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Alternate Construals in Language and Linguistics

Philologica Wratislaviensia: Acta et Studia

Edited by Zdzisław Wąsik Advisory Board

Janusz Arabski (Katowice) Jerzy Bańczerowski (Poznań) Piotr Chruszczewski (Wrocław) Andrzej Ciuk (Opole) Anna Duszak (Warszawa) Jacek Fisiak (Poznań) Krzysztof Janikowski (Wrocław) Norbert Morciniec (Wrocław) Tadeusz Piotrowski (Wrocław) Michał Post (Wrocław) Stanisław Prędota (Wrocław) Stanisław Puppel (Poznań) Teresa Siek-Piskozub (Poznań) Liliana Sikorska (Poznań) Anna Stroka (Wrocław) Aleksander Szwedek (Poznań) Jerzy Wełna (Warszawa) Ryszard Wolny (Opole)

Vol. 8

PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW PUBLISHING

Zdzisław Wąsik

Piotr Czajka Michał Szawerna

(eds.)

Alternate Construals in Language and Linguistics

WYDAWNICTWO WYŻSZEJ SZKOŁY FILOLOGICZNEJ

WE WROCŁAWIU

This volume basing on the peer-review principles has been published with a financial support from Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław. ABSTRACT: Zdzisław Wąsik, Piotr Czajka, Michał Szawerna (eds.) 2012: Alternate Construals in Language and Linguistics. Wrocław: Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław Publishing / Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Filologicznej we Wrocławiu (Philologica Wratislaviensia: Acta et Studia. Vol. 8. Edited by Zdzisław Wąsik). 190 pp. ISBN 978-83-60097-14-4

KEY WORDS: alternate construals, cognitivism, conceptual metaphor, comics, possible worlds, truth semantics ZDZISŁAW WĄSIK, Rector, Professor and Head, Department of Linguistic Semiotics and Communicology, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław; Professor, School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, Member of the I.C.I. Bureau and Director of Regional Coordinators for Europe, Washington, DC

PIOTR CZAJKA, Assistant Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław; Associate Professor, Faculty of Modern Languages, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław

MICHAŁ SZAWERNA, Assistant Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Lecturer, Faculty of Modern Languages, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław

© Copyright by Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu, Wrocław 2012

Typesetting by Zdzisław Wąsik

Editorial reading by Sylwia Rudzińska and Barbara Woldan

Cover design by Beata Opala

ISBN 978-83-60097-14-4 WYŻSZA SZKOŁA FILOLOGICZNA WE WROCŁAWIU ul. Sienkiewicza 32, 50-335 Wrocław tel. +4871 328 14 14, fax. +4871 322 10 06, e-mail: [email protected] Wydanie I. Nakład 200 egz. Ark. wyd. 11,88

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION Alternate construals in language and linguistics .................047

ARIADNA STRUGIELSKA Alternate construals of source and target domains in conceptual metaphors..................................................................................011

TOMASZ FOJT Metaphor-induced construal alterations ...............................027

AGNIESZKA LIBURA Kto, komu i dlaczego grób kopie, czyli o sposobach analizy semantycznej zwrotu „kopać sobie grób”...........................................043

MICHAŁ SZAWERNA Toward a cognitive approach to analyzing comics: The contrasting construals of comics in similarity-based theories of conceptual representation................................................................................059

LAURA SUCHOSTAWSKA An alternate construal of humans and nature in deep ecology................................................................................................075

ALEKSANDRA SZUDY-SOJAK A cognitive perspective on Naomi Klein’s Fences and Windows .......................................................................................085

MATEUSZ MARECKI The actual, the possible and the hypothetical: The significance of the 2nd conditional for the creation of multidimensional worlds in Bruce Boston’s speculative poems..................................................095

ADAM BIAŁY On the construal of prepositional phrases ............................... 105

Table of contents

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JOLANTA MACHOWSKA Alternatywne konstrukty w opowiadaniach uczniów w młodszym wieku szkolnym........................................................... 121

ANNA CISŁO Between tradition and innovation: The alternative Gaelic script .................................................................................................... 131

PAUL J. VAN DEN HOVEN A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there: About the semiotics of the trivial ................................... 143

IVAN KASABOV Words’ connotations and semantic construals..................... 161

ERIK VOGT Speaking the inhuman in the human: The testimonial structure of language “after” Auschwitz ......................................................... 175

PHILOLOGICA WRATISLAVIENSIA: ACTA ET STUDIA 8

INTRODUCTION

Alternate construals in language and linguistics

Centered on the inspirational belief that people perceive, interpret, and ex-plain the world around them in multifarious ways, this collection of articles presents various applications of the notion of construal in the area of language and linguistics. It refers to the ideas originally conceived by social psychologists, and adapted by cognitive linguists to investigate the multifaceted relationship between language users and the conceptualizations they entertain for purposes of linguistic expression. The issues raised in this collection base on the assumptions that construals appear to be ubiquitous in linguistic categorization as any act thereof involves interpretation of a continuous flux of stimuli on the part of a language user. In view of the ubiquity and inherent flexibility of construal, the following contri-butions have taken as a point of their departure an array of metalinguistic con-structs, elevated it to the status of principal factors accounting for both inter- and intra-categorial semantic variation encountered along the entire lexicological-grammatical continuum, and exploited its potential for facilitating the process of language development by approaching such major mechanisms of semantic extension as metaphor, metonymy, and subjectification in construal-related terms. The centrality of the notion of construal to cognitive linguistics arguably accounts for the fact that most contributors to this volume have adopted the cognitive perspective and explore the relationship between construal and the semantics of a broad range of linguistic expressions. From among the contributors of cognitive linguistic persuasion, Ariadna Strugielska, Tomasz Fojt, and Agnieszka Libura reflect upon the interface of construal and metaphor, albeit in the context of various cognitive frameworks: conceptual metaphor theory, cognitive grammar, and blending theory. The topic of Strugielska’s article concerns the metalinguistic expressions used by cogni-tive linguists to refer to the essential components of conceptual metaphor: target domain and source domain. Seeking an alternative to the standard conception of the target and source domain, whereby the two domains are internally homoge-nous representational fields with clearly delineated boundaries, the author ex-plores the grounds for regarding these domains as more than heterogeneous concepts, varying in terms of their internal complexity as well as the level of specificity at which they are formulated. A suggestion is put forward in the pa-per that this alternative construal of the domains calls into question their di-

Introduction

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chotomous nature: just as conceptual metaphor may be conceived of as com-prising more than two constitutive domains, the existence of a clear-cut bound-ary between these constitutive domains may also be called into question. As far as Fojt is concerned, he inquires into the meaning of intra-categorial semantic variation arguing that unlike the primary, nominal sense of the Polish lexeme burza, which designates a meteorological phenomenon, the lexeme’s metaphorical senses, which do not refer to weather events, exemplify non-nominal semantic structures. According to the author’s observation, the meta-phorical construal of a range of concepts in terms of the primary sense of burza is accompanied by the lexeme’s recategorization as an atemporal relation. The results of Fojt’s paper have shown that this recategorization has grammatical consequences: unlike the lexeme’s primary sense, metaphorical extensions of burza occur in a construction referred to as the appositive genitive. In Libura’s article a number of competing cognitive linguistic analyses of the metaphorical expression kopać sobie grób (to dig one’s own grave) are compared for answering how well these alternative analytical construals ac-count for the problematic idiosyncrasies of this expression’s semantic structure, which integrates specific, yet unintentional, actions performed by an agent, the agent’s ignorance of their effects, and language users’ negative evaluation of the meaning of this expression. Like Libura’s contribution, the paper by Michał Szawerna evaluates the potential of a number of competing theories to charac-terize a particular semantic structure in an accurate and comprehensive manner. The objects of Szawerna’s comparative study constitute three contrasting con-struals of the conceptual representation of the narrative medium referred to as comics, discussed in terms of the classical theory, the family resemblance the-ory, and the exemplar theory of categorization with the purpose of selecting the theory of conceptual representation which provides the most suitable basis for the development of a holistic approach to analyzing comics informed by theo-retical and applied cognitivism. The three subsequent articles, written by Laura Suchostawska, Aleksandra Szudy-Sojak, and Mateusz Marecki, concentrate around the idea of construal with reference to such varieties of creative writing as creative non-fiction and poetry. Correspondingly, Suchostawska contrasts the mainstream, anthropocen-tric construal of humans and nature with an alternative, biocentric construal of these concepts. The analysis of the lexical material retrieved from a book on the practice of deep ecology demonstrates that the mainstream construal is based on a system of conceptual metaphors whose source domains include such concepts as separation, containment, and war, while the biocentric construal rests on a system of metaphors employing such concepts as connection, entirety, and cooperation as their source domains. Szudy-Sojak, in turn, examines the system of metaphors employed by the award-winning journalist Naomi Klein in a col-

Alternate construals in language and linguistics

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lection of articles on demonstrations against corporate globalization. In Szudy-Sojak’s paper, an argument is put forward that Klein’s primary reliance on a construal whereby the activities of the anti-corporate movement are consis-tently portrayed by means of lexical items referring to various aspects of war-fare is a conscious linguistic strategy on the part of the journalist, who aims to perspectivize the more dramatic aspects of the anti-globalist enterprise and, at the same time, background its less sensational aspects. In the same context, having adopted the tenets of cognitive poetics and text world theory, Marecki analyzes the way in which English second conditional sentences appearing in selected poems by Bruce Boston, a representative of speculative poetry, trigger the emergence of imaginary, often utopian, worlds in the interpretive mind of the reader. Two other contributors, Adam Biały and Jolanta Machowska, make evident that the notion of construal may be employed in considerations of language that either exceed the theoretical confines of cognitive linguistics or center on lin-guistic data other than the conventional expressions typically included in the scope of cognitive linguistic explorations. Presupposing the creed of the Chomskyan Minimalist Framework, Biały offers an analysis of data from Eng-lish, Polish, Czech, and Dutch whose aim is to support an alternative view on the place of prepositional elements in the Universal Grammar. The subject-matter of Machowska’s investigations constitutes the ways in which young school children make sense of the non-conventional lexical concept of a magic drop of water. In the stories they wrote about the magic drop, the children pro-ject the physical, mental, and behavioral traits conventionally associated with humans on to the novel concept of the magic water drop. Arguably, this kind of anthropomorphization exemplifies the metaphorical reasoning motivated by embodiment, whereby inherently salient human characteristics are accessed and employed as the source domain for the construal of the non-salient concept of the magic water drop. The remaining contributors, Anna Cisło, Paul van den Hoven, Ivan Ka-sabov, and Erik Vogt, utilize the concept of construal as a methodological tool for discussing language in the light of such non-linguistic disciplines as cultural history, classic semiotics, and contemporary philosophy. Cisło’s studies prove that the visual forms of writing may be influenced by social and historical con-ditionings. On the basis of historical accounts of the Irish script, the paper dem-onstrates that the Irish fonts, revived, redesigned and used until the 1960’s, were deliberately taken to symbolize the independence of the Irish from the English culture in a newly established state. The focus of Hoven’s paper is on the situations in which the interpretive human mind is satisfied with the simplest, trivial understanding of the surround-ing objects and does not venture to create multiple, alternate interpretations of

