictive relative blend that I discussed earlier, since the relevant pragmatic association rising from the second clause (and hence the second input to the blend) is no longer that you earned money by giving private lessons but that you worked really hard giving private lessons, in the context of which the first clause is interpreted as a rhetorical question. Returning briefly to the indeterminacy inherent in (10), we may again observe that the possibility of construing differently the contents of the main and the relative clause, as well as the relationship between them, is sanctioned (as in all examples discussed previously) by the lack of any explicit connection or marking. The reading in (12) exploits for instance the polysemy of kano ‘do’ to mean ‘achieve’ and places emphasis on the tosa ‘so many’ modifier in the relative clause. However, example (10) is also different from all the previous ones in that the distance of the semantic-pragmatic relationship between head and relative (as discussed before) allows for a non-relative reading as well. In this respect, example (10) may be thought of as the limiting case of a relative clause, allowing us to identify a constructional constraint for relatives. Such a constraint may simply be that a nominal element in the main clause instantiates an argument role in an explicit or evoked predicate in the relative.14 Once this constraint is relaxed, other interpretations become possible. Put differently, if the conceptual integration involved no longer requires an identity 14. In discussing the interpretation of complex noun phrases in Japanese, Matsumoto (2000) proposes that their interpretation is constrained by the “Predicate Frame Constraint” to the effect that the head noun should instantiate a role in the frame evoked by the main predicate of the modifying clause. This kind of explanation obviously breaks down for Greek examples like (10) where the relevant predicate is not the main one in the relative (see also note 12). Matsumoto acknowledges the inadequacy of her constraint for some of her own examples, suggesting that pragmatically motivated blending may be the only possible account in some cases. What I suggest here is that if the constraint is modified to include pragmatically evoked predicates, it may still be useful for distinguishing relatives from other related constructions.

The construction of meaning in relatives 203

link between some element in the first input and another element in the blend, then we are outside the realm of relatives and in other constructions. This is clearly a constraint which, if violated, does not result in awkwardness or uninterpretability (as with the conceptual constraints discussed before) but in a non-relative interpretation, i.e. in a different construction.

5. Conclusion That the lexical components in a given construction can sustain multiple interpretations is hardly unexpected or surprising. Cognitive Linguistics has for a long time recognized the extensive nature of polysemy and vagueness in natural languages as well as the “normal” rather than exceptional character of such phenomena, and has provided principled descriptions and analyses mainly in the work on metaphor and metonymy. What is perhaps more surprising is that indeterminacy may also occur in the way such components combine in the context of specific constructional patterns. The attraction of Langacker’s approach, as sketched out in the introduction, is precisely that it allows us to simultaneously recognize the indeterminacy in both the parts and the links and identify the role of each in the overall interpretation(s). I have shown that Greek relatives introduced by pu, whose interpretation was hitherto assumed to be guided uniquely by the syntax of the clause, incorporate indeterminacy in the way the contents of the relative integrate with the meaning of the head, allowing multiple construals of the relationship. Such indeterminacy is reflected in the emergent structure of the resulting blend and/or the possibility of constructing more than one blend. I have also suggested that conceptual and constructional conditions may be operative in constraining the possible interpretations. While the former need to be worked out in a lot more detail, it is very likely that such conditions may be ultimately expressed as constraints on blending. An obvious result of this analysis is that well-formedness conditions on Greek pu relatives are really constraints on interpretability.

References Alexiadou, Artemis. 1998. On the structure of Greek relative clauses. In Μελέτες για την Ελληνική Γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language) 18: 15–29. Thessaloniki: Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. Christidis, Anastasios. 1986. Το μόρφημα που σαν αναφορικός δείκτης (The morpheme pu as an anaphoric marker). In Μελέτες για την Ελληνική Γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language) 7: 135–48. Thessaloniki: Kiriakides. Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Comrie, Bernard. 1998. Rethinking the typology of relative clauses. Language Design 1: 59–86. Comrie, Bernard. 2002. Typology and language acquisition: The case of relative clauses. In Typology and Second Language Acquisition, Anna Giacalone Ramat (ed.), 19–37. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Croft, William. 1993. The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphor and metonymies. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 335–70. Fauconnier, Gilles and Sweetser, Eve (eds). 1996. Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 1996. Blending as a central process of grammar. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, Adele Goldberg (ed.), 113–30. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 1998. Principles of conceptual integration. In Discourse and Cognition, Jean-Pierre Koenig (ed.), 269–83. Stanford CA: CSLI. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 1999. Metonymy and conceptual integration. In Metonymy in Language and Thought, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 77–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York NY: Basic Books. Fillmore, Charles. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6: 223f. Fillmore, Charles and Atkins, Sue. 1992. Toward a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In Frames, Fields, and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization, Adrienne Lehrer and Eva Feder Kittay (eds), 75–102. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Geeraerts, Dirk. 1993. Vagueness’s puzzles, polysemy’s vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics 4–3: 223– 72. Holton David, Mackridge, Peter and Philippaki-Warburton, Irene. 1997. Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London: Routledge. Joseph, Brian and Philippaki-Warburton, Irene. 1987. Modern Greek [Croom Helm Descriptive Series]. London: Croom Helm. Kövecses, Zoltán and Radden, Günter. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York NY: Basic Books Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. There was a farmer had a dog: Syntactic amalgams revisited. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Shelley Axmaker, Annie Jaisser and Helen Singmaster (eds), 319–39. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Langacker, Ronald. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 1, Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2, Descriptive Application. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. 1993. Reference point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38. Langacker, Ronald. 1997. Constituency, dependency, and conceptual grouping. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 1–32. Langacker, Ronald. 1998. Indeterminacy in semantics and grammar. In Estudios de Linguistica Cognitiva II, J. L. Cifuentes H. (ed.), 649–72. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Departamento de Filología Española, Lingüística General y Teoría de la Literatura.

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Langacker, Ronald. To appear. Metonymic grammar. In Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar, Antonio Barcelona, Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1997. Noun-Modifying Constructions in Japanese: A Frame-Semantic Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 2000. Extending frame-semantics: Flexibility of complex noun phrase constructions in Japanese. Paper presented at the 7th International Pragmatics Conference. Budapest. Nicholas, Nick. 1999. The Story of pu: The Grammaticalization in Space and Time of a Modern Greek Complementiser. PhD dissertation, The University of Melbourne. Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2005. Conceptual blending and the interpretation of relatives: A case study from Greek. Cognitive Linguistics 16: 169–206. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Radden, Günter (eds). 1999. Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda. 2004. The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. Paper presented at ICLC 8 and at the Warsaw-Hamburg Cognitive Linguistics Workshop. Sweetser, Eve. 1999. Compositionality and blending: Semantic composition in a cognitively realistic framework. In Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology, Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (eds), 129–62. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sweetser, Eve. 2005. Putting the ‘same’ meaning together from different pieces. In Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the Twenty-First Century, Sophia Marmaridou, Kiki Nikiforidou and Eleni Antonopoulou (eds), 23–51. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Theophanopoulou, Dimitra. 1985. Οι που-αναφορικές προτάσεις της Νέας Ελληνικής και η παράλειψη της προθέσεως (Pu relatives in Modern Greek and the omission of the preposition). In Μελέτες για την Ελληνική Γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language) 3: 17–45. Thessaloniki: Kiriakides. Tzartzanos, Achileus. 1963. Νεοελληνική Σύνταξις (Modern Greek Syntax). Athens: ΟΕΔΒ. Varlokosta, Spyridoula and Armon-Lotem, Sharon. 1998. Resumptives and wh-movement in the acquisition of relative clauses in Modern Greek and Hebrew. In Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference on Language Acquisition, 737–46. Boston MA: Cascadilla Press.

chapter 10

Constraints on inferential constructions Christian Koops Rice University

This chapter addresses the cross-linguistic variability of inferential constructions and the constrained character of the English it is that-construction in particular. A quantitative case study of the latter (e.g. It’s just that I’m a different person now) shows that, compared with inferential constructions in other languages, the English construction is even more restricted than has previously been assumed. A discourse constraint is proposed which limits its applicability to inferences which are highly accessible at the point of utterance. This constraint severely limits the use of the construction in its unmarked form, i.e. in affirmative declarative clauses without further modification, and explains why it occurs specifically with certain modifiers and in combination with certain other grammatical constructions. The chapter explores the implications of these findings for the study of inferential constructions across languages. Keywords: cleft construction, corpus analysis, discourse, discourse analysis, focus, inferential construction, information structure, pragmatic inference, pragmatics, presupposition

1. Introduction The phenomenon I am concerned with in this chapter is illustrated in the contrast of (1) and (2). Each is to be understood as two consecutive utterances by the same speaker.

(1) a. I’ve got a bit of a problem here. b. It’s that all the banks are closed. (Otake 2002: 142)

(2) a. I cannot pay you back today. b. It’s just that all the banks are closed

In (1b) it is readily understood as referring anaphorically to the lexical NP a bit of a problem. In (2b), on the other hand, it has no overt antecedent. Rather, what is addressed by (2b) is an aspect of the interpretation of (2a). More specifically, (2b) can be understood as offering an explanation for the state of affairs described in (2a). . I would like to thank the editors of this volume and Sebastian Ross-Hagebaum for commenting on an earlier version of this chapter. All remaining errors are mine.

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Note that the notion of an explanation is not overtly expressed in (2a). What makes it nevertheless possible to understand (2b) as providing an explanation is that a hearer of (2a) is likely to have enriched its content by inferring that some explanation exists and is forthcoming. As another example of the phenomenon seen in (2), consider (3), which is taken from a conversation. The speaker is talking about the difficulties of doing one’s own car maintenance.

(3) I look under the hood and I see all the stuff under there and I say, boy, my chances of doing — how shall I say it? Everything’s electronic. It’s not that I’m against at least trying, it’s just that there’s so much, you know. You can’t tune it yourself. You can’t do anything. (swb 4400)

In saying “It’s not that I’m against at least trying,” the speaker displays his assumption that the hearer has drawn inferences from the speaker’s earlier talk about his general stance. The speaker rejects the undesired inference that he would not “at least try” to work on his own car, and then uses the same syntactic construction in its affirmative form (It’s just that. . .) to provide his preferred interpretation, which is that working on one’s own car is simply too difficult. Note that what is negotiated in (3), just as in (2), is not the content of an utterance per se, but rather its contextual interpretation. In other words, the it is that-sentences in (2) and (3) are not simply concerned with what was said. Rather, they operate on what was meant or understood (in addition to what was said). This distinction is, of course, a well-known formulation of what distinguishes pragmatics from semantics. It is that-sentences thereby constitute an interesting point of contact, or interface, between syntax and discourse pragmatics. What I have loosely termed “it is that-sentences” – copular clauses with it in subject position and a that-clause copular complement which display the pragmatic properties pointed out above – have been called instances of the English “sentential focus cleft” (Horn 1989), “inferential construction” (Delahunty 1990), “inferential cleft” (Lambrecht 2001), or simply “it is that-construction” (Otake 2002). In this chapter, I will follow the most widely used term and speak of “inferential constructions” or simply “inferentials.” However, when referring to the English it is that-construction, rather than an inferential construction in another language, I will also use the term “it is that-construction.” Regarding their discourse function, previous analyses (especially Delahunty 1990, 1995, 2001; Declerck 1992; Bearth 1999; Otake 2002), are essentially in agree. If necessary, examples have been edited to ensure greater readability. Pauses, repetitions, and most false starts have been removed. Occasionally, punctuation has been changed to reflect syntax rather than prosody.

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ment on the point that inferential constructions, in one way or another, serve the purpose of “inference-monitoring and repair” (Delahunty 1995: 529). Speakers who use an inferential construction assume that hearers are entertaining particular assumptions with regard to some aspect of the discourse context (typically, an earlier speaker utterance). For example, the speaker of (2) can assume that on hearing (2a) the hearer is anticipating an explanation for not getting his or her money back. The proposition in the that-clause of an inferential construction spells out possible assumptions in order to reject, endorse, or otherwise address them. Previous treatments differ mainly in two questions. First, it has been debated how to adequately characterize the range of contextual interpretations that inferential constructions are sensitive to. That is, what types of inferences can they be used to address? Contextually implied explanations, as in (2), appear to be most prominent. However, other modes of interpreting the discourse context can also be spelled out through inferential constructions. As will be discussed below, languages differ on this point. Second, the literature includes a variety of proposals concerning the role of general pragmatic principles in the use and interpretation of inferentials. For example, Delahunty (2001) suggests that the properties of inferentials fall out from the principles of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1987). This is not the place to review all previous proposals regarding the use and interpretation of inferential constructions, since the present chapter does not propose an entirely new account. Rather, I am taking advantage of the insights of earlier treatments in order to shed light on the question of differences in inferential constructions across languages. The issue of language-specific constraints has come up in more recent work (Bearth 1997, 1999; Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz 2000; Otake 2002), but has, as I argue, not been adequately resolved. It is still unclear whether the differences in inferential constructions observed across languages are random, and therefore unpredictable, or whether they follow some general pattern. The specific phenomenon which this chapter is devoted to is the constrained character of the English it is that-construction. In Section 2, I review several previously noted effects which suggest that this construction is more limited in its applicability than its counterparts in other languages. I then propose that the English construction is, in fact, subject to a further constraint, which has so far escaped the attention of researchers. This constraint manifests itself in the fact that the it is thatconstruction is almost never used in its unmarked, “bare” form, i.e. without any additional modification in affirmative, declarative clauses. Section 3 presents the results of a corpus investigation which demonstrates this point. In Section 4, I propose an explanation of this strikingly restricted distribution in the form of a constructionspecific discourse constraint which may be more easily met with the addition of certain modifiers or in the context of other grammatical constructions. In Section 5, the independently recognized constraints on the English inferential construction

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are revisited and related to the proposed discourse constraint, which accounts for both of them. In conclusion, I propose that the cross-linguistic differences seen in inferential constructions can be understood to reflect variation along the dimension of contextual accessibility of the discourse variable which the construction specifies. While the English it is that-construction constitutes an extreme case of contextual dependence, constructions in other languages are apparently more flexible, i.e. capable of specifying variables that are less clearly “at issue,” which accounts for their applicability in situations where the English construction is not an option.

2. Constraints on the English inferential construction The cross-linguistic study of inferential constructions goes back to Delahunty’s (1990) observation that a surprisingly large number of languages have a morphosyntactic device specializing in this particular discourse function. In other words, the English it is that-construction appears to have translation equivalent, or nearequivalent, counterparts in many of the world’s languages. Cross-linguistic comparison has since brought to light some interesting contrasts. Most relevant in the context of this chapter are the conclusions of Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz (2000) and Otake (2002), who contrast English with Spanish and Japanese, respectively. These authors provide evidence which suggests that the English inferential construction is more constrained than those of other languages. In the following, I point out two of these constraints. First, it is argued that in English, unlike in Spanish and Japanese, an inferential construction can apply only to inferences triggered by linguistic context, rather than, for example, by the environment. To illustrate this point, Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz point to the attested Spanish utterance in (4). This utterance was produced by a husband when his wife walked into their house and found that he had made a mess.

(4) Es que estaba buscando las ceras para la niña. ‘It’s that I was looking for the crayons for the child.’ (Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz 2000: 318)

Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz report that they have not observed usage of this kind in English. Moreover, their proposed constraint is corroborated by the intuition of native speakers of English, who largely agree that in the context of (4) the preferred sentence form in English would be a simple declarative (I was looking for the crayons for the child), and that the it is that-construction would not likely be used. . The speakers consulted for the acceptability judgments presented in this chapter were three

Constraints on inferential constructions

Another point of contrast is the range of contextual uses of inferential constructions. Constructions in different languages can apparently capture a greater or smaller variety of inferential relationships between the discourse context (the source of the inference) and the proposition presented as a possible inference from it. In this connection, Delahunty and Gatzkiewicz point to Kuno’s (1973) discussion of the Japanese no da-construction to show that the English it is that-construction has a more limited usage potential. Consider the example in (5), taken together with its gloss and translation from Kuno (1973: 226).

(5) a. Byooki desu. sick ‘I am sick.’ b. Taizyuu ga zyuppondo hetta no desu. weight ten.pounds lessened ‘The explanation (or evidence) for my being sick is that I have lost ten pounds.’

Kuno’s translation indicates that the relationship of (5b) to (5a) is not easily construed as an explanation of the speaker’s sickness, but rather as a form of justification, or, as Kuno states, as providing evidence. Regardless of how one chooses to translate the sentence into English, the point is that this particular mode of interpreting the speaker’s first utterance is not one that calls for, or in fact allows, an inferential construction in English. Language-specific restrictions like the two constraints summarized above pose a challenge for an account of inferential constructions that attempts to capture not only their universal properties but also their typological variability. Previous treatments have been concerned almost exclusively with formulating the universal principles involved in their interpretation. Thus, for example, Delahunty states that “[t]he universality of the uses and interpretations [of inferential constructions] follows from the universality of pragmatic principles such as those articulated in RT [Relevance Theory]” (2001: 540). Language-particular aspects, by contrast, have been pointed out but have not received a principled explanation. In the absence of such an account, however, they cannot but appear as ad hoc, unpredictable “quirks” of individual languages. In the remainder of this chapter I treat language-specific restrictions on inferentials as interesting in themselves, and take up the challenge of providing a unified explanation of the constrained character of the English inferential construction. I suggest that the solution is to consider a further way in which the it is that-construction graduate students and one undergraduate student at Rice University. All four are native speakers of American English.

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is limited. English inferential constructions are even more severely constrained than has been previously assumed. The effect of this can be observed in the way in which the construction is used in discourse. As will be demonstrated below, inferentials are almost never used in their “bare,” unmarked form, i.e. without any additional modification in affirmative, declarative clauses. The preference of it is that-constructions to appear with additional modifiers has been pointed out (see, e.g., Delahunty 1990: 7), but has not been interpreted as unusual and in need of an explanation. In fact, constructed examples of unmarked inferentials have been discussed as though there was nothing exceptional about them. An example is given in (6).

(6) a. He was shot in his house. b. It is that he knew too much. (Declerck 1992: 219)

The fact that the inferential construction in (6b) is given a minimal context in (6a) takes account of the fact that inferentials are inherently contextually bound, i.e. they are necessarily interpreted with reference to certain contextually implied assumptions. However, as it turns out, a context such as (6a) is rarely sufficient to license an unmarked inferential. The evidence for this claim comes primarily from usage patterns, as discussed in the following section. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that native speakers of English, when asked to judge the felicity of the inferential in (6b), tend to view it as “grammatical but unnatural” at best. Apparently, the inferences that can be derived from (6a) are not sufficient to license the form of the inferential in (6b). Instead, speakers prefer an unmarked declarative sentence, as in (7a), or the more explicit variant it’s because in (7b). If the inferential construction is retained, its perceived degree of naturalness rises with the addition of an epistemic modal, as in (7c), or the change to an interrogative sentence (implying a speaker change), as in (7d).

(7) a. b. c. d.

He knew too much. It’s because he knew too much. It may be that he knew too much. Is it that he knew too much?

Of course, (7c) and (7d) change the meaning and the illocutionary force of (6b), respectively. But this is precisely the point. Additional modification introduces further assumptions, which, as I argue in detail below, aid the hearer in the process of meaning construction and facilitate the inferential interpretation.

3. The distribution of inferential constructions in discourse Previous analyses of inferential constructions have been based, for the most part, on examples that were observed in actual language use. The source of these examples

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Table 1. Distribution of inferential constructions in the Santa Barbara Corpus and a sample of the Switchboard-1 corpus marked

negation just wh-cleft degree adverbs epistemic modal

it’s not that . . . it’s just that . . . what it is is that . . . it’s more/not so much that . . . it could be that . . .

unmarked

after negative IC

it’s not that . . . it’s that . . .

28 14 4 3 1 1

was primarily written discourse, especially literary and scholarly prose and print journalism. What is missing, therefore, is an analysis of a representative sample of inferential constructions in ordinary, conversational language use. In this section, I present the results of an analysis of a large collection of American English conversations. These were taken from two sources, the Santa Barbara Corpus and the Switchboard-1 corpus.All inferential constructions were extracted from the former, which yielded 25 instances. In addition, a random sample of conversations from the latter was also exhaustively analyzed, until an equal number of cases was obtained. Thus, the total number of instances is 50. All collected instances were analyzed with respect to their grammatical context. Table 1 shows the results of this analysis. The category “unmarked” refers to cases where the inferential construction occurs in an affirmative declarative main clause with no modification of any kind, as in example (6b). All other cases fall in the “marked” category. Each of the subcategories will be discussed in Section 4. The distribution in Table 1 is heavily skewed towards two preferred categories: negation of the copular clause and occurrence with the adverb just. Moreover, inferential constructions occur very infrequently in their “bare” form. In fact, the one case of an unmarked inferential can still be given a clear contextual characterization. It occurs in direct sequence with a negative inferential. Before discussing the effects shown in Table 1 in more detail, I want to address a . The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois et al. 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005) is based on recordings of natural speech representing a wide variety of speakers of different regional origins, ages, occupations, ethnic and social backgrounds, and a wide variety of speech events. The Switchboard-1 corpus (Godfrey and Holliman 1997) consists of telephone conversations between speakers from various regions of the United States about a wide range of topics. The Switchboard-1 sample used for this study consists of conversations 4400 to 4901. In this chapter, the names of the two corpora are abbreviated as “sbc” and “swb”, respectively. . The reason why the total number in Table 1 exceeds 50 is that the contexts are not mutually exclusive. For instance, the following example is both a yes/no question and includes a degree adverb: Don’t you think it’s more that you were just nervous at the time? (sbc 044)

214 Christian Koops Table 2. Distribution of inferential constructions in all linguistic examples discussed in five central publications Attested Constructed marked

unmarked

negation just-type adverbs yes/no-question epistemic adverbs subordinate interrogative degree adverbs epistemic modals

it’s not that . . . it’s just/only/simply that . . . is it that . . . ? perhaps/no doubt it’s that . . . I wonder if/whether it’s that . . .

after negative IC other

35 34 4 3 2

4 2 3 2 0

it’s not so much/not exactly that. . . it may/must/cannot be that . . .

2 1

0 2

it’s not that . . . it’s that . . . it’s that . . .

