Cognitive Linguistics
mixingmemory | June 18, 2007In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes:
The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in progress book. My own opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, and other related ideas from cognitive linguistics are threatening to traditional scholars because it is contrary to prevailing, enduring beliefs that the mind is literal and disembodied. Put simply, many cognitive scientists could not continue to work in the ways they do if they embraced some of these…
mixingmemory | June 18, 2007In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously addresses the evidence and theoretical arguments against CMT from outside cognitive linguistics. As he's done before, Dr. Gibbs dropped by and left a lengthy response in the comments, which I'm reposting here in its entirety (edited to remove some HTML problems, but not for content). At the end there is a long list of citations. I…
mixingmemory | June 17, 2007In case you haven't heard about it, there's a relatively new blog in the cognitive science section of the blog world called Cognitive Approaches to Literature. They don't post very often over there, but if they ever start doing so, it promises to be an interesting read with lively discussions. The latest addition to the blog's stable of contributors is Michael Kimmel, a "cognitive social scientist" in Vienna whose main interests are "metaphor, imagery and embodiment." Now, if you speak the language of cognitive science, you can probably guess a few of Kimmel's major inspirations from the…
mixingmemory | December 18, 2006A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of the work in the poster (it's about negative numbers being represented on a mental number line). Apparently, nothing. But in the process of looking for more information, I came across another paper that might be even more interesting.
The poster was inspired by work showing that we may represent positive numbers on a "mental number line." In one experiment testing the mental number line hypothesis…
mixingmemory | November 11, 2006Earlier today I posted about the spatial and temporal ventriloquism aftereffects. One of the reasons I find those effects fascinating because I think they might hint at a counterargument to recent studies by Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that seem to provide evidence that time is metaphorically structured through spatial experience and concepts, as I discussed the other day. In those experiments, the growth of a line and the length of a line influenced people's perception of temporal durations (see the link for a full description of the studies). I think this result might occur because…
mixingmemory | November 9, 2006The last post on time-space metaphor research has sparked a really interesting discussion in the comments (go check it out), so I thought I'd talk about some more research to see if we can't get even more people talking. If you've been following that discussion, this is the research by Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that commenter Shane keeps mentioning.
If you haven't been following the the many posts on time-space metaphors on Mixing Memory, here are the basics. One of the examples of an abstract concept being structured by a more concrete one that Lakoff and Johnson use in their 1980…
mixingmemory | November 7, 2006As I've said before, the primary (if not the only) real experimental evidence for conceptual metaphor theory -- the theory that abstract concepts are structured by more concrete (i.e., closer to sensory/perceptual) concepts -- comes from one domain: time. Time, according to conceptual metaphor theory, is structured primarily through spatial metaphors. In English, there are two dominant spatial metaphors: the ego-moving metaphor, in which we are moving toward the future (e.g., "I'm coming up on my 30th birthday"), and the time-moving metaphor, in which we are stationary while time moves…
mixingmemory | November 6, 2006You know things have taken a turn for the surreal when George Lakoff is described as "an admirer of Noam Chomsky." I may dislike his linguistics and his political theory, but I have to pat him on the back for striking such a nerve with the wingnuts that they are willing to call a man who was once denounced as a heretic by Chomsky, and who's devoted the bulk of his adult life to anti-Chomskyan linguistics, an "admirer of Chomsky," or a "Chomsky protege." I mean, some guy wrote a book about how much these linguists dislike each other.
mixingmemory | November 2, 2006Raymond Gibbs Jr., psycholinguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the principle adherents of cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory, was kind enough to leave a comment at the post "Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!." Dr. Gibbs' book, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding is a must read for anyone interested in cognitive linguistics. Among psychologists, Dr. Gibbs has done more, emprically and theoretically, to support conceptual metaphor theory than anyone else I know (Arthur Glenberg might compete, but his work is more…
mixingmemory | November 1, 2006Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory is, well, wrong. I guess I think that since I've been posting about such evidence for two years, and I remember those posts, everyone else must as well. Once I realize that not all of you have been reading Mixing Memory from day 1, I think, "I should write some more posts on the evidence," but then I remember something else:…
mixingmemory | October 7, 2006George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New Year's resolution this year was to not read any more bullshit), but Steven Pinker has, and his review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic (the review is behind a subscription wall, but you can read it in its entirety below the fold in this Gene Expression post) has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and…
mixingmemory | June 20, 2006I've got it! I know how we can test conceptual metaphor theory in the domain of time. Yesterday I argued that the problem with the experiments published so far is that it's impossible to distinguish mere lexical priming (priming spatial meanings of the terms, which influences subsequent temporal reasoning) from conceptual priming due to metaphorical mappings between time and space. As I was walking across campus today, I came up with an idea. Now, this idea is in its infancy, but I bet some of you can help me with it. Of course, I don't actually plan on running this experiment, because coming…
mixingmemory | June 20, 2006I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conceptual metaphor theory sucks. Why does it suck? Well, because there's no experimental evidence for it (and plenty of evidence against it). Except, that is, in one domain: time. Specifically, the work of Lera Boroditsky, along with Dedre Gentner and her colleagues, has provided interesting demonstrations of the influence of the way we talk about space on the way we conceptualize time. I've talked about their work before, and now Dave's talking about Gentner's work over at Cognitive Daily, so I won't go into a lot of detail. Instead, I'll give you…