Introduction

10

what is sensually available. With reference to Peircean semiotics, Hoven strives to capture the phenomenon of objects’ trivial appearance and contrast it with two other types of their appearance: theoretical and aesthetic. Peircean semiotics is also the theoretical framework of the paper by Ka-sabov, whose attention concentrates on the processes that result in the creation and evolution of word forms and meanings. The paper is an attempt at pinpoint-ing and characterizing the stages in their development at which the whole array of alternative choices concerning words’ tangible forms and meanings is wid-ened or narrowed due to social practices of interpersonal communication that are presented as embedded in dynamically understood systems of beliefs and values shared by the members of a given speech community. Put at the end of this collection, Vogt’s paper discusses Giorgio Agamben’s contribution to the question of truth-related assessment of how the events at Auschwitz are represented in contemporary discourses. Considering the insuffi-ciency of the traditional construal of ordinary language as the default means of performing the speech acts of bearing witness and giving testimony, Vogt is of the opinion that they have to be rejected in favor of an alternate construal whereby those speech acts cannot be accomplished without recourse to poetry as it is only poetry that can transcend the limitations of ordinary speech as the instrument of bearing witness and giving testimony to experiences which defy recounting. The broad scope of the issues taken up in the articles collected in this vol-ume and the variety of research perspectives from which these issues have been explored point to the wealth of applications that exist for the notion of alternate construal, both in linguistics and in non-linguistic academic disciplines which may impinge on language. While a collection of this size cannot be deemed a definitive statement on the applicability of construal in language-related re-search, it may well assist students and scholars who are interested in the study of language by raising their awareness that the multifarious approaches to lan-guage currently accepted within the academia not only overlap and complement each other, but also select, highlight, and perspectivize some aspects of lan-guage at the cost of discounting, back grounding, or altogether excluding others. The editors wish to express their thanks to all the contributors who offered their energies and talents to elaborate on the overall theme of this volume. Spe-cial acknowledgments should also go to the authorities of the Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław, who were principally involved in bringing this publication to print. Wrocław, in August 2012 Zdzisław Wąsik, Piotr Czajka &

Michał Szawerna


ARIADNA STRUGIELSKA NICOLAUS COPERNICUS UNIVERSITY IN TORUŃ

Alternate construals of source and target domains in conceptual metaphors

ABSTRACT. Conceptual Metaphor Theory has developed a rich metalinguistic inventory which equips the researcher with a number of heuristically important constructs, among which source and target domains should be seen as fundamental. Consequently, both definitions and registers of the two concepts proliferate in the conceptual metaphor literature. Importantly, though, little consensus as to the nature and number of source and target domains can be detected within standard Conceptual Metaphor Theory as well as across its variants. As a result, the dominant construal of the two concepts is accompanied by many alternative understandings. For instance, Conceptual Metaphor Theory sees the source domain as a neatly delineated construct, which entails that linguistic units are defined through a single perspective and with reference to a fixed set of semantic primitives. Alternately, however, the source domain can be seen as a potential of interpretations, derived from the polysemous character of relevant lexemes. Relatedly, a number of alternatives can be proposed if the level of generality of a particular category is re-evaluated. Essentially, alternate construals multiply if a particular source domain is verified against naturally occurring language. Apparently, a data-driven approach implies that metaphorical linguistic expressions are only peripherally related to their schematic source categories. Likewise, the target concept can be alternately construed, which can either engender highly elaborate or extremely schematic domains. Most importantly, alternatives within the target concepts are related to the level of informativity which a particular perspective allows, and while Conceptual Metaphor Theory aspires to provide a most comprehensive account of abstract concepts, its description of, for instance, the domain of fear is in fact impoverished. Thus, alternate construals may well indicate that the source/target dichotomy is invalid, and, by entailment, that the role of conceptual metaphors as semantic representations is rather insignificant.

1. The source/target dichotomy in Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT) is rather customarily situ-ated within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. René Dirven (2005: 17–18) sees Cognitive Linguistics as a diverse paradigm with several ramifications, among which there is a “phenomenology-based strand … explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the direction of ‘embodied realism’ … Here be-long prototype theory, lexical network theory, conceptual metaphor theory, and conceptual metonymy theory with inroads into cognitive pragmatics”. At the same time, though, the theory of cognitive metaphor perpetuates a number of dichotomies, which, as Ronald Wayne Langacker (1987: 18) rightly observes, “leads to the reification of working distinctions into disjoint categories, which

Ariadna Strugielska

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are then taken as ‘established’ and accorded a theoretical status quite unjustified by the facts”. Brigitte Nerlich (2007: 95) argues that CMT is based upon, at least, “use / concepts, form / function, objective / experiential, [and] literal/ figurative” segregations. According to Zoltán Kövecses (2002: 248), conceptual metaphors are “ways of understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another”, which is achieved by proposing systematic correspondences between the two concepts. Importantly, metaphors, captured by the A IS B formula, consist of two differ-ent domains – the source and target concepts. Thus, the source/target differen-tiation constitutes the corner-stone of CMT. The distinction into donor (source) and topic (target) domains is based on the class membership of the relevant term. Importantly, decisions pertaining to defining source and target categories are not systematic since they are based on dissimilar approaches to categoriza-tion. As a result, alternate construals of the two concepts are not infrequent. To begin with, the standard version of CMT, propagated by Lakoff & John-son (1980) and Kövecses (1986, 2000, 2002), is based on the monosemy princi-ple, while recent developments within the model expand in two directions. The first tendency, disseminated in the works of Gerard J. Steen (1994, 2007) and his followers (see, for instance, Małgorzata Fabiszak 2007), is to approach con-ceptual metaphors from a bottom-up perspective. The inductive methodology results in postulating new or improved mappings, which is predominantly the consequence of adopting a principled polysemy perspective on concepts (see Evans 2006). The other tendency, represented by Joseph Grady (2005) and Aleksander Szwedek (2004), is to assume schematic constructs as source do-mains, much in line with Ray Jackendoff’s (1983) conceptual primitives or Langacker’s (2008) archetypes. In the following sections, the source/target distinction within the standard version of CMT will be discussed in detail. Consequently, alternate construals of source and target concepts will be proposed.

1.1. Alternate construals of the source domain

The Lakovian account of conceptual metaphors stipulates not only that the source/target dichotomy is possible to maintain, but also that the domain of the focus inherits its structure from the image-schematic make-up of the source. This proposal has been formulated as the Invariance Hypothesis:

Given that all metaphoric mappings are partial, the Invariance Hypothesis claims that the portion of the source domain structure that is mapped preserves cognitive topology (though, of course, not all the cognitive topology need be mapped). Since the cognitive topology of image schemas determines their inference patterns, the Invariance Hypothesis claims that imagistic reasoning patterns are mapped onto abstract reasoning patterns via metaphorical


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mappings. It entails that at least some (and perhaps all) abstract reasoning is a metaphorical version of image-based reasoning (Lakoff 1990: 39).

Olaf Jäkel (2002: 36) illustrates the hypothesis on the basis of the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and the linguist argues that “[a]ccording to the hypothesis, the structures mapped from the source domain JOURNEY to the target domain LIFE should be that of the PATH schema which is at the heart of the JOURNEY domain”. Essentially, then, the Invariance Hypothesis is built on the cognition-as-topology premise, which results in the monosemy perspective imposed on data. For instance, in standard CMT the noun “source” is invariably related to the domain of liquids, e.g., FEAR IS A LIQUID (“source of fear”), HAPPINESS IS

A LIQUID (“source of joy”), SADNESS IS A LIQUID (“source of sadness”) (cf. Ste-fanowitsch 2006). Moreover, Kövecses (2002: 258) argues that the source do-main of fluids highlights the aspects of control and intensity. Thus, the linguis-tic unit “source” is invariably defined through one domain and with reference to a fixed set of semantic primitives. However, even a cursory look at naturally occurring data provides a number of alternatives. For instance, the British Na-tional Corpus offers the following domains with which “source” can be felici-tously associated: money (“source of income, revenue, funds”), energy (“source of energy, power”), or food (“source of food, supply”). Dylan Glynn (2002: 2) voices a similar criticism, when he questions the arbitrary connection between a class and its member:

Why is losing one's senses related to madness? Similarly, why do blind with rage or with love and go mad with anger or insanely jealous represent something similar? That is, how do we judge the boundaries, and thus the members, of the prototype sets that we identify as source domains? Is blind love or rage necessarily related to insane jealousy or mad anger? It is because we equate insanity with the loss of sensible behavior that we judge them similar. This is less obvious than it may seem because such a judgment of similarity is dependent on cultural mediation.

In other words, a particular linguistic expression may well be classified as belonging to alternative source domains. Anatol Stefanowitsch (2006: 72–73) argues along similar lines when he posits that “it is unclear why … He is a pain in the neck, is categorized as an example for ANGER IS A PHYSICAL ANNOY-

NANCE rather than simply ANGER IS PAIN. Such decisions often result from an attempt to categorize examples that are felt to be similar under a single map-ping”. Likewise, when discussing Kövecses’ (2000) EMOTION IS AN OPPONENT meta-phor, Steen (2007: 202–205) proposes alternative cognitive mappings, motivated by the polysemous character of the key words in examples [1a–1d] (see Kövecses 2000: 69):

Ariadna Strugielska

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[1a] He was seized by emotion. [1b] He was struggling with his emotions. [1c] I was gripped by emotion. [1d] She was overcome by emotion.