3 3

0 13

potential point of criticism. The distribution in Table 1 suggests that, to the degree that the data are representative, unmarked inferentials do not occur at all in conversational English, unless they immediately follow a negative inferential construction. This would be a strong constraint, indeed. However, other attested cases of unmarked inferentials have been presented and discussed in previous work on this construction type. In order to gauge the difference between the corpus data examined for this chapter and the situation as it emerges from the data cited in the literature, I also present the results of a systematic account of all examples of the English inferential construction discussed in five central publications. The examples included in this collection were analyzed according to the same criteria as the corpus data. Table 2 shows the results. Note that the number of attested and constructed examples is given separately. In general, the frequency distribution in Table 2 is very similar to that in Table 1. The vast majority of inferentials occur in the same two contexts: under negation and modified by just (or semantically similar adverbs like only and simply). This makes it all the more remarkable that such a skewed distribution has not been given more attention. Furthermore, Table 2 supports the claim that unmarked inferential constructions are rare. While such cases do occur, their small number shows that they constitute a possibility which is mostly avoided. A final point in connection with . The five publications are: Declerck (1992), Delahunty (1990, 1995, 2001), and Otake (2002). Included were only examples which all authors agree instantiate the English inferential construction. Specifically excluded were all examples which can be analyzed as cases of extraposition (see Declerck 1992: 209ff). Also excluded were cases marked as ungrammatical or questionable in any way, as well as translations of inferential constructions from other languages (unless they are explicitly said to be felicitous in English). Not excluded were the variants Not that . . . and Just that . . . Examples cited repeatedly by the same author or different authors were counted only once. If no source was given for an example, the example was assumed to have been constructed.

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Table 2 concerns the comparatively high number of constructed examples of unmarked inferentials. This number suggests that the role and representativeness of such cases has been somewhat exaggerated.

4. A discourse constraint on English inferential constructions The general result of the corpus investigation presented in Section 3 was that unmarked inferential constructions are generally avoided in English. This raises the following questions: What causes this disregard? And in what way do the contexts in which the construction is attested make its use possible? The solution to be proposed here is that there exists a discourse constraint on unmarked English inferential constructions which can be more easily met by the introduction of additional assumptions connected to the modifiers and grammatical constructions which the inferential construction combines with. This proposal rests on the analysis of inferential constructions as specificational. I will briefly introduce this notion. In his analysis of the English inferential construction, Declerck (1992) likens inferentials to cleft constructions by suggesting that, like clefts, they involve the specification of a value for a variable. As an illustration of how the process of specification works in inferentials, consider again example (2), repeated in (8).

(8) a. I cannot pay you back today. b. It’s just that all the banks are closed.

As discussed above, (8b) can be understood as providing an explanation for the state of affairs described in (8a). The expectation of an explanation is triggered in the hearer on hearing (8a). The inferential construction assigns a particular value (a particular explanation) to the inferred discourse variable (some explanation). The inference derived from (8a) has the form of an open proposition with the discourse variable as the missing argument, which can be formulated as in (9).

(9) s cannot pay h back for reason x

The assertion made by means of the inferential construction (ignoring, for the moment, the import of the adverb just) can be stated as in (10). (10) x = all the banks are closed The variable is presupposed to exist in the hearer, so that he or she will be able to understand the that-clause proposition as the value that saturates the open proposition. The defining feature of inferential constructions is, of course, that the variable is “silent.” Unlike other grammatical constructions, inferentials, by definition, operate specifically on inferences. The variable which they specify is an inferred

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discourse entity. As a consequence of being understood, rather than lexicalized, this variable is naturally at a disadvantage when it comes to being made reference to and specified. It cannot be taken for granted that an entity whose existence is merely inferred is as accessible to a hearer as one which has been overtly introduced. Inferential constructions, therefore, apply in special discourse conditions, namely in situations where a variable is accessible to a hearer despite the fact that it has not been explicitly mentioned. These considerations help motivate why unmarked inferentials are largely avoided in English. I propose that the it is that-construction is subject to the following constraint. (11) The use of the English inferential construction in its unmarked form presupposes that at the point of utterance the discourse variable which it assigns a value to is evoked to an exceptionally high degree. In order for a covert variable to be specifiable by means of an inferential construction, the discourse context must include an unusually high degree of attention directed at that variable. As it turns out, such contexts are extremely rare, which is the reason why the English inferential construction is so sparingly used in its unmarked form. The constraint in (11) also explains why the it is that-construction occurs specifically in combination with certain modifiers and grammatical constructions. As I discuss in the remainder of this section, these modifiers and constructions, which I will refer to as “contexts,” act as facilitators. What they have in common is that they make it easier to accommodate the presuppositional structure of the inferential construction. More specifically, they provide additional marking of its specificational character, thus providing the hearer with an additional clue to the idea that the that-clause proposition is to be understood as a value of some currently relevant discourse variable.

4.1 Unmarked inferentials following negated inferentials Consider first what is perhaps the most obvious case. Unmarked inferential constructions can occur immediately after a negated inferential. (Negation itself is discussed in Section 4.3.) The utterance in (12) comes in response to the suggestion by another speaker that using dish water for the purpose of watering one’s lawn might be a bad idea. (12) It’s not that you don’t want it on your lawn, it’s that you don’t want it sitting around, before it goes on your lawn. (sbc 003) Here the negated inferential provides a contrastive context which licenses the affirmative inferential. As Declerck (1992: 215) puts it, a “sense of contrast comes

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from the rejection of the value: the statement that a given value is not the correct one automatically implies that there must be some other value which is.” The first, negative inferential explicitly establishes the presupposition that there is, indeed, some problem with using dish water and evokes this problem as a salient variable. The second inferential assigns the desired value to it.

4.2 ‘Just’-type adverbs and degree adverbs Next, consider the group of adverbs centering around the notion ‘only’ such as just, only, or simply. In (13), B has just told A that he sometimes uses a budget to monitor his spending, but that he does not do so all of the time. (13) A: Any particular reason that you get off of it? Or, does it seem to work for you? B: Oh it works fine. It’s just I think sometimes I — you know, you get busy. You slack off a little bit. And then it’s work to catch up. (swb 4804) The inferential construction responds to the suggestion that the reason why B “gets off ” his budget might be that it does not work for him, which is inferable from A’s question. Thus, the relevant variable is the reason why B loses track of his budget. B replaces the implied value with the desired value. In this way his use of just creates a contrast between competing values by positioning the preferred value on a scale of more or less significant reasons. Again, to quote Declerck (1992: 214), “[i]t is clear from the use of only that other values could have been selected: only still suggests a contrast with other values (which are superior in some respect to the chosen one).” The presupposition of an alternative value facilitates the use of the inferential construction. Marking the value as one that is chosen over others additionally marks the value as a value. This makes it easier to construe the speaker’s utterance as an act of specification. Another way of marking an implicit contrast is the use of degree adverbs such as more or not so much. In (15) the speaker offers a possible reason for why his interlocutor was unable to tell his brother that he is gay. (14) Don’t you think it’s more that you were just nervous at the time? (sbc 044) Degree adverbs invoke the idea of a scale on which alternative values can be compared with respect to the degree to which they saturate the variable. In the case of more, the proposed value is presented as saturating it to a greater degree than an implied, alternative value which acts as the standard of comparison. Again, the implication of the alternative value additionally marks the construction as specificational.

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4.3 Negation Coming to the most frequently found contextual category, consider the negated inferential in (15). B, a teenage daughter, has just told A, her mother, that she regrets not having had a chance to go to a particular shopping mall (“the Galleria”). (15) A: You wouldn’t’ve had any money left anyway probab[ly]. B: It’s not that I needed money. It’s the Galleria. Every teenage film that has ever been filmed was filmed in the Galleria. (sbc 035) The variable which B infers from A’s utterance is the reason for B’s disappointment at not visiting “the Galleria.” The implied value is rejected by the negative inferential and, as is typical of negated inferentials, the specification (which need not be in the form of an inferential construction) follows immediately. The crucial difference between affirmative and negative inferentials is that negative ones do not simultaneously make reference to a discourse variable and specify it. They merely present the variable as presupposed and reject a candidate value. Speakers can use the inferential construction under negation rather freely even when the relevant discourse variable is not strongly evoked. That is because the specification happens only in a second step, when the variable can be taken to be established (cf. the discussion in Section 4.1). The negative inferential merely sets the stage for the act of specification. In fact, as pointed out by Delahunty (1995: 359), speakers sometimes use a negative inferential in contexts where it is unlikely, or in fact impossible, that the undesired and rejected assumption already exists in the hearer. This can be observed where a negative inferential is used preemptively, to keep some anticipated inference from arising in the first place. The speaker in (16) is talking about the reaction of some customers to the proselytizing going on at the business where she worked. (16) It’s not that they weren’t Christian at all. You know, it was just, it annoyed them. (sbc 036) The possible inference that the customers “weren’t Christian at all” as a reason for their annoyance can obviously arise only from saying that they were annoyed in the first place. The fact that even unlikely assumptions can be introduced as possible ones suggests that hearers are quite tolerant when it comes to accommodating the presupposition that a given variable is currently relevant.

4.4 Epistemic modals and adverbs Next, consider cases in which the inferential construction is additionally qualified by an indicator of epistemic modality: epistemic modals and adverbs. The exchange in (17) illustrates the first category.

Constraints on inferential constructions 219

(17) A: So, what are your favorite TV shows? B: One that I can’t find anymore, which is Gabriel’s Fire. A: Oh, I haven’t watched that very much. Is that— do you like that? B: Yes. A: When was that on? B: It was usually on Thursday nights. A: On ABC? B: I don’t know. (laughs) C: Oh. Oh, yeah, well, it may be that it was recently replaced, by what may be my favorite TV show of this sort of era, Twin Peaks? (swb 2528) With the use of epistemic modals like may or must the assignment of the value in the that-clause proposition is presented as the result of a process of deduction. As such, additional marking of the inferential as inferential is already achieved. After all, deduction is a form of inference. More specifically, presenting the value as a possible value, by means of a modal (may, might, could) or adverb (perhaps), implies that other values are also possible. Presenting the choice as necessary, by means of a modal (must) or adverb (no doubt), also implies that other values might have applied given different premises. In each case an implicit contrast is created, as seen earlier in the case of just or more. Thus, epistemic contexts also facilitate the use of the inferential construction by marking the value as a value chosen over other potential candidates.

4.5 Yes–no questions and subordinate interrogatives A further context for inferential constructions, though not attested in the conversational corpus, are yes/no-questions and subordinate interrogative clauses. (18) How is it possible that she has such a grip on the boy? Is it that he is infatuated with her? (Declerck 1992: 217) (19) What happened, sir? Were you . . .? – Was I what? – I just wondered what . . . whether it was that you’d – That I’d what? – . . . drunk too much at the time, sir. (Declerck 1992: 205) In the case of yes/no-questions, the argument that the context in which inferentials occur tends to mirror their specificational function is easy to make. Speakers who use inferential constructions in yes/no-questions seek confirmation from the hearer that a particular value, which is offered as a candidate, saturates a presupposed variable. This is all the more obvious in cases like (18) where the yes/noquestion follows a wh-question which makes the relevant variable explicit in the wh-word. (Two of the four attested cases cited in the literature are like this; the other two cases are cited without preceding context.) When inferential constructions ap-

220 Christian Koops

pear in subordinate interrogative clauses introduced by if or whether, the proposition they contain is also presented as a possibility, or, more precisely, as a possible value of some variable, as seen in (19). As such, they make alternative values relevant, which additionally draws attention to the fact that a variable is being specified. Furthermore, when, as in (19), a subordinate interrogative is used as an indirect request for confirmation, i.e. as an indirect yes/no-question, the explanation given for inferentials in yes/no-questions applies as well.

4.6 Wh-clefts Finally, inferential constructions may be combined with wh-cleft constructions, as in (20). In this example the speaker is talking about the color coding system used to identify penguins in an aquarium. (20) What it is is that green, let’s say for example, green stands for one, black stands for two. That’s number twelve. (sbc 039) Wh-clefts have traditionally been analyzed as information structure constructions consisting of two parts: a presupposition expressed in a wh-clause and a focus coded as a copular complement (Prince 1978; Lambrecht 2001, inter alia). The focus constituent gives a value for the open proposition in the wh-clause. The result of endowing an inferential construction with the information structure of a wh-cleft is that the that-clause proposition is additionally marked as focal, and the remainder of the inferential construction as presupposed. This means that the assignment of a value to a variable and the fact that the variable is presupposed to exist in the hearer are both doubly marked. Moreover, the reading of the wh-cleft focus as exhaustive, i.e. the implicature that no other values exist which saturate the variable, is also transferred to the inferential. As a result, alternative values are implicitly excluded, which once more provides for a contrast between alternative values and highlights the fact that specification is taking place.

5. Discussion In this chapter I have proposed a reason for the fact that in English unmarked inferential constructions are extremely rare. Their status as the unlikely alternative can be attributed to a construction-specific constraint which allows them to be used only when the variable for which they assign a value is evoked to an exceptionally high degree. Where this is not the case, hearers will not be able to fully integrate the act of specification, which the construction is used to perform, into the discourse. For this reason, when inferential constructions are used in English, they occur with

Constraints on inferential constructions 221

precisely those types of modification and in those syntactic contexts which provide additional marking of the fact that a value for a variable is being specified. Each of the contexts discussed in Sections 4.1 to 4.6 reinforces the specificational character of the inferential construction and thereby provides the hearer with an additional instruction to construe the current discourse context as including some salient variable and the that-clause proposition as a value for it. It might be objected that the effects pointed out in this chapter are not significant enough to speak of a constraint. After all, it is plausible to assume that highly context-dependent grammatical constructions will tend to occur in contexts which harmonize with and, therefore, partially reflect their own function. On such a view, there might be nothing unusual about the skewed distribution of inferentials in discourse. Perhaps it is this view which explains why the issue has not been confronted in earlier research. There are, however, good reasons to dismiss this objection. First, to argue that the effects seen above are no more than a byproduct of the use of an inferential construction in general is to ignore the existence of cross-linguistic differences. Although very little is known about such differences, it is safe to say that there is, indeed, something unusual about the almost obligatory additional marking of the English it is that-construction. For example, Kuno’s (1973) discussion and examples of the Japanese no da-construction suggests that unmarked inferential constructions are far more common in Japanese than in English and not nearly as constrained. Second, the constraint on the English inferential construction which I argue for in this chapter sheds new light on the two independently recognized constraints discussed in Section 2. In fact, they can both be derived from it, which further speaks for its significance. Recall that it was suggested that the it is that-construction is restricted to inferences derived from the linguistic context. If, however, the felicity of the construction depends instead on the degree to which the discourse context (whether linguistic or non-linguistic) includes an exceptionally strongly evoked variable, the constraint on environmentally induced inferences follows from the fact that interlocutors rarely have their attention trained on some aspect of the environment without also verbalizing what they perceive. Reinterpreting the constraint in this way also leaves open the possibility that such situations may still arise, albeit rarely. In fact, they do occur, as shown by example (21). This example comes from a public science lecture. The speaker is conducting an experiment and simultaneously commenting on it. As he produces (21), he has just poured liquid nitrogen over a balloon filled with air. As a consequence, the balloon shrinks. (21) You still have the same number of air molecules inside this balloon as you did before. It’s just that they’re going slower, so they’re closer together and they take up less space in this balloon. (sbc 027)

222 Christian Koops

The crucial point to note is that the speaker never actually verbalizes the fact that the balloon is getting smaller, neither in (21) nor in the earlier discourse. Nevertheless he is able to use the inferential construction felicitously, and, in doing so, presupposes that the variable – the reason for the balloon’s getting smaller – is sufficiently evoked. In his utterances preceding the inferential construction, the speaker dismisses as a possible value the idea that the number of air molecules in the balloon has decreased. He then presents the correct value, which is that air contracts as it gets colder. In the context of a science demonstration situations may arise which “cry out” for explanation. Moreover, it can be taken for granted that there is increased inferencing activity on the part of the audience. Together, these conditions are sufficient to license an it is that-construction that is directed at inferences prompted by an event in the environment. The second constraint discussed in Section 2 is the lack of an ‘evidence’ reading of the English inferential construction. Recall that in Japanese, but not in English, a speaker may state that he or she is sick and follow up with an inferential construction which specifies not the reason for getting sick, but the grounds for claiming to be sick. The argument made in this chapter is that inferential constructions are sensitive to the degree to which the relevant inference is evoked. I therefore suggest that an ‘evidence’ reading of the English inferential is not available because, upon being told that someone is sick, the idea of evidence does not stand out as the most obvious question. What would seem to be more relevant is, for example, the cause or the nature of the illness. The Japanese construction, however, apparently allows less central aspects of a situation to be specified, which results in a greater range of contextual uses.

6. Conclusion The larger goal of this chapter was to shed light on the issue of language-particular constraints on inferential constructions in order to arrive at a theoretical perspective from which such constraints can be shown to follow a general pattern. I have argued that the English it is that-construction is subject to a pragmatic constraint which provides a unified explanation of its limited applicability compared to counterpart constructions in other languages, such as Spanish and Japanese. While the present findings pertain primarily to English, the explanatory potential of the proposed constraint suggests that the findings may have implications for a general typology of inferential constructions. The results of the current analysis give us more insight into the attested cross-linguistic variability of inferential constructions. This variability may be seen as reflecting variation in the degree of contextual accessibility which a particular construc-

Constraints on inferential constructions 223

tion in a particular language requires of the variables which it can specify. Individual constructions, then, conventionally require greater or lower degrees of accessibility, reflected in more or less restrictive inferentials. This variable restrictiveness is in principle no different from the variable restrictiveness found in other types of grammatical constructions. For example, there are conventional differences in the range of semantic roles that can appear in subject position across languages, where English is particularly lenient, while other languages, such as German, are more restrictive (Hawkins 1986). Among the known inferential constructions, the English it is that-construction constitutes an extreme case of contextual dependence, while those of other languages appear less restrictive. This makes them capable of “absorbing” a greater range of different inferences, including inferences which are less strongly evoked. It remains to be seen if intermediate degrees can be established. This conclusion is admittedly programmatic and will require detailed case studies of other languages to be substantiated. However, the predictions are clear. To the degree that an inferential construction is subject to the parameter of contextual accessibility, it should display the same effects as the English construction, for example in being used preferably in combination with those modifiers and grammatical constructions which reinforce its specificational function. The quantitative, corpus-based methodology used in this chapter suggests itself as a useful technique for bringing out such effects. It will be interesting to test these predictions in future research.

References Bearth, Thomas. 1997. Inferential and counter-inferential grammatical markers in Swahili dialogue. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 51: 1–22. Bearth, Thomas. 1999. The inferential gap condition. Pragmatics 9: 249–88. Declerck, Renaat. 1992. The inferential it is that-construction and its congeners. Lingua 87: 203–30. Delahunty, Gerald. 1990. Inferentials: The story of a forgotten evidential. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics 15: 1–28. Delahunty, Gerald. 1995. The inferential construction. Pragmatics 5: 341–64. Delahunty, Gerald and Gatzkiewicz, Laura. 2000. On the Spanish inferential construction ser que. Pragmatics 10: 301–22. Delahunty, Gerald. 2001. Discourse functions of inferential sentences. Linguistics 39: 517–45. Du Bois, John, Chafe, Wallace, Meyer, Charles and Thompson, Sandra. 2000. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Part 1. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. Du Bois, John, Chafe, Wallace, Meyer, Charles, Thompson, Sandra and Martey, Nii. 2003. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Part 2. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. Du Bois, John and Englebretson, Robert. 2004. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Part 3. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.

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Du Bois, John and Englebretson, Robert. 2005. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Part 4. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. Godfrey, John and Holliman, Edward. 1997. Switchboard-1 Release 2. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. Hawkins, John A. 1986. Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. London: Croom Helm. Kuno, Susumu. 1973. The Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39: 463– 516. Otake, Yoshio. 2002. Semantics and functions of the It is that-construction and the Japanese No da-construction. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 43: 139–53. Prince, Ellen. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54: 883–906. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

chapter 11

The construction of vagueness “Sort of ” expressions in Romance languages* Wiltrud Mihatsch University of Bielefeld

The aim of this contribution is to study the stages involved in the emergence of Romance (and some Germanic) approximators such as French espèce de or genre de based on taxonomic nouns such as French genre ‘genus’ and espèce ‘species’ and to demonstrate which implicatures trigger the emergence of the discursive function which consists in signalling loose talk. Particularly the first steps leading from taxonomic nouns to approximators are still unknown, while the emergence of further pragmatic functions such as mitigation, quotation or focus marking on the basis of approximative functions are relatively well-studied. Corpus data complemented by lexicographical data will help to reveal the implicatures arising and becoming entrenched in specific communicative tasks where expressions containing taxonomic nouns are used in order to achieve certain communicative goals related to loose meaning construction. Keywords: approximation, approximator, hedge, taxonomy, pragmaticalisation, pragmatic marker, sort of, kind of, reanalysis

1. Introduction The accurate categorisation of referents is a highly important discourse function mainly realised by lexemes. However, in many situations the categories provided by lexemes do not exactly fit the categories a speaker wishes to express. In these cases conventional lexical meanings have to be loosened (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1991; see He 2002: ch. 8 and 10 for an overview). Loose talk can and often has to be made explicit by special linguistic expressions, so-called hedges (Lakoff 1972). Wellknown approximating hedges in English are sort of and kind of (see for instance Aij mer 2002; Channell 1994; Kay 1997 and, of course, Lakoff 1972). Many languages have equivalent expressions, such as French espèce de, genre de and sorte de (Fleisch man and Yaguello 2004; Rouget 1997). This type of hedge also exists in other Romance languages, however, there are no detailed studies on languages other than English and French. * I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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The aim of this analysis is to discover the necessary steps in the emergence of Romance approximators based on taxonomic nouns such as French genre ‘genus’ and espèce ‘species’ and to show which implicatures trigger their pragmaticalisation, i.e. the conventionalisation of the discursive function which consists in signalling loose talk. Some studies briefly mention the diachronic transition from taxonomic nouns to approximators (for instance Fleischman and Yaguello 2004). However, the exact history even of the comparatively well-studied French marker genre is still largely unknown: “As for genre, its history as a pragmatic operator has yet to be been (sic) explored” (Fleischman and Yaguello 2004: 130). Particularly the first steps which transform taxonomic nouns into approximators are still unknown, while the emergence of further pragmatic functions such as mitigation, quotation or focus marking on the basis of approximative functions are relatively well-studied (see, for instance, Channell 1994; Fleischman and Yaguello 2004). This analysis will concentrate on the conceptual nature of the recurrent implicatures involved in the emergence of approximative hedges in line with Panther and Thornburg (1998 and 2004) who study the make-up of scenario structures and contextual clues which explain the ease with which hearers draw certain types of inferences. Corpus analyses and dictionary entries will reveal the “frozen conversational implicatures” (Brown and Levinson 1998: 510) which arise and become entrenched in specific communicative tasks where expressions containing taxonomic nouns are used in order to achieve certain communicative goals related to loose meaning construction. Abbreviations will be used throughout the text to indicate corpora, internet and dictionary sources. Detailed bibliographical information is given in the dictionary and corpora section of the references.