On the basis of a dictionary check, Steen (2007) postulates four concrete senses of the highlighted verbs. He further argues that the meanings do not nec-essarily all instantiate the opponent category. Instead,

[while] the items struggle and overcome clearly involve opponents when their more basic senses are examined, … the items seize and grip do not necessarily presuppose or entail opposition. One may seize or grip objects or people for a whole range of reasons, for instance to steady either oneself or the person or thing, which goes against the idea of opposition. More central to the idea of seizing or gripping is the idea of control, either of oneself or of the other person or thing. This suggests that the items seize and grip might be better explained by an alternative conceptual metaphor, which highlights the control aspect of emotions as forces (Steen 2007: 202–203).

In the same vein, Glynn (2002) re-evaluates linguistic examples of ANGER metaphors to be found in, for instance, Kövecses (1986: 11–27):

[2a] They were having a heated argument. [2b] Those are inflammatory remarks. [2c] Sparks flew when Said entered the room. [2d] You make my blood boil. [2e] Billy’s just letting off steam. [2f] When I told him, he just exploded.

When discussing the above occurrences, Glynn (2002: 1) justly remarks that: These examples indicate the lack of means for delineation in the source domains. Are these expressions part of one general metaphor ANGER IS HEAT, or rather, do they belong to two independent metaphors such as ANGER IS CONTAINED PRESSURE and ANGER is FIRE? [The first three examples] take the concept ‘fire’ as a source domain [while the last three instantiations] take the conceptualization of ‘contained heated fluid creates pressure’ as a source domain. By what reasoning do the studies of Lakoff and Kövecses distinguish these concepts as separate domains?

To conclude our discussion so far, the first set of alternate construals of source concepts has been motivated by a monosemy-to-polysemy shift in cate-gorization. Respectively, a number of alternatives can be proposed if the level of generality of a particular category is re-evaluated. It might be worth looking at some examples of common source domains postulated by Kövecses (2002: 16–20), which include: the human body, health and illness, animals, plants, buildings and constructions, light and darkness, heat and cold, money and business, movement and direction or force. Not only are


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these source domains, defined as more concrete, physical and clearly delineated than the target domains (Kövecses 2002: 15), fairly intangible themselves, but they are also formulated at a rather superordinate level. A different picture emerges from studying the source domains for the concept ANGER. These in-clude: hot fluid in a container, fire, insanity, an opponent in a struggle, a captive animal, a burden, aggressive animal behavior, trespassing, physical annoyance, a natural force, being a functioning machine, a superior (Kövecses 1998: 129). Moreover, the source domains for anger listed above are far more specific than those proposed in Kövecses (2002), e.g., animals, movement or force. Probably, a captive animal and aggressive animal behavior elaborate the animal domain, trespassing is a kind of movement and a natural force instantiates the force schema. Most importantly, though, no clear criteria are provided on the basis of which such distinctions could be maintained. Thus, there are no means by which possible alternatives could be systematically constrained even within the standard version of metaphor theory. Further alternatives can be proposed if the level of generality of a particular source domain is verified against naturally occurring data. For instance, Ste-fanowitsch (2006: 79) posits that the source domain of liquids defines the mean-ing of the verb well up. However, the proposed category is too general if con-fronted against corpus data since the most frequent nominal collocates for “welled up” include: “tears”, “misery”, “panic”, “anger”, and “nausea”. Hence, subsuming “welled up” under the liquid domain overlooks the fact that the verb is most frequent with abstract nouns. Likewise, John Sinclair (19911, cited by Alice Deignan (2006: 110) observes that “build up” is not related to the domain of buildings, as illustrated by “Problems are building up”. The above-mentioned tendency, i.e., a proposed source domain lexeme being only peripherally related to its schema, is particularly noticeable in the case of permeate, another postulated member of the liquid category (cf. Ste-fanowitsch 2006: 79). In the BNC the verb can co-occur with the following nouns: “ideas”, “pain”, “errors”, “concerns”, “understanding”, “odors”, “atti-tudes”, “values”, “energy” or “style”. The most important observation to be made at this stage concerns the ab-stract nature of the nouns accompanying “permeate”. In fact, it could be posited that the verb is particularly linked to the non-physical domain since its top col-locates in the BNC are “values” and “ideas”. Hence, in view of the Invariance Hypothesis presented above, the case of “permeate” is highly problematic within standard CMT since it is “the target domain [which] contributes to the form of the linguistic metaphor rather than having a structure imposed on it” (Deignan 2006: 120).

1 John Sinclair 1991: Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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In the same vein, the fact that we use, for instance, “overwhelming” when talking about feelings and victories does not necessarily presuppose that the former is more salient than the latter. Indeed, when considering the most fre-quent collocates for “overwhelming” in the BNC, “majority”, “support”, “evi-dence”, “desire”, “sense” and “need” come first. Moreover, no collocation is found including the word “opponent”, the closest relevant lexeme being “oppo-sition”. Hence, postulating the EMOTION IS AN OPPONENT metaphor, to be found in Stefanowitsch (2006: 79–86), is not confirmed in a usage-based model, where frequency and productivity are of paramount importance. Finally, alternate construals of the source concepts are reflected in sense relations. In fact, relations of antonymy and synonymy point to the fact that although certain linguistic items are expected to alternate, they do not. For in-stance, since “bright” and “brilliant” are two equally plausible choices within the domain of light, and if the metaphorical mapping EMOTIONS ARE LIGHT (cf. Kövecses 2002) really holds, both “bright” and “brilliant fear” should be ac-ceptable. Since, however, the latter is not an option, we may wonder why se-mantically related words have different metaphoric uses. To illustrate further, since “cold” an “hot” are antonyms and “cold fear” is an adequate collocation highlighting the intensity of the emotion, “hot fear” could be expected to denote a very low degree of an emotion’s strength. However, Deignan (2005: 18) rightly argues that

[t]he literal senses of both hot and cold are clearly antonymous in the corpus, and occasionally, there also seems to be antonymy between metaphorical hot and cold. For instance, just as hot is used to talk about sexual desire, a conventionally metaphorical sense of cold is used to talk about lack of sexual feelings. The following citations show this apparent opposition: The couple are tipped to steam up the screen with red-hot love-scenes. What I adore about her is the fact that sexually she's rather cold and remote. However, the collocations of the two senses are different: hot used in a sexual sense collocates with words that refer to texts or pictures, such as film and photo, while cold collocates with words that refer to people. There is also some antonymy between metaphorical warm and cool, but as is the case for hot and cold, there are many nonliteral senses where this relationship does not hold. Overall, the data suggest that a few of the metaphorical senses of the four central temperature adjectives are related to each other by loose synonymy or by antonymy, echoing the relationship which exists in the source domain, but that the majority of their nonliteral senses exist independently.

To sum up, there are a number of problems with establishing the source domain of a conceptual mapping. To begin with, the arbitrarily imposed physi-cal sense of the lexeme is tantamount to postulating monosemy, and reflecting “certain ghosts from our theoretical past, ghosts which we might have thought exorcised from cognitive linguistics. … One is the notion that the shortest grammar is necessarily the best grammar. Another is the minimalist lexical se-


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mantics, with the expectation of monosemy and the possibility of circumscrib-ing linguistic meaning” (Langacker 2005: 51). Secondly, it has been demon-strated that the concrete and tangible nature of donor concepts is sometimes hard to justify, and the level of generality at which they should be formed is largely unmotivated. Thus, a non-trivial number of mappings proposed within CMT may be coincidental similarities rather than systematic analogies between the two concepts. In other words, numerous conceptual metaphors could in fact represent not only separate, but also unrelated concepts.

1.2. Alternate construals of the target domain

As Kövecses (2002: 21) argues, “the domain of emotion is a par excellence target domain. Emotion concepts such as anger, fear, love … are primarily un-derstood by means of conceptual metaphors”. The list of abstract concepts would thus include fear and love, as well as life, theories or marriage. Clearly, however, the abstract nature of these categories can be questioned. For instance, as Brigitte Nerlich (2007: 96–97) argues, “not all abstract concepts are the same. The word ‘marriage’ might be used by activating a concept uncon-sciously and automatically, but that would not be the case for ‘relativity,’ at least in my case. I would have to think rather hard about that one to make sense of it”. Thus, alternate construals within the target category are primarily related to the fact that the concrete/abstract distinction is difficult to maintain. Conse-quently, and building on the premise that abstractness is related to the degree of the internal complexity of a concept, many target domains could be alternately construed as source concepts.

Table 1. The most frequent adjectival collocations for LIGHT and HAPPINESS (source: BNC)

LIGHT HAPPINESS red green blue bright new electric dim white good grey natural yellow different brown

human true greatest great general future own domestic perfect personal

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For instance, if we compare the structure of the domain of happiness with that of the concept of light, as illustrated by the most frequent adjectival collo-cations in Table 1 above, quantitative discrepancies do not seem significant. Namely, the (concrete) concept of light is clearly definable against four do-mains (color, intensity, source, evaluation), while (abstract) happiness seems to evoke at least three concepts (intensity, experiencer, source). Consequently, each domain displays its own internal structure, and there is no reason why the former should be defined as more concrete than the latter. Naturally, the above juxtaposition is only to signal a possible regularity, i.e., the fact that the target concepts have a structure. Olaf Jäkel’s (2002: 37) empiri-cal study of the JOURNEY metaphor in a religious context arrives at a far more definite conclusion. Namely, building on the observation “that there is a number of central aspects of the PATH schema … that appear not to be mapped in the religious application of the conceptual metaphor”, e.g., distances or routes, Jäkel (2002: 37) concludes that

[i]f image-schematic structure from the source domain was really always preserved in the metaphorical mapping to the target domain, differences like those observed here between the religious and the profane versions of the journey metaphor for life should not occur. After all, both versions utilise the same source domain of travelling and the path schema that goes with it. If nevertheless mapping differences occur even within the small set of structural elements of the path schema, there must be something wrong with the invariance hypothesis.