2. Lexical sources The lexical sources of hedges like sort of are semantically very similar in related languages – they all designate (sub-)categories at different hierarchical levels, mostly in scientific taxonomies, since Western scientific knowledge is to a large extent organ. The emergence and conventionalisation of pragmatic markers closely resemble grammaticalisation processes, but they also differ in some important respects. Pragmatic markers do not belong to tight paradigms, are optional, do not become affixes and thus do not reduce their scope to lexical stems but rather develop more flexible scope (Aijmer 1997: 7, Brinton 1996: 34, 65, Mosegaard Hansen 1998: 73–4, Waltereit 2002: 1004–1007). This is why many authors have independently created and employed the term pragmaticalisation to describe the creation of markers with discursive functions (for instance Dostie 2004; Erman and Kotsinas 1993; FrankJob 2006). I will therefore employ the term pragmaticalisation for the processes that transform taxonomic nouns into hedges.

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ised in taxonomies, a principle that goes back to Aristotle (see Mihatsch 2006: ch. 1 for an overview). Here we find English class, genus, species, sort, the less well-known upper levels such as kingdom, phylum or family, and the related but not strictly taxonomic nouns type and form and their equivalents in other languages. These terms all have in common Greco-Latin origins, some of them are calques, such as German Gattung ‘genus’ (EWD) and probably Art ‘species’ (EWD, GDW), which reflects a general tendency of German to translate scientific Latin terms (Roelcke 1999: 180f.). In English the Germanic noun kind, which in Old English meant ‘birth, origin, descent, natural quality, manner’ and early on also ‘class, division of things’ (OED) is probably a calque, too. Almost all these terms appear first in Greek or Latin philosophical texts and often enter Romance and other vernacular languages in learned contexts, mostly in the domains of philosophy and natural history, via Scholastic Latin. From the sixteenth century onward the meaning ‘(sub)category at a certain level’ became firmly established in biological taxonomies (Gingras, Keating and Limoges 2000: 301f.) and was then bound to specific levels of generalisation:

kingdom phylum class order family genus species

animal vertebrata mammalia carnivora felidae felis felis domesticus (Störig 1965: 336)

Type, form and their cognates do not designate any specific levels of scientific categorisation, but rather general categories. In the natural sciences the function of type and its equivalents in other languages differs from that of genus and species. Type does not designate a taxonomic category but the species or genus which most perfectly exhibits the essential characters of its family or group, and from which the family or group is (usually) named; an individual embodying all the distinctive characteristics of a species [. . .] (OED, s.v. type)

Similarly, English form and its cognates do not primarily mean ‘category’, but ‘essential property.’ In Scholastic philosophy, the older sense is ‘shape, configuration, mould’ (DHLF, GDW, OED). However type, form and their equivalents in other languages are now also used to designate categories in everyday language, just as most scientific taxonomic nouns are now part of everyday speech, too, except for English genus and species and German Genus and Spezies, which are expressed by calques. The upper levels kingdom, phylum and family need not be dealt with here, since they have not been adopted in everyday speech in their taxonomic senses. In the languages studied here we find the following taxonomic nouns in everyday speech (see Table 1).

228 Wiltrud Mihatsch Table 1. Taxonomic nouns in some Germanic and Romance languages English

French

German

Italian

Portuguese

Spanish

class kind kind sort type form

classe genre espèce sorte type forme

Klasse Gattung Art Sorte Typ Form

classe genere specie sorta tipo forma

classe género espécie sorte tipo forma

clase género especie – tipo forma

Since these nouns all provide sources for hedges in their respective languages, the lexical meaning itself must have an intrinsic potential for approximative uses. The following analyses will show how the meaning ‘class’ can contribute to the construction of loose meaning and which intermediate inferential steps are necessary in the emergence of approximating hedges.

3. The functions of taxonomic nouns in scientific contexts The lexical meaning of taxonomic nouns, i.e. ‘category at a certain taxonomic level,’ does not show any obvious semantic links with the approximative meaning; on the contrary, scientific taxonomies are based on particularly rigid category boundaries, as precising hedges like technically speaking reflect (Lakoff 1972). In scientific contexts these nouns are often employed in definitions:

(1) Halicacabum vulgare. Otra especie de yerva mora. Esta especie de yerva mora viene en grande abundancia cabo los setos y tapias de las viñas. [emphasis mine] (CORDE, Jarava (1557–1567): Historia de yerbas y plantas con los nombres griegos, latinos y españoles) ‘Halicacabum vulgare. Another species of blackberry. This blackberry species is found in great abundance on vineyard fences and walls.’

These uses also reveal the strong relational component of these taxonomic nouns, typical for lexical sources of grammaticalisation. Taxonomic nouns are hard to conceptualise without the individuals or subcategories they classify and the superordinate category they belong to. A genus is defined via the individuals or species that it encompasses or via its superordinate, following the Greek and Scholastic definition technique based on the genus proximum and differentia specifica (Klix 1993: 347f.). In these constructions kind is the semantic and syntactic head of the NP kind of Y (cf. Aijmer 2002: 175) and classifies an individual or a species with regard to its superordinate noun.

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4. The emergence of approximative modifiers 4.1 Subcategorisation in everyday language The taxonomic nouns in Table 1 have all spread to everyday language, a case of determinologisation. As Mihatsch (2005) shows, determinologisation is usually accompanied by semantic adaptation processes caused by the different communicative needs and background knowledge of speakers and hearers in everyday contexts as opposed to scientific communities. It is of course important to categorise and define in everyday language, too, however, definitions and explicit categorisation are not an aim in themselves as in academia. Familiar, everyday words need not be defined – what is more, especially basiclevel nouns are in fact rather hard to define (see Mihatsch 2006, ch. 2) since they are represented by gestalts which are automatically extracted from visual information (Rosch et al. 1976: 387). Therefore, in everyday reasoning prototypes and common basic-level members are not conceptualised via their superordinates. Explicit categorisation is rather restricted to specific situations – in particular situations where speakers have conceptualisation or naming problems. Thus, definitions seem to be particularly important for marginal, peripheral subcategories. Less commonly known, usually very specific concepts are indeed often categorised via their superordinates. According to Wierzbicka, an apple is an apple, but: “I think of paw-paws as of ‚‘some kind of (tropical) fruit’” (Wierzbicka 1985: 217). The use of taxonomic nouns in the classification of peripheral members is even mentioned in the OED under the entry of sort: “denoting that some thing, person, quality, etc., is, or may be, included in the specified class, although not typical of it or possessing all its characteristics.” This use even tends to get entrenched – a subtle case of meaning specialisation as a consequence of determinologisation. Indirect evidence for the importance of this entrenched use comes from a quite conventionalised function based on the categorisation of peripheral members producing scalar implicatures. Taxonomic nouns are often found in combination with universal quantifiers, free choice and negative indefinites:

(2) Fist à Naples, près laporte Saint Nicolas, soubz le pavement de la rue, soubterre, ung sigille par lequel [perit] tout genre de reptilles noccives; à ceste cause en tout icelui territoire ne s’en treuve nulle espece. [emphasis mine] (BTMF, de Phares (1494): Recueil des plus celebres astrologues). ‘In Naples, near the Saint Nicolas gate, he put under the pavement of the street, underground, a statuette which kills all kinds of nuisible creeping animals. For this reason no species is found on the whole territory.’

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(3) [. . .] les hommes ont plus de manieres de delectations que quelconque espece de beste. [emphasis mine] (BTMF, Oresme (1370): Le livre de ethiques d’Aristote) ‘Men have more kinds of delights than any animal species’

The taxonomic nouns seem to be redundant, since the expressions consisting of a taxonomic noun followed by de + N can usually be replaced by the second noun without changing the reference. In most everyday contexts, expressions containing taxonomic nouns refer to individuals or generic concepts rather than taxonomic categories. A closer look, however, reveals that these nouns are not redundant but enhance the expressivity of noun phrases, which can be explained by the association of these nouns with the reference to marginal members. If the use of these lexemes is entrenched for marginal members, these constructions can underline the absoluteness of quantification. A marginal member of a category is a scalar endpoint, similar to minimal units (cf. Fauconnier 1975: 226–30). Therefore, these nouns can emphasize negative quantification (‘not even a peripheral species’) and free choice (‘any, even marginal, species’). Both negative quantification and free choice are likely to be reinforced and therefore frequently serve as starting points of grammaticalisation processes of indefinite pronouns (Haspelmath 1997: 134–50, 226– 30). Free choice indefinites, in turn, are frequent sources of universal quantifiers (Haspelmath 1997: 154–6). However, it is equally plausible to assume that universal quantifiers are independently prone to reinforcement of the type ‘all species, including marginal ones.’ These expressive uses seem to be quite entrenched, as dictionary entries show, for instance ADLP, s.v. gênero, ZVI s.v. sorta, and OED s.v. sort and kind. These reinforced constructions can then become grammaticalised. Italian di sorta is now a negative polarity item which reinforces negation (ZVI s.v. sorta). Catalan gens is grammaticalised as a negative indefinite marker (DCLIC). In Old French we find gens, giens (DLAF, FEW s.v. gěnus) as an emphatic negative adverb. Thus we have a very productive type of metonymy in which a scalar endpoint is used to emphasize the whole scale (see Radden and Kövecses 1999: 32).

4.2 From subcategorisation to resemblance The use of taxonomic nouns in the classification of peripheral members can easily transcend category boundaries, as OED notes in the entry for sort: “denoting that some thing, person, quality, etc., is, or may be, included in the specified class, although not typical of it or possessing all its characteristics”[emphasis mine]. In everyday usage taxonomic nouns can thus become further entrenched for the classification of concepts that are not usually thought to belong to the following super-

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ordinate since they are hard to classify or whose category membership depends on subjective or not (yet) established criteria as in (4):

(4) L’homéopathie est une forme de médecine [emphasis mine] (Internet source, Eutraco) ‘Homeopathy is a form of medicine’

Speakers may also use taxonomic nouns strategically by pretending to subcategorise when they really can only give a rough approximation as is still visible in (5), where especie ‘kind,’ perhaps an attempt at classification, is followed by three approximators, i.e. the parenthesis cómo le diría yo ‘how shall I say,’ como ‘like’ and the list completer o algo así ‘or something like that’:

(5) habría que construir una especie de hhh cómo le diría yo ? como de cobertizo o algo así [emphasis mine] (C–ORAL–ROM, epubdl04) ‘one should build a sort of how shall I say like a shed or something’

Thus taxonomic nouns can be very convenient in the case of problematic meaning constructions, which also explains why the approximative expressions tend to be restricted to indefinite NPs (cf Rouget 1997: 294). The hearer may then reanalyse such cases of loose spontaneous or subjective taxonomic classifications or strategic uses as approximative categorisations (see Detges and Waltereit 2002 for a detailed study of reanalysis, for the role of speaker strategies in such processes also see Haspelmath 1999). This process of semantic change based on actual usage brings to mind the speech act metonymies analysed by Panther and Thornburg (1998). However, in this case there is no metonymic use of an illocutionary act standing for or pointing to another speech act, but rather the communicative problem of approximative naming linked with the scenario of classification in everyday language is foregrounded. The difficulties associated with classification may trigger approximative readings when the strategy is reanalysed. If a peripheral member is classified as belonging to a superordinate, this implies that it only vaguely resembles the prototype or typical exemplar of the superordinate category. This vague resemblance on one level of generalisation – a peripheral subcategory is compared with an implicit central subcategory of the second noun – can then become the main sense of the expression, a case of meaning generalisation since categorization is then not any longer restricted to a taxonomy but just signals similarity, whether within one domain as in the case of cohyponyms or across two domains as in the case of metaphors. The nouns linked by the taxonomic noun are then on the same level of generalisation. . All symbols indicating prosodic and other spoken language phenomena in the oral corpora have been eliminated for this study.

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The reanalysis is completed in contexts where only the approximative reading indicating nonliteral speech is left, as in the case of metaphors such as especie de cajón de sastre ‘kind of conglomeration,’ literally ‘kind of tailor’s box,’ a very appropriate metaphor in the context of a fashion show as in (6):

(6) El último día de Cibeles es desde hace algunas temporadas el más aburrido, un [sic] especie de cajón de sastre donde van a parar las propuestas más heterodoxas. [emphasis mine] (CREA, El Mundo, 30/09/1995) ‘The last day of the Cibeles fashion show has been the most boring one for a couple of seasons, a sort of conglomeration where the most heterodoxical suggestions end up.’

Such approximative conceptualisations which relate elements on one level of generalisation are cognitively more basic than the original vertical relation of subordination signalled by a taxonomic noun (cf. Mihatsch 2006, ch. 2). Children find it easier to understand and use cohyponymic relations than hyponymy (Klix 1984: 56); this also seems to be true for adults, as results of word association tests, slips of the tongue and errors made by aphasics suggest (Aitchison ³2003: 86–99, Leuninger 1986: 231f., 237, Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 248f.).

4.3 The emergence of approximating modifiers In everyday usage, many “sort of ”-expressions develop this new approximative function and then operate as modifiers of the following noun. In French we find three well established approximators in this domain: genre de, espèce de and sorte de (DHLF, Fleischman 1998; Rouget 1997). Type de can have an approximative reading, however, it is not well entrenched, as (7) shows. (Pissa ladière is a specialty from Southern France that resembles pizza, but is no subclass of pizza .

(7) ? La pissaladière est un type de pizza. ‘The pissaladière is a type of pizza’ (Mihatsch in press)

Classe de has not developed any approximative readings:

(8) *La pissaladière est une classe de pizza ‘*The pissaladière is a class of pizza’ (Mihatsch in press)

Approximative forme de seems to be restricted to abstract nouns. The following example is approximative, as the quotation marks indicating a loose interpretation suggest: . The judgments in examples (7) and (8) were given by Véronique Featherston.

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(9) Satisfaction au travail → une forme de “paiement” [emphasis mine] (Internet source, Champarnaud) ‘Satisfaction at work → a form of “payment”’

As in French, several taxonomic nouns have developed approximative uses in Italian. ZVI only mentions specie di. However, sorta di and tipo di can also be used approximatively. Approximative forma di appears with abstract nouns: (10) Non ho mai pensato alle canzoni come una forma di confessione, piuttosto assomigliano a sogni [emphasis mine] (Internet source, Massaroni 2003) ‘I have never thought of the songs as a form of confession, they rather resemble dreams’ Genere di and classe di only show the original taxonomic sense. In Portuguese, only espécie de has developed approximative readings according to lexicographical sources such as ADLP. However, género also shows approximative uses, although rather sporadically. In (11) the negation of the first proposition rules out a taxonomic reading of género in the second proposition: (11) Eu não sou um músico, sou um género de músico, a minha formação prende-se mais com o cinema e o audiovisual [. . .] [emphasis mine] (Internet source, Portugal, Margarida) ‘I am not a musician, I am sort of a musician, my education is rather linked with the cinema or the audiovisual media . . .’ Sorte de seems to have quite established approximative uses: (12) Esplêndido retrato do indomável Jim Morrison interpretado por Val Kilmer. Para muitos é uma sorte de Deus [. . .] (Internet source, DVDLX) [emphasis mine] ‘Great portrait of the indomitable Jim Morrison interpreted by Val Kilmer. For many he is a sort of god (. . .)’ Forma de, which again combines with abstract nouns, can express approximation. In (13) às vezes ‘sometimes’ and the modalising effect of sabe ser ‘can be’ renders a rigid taxonomic reading improbable, since taxonomies are stable inherent conceptual structures: (13) A pintura, às vezes, sabe ser uma forma de música: sugere, no fluxo imparável do acontecer, que a vida pode não acabar. [. . .] [emphasis mine] (Internet source, Instituto Camões) . Sarah Dessì Schmid, personal communication.

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‘Painting can sometimes be a form of music: it suggests, in the constant flux of events, that life can not end.’ In Spanish, similarly to Italian and Portuguese, only especie de is really established as an approximator according to most dictionaries (see MOL, for instance): (14) El dromedario es una especie de camello ‘The dromedary is a kind of camel’ [emphasis mine] (MOL, s.v. especie) Clase de is marginally approximative, tipo de is not according to Héctor Fernández (pers. communication, also see Mihatsch 2005: 278). However, even tipo de can be found in ambiguous utterances, so perhaps we are dealing with strategic uses in cases of spontaneous emergency classification: (15) El hecho de haber renunciado desde el primer momento de la Restauración a montar una un tipo de Corte o algo parecido de lo que fueron las tradiciones protocolarias de la Familia Real española. . . [emphasis mine] (CREA, Oral, La Corona y su imagen popular, Madrid, 09/05/91) ‘The fact that they renounced from the beginning of the Restauration to set up a a type of Parliament or something resembling the protocolary traditions of the Spanish Royal family . . .’ As in the other languages analysed so far approximative forma de is combined with abstract nouns. English approximators are well studied compared with those in Romance languages. Approximative kind of is already found in Shakespeare (OED), approximative sort of has been attested since 1703 (OED). Class and type do not seem to appear as approximators, form does sporadically with abstract nouns, in (16) quotation marks again exclude a strict taxonomic interpretation: (16) The Reverend Hawkes engaged in a high profile publicity stunt in January when he conducted a form of “marriage” between two same-sex couples. [emphasis mine] (Internet source: Real Women of Canada (2001)) In German only one approximative construction of this type is well entrenched according to WDW, namely Art. Again, Form can be found with abstract nouns. The use of form and its equivalents with abstract nouns probably goes back to its abstract meaning in theology where it is opposed to matter (OED, s.v. form). The categorisation of peripheral members triggering the reanalysis as approximators does not usually concern central basic-level nouns or nouns on higher levels of categorisation, but rather specific and abstract nouns. Therefore, taxonomic nouns on lower levels such as species are more likely to get pragmaticalised in this construction than higher levels such as class or genus, as the contrastive analysis has shown.

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These premodifiers may lose their status as nouns when the second noun becomes the head of the expression. Rouget (1997: 292–4) and Roché (1997: 71) show that in French this syntactic reanalysis surfaces in a number of agreement phenomena which indicate that the second noun can sometimes determine the congruence with the verb as well as gender and number of the whole noun phrase. The approximator sometimes even adopts number and gender of the following noun, just like other modifiers in French. Similar phenomena can be observed in English (Aijmer 2002: 176). Interestingly, in English the syntactic scope increases, so that the former taxonomic nouns can sometimes modify whole NPs, not just nouns (see Aijmer 2002: 176, Kay 1997: 145): (17) A mastodon is kind of an elephant (Kay 1997: 145) Thus, taxonomic nouns adopting approximative functions tend to give up all the syntactic properties of nouns, including the possibility to be modified by adjectives (see Franco 1998: 87 for Portuguese uma espécie de). Unlike grammaticalisation, further pragmaticalisation processes can lead to even greater syntactic flexibilisation. Sorta and kinda can modify very diverse constituent types (see Aijmer 2002: 182f.), including adjectives (see Tabor 1994 for the reanalysis of kind of and sort of as degree modifiers). The Romance and German premodifiers created this way are (still) restricted to nouns. The syntactically flexible particles French genre, Spanish and Portuguese tipo and Portuguese género go back to a different kind of source expression as will be shown in the next section.

5. From prepositional to modifying use Beside the pragmaticalisation process creating NP-premodifiers there is a second, different path of pragmaticalisation, although the outcome is quite similar to the approximative premodifiers. Here, the taxonomic nouns link two nouns – in (18) the first noun phrase fruits évolué(e)s ‘ripe fruits’ is specified by ranking it with the same implicit category as the following more specific nouns which designate particular kinds of fruits: (18) les arômes que ressort euh ce vin on sent euh des odeurs de cassis des odeurs euh de fruits évolué(e)s type euh griotte euh fruits confits [emphasis mine] (C–ORAL–ROM, fpubmn03) ‘the flavours this wine uh evokes one smells uh blackcurrant smells uh ripe fruit of the type uh sour cherry uh candied fruit’ The speaker construes an implicit superordinate by ranking a previously mentioned lexeme in the same unnamed superordinate category as the lexeme introduced by

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the taxonomic noun, thereby exemplifying, illustrating and specifying the first noun, which is more generic than the more specific noun introduced by the taxonomic noun (cf. Danon Boileau and Morel 1997: 196f.). The effect of this use is a narrowing of the reference of the first noun phrase. This type of expression can be paraphrased as “X belonging to same superordinate category as Y,” which of course means quite the same as “X resembling Y.” Since X and Y belong to the same superordinate, they are interpreted as cohyponyms. As mentioned in section 4, inclusion relations are cognitively more costly than similarity, so that these taxonomic nouns can be reanalysed as approximators meaning ‘like’ by taking a short cut and eliminating the classification via an implicit superordinate. Syntactically, these constructions are simplified versions of genitival expressions of the type ‘N de taxonomic noun de N.’ This genitival expression can show various degrees of syntactic simplification (omission of the prepositions and articles) (Danon-Boileau and Morel 1997: 194f.). According to Danon-Boileau and Morel (1997: 195), the lower the degree of planification is, the shorter the construction used. In French this structure seems to have emerged in the first half of the twentieth century (Rosier 2000: 209). In the analysed Romance languages these nouns as well as other types of nouns can thus become prepositions (Danon-Boileau ans Morel 1997; Fleischman and Yaguello 2004: 130) since they now lose their nominal status and serve to link two noun phrases. In French, type, genre, façon and style can be used as prepositions to introduce an example or an elaboration of a more generic noun (see also Danon-Boileau and Morel 1997: 199, Fleischman and Yaguello 2004: 134f., Rosier 2000: 210). These expressions can also be used when a speaker feels he or she lacks the appropriate word. In (19) the speaker looks for a more adequate expression designating semi-public companies and finally resorts to an example: (19) c’est dans des entreprises euh à moitié euh enfin pas vraiment privées des entreprises publiques genre SNCF euh [emphasis mine] (ELICOP, Corpus Tours, file faf01gb6.txt). ‘that is in the companies uh semi uh well not really private public companies like SNCF uh’

. A related task of taxonomic nouns in everyday language is that of establishing an implicit superordinate category by combining the taxonomic noun with deictic elements (sometimes with placeholders) pointing to a preceding subordinate as a typical member, thus construing an implicit superordinate. These expressions are typically used in list completer constructions such as and/or that sort of thing (Aijmer 2002: 211f.) and build up a more general, but not well defined category paraphrasable as ‘and/or things which belong to the same (unspecified) category as x’.