Apart from the central problem with the target domain outlined above, i.e. the source/target alternation, a related issue concerns a lack of criteria for dis-tinguishing between competing target concepts. For instance, Stefanowitsch (2006: 71–72) argues that the target domain of ANGER posited by Kövecses (1998: 129) to motivate the following utterances: “Here I draw the line”, “He is a pain in the neck”, “It was a stormy meeting” and “That really got him going”, should be substituted by unacceptable behavior, aggressiveness, inconvenience, and animated behavior respectively. Hence, the problem of arbitrary monosemy, already observed in Section 1.1 above, can also be detected in the treatment of target concepts within CMT. Another illustration of possible alternatives to CMT’s proposal can be provided on the basis of the LOVE IS MAGIC metaphor, which Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 49) see instantiated by utterances [3a–3g]:

[3a] She cast her spell over me. [3b] I was spellbound. [3c] She had me hypnotized. [3d] I was entranced by him. [3e] I am charmed by him. [3f] She is bewitching. [3g] The magic is gone. [3h] He has me in a trance.


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In other words, the concept of love is regarded as a sole and explicit cate-gory that the above examples refer to. However, alternative interpretations, whereby the target concept could be defined as, for instance, attractiveness are justified by the following examples extracted from the New Oxford English Dictionary (1998):

[4a] Hong Kong casts a spell over the visitor almost as soon as the aircraft touches down. [4b] ‘King Lear’ still holds audiences spellbound. [4c] We were completely hypnotized by her performance of the Haydn. [4d] I was entranced by a cluster of trees which were lit up by glow-worms. [4e] We were charmed by the friendliness of the local people.

A further correlated issue is positing synonymy between many abstract do-mains. For instance, Kövecses (1998: 130) illustrates the concept of sadness with the following linguistic examples: “He is in a dark mood”, “I am filled with sorrow”, “Waves of depression came over him”, “He was insane with grief”, “He staggered under the pain”, “His feelings of misery got out of hand”. The highlighted words are thus taken as instantiating the domain of sadness despite the fact that none of them clearly relates to the target concept. The problem of synonymy at the level of abstract domains, and the ensuing lack of alternate construals, is also raised by Stefanowitsch (2006: 98), who argues, after Cliff Goddard (1997: 93), that happiness and joy differ with refer-ence to the intensity parameter, and hence certain metaphors, e.g., BEING HAPPY

IS BEING UP are associated with the latter domain rather than, as the mapping suggests, the concept of happiness. A similar overgeneralization is imposed by another notational convention adopted in CMT, whereby things are not distin-guished from processes (cf. Langacker 1987). Thus, fear and being afraid are taken as equivalent (Kövecses 1998; Stefanowitsch 2006: 78–81) despite the fact that things and processes exhibit different inherent structures, which is of non-trivial importance for the cognitive topology presupposed by the Invariance Hypothesis (see Section 1.1). So far, alternate construals of the target concept have resulted in positing concepts more detailed than those postulated within standard CMT. However, apart from elaborations of the target concept, there is also a tendency to inter-pret the domain as highly general. For instance, the target domain of a situation is taken to substitute for actions, events and states (Kövecses 2002: 116). Fur-ther superordinate-level target concepts include the Great Chain metaphor or the Event Structure metaphor. Kövecses (2002: 127–128) further posits the Com-plex Systems metaphor, whereby THEORIES, RELATIONSHIPS, CARRIERS, COM-

PANIES, ECONOMIC SYSTEMS or SOCIAL GROUPS are collapsed into one general category. Consequently, the target concepts all inherit the same central aspect(s) of the donor domain(s). For instance, in the case of the ABSTRACT COMPLEX

SYSTEMS ARE BUILDINGS metaphor, “the main theme … of the metaphor seems

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to be the creation of a well-structures and stable or lasting complex system” (Kövecses 2000: 131). On the other hand, there are target domains which allow multiple sources to contribute to their structure. For instance, LOVE can be un-derstood in terms of MAGIC, ILLNESS, JOURNEY or WAR where each donor con-cept highlights a specific aspect. Thus, target concepts can, depending on their level of generality, be construed as more or less informative. Importantly, though, the proponents of standard CMT argue that conceptual metaphor is “… essential to the understanding of most aspects of the conceptualization of emo-tion concepts and emotional experience” (Kövecses 2000: 20). To verify the above claim and to provide possible alternate construals of emotion concepts, the domain of fear will now be discussed. To begin with, on the basis of the source domains and their central aspects, as proposed by Kövecses (1998, 2000, 2002) and Stefanowitsch (2006), the following interpretation of fear is obtained in standard CMT:

Table 2. The concept of fear and its highlighted aspects

Source domain Aspects(s) highlighted

superior lack of control insanity lack of control natural force lack of control incomplete object lack of control vicious enemy loss/lack of control tormentor loss/lack of control supernatural being loss/lack of control burden difficulty fluid in a container intensity, attempt at control, loss of control illness negative character, lack of control, behavioral responses

On the basis of CMT data in Table 2 above, the metaphorical construal of fear concentrates on five aspects: control, difficulty, negative character, behav-ioral responses, and intensity. In fact, a similar picture emerges from Beverley Fehr and James A. Russell’s (1984: 482) proposal, whereby fear is seen as a coherent sequence of events and reactions:

A dangerous situation occurs suddenly. You are startled and you scream. You try to focus all your attention on the danger, try to figure a way out, but you feel your heart pounding and your limbs trembling. Thoughts race through your mind. Your palms feel cold and wet. There are butterflies in your stomach. You turn and flee.

Moreover, the understanding of fear revealed via conceptual metaphors does not address the crucial parameters along which the emotion should be dis-cussed, and which Wierzbicka (1999: 44)sees as responses to the following eight questions:


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1. Does the fear have a particular object? 2. Does one fear for himself or for someone else? 3. Does one fear physical harm to oneself? 4. Is the feared entity proximate? 5. Is the fear the result of one’s having done something? 6. Is the fear a response to having ‘felt’ some sensation? 7. Is the feared entity a spirit? 8. Is the fear a response to something having happened?

Consequently, it seems that the construal of the domain of fear provided in CMT does not highlight the central aspects of the concept. In fact, an alternative posited by cognitive compositional semantics seems to be more revealing about the structure of fear, which is characterized by Dmitrij Olegovič Dobrovol’skij, and Elisabeth Piirainen (2005: 153, 158) along the following oppositions:

strong vs. not such a strong fear; expectation of something bad vs. reaction to something bad (to something already in existence); an especially ‘personal’ feeling (concerning the subject as such or the subject’s personal sphere) vs. an unspecified, ‘general’ feeling; control vs. lack of control (i.e. the subject does or does not have things under control); a sudden reaction vs. not necessarily sudden; immediate danger vs. not immediate danger; for a long time vs. for a short time; acceptable vs. unacceptable fear; fear as a feeling caused by serious vs. not serious reasons; fear as an inherent quality of the person in question vs. as an emotional state conditioned by external factors.

Thus, construals of target concepts outside the mainstream theory of con-ceptual metaphor are more informative than those obtained via conceptual map-pings. In fact, it seems that the understanding of fear obtained by means of metaphor is less revealing precisely because of the presence of the metaphorical schema, which necessarily constrains possible interpretations. Consequently, alternate construals may well indicate that the source/target dichotomy is inva-lid, and, by entailment, that the role of conceptual metaphors as semantic repre-sentations is rather insignificant.

2. Conclusion

Alternative understandings of source and target concepts, which constitute the foundation of CMT, should be seen against the background of a general discussion pertaining to the precise function of cognitive mappings. Essentially, conceptual metaphors can be regarded as either concept-structuring devices or as schemas facilitating language comprehension. The first option is discussed

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by Gregory L. Murphy (1996), who posits that standard CMT can be considered from two perspectives: the strong and the weak version of metaphoric represen-tation. The former is instantiated by the Invariance Hypothesis discussed in Section 1.1, while the latter may be related to its modified version (see, for in-stance, Kövecses 2002), whereby the image-schema structure of the source do-main is projected onto the target domain in a way which is consistent with the structure of the target. In other words, source and target domains are perceived as two distinct concepts. Another interesting option has been proposed by Deig-nan (2006: 120), who states that the data suggest that “the target domain con-tributes to the form of the linguistic metaphor, rather than having a structure imposed on it”. Consequently, meaning does not come from a single source but is the prod-uct of interaction of (at least) two domains. Ultimately, then, the source/target distinction may turn out to be altogether unmotivated, and the idea of establish-ing dependencies between these particular concepts becomes naturally vacuous. The above alternative is also entertained by Verena Haser (2005: 203), who points out that “no compelling evidence in favor of either the strong or weak view has been cited in the cognitivist literature”. In view of the above, Raymond Gibbs et al. (1997) postulate that conceptual metaphors may not have an influence upon our knowledge of the target concept, but they, nevertheless, facilitate the understanding of metaphoric language. In other words, “people’s tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors, such as AN-

GER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER, partly motivates how they make sense of idiomatic phrases like ‘blow your stack’ and ‘flip your lid’” (Gibbs et al. 1997: 141). Simultaneously, however, results of related research provide two types of evidence in reaction to the above proposal. On the one hand, it may well be the case that “even though pre-stored meta-phorical mappings may be available, such knowledge may not always be acces-sible and used in any given context” (Gibbs et al. 1997: 142). On the same note, Markus Tendahl (2009: 171) observes that “[i]t is an important issue to find out whether conceptual metaphors, family resemblances, etc. only motivate polysemous meanings or whether people actually use them while processing polysemous words in context”. On the other hand, Cristina Cacciari and Samuel Glucksberg (1994) argue that it is the activation of key words in the process of on-line communication that provides access to related nodes in the semantic network. Moreover, “…such activation is experimentally indistinguishable from the presumed acti-vation of underlying ‘conceptual metaphors’” (Givón 2005: 80). Essentially, then, there is no conclusive experimental evidence which demonstrates that a conceptual metaphor is a unique form of semantic representation. In fact, Josef Stern (2000: 187) argues that “it is far from evident that the ‘mappings’ to


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which the theory appeals are specifically metaphorical, [and] that the principles that govern [the] mappings are really different from those of opposing ac-counts”. In the same vein, John R. Taylor (2002: 505–512) argues that Jackend-off’s (1983) conceptual structures – the essence of the Thematic Relations Hy-pothesis – are a viable alternative to Lakovian spatial metaphors. Finally, the redundancy of conceptual metaphors is convincingly discussed by Givón (2005: 80), who argues that certain concepts are “automatically activated in the meta-phoric usage without any need to invoke a conceptual metaphor”. Ultimately, then, the proposal by which metaphors are seen as language-structuring devices can also be interpreted in terms of strong or weak versions. To sum up, separating source and target concepts triggers a number of im-portant questions. Firstly, there is a possibility that the two domains are only loosely related and the differences between them are more significant than the similarities. Consequently, the partial nature of metaphorical mappings could be taken as evidence against positing a particular conceptual metaphor. To con-tinue, if source and target domains are not elements of a unique conceptual link which, at least, facilitates language processing, there is a possibility that a num-ber of other knowledge structures could be evoked to interpret a particular ex-pression. In other words, even if a mapping is indeed activated, conceptual metaphors are not to be viewed as unique semantic phenomena but as closely related to a number of other mental representations, e.g., constructions or lexical items. Essentially, any of these mental schemas can in theory be accessed, al-though the intended meaning can also be derived directly, without recourse to conceptual representation.