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In (20) un bon acteur ‘a good actor’ has to be explained, since what counts as a good actor is quite subjective. It is here specified by an example of a good actor: (20) lorsque je vois un film avec un bon acteur genre BOURVIL ou des comiques comme ça [emphasis mine] (ELICOP, Corpus Tours, file gra19as12.txt) ‘so when I see a film with a good actor like Bourvil or comedians like that’ Interestingly, in French we also observe an ellipsis of the linking noun (probably mode or manière) in constructions like à la, as in s’habiller à l’européenne (Grevisse and Goosse 131993: 1368) instead of an ellipsis of the preposition linking the first noun with the taxonomic noun. In Italian there is an equivalent construction with tipo and stile. The equivalent constructions in Portuguese are based on género, estilo and tipo. Franco (1998: 90) observes that this use of tipo does not appear in dictionaries since it may be too recent and is restricted to spoken Portuguese (also see Bittencourt 2000: 264). In (21) a very generic expression meaning ‘that thing’ is specified: (21) Para ires para o Jornal de Notícias, vais por aquela coisa tipo ponte [. . .] (Franco 1998: 89) ‘In order to go to the Jornal de Notícias go past that bridge-like thing’ Spanish has equivalent constructions based on tipo and estilo. No such prepositional construction seems to exist for Spanish género. However, now and then one comes across the full, not yet conventionalised, construction: (22) ¿Había algo de irónico, por ejemplo, en el hecho de que W llamase a V Fuerza Ciega Caída Sobre Sí Misma, un nombre del género de Donde Empieza la Respiración o de Oscura Narración de los Tiempos, los nombres que daba V a los personajes de su obra en proyecto? [emphasis mine] (CREA, Goytisolo (1984): Estela del fuego que se aleja) ‘Was there something ironic for instance in the fact that W called V Blind Force Acting Onto Itself, a name of the type Where does Breathing Begin or of Dark Narration of the Times, names that V gave the figures of his work in progress?’ In English and German this type of exemplifying and approximative construction does not exist. Instead we find the adjectivising suffixes -style, -type as well as -like (OED s.v. -like -style and -type) in English. Interestingly, different subsets of nouns from the ones that appear in the premodifier constructions presented in section 4 are conventionalised as prepositional elements. The well-entrenched French approximative premodifier espèce de (also see Danon-Boileau and Morel 1997: 193) and its cognates do not develop prepos-

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itional uses, instead non-taxonomic nouns meaning ‘manner, style’ as well as equivalents of genus appear in the prepositional function. French prepositional approximators are type, genre, façon and style, Portuguese género, estilo and tipo, Spanish tipo and estilo and Italian tipo and stile. The source lexemes thus do not completely match those directly entrenched as premodifiers. This path of pragmaticalisation shows a clear preference for the more general taxonomic nouns meaning ‘genus’ rather than ‘species’ since here the aim of the original strategy is not to explain a peripheral specific noun by ranging it under a superordinate, but on the contrary to specify more general nouns by showing that they belong to the same implicit superordinate as another noun. Generally, on the higher taxonomic levels there is a strong tendency toward implicit concepts, and lexemes are often lacking at the superordinate level (Mihatsch 2006: ch. 3). Just like some premodifying approximators discussed above, some of these exemplifying or approximative prepositions can, in the course of conventionalisation, also link other types of constituents, even whole clauses, and become subordinating conjunctions (also see Rosier 2000: 211): (23) Elle fait une tête, genre tout le monde devrait être à ses pieds. (Yaguello 1998: 18) ‘She makes a face like everybody should be at her feet’ Again, the first constituent is specified (via exemplification) by the second constituent (Rosier 2000: 212, 216). From exemplification there is only a small step to another new function, that of a quotative (Bittencourt 2000: 265, Danon-Boileau and Morel 1997: 199, Fleischman and Yaguello 2004: 135–8, Rosier 2000). The first constituent is then left out. The full version would be ‘say something of the type X.’ This quotative typically introduces approximative, exemplary or imaginary quotes: (24) A: au lieu de lui dire euh genre tu me manques toi en tant que personne plus ou moins il lui a fait comprendre que elle lui manquait B: au niveau sexe [emphasis mine] (C–ORAL–ROM, ffamcv11, arranged by W.M.) ‘A: Instead of telling her like I miss you as a person he more or less let her know that he missed her B: on the sexual level’ If they are further entrenched, some of these constructions, such as the one based on Brazilian Portuguese tipo (assim) que, can eventually introduce any kind of sentence and just establish textual cohesion (Bittencourt 2000: 268) – certainly via the explicative function, which is then weakened as in (25):

The construction of vagueness 239

(25) Pediram para eu falar sobre minha infância. Para mim foi uma fase muito difícil. Tipo assim que me marcou para o resto da vida. (Bittencourt 2000: 267) ‘They asked me to talk about my childhood. For me that was a very difficult phase. Like it marked me for the rest of my life.’ According to Bittencourt (2000: 264) and DHLF (s.v. genre), such constructions with Portuguese tipo or French genre are quite recent. If the first constituent corresponds to an indefinite pronoun and is left out the construction can also become a premodifying approximator. The illustrative function then almost fades away and is reanalysed as a pure case of approximation. Exemplification always has an approximative flavour, since giving an example implies that there are roughly similar alternative examples. Again, this is a case where part of a scenario (in this case the scenario is that of illustration and exemplification) is inferred, namely the existence of alternatives, and linked with this aspect of the scenario, the loose interpretation of the element modified by the former prepositions, as with Portuguese tipo and género: (26) acho que havia tipo sessenta pessoas a ver o concerto [emphasis mine] (C– ORAL–ROM, pfamcv05) ‘I think there were like sixty people at the concert’ (27) e aquilo era género uma conspiração porque ali havia pessoas candidatos candidatos à junta candidatos à à câmara municipal do Fundão [emphasis mine] (C–ORAL–ROM, pfammn16) ‘That was sort of a conspiration because there were people . . . candidates candidates of the local government candidates of the district council of the Fundão’ The same construction exists with Spanish tipo. This construction, although now clearly premodifying and no longer prepositional, has a different history from the modifying expressions analysed in part 4. One argument in favour of a different path of pragmaticalisation is the observation that taxonomic and other nouns going through a prepositional stage are not followed by a preposition meaning ‘of ’ like the French premodifier construction une espèce de or English kinda and sorta. The constructions without de go back to a prepositional antecedent. The other argument is the different choice of lexemes of the two types of source constructions. In Québecois French we also find postposed genre and style with an approximative or exemplifying value, which Dostie (1995: 247f.) explains in analogy to the position of similar markers like presque ‘almost’ or par exemple ‘for example.’

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(28) A: Qu’est-ce que vous aviez à faire comme travail? B: Ben, i fallait faire des réparations genre [emphasis mine] (Dostie 1995: 247) ‘A: What kind of work did you have to do? B: Well, I had to do like repairs.’ However, the set of source nouns again clearly points to prepositional origins. Sporadically, analogous constructions are also found in European French: (29) A: chanson française euh style quoi parce que B: avec eux c’est c’est pas évident A: c’est large hein c’est la chanson française hein [emphasis mine] (C– ORAL–ROM, ffamdl16) ‘A: French chanson uh sort of because B: with them it is not obvious. A: It is a wide field, French chansons’ These postmodifying uses must be derived from the prepositional use, since premodifying approximators such as espèce de cannot appear in this position. Here, the postposed taxonomic nouns probably indicate that the speaker realizes quite late that a specification should follow (but does not), since the postmodified noun is too vague, possibly a case of self-repair, since quoi (originally ‘what’) often marks self-corrections (Hölker 1984: 55).

5. Conclusion This study discusses two paths of pragmaticalisation of approximation markers emerging on the basis of taxonomic nouns in some Romance and Germanic languages. All the analysed equivalents of kind and sort seem to have the potential to develop approximative functions which become part of the conventional meaning of some of these elements. The contrastive analysis reveals two sources in Romance languages based on different strategies of meaning construction. The premodifying approximation markers have to be distinguished from prepositional and subsequent pre- or postmodifying approximation markers. In Table 2, premodifiers are in capitals, less established premodifiers in italics, and prepositional approximators, bold. A significant starting point for the emergence of approximative premodifiers is the use of taxonomic nouns for the classification or definition of marginal specific nouns in everyday usage. Reanalysis can then produce approximative readings. Rather specific taxonomic nouns, mostly those meaning ‘species,’ are pragmaticalised

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Table 2. The polygenesis of approximation markers English

French

German

Italian

Portuguese

Spanish

class kind kind sort type form

classe genre espèce sorte type forme

Klasse Gattung art Sorte Typ Form

classe genere specie sorta tipo forma

classe género espécie sorte tipo forma

clase género especie – tipo forma

in this function since the aim of the source expression is to categorise specific nouns. The entrenchment of this use for the classification of marginal categories is also manifest in incipient grammaticalisation processes producing expressive negative and free-choice indefinite pronouns reinforced by taxonomic nouns. These taxonomic nouns function as scalar endpoints as a consequence of their specialisation in the classification of marginal subcategories. The second path sets out from a different communication strategy which construes an implicit superordinate on the basis of the specific noun following the taxonomic noun, thereby illustrating or specifying the more general noun the taxonomic noun postmodifies. If speakers reanalyse the strategy and set up a short cut, the first noun is defined as an approximation of the second noun, and the taxonomic noun then becomes a prepositional element. Since more general nouns are specified here, more general taxonomic nouns tend to be employed and we find equivalents of genus rather than species, as the comparative analysis in table 2 shows. If the first noun is left implicit, these prepositional elements can become premodifiers and thus converge with the premodifiers based on nouns designating ‘species.’ In both cases speakers first use such expressions to cover up imprecise categorisation by pretending neat taxonomic classifications. The emerging functions originate in implicatures suggesting loose talk, which, in the course of conventionalisation, can become part of the semantics of these markers.

References Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Aitchison, Jean. ³2003. Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Oxford: Blackwell. Bittencourt, Vanda de Oliveira. 2000. Tipo (Assim) como Delimitador de ‘Unidades de Informação’. Estudos Lingüísticos 29: 264–69. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions [Topics in English linguistics 19]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. 1998. Politeness: Introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Asa Kasher (ed.), 488–554. London: Routledge. Channell, Joanna. 1994. Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danon-Boileau, Laurent and Morel, Mary-Annick. 1997. Question, point de vue, genre, style. . .: Les noms prépositionnels en français contemporain. Faits de Langues 9: 193–200. Detges, Ulrich and Waltereit, Richard. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semanticpragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21(2):151–95. Dostie, Gaétane. 1995. Comme, genre et style postposés en français du Québec: Une étude sémantique. Linguisticae Investigationes XIX (2): 247–63. Dostie, Gaétane. 2004. Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs: analyse sémantique et traitement lexicographique. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck/Duculot. Erman, Britt and Kotsinas, Ulla Britt. 1993. Pragmaticalization: the case of ba’ and you know. Studier i Modern Språkvetenskap 10: 76–93. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6: 353–75. Fleischman, Suzanne. 1998. Des jumeaux du discours: Genre et like. La linguistique 34(2): 31– 47. Fleischman, Suzanne and Yaguello, Marina. 2004. Discourse markers across languages? Evidence from English and French. In Discourse Analysis Across Languages and Cultures, Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic (eds), 129–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Franco, António. 1998. ‘Uma Espécie (de)’ nem sempre é uma espécie. Marcadores de gradação variável e os dicionários. In Lexicografías iberorrománicas: Problemas, propuestas y proyectos, María Teresa Fuentes Morán and Reinhold Werner (eds), 81–95. Frankfurt: VervuertIberoamericana. Frank-Job, Barbara. 2006. A dynamic-interactional approach to discourse markers. In Approaches to Discourse Markers [Studies in Pragmatics 1], Kerstin Fischer (ed.), 395–413. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gingras, Yves, Keating, Peter and Limoges, Camille. 2000. Du scribe au savant: Les porteurs du savoir de l’Antiquité à la révolution industrielle [Science, histoire et société]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Grevisse, Maurice and Goosse, André. 131993. Le Bon Usage: Grammaire française. Paris, Louvain-La-Neuve: Duculot. Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite Pronouns [Oxford studies in typology and linguistic theory]. Oxford: Clarendon. Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37: 1043–1068. He, Ziran. 2002. Notes on Pragmatics. Guangzhou: Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Hölker, Klaus. 1984. Quoi als diskursorganisierende Partikel im gesprochenen Französisch. Linguistische Berichte 92: 46–59. Kay, Paul. 1997. Words and the Grammar of Context [CSLI lecture notes 40]. Stanford CA: CSLI. Klix, Friedhart. 1984. Über Wissensrepräsentation im menschlichen Gedächtnis. In Gedächtnis, Wissen, Wissensnutzung, Friedhart Klix (ed.), 9–73. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. Klix, Friedhart. 1993. Erwachendes Denken: geistige Leistungen aus evolutionspsychologischer Sicht. Heidelberg: Spektrum.

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Lakoff, George. 1972. Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. In Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 1972: 183–228 (Reprinted in: Journal of Philosophical Logic. 1973, 2(4): 458–508). Leuninger, Helen. 1986. Mentales Lexikon, Basiskonzepte, Wahrnehmungsalternativen: Neuround psycholinguistische Überlegungen. Linguistische Berichte 103: 224–51. Mihatsch, Wiltrud. 2005. Desterminologización y cambio semántico. In Lingüística en el texto – contribuciones de Argentina y Alemania [Neue Romania 32], Guiomar Ciapuscio, Konstanze Jungbluth and Dorothee Kaiser (eds), 263–85. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. Mihatsch, Wiltrud. 2006. Kognitive Grundlagen lexikalischer Hierarchien untersucht am Beispiel des Französischen und Spanischen [Linguistische Arbeiten 506]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Mihatsch, Wiltrud. In press. La influencia de los lenguajes especializados en las lenguas románicas y germánicas – dos tipos de pragmaticalización. In Lenguas en contacto en una Europa multilingüe, María Antonia Martín Zorraquino (eds). Miller, George A. and Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 1976. Language and Perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt. 1998. The Function of Discourse Particles: A Study with Special Reference to Spoken Standard French [Pragmatics & Beyond NS 53]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda L. 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Thornburg, Linda L. 2004. The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. Metaphorik.de 6 :91–116 (http://www.metaphorik.de). Radden, Günter and Kövecses, Zoltán. 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In Metonymy in Language and Thought [Human Cognitive Processing 4], Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds), 17–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Roché, Michel. 1997. La variation non flexionnelle du genre des noms. Diachronie, diatopie, diastratie [Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes]. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse II Le Mirail. Roelcke, Thorsten. 1999. Fachsprachen [Grundlagen der Germanistik 37]. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Rosch, Eleanor et al. 1976. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8: 382–439. Rosier, Laurence. 2000. Les petits «rapporteurs» de discours. Travaux linguistique du Cerlico 13: 209–29. Rouget, Christine. 1997. Espèce de, genre de, sorte de: Approximatifs ou sous-catégorisateurs? In Psychomécanique du langage. Problèmes et perspectives. Actes du 7e Colloque International de Psychomécanique du langage (Cordoue, 2−4 juin 1994) [Champion varia 11], Paulo de Carvalho and Olivier Soutet (eds), 289–98. Paris: Champion. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1991. Loose talk. In Pragmatics: A Reader, Steven Davis (ed.), 540–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Störig, Hans Joachim. 31965. Kleine Weltgeschichte der Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Tabor, Whitney. 1994. The gradual development of degree modifier sort of and kind of. In Proceedings of the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Katharine Beals et al. (eds), 451–65. Chicago IL: CLS. Waltereit, Richard. 2002. Imperatives, interruption in conversation, and the rise of discourse markers: A study of Italian guarda. Linguistics 40: 987–1010. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1985. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma. Yaguello, Marina. 1998. Petits faits de langue. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

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Dictionaries, corpora, and internet sources ADLP = Buarque de Holanda Ferreira, Aurélio. 31999. Novo Aurélio Século XXI: o dicionário da língua portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. BTMF = ATILF: Base textuelle du Moyen Français Champarnaud, Luc: «Revenu psychique» C–ORAL–ROM = Cresti, Emanuela and Moneglia, Massimo (eds) 2005. C–ORAL–ROM: integrated reference corpora for spoken Romance languages [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 15]. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. CORDE = Real Academia Española: Corpus Diacrónico del Español . CORIS = CORpus di Italiano Scritto, Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of Bologna University, CILTA . CREA = Real Academia Española: Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual . DCECH = Corominas, Joan and José A. Pascual. 1980−1991. Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico [Biblioteca románica hispánica. 5. Diccionarios. 7]. 6 vols. Madrid: Gredos. DCLIC = Coromines, Joan. 1980−1991. Diccionari etimológic i complementari de la llengua catalana. 9 vols. Barcelona: Curial. DHLF = Rey, Alain. (ed.) ²1998. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. 3 vols. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert. DLAF = Greimas, Algirdas Julien. ²1992. Dictionnaire de l’ancien français. Le Moyen Âge. Paris: Larousse. DVDLX: Doors – O mito de uma geração , page consulted 29/12/2005. ELICOP = Brosens, Veerle et al. 1997−2000. Etude linguistique de la communication parlée. Katolieke Universiteit Leuven . Eutraco: L’Homéopathie: , page consulted 29/12/2005. EWD = Kluge, Friedrich. 231999. Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Elmar Seebold (ed.). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. FEW = Wartburg, Walther von. 1922−. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 25 vols. Otto Jänicke (1972−1987) and Carl Theodor Gossen (1979−1983) (eds). Basel et al.: Zbinden et al. GDW = Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. 1854−1893. Deutsches Wörterbuch. 16 vols. Leipzig: Hirzel. Instituto Camões: Malangatana, de Matalana a Matalana , page consulted 29/12/2005. Massaroni, Andrea. 2003. La morte di Elliott Smith. La Differenza , page consulted 29/12/2005. MOL = Moliner, María. ²1998. Diccionario de uso del español. 2 vols. Madrid: Gredos.

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OED = Simpson, John and Weiner, Edmund (eds) ²1989. The Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press . Portugal, Margarida. “Vitor Joaquim, compositor do aleatório.” Magazine, Centro Cultural de Belém , page consulted 29/12/2005. Real women of Canada 2001. Newsletter March/April , page consulted 29/12/2005. WDW = Wahrig, Gerhard. 72000. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Renate Wahrig-Burfeind (ed.). Gütersloh, München: Bertelsmann. ZVI = Zingarelli, Nicola. 121999. Lo Zingarelli. Vocabolario della lingua italiana. Miro Dogliotti and Luigi Rosiello (eds). Bologna: Zanichelli.

chapter 12

Communication or memory mismatch? Towards a cognitive typology of questions* Wolfgang Schulze University of Munich

Questions are traditionally interpreted as a universal strategy in human language that invites the addressee to share his/her knowledge with the speaker. Hence, questions are seen as a basic property of human communication. However, from a cognitive point of view, it may be asked whether questions (together with their constructional representations) reflect a specific state of cognition, conceptualized in terms of interrogativity. Referring to the framework of Radical Experientialism (Cognitive Typology in linguistic terms), I will propose a model of interrogativity that concentrates on the meaning of questions as such. It will be argued that interrogativity is the immediate reflex of a memory mismatch that may occur when processing outer world stimuli. Its most prototypical (and embodied) expression is that of pitch variation, frequently accompanied by secondary mismatch echoes that can be grammaticalized as question morphemes, particles, tags and so on. The communicative value of questions is viewed as a secondary cognitive hypothesis on mismatch mapping strategies in an interindividual setting. Keywords: Cognitive typology, communication, interrogativity, meaning construction of questions, memory mismatch, questions, Radical Experientialism, semantic vagueness

1. Introduction 1.1 On questions A seemingly valid language universal is reflected within the hypothesis that every language knows strategies to encode what is usually called a question. These strategies can be either formal (that is represented by articulated substance) or structural/constructional (that is encoded with the help of structural variation). In add * I want to thank the participants of a lecture on Interrogativity (University of Munich, Winter Term 2003–4) for their valuable contributions when discussing issues of Cognitive Typology with respect to interrogativity. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers of the present chapter, who helped me a lot to render the text more readable. Finally, I want to whole-heartedly thank Kerstin Kazzazi who undertook the arduous job of correcting my English.

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ition, suprasegmental aspects are often coupled with other strategies or are the sole means to mark an utterance for interrogative properties. Finally, interrogative properties may become apparent from emergent factors only, such as the strong coupling of the first person with assertions and of the second person with modal features, among them interrogativity. In sum, interrogative strategies superficially show a relatively high degree of variation from a cross-linguistic perspective. This observation holds even more strongly if we extend the phenomenology to answers, which themselves are often shaped the way they are because of their nature as utterances within the question-answer frame (see for instance Hintikka 1978; Meyer 1988; Graesser 1994; Ginzburg 2002). Traditionally, question strategies are subcategorized for their semantic/pragmatic contents. Here, multiple types are described, the most important of which is the traditional distinction between polar (yes/no) questions and constituent questions (König and Siemund 2006). Such categorizations tend to be related to the pragmatics of illocutionary force (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and indirect speech acts (Grice 1975), and their common denominator is the hypothesis that questions are derived from propositions, often with the help of overt means, the so-called illocutionary force indicating devices. Crucially, a great degree of attention has been paid to the fact that there doesn’t seem to exist a clear-cut boundary between semantic strategies and their formal expression. It is a well-known hypothesis that superficially interrogative structures or constructions can be used to indicate non-interrogative utterances, just as superficially non-interrogative structures or constructions may function as questions.

1.2 Questions and Cognitive Linguistics In sum, we are left with the impression that questions (or, more precisely, the meaning construction of questions) are rather heterogeneous with respect to both form and function/semantics. The descriptions of this heterogeneity, however, go against standard assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics, as they claim that much of what shows up in language as variations in form or function goes back to a single cognitive strategy. This strategy may then develop variants in terms of allo-structures, metaphorization, or polysemy. In this sense, we can ask, how ‘meaning’ emerges in question constructions and what causes the heterogeneity just mentioned. As stated above, questions are usually defined in the context of their illocutionary force directed towards a hearer. For example, Bussmann (1996: 258) describes questions as a “class of sentences, in which the hearer is requested to give information about something.” Hence, questions are seen as being embedded into the broader frame of communication. In order to match the definition given above, communication has to be described in terms of a more or less co-operative strategy

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to exchange information. In an optimistic reading, this would mean that questions serve to address a hearer as an authority of knowledge who is invited to share this knowledge with the speaker. A pessimistic reading, however, does not start from the hearer, but from the cognitive state of the ‘Self,’ which is spoken out into the outer world and which expresses the cognitive need of the ‘Self.’ The linguistics of questions would then reflect variations in the cognitive state of the speaker rather than a strategy to open a hearer’s knowledge base to the speaker (see below). Many approaches to Cognitive Linguistics subscribe to the claim that language takes place in and is processed by individual cognition (see Schulze 1998 for details). Accordingly, language-based communication is interpreted as an epiphenomenon of cognition interacting with its environment. Likewise, Cognitive Linguistics explains linguistic structures in terms of underlying cognitive procedures, whatever their nature may be. In this sense, it seems plausible to start from a pessimistic model of communication, which interprets the Griceian co-operative conversational implicatures (Grice 1975; Keenan 1976) as a secondary collective hypothesis entrenched in cognition in order to ‘make sense’ of its internal processes (Schulze 1998; see below).

1.3 Meaning-constructions and the ‘meaning’ of question constructions An important issue in Cognitive Linguistics is also the reconstruction of the conceptual layer of a given linguistic strategy. Here, I start from the following hypothesis, as uttered by Evans (n.d., p.2): [M]eaning-construction appears to proceed by virtue of the ‘meaning’ associated with a given word being ‘calculated’ once the meaning of the entire utterance has been established. That is, individual word ‘meaning’ is determined by utterance meaning rather the other way round. From this perspective, meaning-construction involves first determining the meaning of the whole before the contribution of the parts can be established.

In the given context, this means that the semantics of question constructions determines the semantics of so-called question words or morphology-based representations of questions. However, this view necessitates a re-definition of lexicality itself: Accordingly, lexical items do not represent conceptual entities as such, but always have the value of utterances that represent – in their most basic form – a relationally attributed deictic construction. Hence, a question word like who does not represent a semantic concept of ‘whoness,’ but an entrenched strategy to deictically refer to a cognitive state of uncertainty, coupled with an hypothesis about agentivity, subjecthood etc. From a more linguistic point of view, we may claim that who represents an expression of uncertainty regarding the referential value that is attributed to the relational case Subjective or Agentive. Accordingly, we have to assume that the meaning-construction of question terms or of morphological means to encode questions

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depends on the construction-based semantics of interrogativity. In order to come closer to the underlying question constructions (in terms of utterance-meaning), we should ask, how questions themselves are conceptualized as ‘utterance-meanings’ (Evans (n.d.)) in cognition. A standard method of reconstruction would be to search for the etymological background of terms denoting the concepts of or or to look at the metaphorical potential of terms used to denote these concepts. A superficial look at terms for and in merely a few languages illustrates that there is hardly a common strategy to be found to formulate the underlying concepts; compare English ask < IE *ais- ‘wish, want, look for,’ German fragen < IE *preḱ- ‘inquire, follow a trace(?),’ Latin questio ‘complaint’ < *ḱu̯ es- ‘to sigh,’ Latin rogāre < ‘direct oneself to someone,’ Latin dēmandāre < ‘put into the hands of someone,’ Old Norse spyrja ‘to trace,’ Lithuanian klausti < ‘will hear,’ Croatian pitati < ‘attempt to know,’ Udi (East Caucasian) xabar-aq’sun ‘take news’ (a typical Northern Oriental calque) etc. Thus, it isn’t coincidental that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage project does not list the concept of < question> among its primitives. Like many other types of linguistic analysis, Cognitive Linguistics has the option to start either from an onomasiological perspective (basing the analysis on socalled cognitive categories) or from a semasiological perspective (basing the analysis on the formal inventory of a language). It becomes clear that interrogativity itself should be related to the cognitive domain: If we take this perspective we may ask how a language reacts to the cognitive need to articulate an interrogative state. Questions, on the other hand, seem to be a linguistic phenomenon rather than a purely cognitive one. Hence, we arrive at the following relation:

Cognitive (Function) Linguistic (Form) (1) Domain: Approach: Onomasiological Semasiological Phenomenon: Interrogativity Question

Space does not permit the elaboration of this scheme in all its details. Nevertheless, it is important to note that both domains can (and normally do) exhibit a considerable degree of variation. Hence, a linguistic form may encode multiple conceptual entities just as a cognitive domain may be expressed by a set of varying forms. In my chapter, I take a basically onomasiological perspective, claiming that both linguistic and conceptual variation ultimately derive from a superficially simple cognitive strategy that has to do with memory mismatch (see below). Still, it is beyond question that both cognitive and linguistic variants entail shifts in the semantics of this basic strategy, which, however, cannot be elaborated here in more detail (see Schulze in press b for further arguments). In order to retrieve the original meaning of the interrogativity concept (frequently alluded to in terms of questions) it is indispensible to look at those linguistic

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 251

means that are used to frame questions and to retrieve their original meaning from the corresponding lexical source. For instance, there seems to exist an intimate relation between wh-terms and lexemes used to express uncertainty or vagueness in the broadest sense (note that this relation does not necessarily suggest a grammaticalization path ‘interrogative’ > indefinite pronoun, as proposed e.g. by Heine and Kuteva 2002: 250–1; see below). Likewise, there is a strong affinity between interrogative strategies and strategies of phrasal subordination (often via relativization). In addition, Diessel (2003) has observed a paradigmatic affinity between wh-terms and demonstratives. A closer look at all these parameters may help to better understand interrogativity in terms of Cognitive Linguistics. In my chapter, I will propose a reduction of interrogative strategies that relates the formal and functional apparatus of language to Radical Experientialism (see Lakoff 1987; Schulze 1998, 2001, in press a) and Cognitive Typology. In a first step, Section 2 will briefly present the underlying framework to the extent that is relevant for the current analysis ). Section 3 will give a rather condensed typology of interrogative strategies together with some comments on the relevant grammaticalization paths. In Section 4, I will turn to the cognitive foundations of questions as they become apparent from Radical Experientialism and relate the results to a corresponding interpretation in terms of Cognitive Typology. Section 5 gives a brief summary of the approach presented in this chapter.

2. Radical Experientialism and Cognitive Typology Radical Experientialism is a framework that is related to Constructivism in its broader sense. It serves as a model to describe the interaction of cognition and environment, claiming that any cognitive process results from and is shaped by techniques of experiencing outer world or cognition-internal stimuli (WS) and mirrored in terms of more or less analogous cognitive ‘images’ (ws, see Schulze in press b for details). These images, contorted by the mirroring process, are linked to memory segments (ws µ) that become actualized (ws α) in combination with the mirroring process. Most importantly, Radical Experientialism claims that the mirroring process (based on cognitive imitation) involves some kind of pattern recognition termed dihairesis (Greek διαιρέω ‘separate, distinguish, decide,’ ‘interpret’ (when used as a middle verb); see Schulze in press b). Dihairesis takes place within a broader range of schematic procedures which are both pre-linguistic and linguistic (as far as the cognitive process is based on language communication). For this chapter, it will suffice to concentrate on two aspects of dihairesis, namely memory and linearization. Any (contorted) construction of a WS is memory-based and memoryinduced: The construing reaction to a given world stimulus is coupled with an ac-

252 Wolfgang Schulze

tivation of stored analogies of this world stimulus (experiential reduction). In other words, new experience is always processed in terms of patterns emerging from old knowledge (the so-called Menōn paradoxon). The figure in (2) helps to illustrate this point (µ = memory stored (habitualized) patterns / α = actualization).

(2) WS

⇒

—— α WS —— µ WS

This graphic reads as follows: An outer world stimulus (WS) activates a more or less analogous memory segment (ws µ). The fact that the world stimulus differs from the activated memory representation with respect to its actuality leads to the inflation of the activated memory segment, resulting in the actualization of (ws µ) (> (ws α)). The triangles are used to symbolize the fractal-like inflation process (see Schulze (in press b) for details). This type of µ/α-mapping corresponds to cognition-internal mirroring techniques. Accordingly, a world stimulus initiates a doubled mirroring process (the mirroring level is symbolized with the help of the shaded arc):

—— α WS

(3) WS

—— µ WS

The first process invokes the mapping of an outer world stimulus onto a cognitive image which is stored in a memory segment (ws µ). The activated memory segment then serves as a cognition-internal stimulus that is again mirrored with respect to the given, actual state of cognition (µ/α-mapping). It is important to note that µ/αmapping does not always take place in terms of the same cognitive effort. Rather, we have to assume that the mapping process is dynamic: It ranges from the immediate activation of μ (short μ/α-distance) to variants of strongly protracted activation (long μ/α-distance) and to a partial or total mismatch. In this chapter, I claim that interrogation strategies reflect an overstretched μ/a-distance or some kind of μ/α-mismatch (see below), whereas (strong) assertions result from a very short µ/αdistance (the mapping of an actual world stimulus onto the corresponding memory segment is successful). Linearization, on the other hand, is a linguistic type of contortion and dihairesis that results from the need to transform a more or less three-dimensional input into a (finally articulated) sequence of segments isolated from the input. Note that here we

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 253

have to speak of stimuli which are not preformatted as linguistic structures: These already include the process of linearization, which in fact directs how the cognition reacts to this linguistic stimulus (the so-called attention flow, see Schulze 2004 for details). The linearization of an outer world stimulus determines that a number of basic schematic processes such as Figure-Ground discrimination, motion, and relations between isolated, time-stable segments (referents) produce more or less isolated constituents. These constituents are processed in analogy with the general μ/αmapping and can hence initiate those mapping types mentioned above. It becomes clear that Radical Experientialism is a framework that is strongly oriented towards reductionism, although it also implies the notion of ‘multiple realizations’ (Fodor 1974). Accordingly, linguistic variation is seen as a reflex of both cognitive variation and the multiple realization of a single cognitive event. Cognitive Typology – the ‘linguistic version’ of Radical Experientialism – claims that even though linguistic meaning is ultimately reducible to very simple, universal patterns and procedures of experience, the multiple mirroring processes, different types of entrenchment and categorization etc. may produce variants in the conceptualization of the reactional type that becomes active during the processing of a world stimulus. In addition, Cognitive Typology acknowledges that much of what is stored as linguistic knowledge in the individual is no longer motivated synchronically, but only diachronically. In other words, the cognitive motivation of linguistic structures and constructions (together with their forms) have often to be described with the help of a projection of diachronic findings onto a corresponding synchrony. This projection guarantees that Cognitive Typology does not reconstruct a synchronic cognitive motivation per se. Rather, it incorporates the findings of language typology from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective in order to avoid explanatory short-cuts, just as it accepts that cognitive routines may acquire a secondary semantic layer stemming from the re-interpretation of cognitive events in terms of a collective hypothesis among individuals sharing the same linguistic experience (see Schulze 1998).

3. Questions 3.1 The construction of interrogativity After having briefly outlined some of the basic aspects of Radical Experientialism and Cognitive Typology, I will present in this section an admittedly condensed overview of the degree of linguistic variation found in the construction of questions. Space does not allow me to exemplify in detail each of the relevant parameters and types (see Siemund 2001 and König and Siemund 2007 for much more

254 Wolfgang Schulze

detailed overviews). In addition, I do not aim at a full coverage of linguistic variation, which should be based on an extensive corpus analysis of a greater sample of languages. Instead, I concentrate on those parameters that provide information about the basic aspects of interrogativity in cognitive terms. The reader should also recall that I do not refer to logic-based approaches to the phenomenon of questions, just as I do not consider purely semantic classifications or analyses based on Syntax Theory (see the references for some relevant sources). I define interrogativity as any type of phonological, morphological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, constructional, or prosodic procedure of construing an utterance that reacts upon a specific memory state of an individual when processing an outer or inner world stimulus. This specific state is marked for a μ/α-mismatch, the articulation of which is processed by another individual or by the individual himself as a stimulus that initiates the imitation of the μ/α-mapping as articulated in the question. Still, it has to be stressed that this definition does not mean that an interrogative construction can only be defined by referring to the question/answer cluster. Rather, I maintain that interrogative constructions have their proper, autonomous meaning whether or not they are actually embedded into a real or fictitious conversational situation. The main point is that the individual whose cognition processes a memory mismatch in terms of a question construes the potential reactional type of a hearer as a part of her reaction to a world stimulus (see below). Before turning to the different types of interrogative constructions, it is important to note that – in many languages – there are alternative strategies which may be processed by a hearer as a question even though the speaker does not mark them in the corresponding, entrenched way. These alternatives include among others negation (e.g.: S1: Mary is not coming! S2: No! She WILL come!) and imperatives with speech act verbs (e.g. Tell me the way to the office!). In addition, a negative exclamation (such as no!) often indicates that the hearer has interpreted the assertion of a speaker as a question rather than as a statement. It may be hypothesized that any assertion uttered by a speaker in conversation entails features of interrogativity; it is up to the hearer to mirror a speaker’s assertion in his/her cognition in terms of a more or less parallel μ/α-distance. In other words, interrogativity is nothing more than a mode used to mark a special state of the μ/α-matching process, just as it is . The present analysis is based (among others) on a detailed, in parts corpus-based study of interrogative constructions in the following languages: Abkhaz (West Caucasian), Arabic, Basque, Breton, Caucasian Albanian (Old Udi), Chechen (East Caucasian), Chinese, Coptic (Afroasiatic), English, Georgian (South Caucasian), Indo-European (as a reconstruct), German, K’ichee’ (Maya), Kayardild (Australian), Kilmeri (Papua), Korean, Latin, Nahuatl, Navajo, Northern Talyshī (Northwest Iranian), Québécois-French, Russian, Suahili, Turkish, Tzotzil (Maya), Udi (East Caucasian), Udihe (Tungus), Yimas (Papua). Note that I do not intend to set up a motivated cross-linguistic sample.

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 255

true for assertions. As far as I know, such alternative question strategies have rarely been monitored in the relevant literature, and I will not refer to them in the subsequent sections.

3.2 A rudimentary typology of question constructions There are just a few studies on interrogative constructions from a typological (crosslinguistic) point of view (e.g. Dik 1997; Siemund 2001; König and Siemund 2007). Nevertheless, there seems to exist some kind of common ground in presenting the basic typological parameters of this constructional type. Accordingly, standard questions are usually divided into two basic types: polar questions (or yes/no-questions, e.g. Hudson 1975) and constituent questions (e.g. Enghahl 1986). I assume that both types are truth-related (or memory-based): A polar question addresses the givenness of a complex world stimulus (or utterance, if the stimulus is a linguistic one), whereas a constituent question reacts upon the question of ‘givenness’ with respect to a specific part of the world stimulus (processed in terms of the abovementioned dihairesis). From a formal point of view, polar questions are usually parameterized with the help of one or more of the following features: question particles, interrogative verb morphology, interrogative word order, absence of declarative morphology, intonation, and tags (see for instance Siemund 2001; König and Siemund 2006; Haspelmath et al. 2005: 470). In addition, superficially pronominal wh-words can occasionally occur in polar questions, as in German:

du wen ge-sehen? (4) Hast have:pres:2sg you:sg who:acc perf-see:part:perf ‘Did you see someone?’

Below I will argue that here we are not dealing with an interrogative function of the term wer ‘who,’ but with its underlying semantic notion of ‘indefiniteness’ (‘anybody’). In the majority of the world’s languages, pure question particles are placed either at the beginning or at the end of a polar question (Haspelmath et al. 2005: 374). There is evidence that one of the sources of polar question markers is ‘negation’ (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 216), another one may be the concept of stemming from the tag construction ‘or not?’. In addition, pragmatic markers such as (often negative) verificational particles (German ob, Russian li, Udi ‑a) may provide question particles (at times resulting from speech act verbs such as <wonder>), or fragments of verbal morphology become reanalyzed as question particles (e.g. Québecois ti). In this sense, question particles tend to usurp the interrogative strategy that before was basically intonational. The same holds for classical tag questions, which are usually marked for an additional intonational pattern not on the declarative

256 Wolfgang Schulze

segment, but on the tag. It may be safely hypothesized that interrogative morphology within verbs once had an analogous background such as North Slope Iñupiaq imiq-pa-t (drink-q-3pl:s) ‘Are they drinking?’ (MacLean 1986: 63)). Interrogative morphemes may share with the corresponding particles the function of focusing the preceding lexical segment., Compare the following examples from Hunzib (East Caucasian, van den Berg 1995: 115; Q = question morpheme, $ = second part of discontinuous lexeme):

(5) a. cax-čó-y (Hunzib) write-pres:i/ii-q ‘Does (s)he writeIs (s)he writing?’ [I do not know.] b. ča-y-x-čo write-q-$-pres:i/ii ‘Does (s)he writeIs (s)he writing? [‘Is it really so that (s)he writesis writing? (S)he shouldn’t be!] c. y-á-y-č’el-er? ii-freeze-q-$-past ‘[Did you say] did you freeze/were you freezing?’ [I did not get you.]

Tagging techniques are widespread among the languages of the world. They may include words for or <no> or other, verificational particles, clefts or partial clefts (i.e. full verbal or partial (identificational) or generic echoes) or an alternative phrasing (or-anacolutha). If the tag is lexically transparent (that is not fully grammaticalized), it is the tag that represents the interrogative construction, not the proposition itself, which remains affirmative. Identificational tags often have an additional verificational value (e.g. French est-ce que). Clearly, clefted tags come close to clause-external focusing strategies: They focus either on the properties of the verbal relation ( so-called propositional focus) or on individual constituents. In the latter case, polar questions differ from constituent questions only in that they identify the potential conceptual domain (often stressed by intonational patterns), whereas wh-terms render it indefinite. In fact, polar questions do not constitute a class of question constructions different from the set of constituent questions, but merely a semantically more transparent way of construing questions. Note that no language seems to have a strategy to question a verbal relation itself (in terms of constituent questions). In other words, there are no pro-verbs that would ask for nothing but the verb. Even so-called rogoverbs (Hagège 2003) are usually marked for a complex conceptual structure that entails a wh-segment and a more or less overt verbal dummy (Wh-Verb, Wh:Verb, Wh:Ø). This observation correlates with the hypothesis that any world stimulus has to be processed by somehow identifying its relational segment, whereas referential constituents can be bleached to uncertainty.

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 257

A noteworthy way of construing polar questions is given by the so-called syntactic inversion (or changes in word order). This technique is typical of a number of Germanic languages, but is also present in some Romance and Slavic languages. In addition, Haspelmath et al. (2005: 470) mention two Austronesian and one Arawakan language which also show word order variation (König and Siemund (2006) add Finnish and Malay). Most importantly, all languages at issue mark the interrogative construction by verb-initial word order. Here, I cannot go into the details of this type of syntactic marking. Still, it should be noted that there is sufficient evidence to claim that, at least in Germanic, the word order of polar questions does not seem to be a secondary change, but rather the reflex of the original word order marked for an interrogative intonational pattern. The hypothesis put forward here suggests that Germanic was once marked for a V-initial typology that later became reanalyzed as a question construction after the prefield had been opened to the focus (topic) function. As has been pointed out, constituent questions differ from polar questions with respect to the degree of lexical and conceptual specification of a constituent. Usually, constituents questioned in an interrogative construction are represented by some kind of interrogative pronoun (note that the term ‘pronoun’ also often applies to those pro-forms which in fact add a relational component, such as how, etc.). The fact that wh-constituents focus on a specific knowledge state of the speaker (better: on knowledge deficiency) means that such constituents often conform to the focal patterns of a given language. In addition, there seems to be an intimate relation between the verbal (relational) domain and a wh-term: Quite often, a wh-term precedes its verb. In sum, we can posit the following correlation:

(6) Assertive FOC V X X > X FOC V X > X X FOC V > X X V FOC >

Interrogative (constituent questions) wh V X X X wh V X X X wh V X X V wh (?)

Postponed wh-terms are rare and often coupled with a specific pragmatic notion, as seen in German and Arbore (Western branch of Omo-Tana, Makro-Somali, Hayward 1984: 116, transcription simplified):

(7) Wer komm-t? > who:nom come:pres-3sg:pres Es komm-t wér? foc come:pres-3sg:pres who:nom ‘Who is coming?’

258 Wolfgang Schulze

(8) móha yéečče máh person come:3sg:past who ‘Who came?’

Obviously, such strategies involve the splitting of the focal domain with the help of a dummy referent (German es . . . wer? Arbore móha . . . máh?) in order to open a slot for an afterthought.

3.3 Uncertainty Constituent questions are marked for a presupposition that is related to the givenness of a questioned referent or reference-relation cluster. By this I mean that a question like Who will come tomorrow? entails the assumption that there is ‘someone’ who ‘will come.’ This presupposition conditions that the wh-domain can be subcategorized to the extent that a language system allows, for instance English who/what or Tabasaran (East Caucasian) fuž (who:sg), fužur (who:pl), fi (what:sg), fiyar (what:pl). The same holds for the relational marking of wh-terms, e.g. case, or for class/gender subcategorization. An example from Hunzib (East Caucasian), a noun-classifying language, is:

‘Who (a man) came?’ (Class I) (9) suk’u ãq’e-r who I:come-past suk’u y-ãq’e-r ‘Who (a woman) came’? (Class II) suk’u n-ãq’e-r ‘Who (a child) came?’ (Class V)

The fact that wh-terms can be subcategorized suggests that they have bleached referential properties. In fact, the well-known debate concerning the relationship between wh-terms and indefinite pronouns illustrates that referential ‘indefiniteness’ is a crucial segment with respect to the conceptual layer of wh-terms. For instance, in Chiricahua, the wh-term <what> is derived from iyáa ‘something’ (> iyáa-hee). In Coptic (Afroasiatic), wh-terms are also used to indicate referential vagueness (nim ‘someone, the so-and-so; who’; aš ‘what(soever), thing; what’ (Till 1966). Although we do not yet have at hand a full coverage of grammaticalization paths that would illustrate the secondary nature of wh-terms, it can said with some certainty that a likely source for wh-terms may have been words for , , , etc.; see Udihe ni ‘who’ ~ ninta ‘man’, Hunzib suk’u ‘who’ = ‘man’ (with different inflectional patterns), šiyo ‘what’ ~ šiyon ‘some, a little’, Arbore móh ‘man’ vs. mah ‘who,’ Idg. *kwe-/*kwo- etc.: *-s , *-d vs. *kwe- etc. ‘some,’ ‘any’ (Latin -que), Korean nugu ‘who’ ~ ‘anyone’, Kilmeri bo ‘what’ = ‘word,’ Udi šu ‘who’ ~ išu ‘man,’ German wer ‘who’ ~ ‘somebody’ etc. Even though indefinite pronouns may again be derived from interrogatives

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 259

(compare Russian kto ‘who’ > kto-nibud’ ‘anybody,’ Udi šu ‘who’ > šuk’al ‘anybody’ etc.), it seems reasonable to assume that we have to start from prototypical ‘dummy’ nouns that occur as wh-terms under intonational patterns, but as indefinite pronouns with assertions. (10) summarizes the possible grammaticalization paths: (10)

DUMMY REFERENCE [−Q]

[+Q]

INDEF I

Wh

Construction O + DUMMY

Lexical DUMMY

INDEF II

In sum, it emerges that constituent questions do not represent a constructional pattern distinct from that of polar questions. Both share the basic property of intonation and only differ in the degree to which referentiality is concretized. In other words, a Cognitive Typology has to start from this aspect, which is obviously the most general pattern.