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Gernsbacher (ed.) 1994: Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York, NY: Academic Press, 447–478.

Deignan, Alice 2005: A corpus linguistic perspective on the relationship between metonymy and metaphor. Style 39 (1), 72–91. In: www.dilbilim.info/yukseklisans/DB%20520/APPLICA-TIONS/Deignen%20style% 20copy.pdf ED 06.2010.

Deignan, Alice 2006: The grammar of linguistic metaphors. In: Stefanowitsch & Gries (eds.), 106–122.

Dirven, René 2005: Major strands in Cognitive Linguistics. In: Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Peña Cervel (eds.), 17–68.

Dobrovol’skij, Dmitrij Olegovič, Elisabeth Piirainen 2005: Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Evans, Vyvyan 2006: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models and Meaning-Construction. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (4), 491–534.

Fabiszak, Małgorzata 2007: A Conceptual Metaphor Approach to War Discourse and Its Implica-tions. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.

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Fehr, Beverley, James A. Russell 1984: Concept of emotion viewed from a prototype perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113, 464–486.

Gibbs, Raymond, Jody Bogdonovich, Jeffrey Sykes, Dale Barr 1997: Metaphor in idiom compre-hension. Journal of Memory and Language 37, 141–154.

Givón, Talmy 2005: Context as Other Minds. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Glynn, Dylan 2002: Love and anger: the grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors. Style 36 (2). In: www. findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_3_36/ai_94775630/?tag=content;col1 ED 10.2010.

Goddard, Cliff 1997: Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grady, Joseph 2005: Primary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration. Journal of Pragmat-ics 37, 1595–1614.

Haser, Verena 2005: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Jackendoff, Ray 1983: Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jäkel, Olaf 2002: Hypotheses revisited: the cognitive theory of metaphor applied to religious

texts. metaphorik.de 02, 20–42. In: www.metaphorik.de/02/jaekel.pdf ED 12.2010. Kövecses, Zoltán. 1986: Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Struc-

ture of Concepts. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kövecses, Zoltán 1998: Are there any emotion-specific metaphors? In: Angeliki Athanasiadou,

Elżbieta Tabakowska (eds.) 1998. Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualization and Expression. Berlin & New York, NY: Mounton de Gruyter, 127–151.

Kövecses, Zoltán 2000: Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses, Zoltán 2002: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford & New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George 1990: The Invariance Hypothesis: is abstract reason based on image schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1 (1), 39–74.

Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1980: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, Ronald Wayne 1987: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. 1: Theoretical Prerequi-sites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald Wayne 2005: Construction grammars: cognitive, radical, and less so. In: Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Peña Cervel (eds.), 101–162.

Langacker, Ronald Wayne 2008: Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Murphy, Gregory L. 1996: On metaphoric representations. Cognition 60, 173–204. Nerlich, Brigitte 2007: A review of Zoltán Kövecses’ Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical

Introduction. metaphorik.de 12, 94–99. In: www.metaphorik.de/12/rezensionkovecses.pdf ED 06.2010.

Pearsall, Judy (ed.) 1998: The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José, M. Sandra Peña Cervel (eds.) 2005: Cognitive Linguis-tics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction. Berlin & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.

Steen, Gerard J. 1994: Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach. London: Longman.

Steen, Gerard J. 2007: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.


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Stefanowitsch, Anatol 2006: Words and their metaphors. In: Stefanowitsch & Gries (eds.), 63–105.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol, Stefan Thomas Gries (eds.) 2006: Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.

Stern, Josef 2000: Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology Press.

Szwedek, Aleksander 2004: Objectification in metaphorical processes: Some philosophical issues. Lingua Posnaniensis. Czasopismo poświęcone językoznawstwu porównawczemu i ogólnemu 46, 121–130.

Taylor, John R. 2002: Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tendahl, Markus 2009: A Hybrid Theory of Metaphor: Relevance Theory and Cognitive Linguis-

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es/Language_ Design/LD2/wierzbicka.pdf ED 01.2011.


TOMASZ FOJT NICOLAUS COPERNICUS UNIVERSITY IN TORUŃ

Metaphor-induced construal alterations

ABSTRACT. The aim of the paper is to compare contrastively morphosyntactic patterns associated with literal and metaphorical uses of the same lexeme, with a view to demonstrating possible differences in the lexico-grammatical patterning attendant on the figurative semantic value of the lexeme. For this purpose, an exemplary analysis of the literal and metaphorical uses of the lexeme burza (‘storm’) is carried out. A corpus concordance of the lexeme burza reveals a consistent preference for the figurative sense of the lexeme to be used in combination with the post-modification in the form of a genitive-marked noun. This substantiates the main claim advanced in this study that the acquisition of a metaphorical meaning by the lexeme burza carries with it a recategorisation of the lexeme to the class of relational nouns. The paper develops as follows: section 2 strives to determine the formal requirements of the lexeme burza with respect to genitival modification. Section 3 offers a cursory overview of research approaches to the genitive case. Capitalising on the notion of an intrinsic relationship proposed by Langacker (2000) for the characterization of the post-nominal of-construction, section 4 offers an analysis that aims to capture the differences between the construal involved in the composition of literal vs. metaphorical genitive constructions. This is supplemented by a discussion of profile determinance in section 5. The discussion leads to the conclusion that the construction under examination constitutes a case of the appositive genitive with a definitional function.

1. Introduction

The study concerns the relationship between metaphor-induced semantic extensions and attendant alterations of the construal imposed by the expressions analyzed. In the case of nominal predications, it has been observed that a shift to a metaphorical semantic value often necessitates a re-categorization of the expression to the class of (atemporal) relational predications. This is accompa-nied by an alteration of the profile determinant, which affects the canonical modifier/head relationship within a construction. The morphosyntactic patterns characteristic of secondary, non-literal meanings form local patterns of limited scope. Because of the peculiarities involved in their construal, it is argued that they are best captured within the construction grammar approach to language analysis which easily accommodates the details of actual patterns of usage. To verify the above claims, literal and metaphorical uses of the same lex-eme, namely the noun burza (‘storm’), are examined with respect to their grammatical behavior. The aim of the analysis is to identify possible formal differences between the grammatical patterns associated with the literal and

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metaphorical uses of the word.1 To this end, the National Corpus of Polish has been queried with the use of the publicly available retrieval tools Poliqarp and Pelcra. A consistent lexico-grammatical association has been identified between the use of burza(m) and post-modification in the form of a noun in the genitive case. The literal use of burza, although accepts post-modification of the form burzaN(gen), does not exhibit any preference for this grammatical environment. For burza(m), however, the genitival modification constitutes an element requi-site for its semantic integrity and, as will be argued, it is a consequence of the semantic structure of the word used in its figurative sense. To the extent that a systematic relationship between the specific morphosyntactic pattern and the metaphorical semantic value of burza can be shown to hold, the composite structure N(m)N(gen) should be treated as a construction in Adele Eva Goldberg’s use of the term (Goldberg 2005: 17–43, 2006: 401–437). Unless otherwise indicated, all the linguistic examples used in the study come from the National Corpus of Polish. They are accompanied by interlinear word-by-word glossing, but the category labels are usually limited only to the values of those grammatical categories that are directly relevant to the analysis.

2. The grammatical patterning of the lexeme burza

The results of the search for the most common nominal right collocates of the lexeme burza (‘storm’) demonstrate the regularities in question. The search has been conducted with the use of the Pelcra collocator, a tool for automatic extraction of collocation patterns. The size of the sample has been defined at 20,000 and the minimal number of co-occurrences has been set at 5. The results are gathered in Table 1 below, arranged according to their chi-square values.2 The lexico-grammatical patterning of the lexeme burza with its 10 most frequent nominal collocates suggests that the genitival post-modification is characteristic of the metaphorical use of the word (only one collocation, burza stulecia, does not involve a metaphorical meaning). Such a strong association of burza(m) with the specific grammatical environment validates the treatment of burza(m)N(gen) as a collostruction, i.e., a conventional “co-occurrence of words /lemmas/ with morphosyntactic patterns or constructions” (Gries 2009: 14).

1 To avoid wordiness, the use of the lexeme in a metaphorical sense will be henceforth sig-

nalled in the text by the subscript placed in parentheses to the right of the word: burza(m). 2 Proper nouns have been ignored in the results and the translations of the examples into Eng-

lish given in parentheses are often unidiomatic, aiming to preserve the forms of expression characteristic of Polish structures.


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Table 1. Immediate right collocates of burza

# collocates number of co-occurrences

χ2

1 burza oklasków (‘storm of applause’) 106 672,505.8 2 burza mózgów (‘brainstorm’) 338 178,039.64 3 burza braw (‘storm of applause’) 35 119,008.27 4 burza hormonów (‘storm of hormones’) 70 94,450.55 5 burza loków (‘storm of locks’) 7 18,298.9 6 burza namiętności (‘storm of passion’) 9 1,326.2 7 burza uczuć (‘storm of emotions’) 16 826,8 8 burza stulecia (‘storm of the century’) 11 486,32 9 burza protestów (‘storm of protests’) 8 423,25 10 burza zmysłów (‘storm of sensations’) 5 262,21

The examples shown below demonstrate that while the literal use of burza takes genitival modification only optionally, for burza(m) the modifying noun in the genitive is constitutive of its semantic characterization.