4. Interrogation and memory mismatch In Section 3, I tried to show that interrogative marking is characterized by a relatively high degree of formal variation. Most of the relevant variants result from the habitualization of interrogative styles that are based on focusing strategies. This holds both for polar and constituent questions. In addition, it should be noted that — as has been observed above — questions do not reflect an immediate conceptual reaction to a given world stimulus, but result from the correlation of an external or internal world stimulus with a corresponding memory segment. Hence, the type of cognitive attention towards the experience of a world stimulus as embodied in the attention flow differs from assertive reactional types in that the stimulus does not find adequate or sufficient correspondences in memory. This experienced deficiency can again result in a number of different linguistic strategies, both within a language and cross-linguistically.

260 Wolfgang Schulze

Hence, a Cognitive Typology-based approach to questions has to start from the underlying universal dihairetic patterns of experiencing a world stimulus. Nevertheless, it also has to consider typological variation, which stems (among others) from types of specification, metaphorization, and categorization that manipulate these patterns. We can start from the hypothesis that intonation represents the basic pattern of indicating a memory mismatch in terms of a linguistic utterance and ask why intonation seems to be the most natural way to react upon such a memory mismatch. Particles and morphological means to mark questions echo this basic strategy, sometimes modifying the semantics of pitch variation due to the semantics underlying these means. Or, to put it differently, particles and morphological and syntactic means of question marking are more language-related strategies to articulate a (more or less strong) µ/α-mismatch. The most pronounced way to encode this mismatch is to link a positive assertion with its negative mode, as in the Mandarin Chinese example quoted by König and Siemund (2006): (11) tā zài jiā bu zài jiā? 3sg at home neg at home ‘Is s/he at home?’ But note that again, this constructional type (µ/α-match () µ/α-mismatch) is accompanied by pitch variation. Other question particles have a different origin; still it can safely be assumed that they, too, once somehow encoded the conceptual representation of a µ/α-mismatch experience. In terms of Radical Experientialism, intonation is derived from pre-linguistic schemata that relate variation in pitch to degrees of certainty. The underlying motoric schema is also present in gesture; see the raising of the arms or of the shoulders to indicate uncertainty or even interrogativity. The same holds for the raising of the eyebrows or of the head. Obviously, we have to deal with a motor schema that is strongly coupled with notions of and (in an embodied sense). The indication of ‘openness’ (in whatever way) seems to be an immediate reactional type with respect to memory mismatch. Here, I will disregard the further elaboration of the question as to why ‘openness’ (resulting from bodily ‘upness’) qualifies as a reactional pattern for a given memory mismatch. Turning to linguistics, it becomes clear that an iconic representation of ‘upness’ is pitch variation (> up). Hence, pitch raising corresponds to the above-mentioned non-linguistic reactional types. From this, we can assume that prototypical questions are marked for pitch. If we include the reactional type of the hearer, we can hypothesize that a question marked for pitch raising serves as a stimulus for the hearer to close the prosodic pattern: high > not-terminated > open > stimulus(!!close). The relevant prosodic pattern can be described as in Figure 1. Here, the term AIF (Attention Information Flow, see Schulze 2004) refers to the ensemble of linearization patterns that are re-

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 261

High

?

AIF

Low Stimulus

!

AIF Reaction

Figure 1.

lated to both the attention of cognition towards the incoming world stimulus and the informational attitude towards a hearer. Accordingly, a speaker may additionally pinpoint a domain with the experienced world stimulus (ws μ>α) that becomes specifically marked for uncertainty during the dihairesis process. As a result, an additional constituent focus can occur. Prototypically, the intonational focus on a constituent in a question emphasizes the assumed givenness of the referent represented by the constituent (e.g. Did MARY give him the book?). Focus-like properties can also be described for polar questions marked by specific question markers. For instance, Russian li not only marks interrogativity itself, but also focuses on the constituent that precedes this marker. The same holds e.g. for Turkish mı can term such elements ‘floating question markers.’ Non-floating (in situ) markers usually do not focus on a constituent but on the whole construction used to encode an uncertain ws μ>α, often in terms of a tag question. Most importantly, a clause-initial, often verificational tag (French estce que) does not have an interrogative intonational pattern itself when it is strongly grammaticalized. The same holds for a number of clause-final tags reduced to question markers, especially if they stem from -anacolutha. As has been said above, constituency is strongly related to the type of linearization applied to the processing of a world stimulus. The more explicit and detailed linearization is, the more a world stimulus is processed in terms of individual features. However, this type of elaborated dihairesis makes the mirroring process more complex: The cognition now activates a more detailed memory segment, leading to the possibility that some parts of it match a world stimulus better than others. The higher resolution of a ws (see Schulze in press b) thus means that a part of the dihairetic output has to be represented by vague conceptualization. As I argued in Section 3, the lexical encoding of vagueness is directly related to dummy concepts, which may again show up as interrogative pronouns. As a result, constituent questions emerge. Quite often, they are marked for additional strategies that stem from the general patterns described above, that is, from intonation and focus. Naturally, it would be of great explanatory power if we had a cross-linguistic study that would list the preferred target of wh-strategies in actual texts from a cross-linguistic per-

262 Wolfgang Schulze

Table 1. Core actants Modal Locative Cause Attributive Temporal Telic

(wer/was) (wie) (wo-) (warum) (welch-) (wann) (wozu)

113 92 39 38 22 14 5

34.98% 28.48% 12.07% 11.76% 6.81% 4.33% 1.54%

spective. Here, I cannot fill this gap. Still, a cursory glance at a sample text from German (Karl May: Kinder des Herzogs, pp.6–109; 20,500 tokens) which contains extensive dialogue sequences illustrates that core actants and modal variations within the verbal relation are the most frequent sequences marked for wh-constituents; see Table 1. From this, we may assume that memory mismatch in terms of uncertainty is most often related to the insufficient identification of coreferents within the dihairesis process.

5. Conclusions In my chapter, I have argued that the world of interrogative structures is directly related to cognitive procedures for processing a world stimulus. Accordingly, the meaning of interrogative constructions reflects a state of cognition that is marked for a memory mismatch. Most importantly, the major formal types of interrogative constructions can be derived from schematic processes that are active during the dihairesis of a world stimulus. Questions of the kind discussed above differ from speech act verb constructions that involve some kind of interrogative mode. For instance, utterances like I am asking you whether you will come or Tell me whom you have seen, etc. are communicative in nature because they include a speech act verb (ask, tell) and the encoding of the addressee. Simple questions, however, often lack this communicative component, unless a second person is overtly marked, as in Are you going to the market? Still, even in these instances, we may question the status of you (the addressee) as a partner in communication. There is sufficient evidence that you represents a rather vague conceptualization reflecting a role swap: ego conceptualizes tu (the conceptual basis for you) as some kind of alter-ego (see Schulze 1998, 2001). Role swapping allows ego to map properties of its own cognition onto another individual (mixed with hypotheses about the mental state of the addressee). I assume that questions are part of these role swapping strategies. Accordingly, questions are not primarily structured in terms of information-seeking devices, as it would be formulated according to an optimistic communication theory. They do not invite a hearer to answer the question, but represent reactional patterns that

Towards a cognitive typology of questions 263

reflect the given state of cognition. In this sense, interrogatives are nothing but a variant of negation (which explains why negative concepts and their lexical representations often occur in the context of interrogatives). Unlike negation, however, questions do not cancel a μ/α-match but keep this match vague. Schematically, the whole process of interrogation can be described as follows: An external or internal world stimulus tentatively mirrored in memory results in a contortion that overstretches the μ/α-relation or (in part) blocks the matching process. This process leads to a state of cognition that is marked for an ‘open’ μ/α-hypothesis (?ws α). The openness of this state evokes a secondary hypothesis of ego, namely that an alterego would interpret the articulation of ?wsα in terms of an imitation process. alterego would then process the world stimulus (or its construction) in an analogous way and articulate the degree of μ/α-match according to non- ego’s general cognitive setting. It should be noted that the projection of ego’s cognitive state onto an alter-ego is not an original property of question strategies. Rather, we have to deal with the assimilation of secondary cognitive procedures stemming from the internalization of communicative routines in a social group. Naturally, this secondary self-justifying strategy of a cognitive system can also have its linguistic realization. This assumption goes together with the hypothesis that communication itself is a social construct of human beings. Accordingly, human beings have since long habitualized their linguistic practice as communication, a process that has had its impact (by recursion) on individual linguistic knowledge itself. However, the corresponding techniques do not represent the original constructional devices. These are direct or indirect representations of a memory mismatch, regardless of whether there is a potential hearer present in the speech act situation or not.

References Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bussmann, Hadumod. 1996. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Translated and edited by Gregory Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi). London: Routledge. Diessel, Holger 2003. The relationship between demonstratives and interrogatives. Studies in Language 27(3): 635–55. Dik, Simon C. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part 2: Complex and Derived Constructions (Edited by Kees Hengeveld). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. Speech Acts [Syntax and Semantics 3], Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds) 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Enghahl, Elisabet. 1986. Constituent Questions. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Evans, Vyvyan (nd). Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning-construction. http://www. sussex.ac.uk/Users/vyv/LexicalConceptsCognitiveModels&Meaning-Construction.pdf

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Fodor, Jerry. 1974. Special sciences – The disunity of science as a working hypothesis. Synthesis 28: 77–115. Ginzburg, Jonathan. 2002. Questions, Queries, and Facts: A Semantics and Pragmatics for Interrogatives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graesser, Arthur C. 1994. Question asking and answering. Handbook of Psycholinguistics, Morton Anne Gernsbacher (ed.), 517–38. San Diego: Academic Press. Hagège, Claude. 2003. A paradox in linguistic theory: Rogoverbs, or WHATed we to interrogative verbs? Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Association of Linguistic Typology Cagliari 2003. Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David and Comrie, Bernard (eds). 2005. The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayward, Dick. 1984. The Arbore Language: A First Investigation. Hamburg: Buske. Heine, Bernd and Kuteva, Tania. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hintikka, Jaakko. 1978. Answers to questions. In Questions, Henry Hiż (ed.), 279–300. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hiż, Henry (ed.). 1978. Questions. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hudson, Richard A. 1975. The meaning of questions. Language 51:1–31. Keenan, Edward O. 1976. On the universality of conversational implicature. Language and Society 5: 67–80. König, Ekkehard and Siemund, Peter. 2007. Speech act distinctions in grammar. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 1, Timothy Shopen (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacLean, Edna Ahgeak. 1986. North Slope Iñupiaq Grammar: First Year (3rd ed. revised). Fairbanks Alaska Native Language Center. Meyer, Michael (ed.). 1988. Questions and Questioning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schulze, Wolfgang 1998. Person, Klasse, Kongruenz. Vol. 1 (in two parts). Munich: Lincom. Schulze, Wolfgang 2001. Selbstlernen und Selbstreflexion: Grundlagen einer Emergenz-Theorie der sprachlichen Interaktion. Munich Working Papers in Cognitive Typology 1. Schulze, Wolfgang 2004. Pragmasyntax: Towards a cognitive typology of the attention information flow in Udi narratives. In Linguagem, Cultura e Cognição: Estudos de Linguística Cognitiva, Augusto Soares da Silva, Amadeu Torres and Miguel Gonçalves (eds), 545–74. Coimbra: Almedina. Schulze, Wolfgang. In press a. Sprache als kommunizierte Wahrnehmung. Paris (FS contribution). Schulze, Wolfgang. In press b. A new model of metaphorization: Case semantics in East Caucasian. In Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar, Antonio Barcelona, Klaus-Uwe Panther, and Linda Thornburg (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Act: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Siemund, Peter. 2001. Interrogative constructions. In Language Typology and Language Universals, Vol. 2, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible (eds), 1010–1028. Berlin: de Gruyter. Till, Walter C. 1966. Koptische Grammatik (Saidischer Dialekt). Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie. Van den Berg, Helma. 1995. A Grammar of Hunzib. Munich: Lincom.

chapter 13

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans Variety-specific meaning construction in the into-causative Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries University of Bremen/University of Bremen/ University of California, Santa Barbara

“England and America are two nations divided by a common language.” (George Bernard Shaw) Adopting a construction-based view of language (Goldberg 1995), we demonstrate that it is possible to uncover differences between British and American English at the lexicosyntactic level, showing that the collexemes, i.e. the words significantly associated with a construction, are variety-dependent. To this end, we compare more than 5,000 verb pair types as they occur in the two varieties in the so-called into-causative construction (as in He tricked me into employing him) and submit them to the scrutiny of a statistical test called distinctive collexeme analysis, which identifies those verbs that distinguish best between the two varieties. Interesting contrasts emerge, such as the predominance of verbal persuasion verbs in the cause predicate slot of the American English data as opposed to the predominance of physical force verbs in the cause predicate slot of the British English data. We discuss how these and other results create a picture of subtle, yet systematic, differences in meaning construction, and we offer an explanation of these differences as reflecting differently entrenched semantic frames. Keywords: British/American English, Construction Grammar, syntax–lexis interface, collostructional analysis, corpus linguistics, culture, dialectal variation, into-causative construction, meaning potential, semantic frame

1. Introduction Over the past decade, the growing availability of variety-specific corpora has generated an increasing number of studies of regional varieties. With respect to the two major national varieties of English, British English and American, these studies already cover an impressive range of topics as diverse as vocabulary use (Leech and Fallon 1992), differences in conversational style (Tottie 1991), or the distinctive use of modal verbs (Nakamura 1993; Oakes 1992). Moreover, several studies have also documented grammatical differences between the two varieties (compare, among others, Biber 1987; Tottie 2002; Crystal 2004). However, the general

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view still is that, as opposed to the obvious and well-documented phonological and lexical differences, “grammatical differences may be more subtle than the lexical ones” (Tottie 2002: 146), with “very few being general points of syntactic construction” (Crystal 2004: 311), so ultimately “non-trivial syntactic differences between British and American English have been notably harder to find in corpus-based studies” (Kennedy 1998: 193) than phonological, lexical, or discursive differences. In the present chapter, we intend to show how new insights can be gained by adopting a construction-based perspective. Dialectal variation has hardly, if at all, been investigated in Construction Grammar, so we hope to show that this framework can provide new opportunities for this field of research, since it allows us to focus primarily on the syntax–lexis interface rather than phonology, morpho-syntax or lexis. Specifically, our approach, which is based on distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a), is geared towards pinpointing subtle, yet systematic differences in the way that grammatical patterns found in both varieties are lexically filled. Taking the example of the so-called into-causative construction, we show that, although two such highly similar varieties as British and American English will, of course, share the same inventory of grammatical patterns to a large extent, they may nevertheless differ substantially in meaning construction, i.e., the uses to which they put these patterns.

2. A construction-based approach The theoretical approach we adopt here is Construction Grammar as developed by, among others, Goldberg (1995, 1996) and Lakoff (1987). The central notion of Construction Grammar is the construction, which is defined as follows: A construction is […] a pairing of form and meaning/use such that some aspect of the form or some aspect of the meaning is not strictly predictable from the component parts or from other constructions already established to exist in the language. (Goldberg 1996: 68)

Note that this definition does not distinguish between different kinds of ‘pairings of form and meaning.’ Like some other current theories of language, Construction Grammar no longer assumes a strict division between grammar and lexicon: the linguistic system is viewed as a continuum which covers the whole range from fully lexically specified constructions (e.g., morphemes or words) to partially specified constructions (such as the What’s X doing Y-construction; cf. Kay and Fillmore 1999) to abstract constructions (for example, argument structure constructions or tense and aspect). In order to capture the relationship between constructions of different degrees of abstraction, Construction Grammar makes two fundamental assumptions. First,

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since morphemes, words, and the larger, more abstract constructions they occur in are attributed an independent and meaningful status, the words that may occur in a construction must be semantically compatible with the meaning of the construction (or, more precisely, the meaning of the constructional slot into which the word is inserted; cf. Goldberg 1995: 59–66.). Secondly, the so-called Principle of No Synonymy states that “if two constructions are syntactically distinct, they must be semantically or pragmatically distinct” (cf. Goldberg 1995: 67). One major strategy to detect these semantic or pragmatic differences is to investigate those elements of a construction that are variable, i.e. the lexical elements that occupy the ‘free’ slots in a construction. Evidence in favor of the necessity of semantic compatibility and the Principle of No Synonymy originally came from the investigation of classic ‘alternation’ phenomena, such as dative movement, the load/spray alternation, the active/passive alternation, particle movement, and others. Each of these cases has been shown to consist of two distinct constructions, each with its own semantics and/or pragmatics (cf. Goldberg 1995, 2002; Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a). Moreover, even constructions which were formerly attributed the status of mere surface structure variants can be distinguished on the basis of the words that they typically attract (cf., e.g., Wulff 2006 on go–V vs. go-and-V in English). In the present analysis, we give this approach a slightly new twist: we do not ask to what extent two highly synonymous or syntactically indifferent constructions can be distinguished by looking at their lexical inserts, but rather to what extent we can distinguish British English and American English on the basis of the verbal predicates that British and American speakers insert when they make use of a construction that is part of the inventory of both varieties. In a more technical parlance, we show that the predicates that are attracted to (or repelled by) the construction in question are variety-dependent. While the present study can only begin to outline the potential of a collostructional approach to meaning construction in different cultures, it appears reasonable to start out with a construction that denotes a concept that is fundamental to all cultures. One such concept that lies at the heart of any culture and accordingly continues to inspire (particularly cognitively oriented) linguistic analyses is causation. Therefore, the particular construction that we focus on in the present study to illustrate our line of reasoning is the so-called into-causative construction.

3. Previous studies of the into-causative The into-causative is a construction which is used to denote a causative event by explicitly stating the causer and causee of this event as well as both the action that the

268 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

causer performed to cause the event (the cause predicate, e.g. trick in (1a)) and the resulting action that the causee performs in response to the causer’s action (the result predicate, e.g. employ in (1a)). It is formally restricted in that the result predicate obligatorily follows the preposition into and only occurs in its gerundial form.

(1) a. He tricked me into employing him. b. They were forced into formulating an opinion. c. We conned a grown-up into buying the tickets.

In her analysis of the into-causative, Wierzbicka (1998) notes that the cause predicates occurring in it typically imply, or are at least compatible with, the idea of manipulation. She also points out that the number of potential cause predicates is limited, claiming that while one can trick, manoeuvre, and also talk a person into doing something, one cannot encourage or induce a person into doing something. Similarly, Hunston and Francis’s (2000) corpus-based analysis of the into-causative leads them to conclude that the construction (“pattern”, in their terminology) is associated with “some kind of forcefulness or even coercion” (Hunston and Francis 2000: 16). This is also reflected in the fact that the cause predicates often denote negative emotions (their examples include verbs such as frighten, intimidate, panic, scare, terrify, shock, and shame), or ways of speaking cleverly or deviously (talk, coax, cajole, charm, and browbeat). Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b) elaborated on earlier studies in several respects: they opted for a maximally objective data selection by including all attestations of the into-causative in their corpus, and they considered both the cause and the result predicates. Most importantly, they provided a quantitative assessment of the association strength between the construction and the verbs that occur in it, as well as of possible interaction between the cause and the result predicates, by employing a technique from the family of methods called collostructional analysis. Since we also employ a technique from this family of methods, we will explain collostructional analysis and the results in more detail in what follows. Collostructional analysis is a family of three methods for determining the direction and the strength of the association between a given construction and the words that occur in one or more of its slots (hence its name, a blend of collocation and construction) (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003; Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a, b; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005). Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b) apply one of these methods, co-varying collexeme analysis, to identify those pairs of cause and result predicates that are strongly attracted to each other in the into-causative in British English (on the basis of the 1990–2000 volumes of The Guardian). For a brief illustration of this method, consider the association between the verbs bounce and accept in the cause and the result slots of the into-causative, respectively. In order to determine whether these are strongly attracted to each other in the into-causative,

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 269

Table 1. 2-by-2 matrix for bounce into accepting in the 1990–2000 volumes of The Guardian bounce other verbs Column totals

accepting

other verbs

Row totals

29 (5.2) 267 (290.8) 296

82 (105.8) 5,910 (5886.2) 5,992

111 6,177 6,288

the following frequencies are required and entered into a two-by-two table as in Table 1 (the italicized values are determined through corpus analysis, the remaining ones can be determined via subtraction): • • • •

the frequency of bounce in the cause slot of the into-causative (111); the frequency of accepting in the result slot of the into-causative (296); the frequency of bounce into accepting in the into-causative (29); the frequency of the into-causative (6,288).

In a first step, the frequencies expected on the basis of chance are computed; they are given in parentheses in Table 1. It is immediately obvious that bounce into accepting occurs much more frequently than expected by chance: it is attracted to the into-causative. To test this result for significance, the table is then subjected to the Fisher-Yates exact test (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003 for justification), which outputs a p-value providing the probability to obtain the observed table or all more extreme ones. In our example, the p-value is 1.095273E–14. This value means that the probability of getting the result in Table 1 is statistically highly significant (p<0.001). In Gries and Stefanowitsch’s terminology, bounce into accepting is a (significant) co-varying collexeme of the into-causative. Once this method is applied to all of the 3,908 pairs of cause and result predicates in the data set, all significant pairs can be ranked on the basis of their p-values (note that for expository reasons, the p-values are transformed into a negative base-ten logarithm (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005), but obviously this does not affect the ranking). Table 2 lists the 25 most strongly associated cause-result predicate pairs identified by the co-varying collexeme analysis. In their interpretation of the results, Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b: 229) conclude that “[m]ost striking of these pairs is that many of them seem to be based on frame-semantic knowledge of varying degrees of culture-specificity about […] what frames stand in an entrenched cause-effect relationship in a particular culture.” A prominent example is the linkage of commercial transaction verbs with what Gries and Stefanowitsch refer to as the trickery frame: con into paying and mislead into buying are examples of this association in Table 2, further examples in their data include lure into purchasing and dupe into paying. From such cases, “a cul-

270 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

Table 2. Most significant Vcause-Vresult co-varying collexemes in the into-causative in the 1990– 2000 volumes of The Guardian (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004: 230) Vcause

Vresult

N

-log (pFisher-Yates)

bounce torture draw shock stimulate dupe con hoodwink mislead delude terrorise talk dupe force pressure bounce shame dragoon swing fool lock guide rush educate fool

accepting confessing commenting understanding producing carrying paying leaving buying supposing fleeing letting leaving making having announcing cleaning voting planning queuing using lending making understanding seeing

29 8 6 7 6 8 16 8 14 3 4 12 13 51 14 6 4 7 2 3 5 2 11 3 6

14.074 13.155 10.581 10.483 9.330 7.244 7.019 6.982 6.980 6.792 6.762 6.743 6.609 6.546 6.505 6.100 5.953 5.899 5.518 5.435 5.406 5.372 5.305 5.296 5.180

tural model emerges of the buyer as a passive participant in the commercial transaction, exploited (and relatively easily so) by others for their own gain” (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004b: 232). Another example is a strong association between verbs denoting coercion and what Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b) refer to as a confession frame: people are preferably tortured, beaten, intimidated, trapped, and coerced into confessing. In addition, Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b: 231–2) observe a more general semantic factor at work in British English, namely a weak but significant preference to conceptualize causation in the physical domain (as opposed to mental or communicative causation). This tendency is reflected by physical cause predicates being twice as frequent as mental cause predicates, and action result verbs being even 37 times more frequent than cognition result verbs. Given these culture-specific explanations, the present study sets out to answer the question to what extent we can expect to find the same patterns in another variety of English, or if the way the into-causative is put to use is actually variety-specific.