[1] W Poznaniu burza złamała kilkadziesiąt drzew. in.LOC Poznań.LOC storm.NOM break.3SG.PST some.NUM.PL.ACC trees.GEN.PL ‘In Poznań, the storm broke several dozen trees.’

[2] Powiał wiatr wznosząc burzę piasku. blow.3SG.PST wind.NOM raise.PTCP.IPFV storm.ACC sand.GEN ‘The wind blew, raising a storm of sand.’

Examples [1] and [2] show that the lexeme burza used in its literal sense is a contentful noun whose meaning is self-contained and independent of context. It can be modified by a noun in the genitive, but the modification is optional and, in fact, infrequent. In a sample of 1,000 constructions of the form burzaN(gen) drawn from the corpus, there were only 9 occurrences of the lexeme in its literal sense. Semantically, the modifiers serve either the definitional function (as in [2], where the part-whole relationship inherent in the meaning of the genitive is exploited to designate a component of the whole-designating head noun) or indicate the time or place of the occurrence of the weather phenomenon. In the case of burza(m), the presence of genitival modification seems seman-tically requisite:

[3] Przez krakowskie getto zaczęły przechodzić kolejne through.PREP Cracow.ADJ ghetto.ACC begin.3PL.PST pass.INF successive.ADJ burze wysyłek. storm.NOM.PL cargo.GEN.PL ‘Successive storms of transportation began to sweep through the Cracow ghetto.’

[4] Przez krakowskie getto zaczęły przechodzić kolejne

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through.PREP Cracow.ADJ ghetto.ACC begin 3PL.PST pass.INF successive.ADJ burze. Ø storm.NOM.PL ‘Successive storms began to sweep through the Cracow ghetto.’

It is possible to remove the genitival modifier from sentence 3 without im-pairing its grammaticality (cf. example [4]). As a result, however, the lexeme burza reverts to its default literal meaning, designating a weather phenomenon. On a literal reading, the sentence is both grammatically well-formed and seman-tically interpretable. In some cases, however, the removal of the genitive modi-fier from a metaphorical noun phrase results in a semantically anomalous ex-pression, as shown in [5] and [6] below:

[5] czarna burza włosów nad białą twarzą black.ADJ storm.NOM hair.GEN above.PREP white.ADJ face.INS ‘a black storm of hair above the white face’

[6] czarna burza Ø nad białą twarzą black.ADJ storm.NOM Ø above.PREP white.ADJ face.INS ‘a black storm above the white face’

In the complex noun phrase in [6], the lexeme burza is semantically underspecified to the extent that it is not possible to arrive at a coherent reading of the utterance. Naturally, occurrences of unmodified burza with a metaphorical semantic value are not infrequent. Such uses, however, can be considered as elliptical and the semantic component encoded in the sequence burza(m)N(gen) in the form of the noun marked for the genitive is contextually recoverable.

[7] Nominacja do Banku Światowego wywołała burzę. nomination.NOM to.PREP bank.GEN world.ADJ cause.3SG.PST storm.ACC Do protestów z Europy dołączyli krytycy to.PREP protests.GEN from.PREP Europe.GEN join.3PL.PST critics.NOM amerykańscy. American.ADJ ‘The nomination to the World Bank caused a storm. American critics joined the protests from Europe.’

The semantically underspecified lexeme burza in the first sentence of [7] is cataphorically related to the coreferential noun protesty (‘protests’), which pro-vides the information necessary for its interpretation. The lexeme does not des-ignate a weather phenomenon, but a social activity of expressing objection or disapproval. The survey of the basic data presented above affords several observations. Firstly, unlike its non-metaphorical counterpart, burza(m) exhibits a strong pref-erence for genitival modification, which is revealed both in the collocation pat-terns and in a frequency count. Secondly, a metaphorical interpretation of burza


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relies heavily on the presence of genitival post-modification. In the absence of a post-modifier in the form of N(gen) either the default literal meaning of the lexeme takes precedence or an expression becomes semantically anomalous. It is then plausible to assume that the metaphorical semantic value of the lexeme burza(m) derives partly from the way it patterns grammatically with the genitive modifier. This, in turn, substantiates the treatment of the sequence burza(m)N(gen) as a construction in Goldberg’s sense of the term (Goldberg 2005: 17–43, 2006: 401–437), i.e., as a unique configuration of form and meaning. In view of its formal and semantic properties, burza(m), in contrast to the literal use of the lexeme, should be regarded as a relational noun. The most rep-resentative relational nouns are kinship terms, location terms, terms designating parts relative to wholes, terms of intrinsic characteristics, measure nouns, and terms designating social relationships. Like typical relational nouns, burza(m) is semantically unsaturated and needs to be used in combination with an argument that completes its meaning. The argument is realized explicitly in the form of genitive post-modification or it must be recoverable from neighboring text; in the latter case, burza(m) becomes referentially dependent on another noun. It may be concluded that the presence of a modifying noun in the genitive licenses the metaphorical use of burza, which otherwise carries literal meaning. The lexeme burza accrues a metaphorical semantic value only by virtue of standing in a particular relationship with its licensor. Section 4 attempts to provide a semantic characterization of the relationships obtaining between the compo-nents of the metaphorical construction burza(m)N(gen) from the standpoint of cog-nitive grammar. As the modifier in the construction is characteristically marked for the genitive, the analysis is preceded by a cursory review of the main ap-proaches to the semantics of this case.

3. Research approaches to the semantics of the genitive case

The genitive case is notoriously heterogeneous, both formally (genitives are expressed synthetically and periphrastically) and semantically (Nikiforidou 1991). Investigations into the semantics of the genitive have come to be marked by two opposing tendencies. On the homonymy view, various senses of the genitive are treated as distinct and (synchronically) unrelated. The proponents of the opposing abstractionist view attempt to identify a schematic meaning of the genitive that would be general enough to account for the variety of the geni-tive uses. Representative of the abstractionist position are Roman Jakobson’s analyses of the Russian case system, in which a general meaning is posited for

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each case3 and diverse specialized usages of the cases are accounted for by con-textual factors (Jakobson 1984: 59–131). In terms of schematicity, an extremist position is adopted by Paul Kay and Karl Zimmer (1990: 239–246), who ascribe to the genitive the function of merely signaling an unspecific associative rela-tionship between two nouns. On the opposite pole of the theoretical approaches to the meaning of the genitive are studies advocating the homonymy view. Rep-resentative in this respect is the work of Adam Heinz (1955). His research on the role of the genitive in the Indo-European case system leads him to the con-clusion that not only no common, schematic meaning can be postulated for the diversity of genitive uses, but also that the various senses of the genitive are not systematically related. Between the polar oppositions of complete homonymy and the abstraction-ist view, there are a number of intermediate positions, whose proponents ac-knowledge the semantic heterogeneity of the genitive uses, but seek to motivate the relatedness between their senses. Drawing on cross-linguistic evidence and diachronic analyses, Kiki Nikiforidou (1991: 149–205) models the genitive category in terms of a radial network of systematically interrelated senses. To motivate the polysemy of the synchronically identified meanings of the geni-tive, she postulates systematic metaphorical links that substantiate the related-ness between the distinct senses of the genitive. In a similar vein, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (2000: 182–241) describes the semantics of the Polish genitive in terms of a network (rhizome) of interdependent senses. In Polish, the genitive case is marked by means of synthetic inflectional endings. Some of the uses of the Polish genitive correspond to the English prenominal possessive, encoded in the form of the ‘s clitic, others are expressed in English by means of the post-modifying of-phrase. The former tend to be analyzed, together with possessive adjectives, as determiner constructions. They typically designate the relation-ships of possession or attribution. Ronald Wayne Langacker (1993: 1–38, 2000: 171–202) proposes a treatment of possessives in terms of reference point con-structions. For the post-nominal of-construction, Langacker posits a characteri-sation whereby the schematic semantic value of the construction designates an intrinsic relationship between two participants (2000: 73–90). Capitalizing on the reference point analysis developed by Langacker, John R. Taylor (2000 /1996/) provides a unified account of possessives in English, focusing on prenominal constructions. Other possessive constructions (post-nominal, pronominal, and predicative) are consistently shown to derive from the

3 As the defining feature of the genitive Jakobson (1984: 72) identifies quantification and

postulates the meaning of the case as indicating “the limit of the referent’s involvement in the content of the utterance”.


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unitary value of the possessive morpheme.4 The pursuit of a general meaning of possessive constructions locates both Langacker’s and Taylor’s analyses to-wards the abstractionist pole of the debate. What distinguishes their analyses from those offered by other proponents of the general meaning of the genitive is that they formulate principled ways in which a relatively schematic meaning of the possessive morpheme comes to be instantiated in a range of specific usages. The following section offers an analysis of the semantic relations between the components of the N(m)N(gen) construction in Polish. As the referential function of the genitive-marked noun is not prominent in this construction, it is the in-trinsic nature of the relation between the two nominal components that is ex-ploited in the analysis.

4. Semantic properties of the N(m)N(gen) construction

In order to better bring out the contrast between the construal involved in the composition of non-figurative genitive constructions and metaphorical ones, it is suitable to start with a relatively straightforward example where the relation profiled by the genitive morpheme is that of part-whole. Diagrammed below are the relationships that obtain between the semantic components of the noun phrase wskazówka zegarka (‘the hand of the watch’):

[8] Wskazówka zegarka minęła cyfrę ‘9’ . hand.NOM watch.GEN pass.3SG.PST digit.ACC 9 ‘The hand of the watch passed digit 9.’