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 271

4. The into-causative in British vs. American English 4.1 Methods More technically speaking, the question is how to identify, out of the set of all predicates that occur in the into-causative in the cause or the result slot in either variety, those predicates that actually distinguish between British and American English such that they are more typical of one variety as opposed to the other. In other words, we are now identifying those collexemes that actually distinguish best between the two varieties, using another extension of collostructional analysis, the socalled distinctive collexeme analysis, which is specifically geared towards this kind of question. Distinctive collexeme analysis was originally designed to measure the dissimilarity of semantically similar constructions; we adapt it here to measure the dissimilarity of the same construction in two varieties. To illustrate this adaptation, consider Table 3, which displays the frequency values required for a distinctive collexeme analysis of talk: the frequency of talk in the cause slot of the into-causative in American English and British English (i.e., 487 and 192, respectively) as well as the frequencies of the into-causative in the two varieties (i.e., 3,467 and 6,287, respectively). As the expected frequencies show, talk occurs much more frequently than expected in the cause slot of the AmE construction and much less frequently in the cause slot of the BrE construction. This association is highly significant (Fisher-Yates exact test, p=3.416513E–85; plog-transformed=84.47). Thus, talk distinguishes very well between American and British English; it qualifies as a distinctive collexeme for American English. In the following section, we will discuss the results of two distinctive collexeme analyses, one for the cause slot and one for the result slot. Table 3. Two-by-two matrix for talk in the cause slot of the into-causative in American English vs. British English talk other verbs Column totals

American English

British English

Row totals

478 (238.1) 2,989 (3,228.9) 3,467

192 (431.9) 6,095 (5,855.1) 6,287

670 9,084 9,754

Note: the overall frequency of the into-causative construction is 6,287, while Table 1 reports it to be 6,288. This is due to a misclassified token which was removed from the data sample only after the publication of Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004b).

. The American data were taken from the 1992 volumes of the L. A. Times.

272 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

4.2 Results concerning the cause slots Let us first turn to the cause predicates that the distinctive collexeme analysis identified. Table 4 provides an overview of all distinctive collexemes for British and American English ranked according to their negative log-transformed p-values. Table 4. Distinctive collexemes of the into-causative in British and American English British English

American English

Vcause

-log (pFisher-Yates)

Vcause

-log (pFisher-Yates)

pressurize bounce panic bully dragoon tempt sting provoke push lead con throw pressgang force prompt hustle persuade inveigle fool terroris|ze bludgeon brainwash draw hoodwink galvanise chivvy sidetrack frighten seduce encourage guilttrip kickstart beguile educate bamboozle bomb delude stir

25.004 18.211 14.899 14.455 5.743 5.710 5.541 5.380 4.781 4.734 4.342 4.215 4.202 4.063 3.390 3.055 2.963 2.907 2.880 2.480 2.464 2.456 2.350 2.166 2.165 1.908 1.908 1.787 1.738 1.731 1.718 1.718 1.676 1.569 1.550 1.527 1.527 1.527

talk pressure prod coax coerce scare snooker parlay entice guide draft rope turn plunge bait badger threaten strongarm frustrate

84.466 39.928 20.239 11.790 8.782 4.697 4.046 3.146 2.774 2.202 2.009 1.869 1.797 1.621 1.547 1.440 1.410 1.284 1.244

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 273

British English Vcause browbeat terrify nag blackmail stimulate torture trigger

American English -log (pFisher-Yates)

Vcause

-log (pFisher-Yates)

1.509 1.504 1.408 1.393 1.387 1.349 1.336

While this mere list of distinctive collexemes may not be very revealing, systematic differences in the usage of the into-causative become apparent once these distinctive collexemes are grouped into larger semantic classes. The semantic classes were arrived at as follows. First, the three authors of this chapter classified the distinctive collexemes separately. The resulting three classifications and semantic classes were then checked for consistency. Verbs and classes which had not been used by all three authors were finally re-classified on the condition that finally a maximum number of distinctive collexemes be captured by a minimum number of semantic classes. The resulting classes are verbs denoting communication (e.g. talk), negative emotion (e.g. terrify), physical force (e.g. push), stimulation (e.g. prompt), threatening (e.g. blackmail), and trickery (e.g. bamboozle). The distinctiveness of each collexeme (or class of collexemes) for either variety is reflected in two pieces of information: first, the ranks of the collexemes in the list, and second, their p-values. Accordingly, Table 5 shows the distribution of all distinctive collexemes according to semantic class and variety, and Table 6 provides the corresponding summed log-transformed p-values per class and variety. In British English, for instance, we see in Table 5 that there are 17 distinctive collexemes that denote physical force; in the corresponding cell in Table 6, we find the sum of the p-values of these 17 verbs, which amounts to 88.16. In American English, there are only 9 verbs denoting physical force, so on the basis of Table 5 alone, one might conclude that this semantic class is much more strongly associated with the British variety. However, as can be seen in Table 6, the sum of the p-values of these 9 American English collexemes amounts to 81.77. That is, the number of verbs denoting physical force is smaller in American English, but then the individual association . As can be seen in Table 5, we agreed on one exception to this principle: the class of communication verbs comprises only two verbs. However, one of these two verbs, talk, is the by far most distinctive collexeme for American English (its log-transformed p-value of 84.466 is twice as high as the one yielded by the one following in the American English ranking, pressure (39.928), and even four times as high as the highest one for British English, pressurize (25.004)). It was felt that this should be reflected in the semantic classification as well.

274 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

Table 5. Distribution of distinctive collexemes according to semantic classes Semantic class

British English

American English

Row totals

Communication Negative emotion Physical force Stimulation Threatening Trickery Column totals

– 7 17 8 4 9 45

2 3 9 – 1 3 18

2 10 26 8 5 12 63

Table 6. Distribution of summed log-transformed Fisher Yates Exact p-values of distinctive collexemes according to semantic classes Communication Negative emotion Physical force Stimulation Threatening Trickery Column totals

British English

American English

Row totals

– 28.86 88.16 20.00 24.07 21.24 182.33

86.48 7.38 81.77 – 1.41 16.11 193.15

86.48 36.24 169.93 20.00 25.48 37.35 375.47

strengths of these verbs are, on average, higher in American English than in British English. Looking at Tables 5 and 6, we find that communication verbs are highly distinctive for the American variety – this class comprises only two verbs, yet the summed p-values in Table 6 strongly suggest that the into-causative is very strongly associated with communication in American English (as opposed to British English). A second striking difference between British and American English can be observed with respect to the class of stimulation verbs. While a variety of British English verbs can be grouped into this class (such as tempt, prompt, or trigger), not a single verb among the distinctive collexemes of American English licenses such a (primary) classification. This contrast between British and American English turns out to be even stronger if we treat the class of threatening verbs as a subclass of stimulation verbs – one can conceive of threatening acts as an act of negative stimulation. A closer look at the British English stimulation verb examples lends further credence to the view that the two classes are semantically highly similar (and besides, it nicely illustrates the interplay between constructional and lexical semantics, thus strengthening the case for a construction-based perspective). While verbs like encourage and stimulate generally have a neutral or even positive connotation, we find that in the into-causative, these verbs are not to be interpreted in their default senses; rather, senses have been selected which allow for a negative interpret-

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 275

ation, mostly involving effort (cf. (2a) and (2b)). Moreover, in some cases, the actually intended reading is even provided by an additional, less polysemous verb to draw attention to the discrepancy between the way in which the causer describes his/her action and the evaluation of the causer’s action by the causee or some bystander/observer, as in (2c).

(2) a. It seems astonishing that millennia of evolution have not educated our bodies into accepting their mature phase, but clearly the female body feels threatened by redundancy. b. So dull is it that dinners have been held so that old retainers can be stimulated into recalling jolly anecdotes which can be injected into Robin Harris and John O’Sullivan’s ghostmanship. c. At the moment the victims of the Barings’ debacle are being encouraged – some would say manipulated – into focussing their attention on Malaysia . . .

Verbs denoting negative emotion also occur more frequently in the British variety, and their summed p-values of 28.86 as opposed to 7.38 for American English indicate that this semantic class is more typical of British than American English. In a way, this ties in well with the above results such that the creation of bad feelings to make the causee comply with the causer’s intentions seems to be a semantic aspect that is particularly emphasized in British English. With respect to the class of physical force, the distribution of verbs seems to point towards a stronger distinctiveness for British English, but a look at the summed p-values reveals that this skewed distribution is not reflected in the association strengths, which are of comparable magnitude for both varieties (88.16 and 81.77, respectively). These p-values are the highest next to the ones yielded for communication verbs in American English, so we can conclude that physical force is indeed highly associated with the into-causative regardless of the variety. Last but not least, let us point towards a yet more subtle difference between the two varieties which goes beyond the semantic classes. While in British English the cause predicates typically denote an action by which the causee is set into motion, be it literal or metaphorical motion (consider sting, provoke, chivvy, stir, stimulate, trigger, etc.), a number of the American English cause predicates denote exactly the opposite concept: verbs such as snooker or rope denote actions by which the causee is not set into motion, but rather fixed to a certain position, restricted in his/her mobility, and thereby forced to undergo some treatment (note that this tendency persists if one considers not only the significant distinctive collexemes, but rather the complete set of verbs that occur in the into-causative). This tendency may hint at a difference between British and American English with regard to what is conceived of as negative manipulation.

276 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

4.3 Results concerning the result slots Let us now turn to the result predicates that are distinctive for either variety. Table 7 shows those distinctive for the British variety, Table 8 those for American English. Looking at Table 7 and Table 8, we first of all see that while verbs denoting communication are rare among the cause predicates in British English, they are substantially more prominent among the result predicates (e.g. concede, answer, suppose, back, announce, or say). In American English, the opposite holds: there is only one verb, plead, which denotes communication (although it has to be admitted here that plead is the most significant of all distinctive collexemes). On the other hand, the majority of American English result predicates are light verbs (let, come, have, and get), or verbs denoting very general, unspecified actions (be), while we find only one light verb, namely make, among the distinctive collexemes of the British variety. Table 7. Result predicates distinctive for British English Vresult

-log (pFisher-Yates)

Vresult

-log (pFisher-Yates)

handing conceding accepting parting following producing creating understanding opting offering making answering supposing feeling

5.660 4.719 4.415 3.414 3.133 2.870 2.808 2.738 2.290 2.106 2.057 1.908 1.908 1.845

taking presenting sacking backing setting booking collaborating announcing standing working abandoning saying cutting embracing

1.762 1.718 1.718 1.637 1.593 1.527 1.527 1.427 1.340 1.375 1.374 1.359 1.347 1.336

5. Summary By means of the distinctive collexeme analysis, we could detect a variety of differences in the way British and American speakers make use of the same construction. These findings call for a modification of the opening quotation by Shaw: the . At this point, the attentive reader may ask why we did not also present a comparison of the co-varying collexemes of each variety — as a matter of fact, we did a distinctive collexeme analysis for all verb pairs in the two varieties; however, the results thereby obtained did not reveal anything substantial that was not already captured by considering the cause and result predicates separately. Moreover, it is worth pointing out here that Stefanowitsch and Gries (2005) even identified significant trigrams which comprise a co-varying collexeme pair and the into-

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 277

Table 8. Result predicates distinctive for American English Vresult pleading purchasing letting surrendering donating throwing enrolling starting being coming trying coaching deeding having staying returning applying entering approving

-log (pFisher-Yates) 5.753 5.753 4.314 3.881 3.340 3.324 3.146 3.099 3.060 2.891 2.871 2.697 2.697 2.545 2.483 2.371 2.271 2.159 2.101

Vresult a

going smoking closing running counseling lending shooting adding preparing slowing helping cashing hurrying mourning seducing soaring getting cleaning

-log (pFisher-Yates) 2.016 2.009 1.869 1.821 1.797 1.655 1.570 1.547 1.547 1.547 1.389 1.348 1.348 1.348 1.348 1.348 1.341 1.334

a

Going, just as running in this table, seem to point towards a weak tendency for motion verbs in the American result predicates. However, a closer look at the data reveals that going hardly ever denotes motion in the literal sense, but is rather used to mean ‘visit’ (going to the museum/ballet) or in combinations like going public. With running, the picture is similar: in about 50% of the instances, running is used in the sense ‘run for office’ (running for the Friedman seat or running for City Council).

cultural differences he hinted at indeed find their reflection in the language, too (as they do in folk ideologies about language; cf. Milroy 2000). In what follows, we make some suggestions as to how these differences may be accounted for in terms of different preferences in meaning construction. The term meaning construction is used here to mean “the ‘selection’ of an appropriate interpretation against the context of the utterance” (Evans, Bergen and Zin ken To appear: 12). We would like to argue that there is a striking parallel between the pragmatic notions of interpretation and context and the lexico-syntactic notions of verb and construction as employed in Construction Grammar: we can conceive of constructions as the contexts that carry a particular meaning potential, that is, a specific range of meaning nuances that may be expressed using the construction. In constructions that are only partially lexically specified, such as the into-causative, the range of meanings that can be expressed, that is, the range of interpretcausative construction (as opposed to trigrams in which either the cause or the result predicate is another verb), but this analysis did not produce any results which are relevant for the present study, either.

278 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

ations that we can attribute to the construction, is an interplay of the construction’s semantics and the words that are inserted into the construction. Provided that the word’s semantics is principally compatible with the construction’s semantics, the lexical items inserted into the construction will highlight (or downplay) certain aspects of the construction’s meaning potential by contributing their own semantics to the overall pattern. Bearing the basic assumption in mind that meaning construction is conceptualization (Evans and Green 2006: 162–3), which is, among other things, fundamentally shaped by a speaker’s cultural input, an interesting question that has hitherto not been investigated in much detail in Construction Grammar is: to what extent is the meaning potential of a construction variety-specific? That is, to what extent can we observe a shift of the range of lexical items that are preferably inserted into the construction if we compare the usage of the same construction in two varieties? The collostructional approach as adopted here allows us to investigate this question systematically: collostructional analysis identifies and quantifies the varietyspecific meaning potential of a construction. The significantly attracted collexemes are those that constitute the spectrum of compatible meanings, with those ranking higher being closer to the core of the construction’s semantics than those ranking lower in association strength. Likewise, the significantly repelled collexemes give us a clue as to the limits of this spectrum. Moreover, by means of distinctive collexeme analysis, we can also identify variety-specific preferences in meaning construction. So how can one explain the differences in preferred meaning construction in British and American English as they show up in the into-causative? Beforehand, two caveats are in order. Firstly, while collostructional analysis itself is a maximally objective method, it goes without saying that the interpretation of the results obtained thereby are, by necessity, subjective. This subjective component is even more profound if only a single construction is investigated, so we cannot derive any far-reaching generalizations regarding the cultural motivations for the observed differences here. Still, we can attempt to point toward plausible interpretations of the semantic differences observed in terms of differently entrenched semantic frames. Secondly, it is beyond the scope of the present analysis to discuss the question if and to what extent semantic frames correlate with mental differences or only general cultural tendencies. For the semantic analysis undertaken here, we simply go with the definition of a semantic frame as constituting conventionalized, culturespecific semantic knowledge. To begin with, the predominance of verbs denoting threatening acts or acts causing negative emotions in British English indicates that this semantic frame is much

Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 279

more strongly entrenched in British than in American English. Since even verbs which generally denote stimulation in a more neutral sense are overridden by constructional semantics, this can be taken as further evidence for a deep entrenchment of this frame. Moreover, the contrast between movement-initializing cause predicates in British English as opposed to movement-restricting cause predicates in American English may confirm the commonplace perception that British culture lacks the strong and explicit emphasis on mobility as an essential condition for a happy and free life as we find it in American culture. Indeed, the importance of freedom of movement for Americans also manifests itself elsewhere in language, for instance in the great variety of transportation metaphors in American as compared to British English (cf. Tottie 2002: 138–41). The second most striking difference we observed was the overwhelming usage of talk in the American data, while no real communication verb was among the set of British English distinctive collexemes. Moreover, most of the stimulation, threatening and negative emotion verbs that are so highly distinctive for British English lend themselves much better to an interpretation which involves physical force rather than verbal persuasion or communication. Adding to this the observation that verbs denoting physical force constitute a considerable part of the distinctive collexemes in both varieties, we find that British speakers have a much stronger preference to conceptualize causation as physical action in the sense of physical force. American speakers, on the other hand, also conceptualize causation via communication or verbal persuasion. As already noted above, these conclusions have to be taken with a grain of salt since they are based on the investigation of a single construction only; as a matter of fact, it would be interesting to see to what extent these differences also show up in other causative constructions. Finally, the high predominance of communication verbs in the result slot in the British variety as opposed to that of light verbs in the American variety suggests that, while the confession frame is not only typical of, but also distinctive for, British English, American speakers mostly leave the resulting action unspecified when employing the into-causative. To conclude, the present analysis has demonstrated how sophisticated methods such as distinctive collexeme analysis are very useful tools for the investigation of dialectal variation at the lexico-syntactic level. By filtering out those collexemes which are significantly distinctive for either British or American English, distinctive collexeme analysis can identify the (mostly subtle) dialectal differences that might otherwise easily escape the naked eye. It thereby constitutes a major step towards an empirical underpinning of such fundamental cognitive-linguistic concepts as meaning potential or (preferred) meaning constructions.

280 Stefanie Wulff, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stefan Th. Gries

References Biber, Douglas. 1987. A textual comparison of British and American writing. American Speech 62(2): 99–119. Crystal, David. 2004. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Vyvyan and Green, Melanie. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. London and Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Evans, Vyvyan, Bergen, Benjamin K. and Zinken, Jörg. To appear. The cognitive linguistics enterprise: An overview. Manuscript downloaded 11 March 2006 at . Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele E. 1996. Construction grammar. In Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories, Keith Brown and Jim Miller (eds), 68–71. Oxford: Pergamon. Goldberg, Adele E. 2002. Surface generalizations. An alternative to alternations. Cognitive Linguistics 13(3): 327–56. Gries, Stefan Th. and Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004a. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on ‘alternations.’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 97–129. Gries, Stefan Th. and Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004b. Co-varying collexemes in the into-causative. In Language, Culture, and Mind, Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (eds), 225–36. Stanford CA: CSLI. Hunston, Susan and Francis, Gill. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kay, Paul and Fillmore, Charles J. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language 75(1): 1–33. Kennedy, Graeme. 1998. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Routledge. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Leech, Geoffrey N. and Fallon, Roger. 1992. Computer corpora – What do they tell us about culture? ICAME Journal 16: 29–50. Milroy, A. Lesley. 2000. Britain and the United States: Two nations divided by the same language. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1): 56–89. Nakamura, Junsaku. 1993. Quantitative comparison of modals in the Brown and LOB corpora. ICAME Journal 17: 29–48. Oakes, Michael P. 1992. Contrasts between US and British English of the 1990s. Paper presented at the Language Technology Workshop, International Conference on Research and Scholarship in Integration Processes, Poland–USA–EU, University of Łódż, 21 June, 1992. Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Gries, Stefan Th. 2003. Collostructions: On the interaction between verbs and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209–43. Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Gries, Stefan Th. 2005. Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1): 1–43. Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Conversational style in British and American English: The case of backchannels. In English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik, Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg (eds), 254–71. London: Longman.