The composition of a complex structure, such as wskazówka zegarka, pro-ceeds through successive integration of simpler symbolic units into larger ones, which then serve as components at a higher level of grammatical organization. Integration is achieved through the identification of the subparts of the compo-nent structures. This is shown in Figure 1 by means of dotted correspondence lines, connecting the relevant subparts of the component structures. At the first level of constituency, the genitive morpheme, the exponent of which in Polish is an appropriate case ending, profiles an intrinsic relationship (Langacker 2000: 74–77) between two participants. Its landmark is elaborated by the nominal expression zegarek, whose semantic specifications are abbreviated in the dia-gram as Z; elaboration is indicated graphically by arrows pointing from the elaboration sites to the elaborating components. By virtue of its elaborative

4 His exploration of the system of English possessives leads Taylor to conclude that these

constructions are language-specific and should be described in their own terms. Conse-quently, he opposes the characterisation of the English possessive morpheme as a marker of the genitive case – a category inapt to accommodate the properties identified within the us-age range of English possessives (Taylor 2000 /1996/: 116–125).

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relationship with the noun complement, the genitive morpheme serves as the profile determinant (head) at this level, which is marked by the thick-line box that encloses it. The composite expression zegarek(gen) thus inherits a relational profile and its trajector remains still unspecified. At the second level of con-stituency, the schematic trajector of the genitive morpheme is brought into cor-respondence with the profile of the noun wskazówka (‘hand’), whose semantic specifications are abbreviated as W. The composite structure zegarek(gen) func-tions as a modifier, because its salient substructure (tr) is elaborated by the autonomous structure wskazówka, which profiles a thing and serves as the head-noun of the composite expression.

genitive morpheme

zegarek

tr

tr

tr

lm

lm

lm

W

W

Z

Z

Z

zegarkawskazówka

wskazówka zegarka

Figure 1. The semantic pole of the composite structure wskazówka zegarka


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The central claim of this study is that nominal predications, such as burza in example [9] below, when used metaphorically are construed as relational nomi-nal predications.

[9] Burza oklasków trwała kwadrans. storm.NOM applause.PL.GEN last.3SG.PST quarter.ACC ‘The storm of applause lasted for a quarter of an hour.’

The semantic characterization of the noun phrase that functions as the sub-ject in sentence [9] is shown in Figure 2 below. At the first level of grammatical organization, the genitive morpheme combines with the noun in plural oklaski (‘applause’).5 The integration is effected through the identification of the nomi-nal profile of oklaski (represented in the diagram by the capital O) with the schematic landmark of the relational predication, symbolized by the genitive morpheme. The combination yields the composite structure oklaski(gen), which inherits a relational profile. In a way typical of modifying constructions, further composition requires the schematic trajector of the relational expression to be elaborated by an autonomous component, as exemplified by the compositional path for the phrase wskazówka zegarka shown in Figure 1. However here, the modified component (i.e., burza(m)) is a relational nominal predication that itself invokes a relation and an argument needed to complete its meaning. This is in contrast to the composition of the phrase wskazówka zegarka, where the noun in the nominative does not prefigure any new elements and can be unequivocally ascribed the status of the head. The semantically more complex burza(m) intro-duces schematically an intrinsic participant which comes to be instantiated by the nominal substructure of the modifying expression. Also the relation inherent in the predication burza(m) is put in correspondence with the genitival relation profiled by the composite expression oklaski(gen). The multiple correspondences between the elements of the relevant semantic structures are marked in the dia-gram with dotted lines. In this way, the participant marked for the genitive completes the meaning of burza(m), which would otherwise be semantically anomalous (cf. example [6]) or interpreted as having the non-metaphorical sense.6 Given the fact that burza(m) schematically profiles a relation inherent in its se-mantic structure, an analysis in terms of an intrinsic relationship between the components of the construction, akin to that posited by Langacker (2000: 73–90) for the periphrastic of-phrase, seems both natural and motivated.

5 For the sake of simplicity, the integration of the noun stem with the inflectional ending serv-

ing as the exponent of the grammatical category number is ignored here. The simplification seems further justified given the fact that in modern Polish the noun oklaski is used exclu-sively in the plural and may hence be considered as having a (relatively) unitary status.

6 For the role of genitive-marked nouns in saturating the meanings of other nouns they com-bine with, see Rudzka-Ostyn (2000: 207, 230).

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tr

tr

tr

lm

lm

lm

genitive morpheme

oklaski

oklaskówburza

burza oklasków

O

O

O

B

B

tr

lm

Figure 2. The semantic pole of the composite structure burza oklasków

The analysis of the integration patterns involved in the composition of the expression burza(m) oklasków proposed here – non-canonical in certain aspects – touches on several problems that need clarification. They pertain to such issues as mutual dependence of component structures, profile determinacy and head-ship, and the compliment/modifier distinction. These will be discussed in turn in the subsequent section. Additional empirical material will be used to substanti-ate the analysis.


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5. Appositive relation between the components of the N(m)N(gen)

construction

Typically, when two component structures enter a grammatical valence relation to form a composite structure, their status is asymmetrical with regard to the parameter of autonomy (Langacker 1987: 298–310, 2008: 199–202). The distinction into autonomous and dependant components rests on the observation that certain structures presuppose other structures for their manifestation, whereas other structures (autonomous ones) need not be characterized in refer-ence to any supporting elements. More specifically: “One structure, D, is de-pendent on the other, A, to the extent that A constitutes an elaboration of a sali-ent substructure within D” (Langacker 1987: 300). The composition of the geni-tive morpheme with the nominal predication oklaski shown in Figure 2 exhibits a marked degree of A/D asymmetry in their alignment. The nominal profile of the autonomous component oklaski elaborates the schematic trajector of the relational predication. The resulting composite structure oklaski(gen) is relational in nature,7 its semantic structure is thus schematically prefigured in the rela-tional component. Given that its profile is inherited by the composite expres-sion, it is the relational predication that may be plausibly assigned the status of profile determinant and may be considered as the head. By virtue of its elabora-tive relation with regard to the relational predication, which specifies the land-mark of the genitive morpheme, the nominal predication oklaski serves as the complement. The integration patterns at the next level of grammatical organization, how-ever, are more complex. Invoking schematically an argument required to com-plete its meaning, burza(m) is coerced into the category of relational nouns. This has a direct bearing on its status with regard to the A/D-alignment; it becomes dependent in that one of its substructures (lm) constitutes an elaboration site for another component. At the same time, a salient substructure (tr) of the relational predication oklaski(gen) also requires specification. Consequently, both compo-nent structures, burza(m) and oklaski(gen), are in a relation of mutual elaboration, indicated in the diagram by solid arrows that point in the opposite directions, where the integration between the corresponding substructures is represented by dotted lines. The co-dependence of the component structures renders less clear the distinction into complement and modifier, which are differentiated on the basis of the direction of elaborative relations with regard to the head of an ex-pression (Langacker 1987: 309–310, 2000: 77–83, 212–218). Also the question of profile determinance at the second level of constituency is equivocal as both

7 For a discussion of the relational character of the genitive case marker (as opposed to the

nominative and the accusative), see Taylor (2000 /1996/: 102–106).

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component structures are equally eligible for the status of profile determinant (indicated in the diagram by heavy line boxes). The situation, although non-canonical, is nevertheless far from anomalous. In connection with constructions involving relational nouns, Langacker (2000: 82–83) observes that their composition manifests integration patterns character-istic of both the head-modifier and the head-complement organizations. The very distinction into complements and modifiers assumes a gradable rather than dichotomous character. Ultimately, for a given construction, it is determined by the viewing arrangement – a parameter of construal (Langacker 2000: 217–218). Typically, the profile of a construction is specified by one of its component structures, referred to as the profile determinant (Langacker 1987: 288–292). It is possible, however, for the profiles of both component structures to contribute to the profile of the composite expression. It is also possible that the profile of the composite expression does not coincide with either profile of the component structures considered individually, but results from the fusion of the profiled substructures in both components. In the latter case, Langacker (1987: 291, 2008: 194–196) talks about conflated profiles; the former is said to involve cor-responding profiles. The formation of the composite expression’s profile from two correspond-ing profiles is characteristic of appositive constructions. The profiles of the component structures in appositive constructions correspond to one another and are each fully schematic for the composite structure. Consequently, they each meet the requirements stipulated for the status of profile determinant. This, in turn, has a bearing on the issue of headship in the construction investigated here. From the more grammatically oriented perspective, the head at a given level of constituency is defined as “the component element that represents the same grammatical category as the composite expression” (Langacker 2008: 194). The notion of the head is thus equated with that of the profile determinant. At the same time, semantically, the head is considered as a “lexical element that provides an overall expression’s essential semantic content” (Langacker 2008: 194). In the case of burza(m) oklaski(gen), the overall meaning of the construction is certainly a kind of applause and not a weather phenomenon. By making a reference to the violent weather phenomenon, the first component qualifies the applause as stormy (thunderous). Semantically, the dual status of the two components in burza(m) oklaski(gen) – and, more generally, the two components of burza(m)N(gen) – with respect to headship is supported by collocation data:

[10] I zerwała się burza oklasków. and.CONJ break.3SG.F.PST itself.REFL storm.SG.F.NOM applause.GEN ‘And a storm of applause broke out.’

[11] Otrzymaliśmy burzę oklasków błysnęły flesze. receive.1PL.PST storm.ACC applause.GEN flash.3PL.PST flash.NOM.PL ‘We received a storm of applause, the flashes flashed.’


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[12] Przywitano go burzą oklasków i owacją. greet.IMPS.PFV him.ACC storm.INST applause.GEN and.CONJ ovation.INST ‘He was greeted with a storm of applause and ovation.’