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Tottie, Gunnel. 2002. An Introduction to American English. Malden: Blackwell. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1998. The semantics of English causative constructions in a universal-typological perspective. In The New Psychology of Language, Michael Tomasello (ed.), 113–53. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wulff, Stefanie. 2006. Go–V vs. go-and-V in English: A case of constructional synonymy? In Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: The Syntax-lexis Interface, Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Index of authors A Aijmer, Karin 225, 228, 235 Aitchison, Jean 232 Alexiadou, Artemis 192 Allan, Keith 78 Anderson, John Mathieson 114, 126 Appelt, Douglas E. 102 Ariel, Mira 177 Armon-Lotem, Sharon 192 Atkins, Sue 197 Austin, John L. 248 B Barcelona, Antonio 13, 33, 34, 39, 51–5, 68, 77, 103, 104, 109, 119, 126, 130–3, 135 Barr, Dale J. 25 Bartlett, Sir Frederic C. 2 Bearth, Thomas 208, 209 Belaj, Branimir 131 Bergen, Benjamin K. 277 Biber, Douglas 265 Bittencourt, Vanda de Oliveira 237, 238, 239 Black, Max 144, 146, 149, 151, 154 Blackings, Mairi J. 82, 83 Bogdonovich, Josephine 25 Bolinger, Dwight 180 Boroditsky, Lera 69 Bowden, John 78 Brdar, Mario 13, 131, 138 Brdar-Szabó, Rita 13, 131, 138 Brown, Gillian 226 Brown, Penelope 226 Buljan, Gabrjela 131 Bussmann, Hadumod 248 Bybee, Joan 78, 82, 114, 115 Byrne, Brian 7 C Campbell, Lyle 89 Carston, Robyn 28 Channell, Joanna 225, 226 Church, Kenneth W. 155 Clarke, David 77 Comrie, Bernard 114, 196 Coulson, Seana 12 Croft, William 52, 102, 105, 190 Crystal, David 265, 266 Cutrer, Michelle L. 172 Cyffer, Norbert 78

D Danon-Boileau, Laurent 236, 237, 238 Dasher, Richard B. 78, 96 Declerck, Renaat 208, 215, 217 Deignan, Alice 78, 84 Delahunty, Gerald 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 218 Denison, David 116 De Swart, Henrietta 104, 113 Detges, Ulrich 231 Diessel, Holger 251 Dik, Simon C. 41, 255 Dostie, Gaétane 239 E Enghahl, Elisabet 255 Evans, Vyvyan 249, 250, 277, 278 F Fallon, Roger 265 Fass, Dan 68 Fauconnier, Gilles 3, 6, 12, 54, 172, 173, 190, 191, 195, 201, 230 Fillmore, Charles J. 53, 191, 197, 266 Fleischman, Suzanne 225, 226, 232, 236, 238 Fodor, Jerry 253 Francis, Elaine 101, 268 Franco, António 235, 237 Francuzo, Edson 24 Frege, Gottlob 127 Frisson, Steven 26, 27 G Gatzkiewicz, Laura 209, 210, 211 Geeraerts, Dirk 77 Gensler, Orin D. 180 Gibbs, Ray W. 7, 8, 12, 21ff, 54, 58, 79, 144 Gingras, Yves 227 Ginzburg, Jonathan 248 Glucksberg, Sam 23 Goldberg, Adele E. 9, 42, 266, 267 Goosse, André 237 Goossens, Louis 78, 79, 95, 96, 129, 130 Gradečak-Erdeljić, Tanja 131 Grady, Joseph E. 12, 80

Graesser, Arthur C. 58, 248 Green, Melanie 278 Grevisse, Maurice 237 Grice, H. Paul 2, 20, 52, 104, 121, 248, 249 Gries, Stefan Th. 12, 14, 145, 155, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270 Gundel, Jeannete K. 177 H Hagège, Claude 256 Halliday, Michael A.K. 36, 40 Hankamer, Jorge 178 Hanks, Patrick 155 Haspelmath, Martin 116, 230, 231, 255, 257 Hawkins, John A. 223 Hayward, Dick 257 He, Ziran 12, 13, 22–4, 37–9, 43, 130, 151, 222, 225 Hedberg, Nancy 177 Heine, Bernd 78, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92, 93, 251, 255 Hilpert, Martin 13, 78, 80, 84, 95 Hintikka, Jaakko 248 Ho, Mian-Lian 114 Hobbs, Jerry R. 102 Hölker, Klaus 240 Hollenbach, Barbara E. 78 Hopper, Paul J. 41, 82, 102, 107 Hörmann, Hans 7 Horn, Laurence R. 103, 104, 208 Hudson, Richard A. 255 I Israel, Michael 137, 139 J Jackendoff, Ray 100, 102, 108, 109, 112, 119 Johnson, Mark 11, 23, 36, 52, 53, 85, 92, 93, 95, 102, 127, 128, 144, 173, 190, 232 Johnson, Michael D. 11, 23, 36, 52, 53, 85, 92, 93, 95, 102, 127, 128, 144, 173, 190, 232 Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 232 K Kay, Paul 225, 235, 266 Keating, Peter 227 Keenan, Edward O. 249 Kennedy, Graeme 266

284 Aspects of Meaning Construction

Kilian-Hatz, Christa 78 Kleiber, Georges 126 Klix, Friedhart 228, 232 König, Ekkehard 248, 253, 255, 257, 260 Kövecses, Zoltán 33, 34, 53, 65, 68, 79, 87, 88, 89, 90, 102, 103, 108, 110, 112, 113, 131, 137, 139, 190, 230 Kripke, Saul 127 Kruger, Ann Cale 173 Kuno, Susumu 211, 221 Kuteva, Tania 78, 82, 93, 251, 255 L Lakoff, George 11, 33, 36–8, 52, 53, 54, 85, 92, 93, 102, 127, 128, 131, 144–6, 149, 151, 173, 190, 225, 228, 251, 266 Lambrecht, Knud 196, 208, 220 Langacker, Ronald W. 2ff, 13, 14, 34, 53, 64, 82, 110, 171ff, 190, 191, 203 Leech, Geoffrey N. 156, 265 Lehmann, Christian 89 Lehrer, Adrienne 126 Leuninger, Helen 232 Levin, Beth 45 Levinson, Stephen C. 80, 99, 102, 103, 104, 109, 118, 226 Lima, Paula 24 Limoges, Camille 227 M Mackridge, Peter 192 MacLaury, Robert E. 78 MacLean, Edna Ahgeak 256 Markert, Katja 22 Martin, Janice 13, 102, 107 Martin, Paul 13, 102, 107 Matsumoto, Yoshiko 78, 83, 91 Merlan, Francesca C. 78 Meyer, Charles 248 Meyer, Michael 248 Michaelis, Laura 43, 47, 99, 101, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113, 114, 115 Mihatsch, Wiltrud 13, 227, 229, 232, 234, 238 Mill, John Stuart 127 Miller, George A. 232 Milroy, A. Lesley 277 Morel, Mary-Annick 236, 237, 238 Mustanoja, Tauno F. 116 N Nakamura, Junsaku 265 Nerlich, Brigitte 77 Niemeier, Susanne 78 Nikiforidou, Kiki 5, 13, 192 Nissim, Malvina 22 Nunberg, Geoffrey 102

O Oakes, Michael P. 265 Oakley, Todd 12 Otake, Yoshio 208–10

Strom, Lise K. 24 Svorou, Soteria 78, 83, 91, 92 Sweetser, Eve 86, 87, 95, 172, 190 Sykes, Jeffrey 25

P Pagliuca, William 115 Panther, Klaus-Uwe 10, 11, 20ff, 47, 51, 54, 68, 79, 80, 103, 104, 121, 129, 133, 144, 176, 190, 226, 231 Papafragou, Anna 52, 104 Paradis, Carita 133 Pérez Hernández, Lorena 54, 109, 110, 112 Perkins, Revere D. 115 Pfaff, Kerry L. 23 Pickering, Martin 26, 27 Piñango, Maria Mercedes 100 Platt, John. T. 114 Posner, Roland 2, 6, 7 Potter, Liz 78, 84 Prince, Ellen 220 Pustejovsky, James 100, 111–13, 119

T Tabor, Whitney 235 Talmy, Leonard 3, 6, 173, 182 Tannen, Deborah 4 Taylor, John 78, 79, 95, 96 Tendahl, Markus 29 Thompson, Sandra 41 Thornburg, Linda 10, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 51, 54, 68, 80, 103, 104, 121, 129, 133, 144, 190, 226, 231 Thurmair, Maria 129 Till, Walter C. 258 Tomasello, Michael 173 Tottie, Gunnel 265, 266, 279 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 78, 96, 101, 102, 105, 116 Traxler, Matthew 27 Turner, Mark 6, 12, 53, 102, 173, 182, 190, 191, 195, 201

Q Quirk, Randolph 107 R Radden, Günter 21, 33, 34, 51, 53, 65, 68, 79, 87–91, 102, 103, 108, 110–13, 131, 137, 139, 190, 230 Ratner, Hilary H. 173 Reddy, Michael J. 44, 77 Roché, Michel 235 Roelcke, Thorsten 227 Rosch, Eleanor 229 Rosier, Laurence 236, 238 Rouget, Christine 225, 231, 232, 235 Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco J. 11, 12, 109–12 Russell, Bertrand 127 S Sag, Ivan A. 178 Scheffer, Johannes 115 Schlesinger, Izchak M. 113 Schmid, Hans-Jörg 144 Schuh, Russell G. 93 Schulze, Wolfgang 13, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 260, 261, 262 Searle, John 144, 248 Siemund, Peter 248, 253, 255, 257, 260 Sperber, Dan 20, 28, 29, 51, 209, 225 Spivey-Knowlton, Michael J. 24 Stefanowitsch, Anatol 12, 13, 14, 103, 144, 146, 155, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270 Stickel, Mark E. 102

U Ungerer, Friedrich 144 V van Hoek, Karen 178 Varlokosta, Spyridoula 192 Vendler, Zeno 41, 114, 116 Verhagen, Ariel 175 Visser, Frederikus Th, 116 Vlach, Frank 115 W Walsh, Michael 90 Waltereit, Richard 231 Weinrich, Harald 144 Wiemer-Hastings, Katja 58 Wiemer-Hastings, Pieter 58 Wierzbicka, Anna 229, 268 Wilson, Andrew 20, 28, 29, 51, 209, 225 Wilson, Deirdre 20, 28, 29, 51, 209, 225 Wrenn, Charles L. 107 Wulff, Stefanie 12, 14, 145, 267 X Y Yaguello, Marina 225, 226, 236, 238 Z Zacharski, Ron 177 Ziegeler, Debra P. 13, 103, 114, 115, 116 Zinken, Jörg 277 Zipf, George K. 118

Index of subjects A accessibility 28, 113, 177, 210, 222–3 action frame 40, 42, 45–6 active zone 8, 133, 190; see also profile/active-zone discrepancy adverb 36, 45, 46, 213–15, 218– 19, 230 alternation 44–5, 47, 267 anaphor 52, 62–5, 106, 177–8, 190, 207 anaphorical connection 62–3, 65 anaphorical expression 52 anaphorical noun phrase 64 antecedent 52, 64, 178–9, 196, 207, 239 approximation 226, 231, 233, 239–41 approximator 13, 226, 231ff aspectual coercion 102, 113–14 association strength 146, 155, 268, 278 Attention Information Flow 260 B basic-level member 229 biological taxonomy 227 blend 12–13, 182–4, 194–6, 199– 203, 268 blending 10–13, 131, 135, 173, 182–5, 190–1, 194–6, 199– 203; see also conceptual integration body part term 13, 78–9, 81–90, 92–6 C causation 267, 270, 279 causative construction 35, 266–7 caused-motion construction 9, 42–4 chained metonymy 13, 77–81, 83, 84–5, 88–90, 94, 96 cleft 208, 215, 220 wh-cleft 220 clue 61, 145, 216, 278 coercion 10, 43, 47, 99–121, 268, 270 aspectual 102, 113–14 constructional 47 nominal 106 coercion metonymy 104, 117

Cognitive Grammar 171–9, 190 cognitive image 252 cognitive linguistics 20, 21, 30, 31, 52, 53, 78, 79, 95, 190 cognitive process 36, 79, 103, 117, 251 cognitive state 249, 263 Cognitive Typology 251, 253, 259, 260 collexeme analysis 266, 271–2, 276–9 colligation 84 collocation 84, 147, 155, 268 collocational overlap 13, 143, 155, 166 collocational overlap model 144–6, 149, 153, 161–2, 165 collostructional analysis 268, 271, 278 conceptual blending 10–13, 131 conceptual integration 34, 135, 173, 189, 191, 194–5, 199–202 conceptual metonymy 10, 20– 22, 25–30, 51, 55, 139 conceptual reality of metonymy 23 conceptual routines 80 conceptual substrate 181 constituent question 248, 255– 261 constraint 8, 16, 21, 29, 43, 47, 80–1, 101, 119, 178, 191, 199–203, 209–10 construal 44–6, 109, 120, 133–4, 180–1, 185, 190, 193, 201, 217, 221 subjective 171, 174, 180–1 construction 1–12, 20–31, 34–6, 39, 42–7, 51, 54–5, 68, 77–80, 100–1, 105–8, 111–21, 126, 129–31, 134–5, 140–4, 182, 185, 189–200, 203, 208–40, 248–57, 261–3, 266–8, 271, 274–9 inferential 208–23 construction-based grammar 105 constructional coercion 47 constructional constraint 202 Construction Grammar 9, 266, 277–8 construction of figurative

meaning 13, 129, 141 Constructivism 251 conversational implicature 51, 104, 121, 226, 249 coreference 178, 195, 199 corpus 13, 22, 144, 147, 151, 155, 156, 160–6, 209, 213–15, 219, 223, 266, 268 corpus-based 144, 151, 223, 266, 268 corpus analysis 162, 254, 269 corpus linguistics 22 Correlation Principle 38, 43 count-to-mass coercion 111 counterfactual 6, 12 cross-linguistic 13, 79, 81, 90, 210, 221, 222, 248, 255, 261 current discourse space 178 D declarative sentence 212 definiteness 61, 107, 175, 177 degree adverb 217 deixis 78, 82–3, 90, 179, 249 delimitation 176, 179–80 demonstrative 174–7, 251 descriptivist view of reference 127 dihairesis 251–2, 255, 261, 262 discourse 3, 6, 10, 13, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30, 54, 55, 58, 59, 65–68, 100, 107, 129, 172–9, 209–22 discourse-pragmatic inferencing 54 discourse function 208, 210, 225 discourse variable 210, 215, 216, 218 distinctive collexeme analysis 266, 271, 272, 276–279 domain reduction 39 double metonymy 11, 39, 46 dynamicity 172 E effort after meaning 2, 7, 11 emergent meaning 12 emergent structure 190, 195–6, 199, 201, 203 enrichment 24, 102, 109, 112– 13, 119–20, 129, 141, 208 epistemic modality 218–19 explicature 21, 51, 54

286 Aspects of Meaning Construction

Extended Invariance Principle 37, 43 F facetization 133 figurative language 12, 22, 24, 27–8, 30, 84 figuratively used proper names 131, 136 figurative meaning construction 23, 25, 26, 28 Fisher-Yates exact test 156, 269, 271 floating question marker 261 frame 2–5, 12, 37, 40–2, 45–6, 53–4, 58–62, 66–7, 79, 114, 137–8, 155, 166, 191, 193, 196–201, 248, 251, 269–70, 278–9 frame semantics 191 functional domain 54 G genus 226–8, 234, 238, 241 grammatical coercion 10 grammaticalization 78, 84, 91–2, 96, 101, 107–9, 114, 228, 230, 235, 241, 251, 258–9 grammaticalization process 78, 84, 96 grammatical metaphor 36 Greek relative clauses 195 grounding 21, 34, 129, 173–6, 181 H hedge 225–6, 228 high-level metaphor 13, 35–6, 42–5, 47 high-level metonymy 45 I illocutionary force 10, 212, 248 image-schematic extension 95 imperative 6, 10–11, 36, 181, 254 impersonal 179, 180 impersonal pronoun 179 implicational hierarchy 81, 84 implicature 34, 54–69, 102–4, 121, 220, 226, 249 scalar 229 text-level 52–7, 61, 65, 68 implicitness 5–6, 51 implicit pragmatic meaning 51 inchoative construction 6, 35 incompatibility 5–10, 107 indefinite article 106–11, 118 indeterminacy 6–9, 34, 180, 189–203 inference 10–12, 20–3, 30, 33–6, 40, 56–67, 80, 103, 109–11, 114, 118–20, 180, 208–12, 215–23, 226

pragmatic 80, 111, 120 inference schema 10–12, 20 inferential activity 33–34, 40 inferential construction 13, 208–23 inferential pathway 8, 11 information structure 220 interpretation of novel metaphorical statements 162 interpretation of conventionalized metaphors 162 interrogative 212, 219–20, 248– 51, 254–63 interrogative clause 219, 220 interrogativity 248, 250–1, 254, 260, 261 intersubjectivity 5, 182, 185 into-causative construction 265–79 Invariance Principle 37–8, 43 inversion 257 it is that-construction 208–12, 216, 221–3 L lexicalization 78, 89–90 linearization 251, 253, 260–1 loose talk 226, 241 M mapping 22, 33, 37–9, 42–4, 53– 4, 80, 84, 87–95, 103, 130–5, 139, 144–5, 190, 194, 201, 252–4 metaphorical 23, 38, 43–4, 79, 94, 127, 129–133, 136–9, 141, 144–8, 166 metonymic 22, 30, 31, 39, 54, 77–81, 94, 96, 127, 129–30, 133–41 serial conceptual 93, 95 Mapping Enforcement Principle 38–9, 46 mapping scope 144 marking 106–10, 116–20, 193, 202, 216–21, 226, 257–60 mass-to-count coercion 108, 111 meaning construction 1–13, 20– 31, 39, 47, 51, 54–5, 68, 100, 126, 143–4, 190, 212, 226, 240, 248, 266–7, 277–8 meaning potential 277–9 memory mismatch 13, 250, 254, 260, 262–3 memory segment 251–2, 259, 261 mental activation 53, 61, 103 mental space 12, 135, 172 metaphor 5–13, 23–24, 28–31, 36–7, 39, 53, 78–80, 89–96, 102, 109, 127–40, 143–8,

151–6, 159–62, 165–6, 173, 190, 198, 203, 232, 250, 275, 279 grammatical 36 high–level 12, 35–6, 42–5, 47 metaphorical mapping 13, 23, 38, 43–4, 79, 94, 127, 129, 130–3, 136–9, 141, 144–8, 166 metaphorical pattern 146 metaphtonymy 129, 140 metonymic chain 39, 62 metonymic mapping 22, 30–1, 39, 54, 77–81, 96, 129–130, 133–141 metonymic motivation 13 135 metonymic processing 26 metonymic reasoning 8, 22–3 metonymy 7–12, 20–42, 45–7, 51–69, 77–96, 100–4, 108– 13, 117–21, 126–41, 190, 198, 203, 230, 231 chained 39, 62, 77–81, 83–85, 87–90, 94, 96 coercion 104, 117 conceptual 10, 20–22, 25–30, 51, 55, 139 conceptual reality of 23 double 11, 39, 46 high–level 11, 45 multiple 132 predication 103 referential 35, 102–3, 111, 118 schematic 53, 103 speech act 121, 231 mirroring process 251, 252, 261 mismatch 4, 13, 100–1, 104, 115– 21, 250–4, 260–3 modality 6–7, 103, 114, 212, 219, 248, 262, 265 morpho-phonological reduction 84 motivation 78–81, 87–8, 135, 143, 165, 191, 253 metonymic 135 multiple metonymy 132 N natural inference scheme 20 negation 213–14, 216, 218, 230, 233, 254–5, 263 nominal 8, 106, 110, 113, 173– 80, 190, 196, 202, 236 nominal coercion 106 O objectively construed 172 object of conception 171, 174, 182–4 onomasiological 250 open proposition 215, 220 Optimality Principle 191 Override Principle 43, 101, 107

P paragon 127, 130–1, 134–8, 141 performative 181 personal pronoun 5, 13, 171, 176, 178–80 personification 83 polar question 255 polysemous expression 80 polysemy 80–1, 84–5, 116, 118, 197, 202–3, 248, 275 pragmaticalisation 226, 235, 238–40 pragmatic function 54 pragmatic implication 33 pragmatic inference 80, 111, 120 pragmatics 21, 24, 28–30, 100, 121, 208, 248, 267 predication metonymy 103 presupposition 216–18, 220, 258 Principle of No Synonymy 267 Principle of Relevance 66, 114 profile/active-zone discrepancy 7–8 progressive aspect 114, 120–1 pronominal 178, 202, 255 pronominal anaphora 178 pronoun 5, 7, 9, 171, 173–4, 176– 80, 183–5, 198, 202, 230, 239, 251, 255, 257–61 impersonal 179 personal 5, 171, 176, 178–80 proper name 125–33, 136–9, 176 figuratively used 131, 136 prototype 191, 229, 231 Q question 219–20, 248–63 particle 255, 260 polar 255

Index of subjects 287

strategy 248, 255, 263 yes/no-question 219–20, 255 quotative 238 R Radical Experientialism 251, 253, 260 reanalysis 116–21, 231–5 reasoning principle 80 reference point 53, 62, 172–5, 178, 190 reference-point construction 190 referential metonymy 35, 102–3, 111, 118 relative 116, 146, 148, 157, 178, 191–203 relative clause 192–202 relative pronoun 198 relativizer 192, 196 Relevance Theory 20, 29, 209, 211 resultative construction 44 S scalar implicature 229 scale 137, 138, 143, 156, 165, 177, 217, 230 scenario 6, 9–11, 35, 180–3, 226, 231, 239 schematic metonymy 53, 103 scientific taxonomy 226, 228 scope of awareness 180 semantic composition 119, 191 semantic domain 143 semantic frame 278 semantic role 192, 193, 197, 202 serial conceptual mapping 93, 95 serial extension 79, 93–5 species 13, 144, 148, 226–30, 234, 238–41 specification 177, 190, 215–20,

240, 257, 260 speech act 36, 181, 254–5, 262–3 speech act metonymy 121, 231 subject coercion 113 subjectively construed 171, 174, 180–1 subject of conception 171, 173, 181–4 syntactic reanalysis 235 T taxonomic noun 226–41 taxonomy 79, 231 text-level implicature 52–7, 61, 65, 68 thematic role 193 transitivity 40, 43–5 typology 112, 222, 251, 253, 257 U uncertainty 164, 249, 251, 256, 260–2 underspecification 2–9, 27, 192, 199 unmarked 106–10, 209, 212–16, 220–1 V vagueness 6, 180, 203, 251, 258, 261 vantage point 64, 174, 184–5 variable 210, 215–23, 267 vital relation 12, 20, 196 W wh-clause 220 wh-cleft 220 wh-question 219 Y yes/no-question 219–20, 255

Index of metonymies and metaphors A ability for action 103 action for effect of the action 39 action for object 87 activity for time to do that activity 20 anger is heated fluid in a container 23, 24, 25 author for work 39 author for work for medium 39

O object for an action in which the object is involved 112 object for material constituting that object 110, 111 object for user 21, 24, 25, 30 objects are humans 83, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94 organ of perception for perception 86, 87, 93, 94

C categories are containers 92 category for defining property 131 cause for effect 20, 24, 59, 68, 79, 86, 89 communicating is giving 44 communicative action is effectual action 12, 43, 44 contained for container 108, 118 container for contained 88, 94

P part for orientation 93 part for region 84, 91, 92, 94 part for whole 9, 20, 21, 24, 65, 68, 79, 102 part of a frame for the whole frame 67 part of frame for whole frame 60, 62 perception for attention 86, 87 perception for thing perceived 87 person for nation 29, 30 place for action 89, 90 place for event 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30 place for institution 26 place for people 22 place for person 22 place for product 22 plants are humans 85 potentiality for actuality 103 potentiality for nonactuality 103 process for action for result 11, 46, 47

D desire is hunger 24 E event for precondition 66, 68 events are entities 35 F food for customer 104 I instrument for action 85, 88, 94, 113 L love is a journey 37 M material for entity containing/holding the material 109 means for action 88 member of a category for the category 89 mind as machine 28

R result for action 10 S salient property for category 68 specific for generic 139 T theories are buildings 11 thing for property of a thing 10 time is space 84, 91, 92, 93

W whole for part 8, 88, 132, 133 whole scale for upper/ lower end of scale 137, 138