The reflexive verb zerwać się (‘break/break out’) in example [10] above is a lexeme that frequently co-occurs with either burza or oklaski and may hence be considered as a regular collocate of both the nouns. This is not true, however, for the verbs otrzymać (‘receive’) and przywitać (‘greet’) in examples [11] and [12]. They readily collocate only with oklaski, whereas their combination with burza signals a collocational clash resulting from semantic incompatibility. This fact is symptomatic of the status of the second nominal component as the no-tional head of the construction (a semantically ‘heavier’ component). Similar cases of semantic incompatibility with the first component of burza(m)N(gen) are not infrequent in adjectival premodification, as shown in the noun phrases be-low:

[13] całkiem zasłużona burza braw quite.ADV deserved.ADJ.SG.F.NOM storm.SG.F.NOM applause.PL.N.GEN ‘quite deserved storm of applause’

[14] mocno szpakowata burza włosów strong.ADV grizzled.ADJ.SG.F.NOM storm.SG.F.NOM hair.PL.M.GEN ‘very grizzled storm of hair’

Although it is the first component of the composite structure, i.e., burza(m), that determines the values of the grammatical categories marked on the adjec-tives, the adjectives clearly specify the attributes of the second components. The semantic anomaly of *zasłużona burza Ø (‘deserved storm’) and *szpakowata burza Ø (‘grizzled storm’) is again indicative of the indeterminate status of the component structures of burza(m)N(gen), with respect to headship. It also supports the claim advanced in this study that burza(m) requires a modification in the form of N(gen) that is instrumental in establishing the metaphorical semantic value of the lexeme burza. The incongruence stemming from the fact that an adjective may modify syntactically the first component of the burza(m)N(gen) construction while seman-tically it imparts information relating to the second component can be accounted for if the appositive nature of the construction is considered. In fact, such dis-crepancies seem natural and unsurprising given that both nouns in the construc-tion designate the same thing even if the first noun does so metaphorically; straightforwardly, the storm is the applause. The modification patterns, seem-ingly defying the semantic specifications of the modifier and modified, can be interpreted as a reflection of the indeterminacy of the two component structures with respect to headship. Similar observations pertain to the English construc-tions referred to as the genitive of apposition, instantiated by, e.g., “Dublin’s

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fair city” (Quirk et al. 1985: 322) and the appositive oblique construction with the of-phrase, exemplified by “her brute of a brother” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1284–1285). The possessive adjective in this phrase determines semantically the sec-ond noun. It is also the second noun that is notionally the head of the construc-tion, as evidenced in the paraphrase “Her brother is a brute”. The genitive of apposition often serves a definitional function. When used for the purpose of explanation, it is referred to as the genitive of definition or epexegetical genitive. It can serve the definitional function precisely because the appositive relation that characterizes the nominal components of the construction establishes identity between the designated entities. Characteristically of the epex-egetical genitive, the first noun, as in the case of the burza(m)N(gen) construction, is ambiguous and often metaphorical (Wallace 1996: 95–96). It relies on the genitive-marked noun for its ambiguity to be removed.

6. Conclusions

The object of the analysis proposed in this study are nominal lexemes which, when used with a metaphorical semantic value, occur in a specific mor-phosyntactic context. To the extent that the coupling between the specific grammatical form and the figurative sense is consistent and systematic, these composite structures may be advantageously viewed as constructions in Gold-berg’s use of the term, i.e., as “a pairing of form with meaning/use such that some aspect of form or some aspect of meaning is not strictly predictable from the component parts or from other constructions already established in the lan-guage” (Goldberg 1996: 68). The constructional character of the N(m)N(gen) structure is borne out by the fact that the constitution of the metaphorical se-mantic value of the first component depends crucially on the modification in the form of N(gen). The conceptual dependence of N(m) on elaboration by N(gen), without which the component is interpreted as either literal or semantically in-complete, conditions the status of the first component of the construction as an (atemporal) relational predication. The relation obtaining between the two component structures is that of mu-tual elaboration, with both components equally eligible for the status of profile determinant. Given that the profiles of both component structures contribute to the semantic structure of the composite expression, it assumes an appositive character. As both component structures designate, at least for referential pur-poses, the same entity, an analysis of N(m)N(gen) in terms of reference point con-structions posited for possessives is clearly not applicable. Instead, this study advances an analysis based on an intrinsic relationship as proposed by Lan-gacker (2000: 73–90) for the semantic characterization of the preposition of.


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This is especially apposite given the inherent nature of the relationship that a relational noun invokes with its licensor.

References Goldberg, Adele Eva 1996: Construction Grammar. In: Keithe E. Brown, Jim Miller (eds.) 1996:

Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. Oxford: Pergamon, 68–71. Goldberg, Adele Eva 2005: Argument realization: The role of constructions, lexical semantics and

discourse factors. In: Jan-Ola Östman, Mirjam Fried (eds.) 2005: Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, PA: John Ben-jamins Publishing Company, 17–43.

Goldberg, Adele Eva 2006: Construction Grammar. The inherent semantics of argument structure: The case of the English ditransitive construction. In: Dirk Geeraerts (ed.) 2006: Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 401–437.

Gries, Stefan Thomas 2009: Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. New York, NY & London: Routledge.

Heinz, Adam 1955: Genetivus w indoeuropejskim systemie przypadkowym [Genetivus in the Indo-European case system]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Jakobson, Roman 1984: Russian and Slavic Grammar. Studies 1931–1981. Ed. Linda R. Waugh, Morris Halle. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (Janua Linguarum, Series Maior 106).

Kay, Paul, Karl Zimmer 1990: On the semantics of compounds and genitives in English. In: Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.) 1990: Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization. London: Routledge, 239–246.

Langacker, Ronald Wayne 1987: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prereq-uisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald Wayne 1993: Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4, 1–38. Langacker, Ronald Wayne 2000: Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin & New York, NY:

Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald Wayne 2008: Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. Nikiforidou, Kiki 1991: The meanings of the genitive: A case study in semantic structure and

semantic change. Cognitive Linguistics 2, 149–205. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik 1985: A Comprehensive

Grammar of the English Language. London & New York, NY: Longman. Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida 2000: Z rozważań nad kategorią przypadka [Ruminating on the case

category]. Trans. Elżbieta Tabakowska. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas.

Taylor, John R. 2000 /1996/: Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wallace, Daniel Baird 1996: Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.


AGNIESZKA LIBURA UNIWERSYTET WROCŁAWSKI

Kto, komu i dlaczego grób kopie, czyli o sposobach analizy semantycznej zwrotu „kopać sobie grób”

STRESZCZENIE. Celem tej pracy jest porównanie i ocena alternatywnych sposobów analizy związku frazeologicznego „kopać sobie grób”, który wielu językoznawców kognitywnych uznało za szczególnie interesujący materiał do badań. Autorka przyjmuje, że kluczem do adekwatnej oceny każdego typu analizy jest sposób opisu i stopień wyjaśnienia osobliwego połączenia konkretności działań i nieświadomości ich efektów oraz nieintencjonalności aktu i jego negatywnego wartościowania, które wyróżnia tę figurę. Zestawia i porównuje ze sobą trzy podejścia: (1) analizę zaprezentowaną przez Ruiza de Mendozę Ibáñeza (1998), w której wykorzystał metaforę rozdzielającą ludzką osobę na różne aspekty (DIVIDED PERSON lub SUBJECT–SELF metaphor), zgodnie z koncepcją George’a Lakoffa i Marka Johnsona (Lakoff 1996; Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 267–289), oraz elementy wczesnej wersji teorii amalgamatów Gillesa Fauconniera i Marka Turnera (1994); (2) analizę Arvo Krikmanna (2007) opartą na standardowych narzędziach kognitywnej teorii metafory Lakoffa i Johnsona (1980) z odwołaniem do scenariusza gwałtownej, nienaturalnej śmierci i metonimicznego uproszczenia relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej; (3) analizę Fauconniera i Turnera (Fauconnier 1997: 168–170; Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 131–134) wykorzystującą teorię amalgamatów kognitywnych. W konkluzji autorka stwierdza, że kompletność oraz adekwatność wyjaśnienia osobliwości związanych z analizowanym związkiem frazeologicznym zależą od elastyczności modelu. Kontrafaktyczność i hiperboliczność badanej konstrukcji pojęciowej najbardziej adekwatnie da się opisać narzędziami teorii amalgamatów. Mimo iż analiza Fauconniera i Turnera także budzi pewne zastrzeżenia, można ją udoskonalić, dodając opis kompozycji, uzupełniania i rozwoju amalgamatu.

1. Wstęp

W semantyce istnieje grupa często przytaczanych i analizowanych na wiele sposobów przykładów, które funkcjonują niemal jak toposy naukowe, np. tłu-maczone na wiele języków zdania „Obecny król Francji jest łysy” czy „Kot siedzi na macie”. Za szczególnie interesujący materiał do badań wielu języko-znawców kognitywnych uznało związek frazeologiczny „kopać sobie grób”. Zwrot ten jest sfrazeologizowany w różnych językach. Używa się go wszędzie w podobnym znaczeniu: jako ostrzeżenie przed skutkami działań, które nieroz-ważnie podejmuje odbiorca, nie zdając sobie sprawy z ich katastrofalnych kon-sekwencji. Porażka czekająca odbiorcę jest figuratywnie rozumiana jako śmierć i pogrzeb, a nierozsądne działania poprzedzające klęskę odpowiadają czynności kopania grobu. Chociaż lingwiści kognitywni badający semantykę tego zwrotu zgadzają się co do tego, że na poziomie pojęć zachodzi w tym przypadku kore-

Agnieszka Libura 44

spondencja między strukturami pojęciowymi śmierci i pogrzebu a strukturami złych decyzji i porażki życiowej, to jednak proponują odmienne sposoby anali-zy i dochodzą do różnych wniosków. Ten związek frazeologiczny doczekał się interpretacji w ramach różnych kognitywnych metod badawczych jako przypa-dek:

(1) metafory rozdzielającej ludzką osobę na różne aspekty (DIVIDED PERSON lub SUBJECT–SELF metaphor), zgodnie z koncepcją George’a Lakoffa i Marka Johnsona (Lakoff 1996; Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 267–289);

(2) metafory odwołującej się do scenariusza gwałtownej, nienaturalnej śmierci i metonimicznego uproszczenia relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej (Krikmann 2007);

(3) amalgamatu, który integruje dwie przestrzenie wyjściowe: przestrzeń men-talną śmierci i pogrzebu oraz przestrzeń mentalną nierozsądnych działań (Fauconnier 1997: 168–170; Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 131–134).

Celem tej pracy jest zestawienie różnych podejść badawczych i próba oceny ich wartości analitycznej w tym konkretnym przypadku. Przyjmuję, że kluczem do adekwatnej oceny każdego typu analizy jest sposób opisu i stopień wyja-śnienia osobliwości, które wyróżniają tę figurę, czyli zaburzonej relacji przy-czynowo-skutkowej, połączenia konkretności działań i nieświadomości ich efektów oraz nieintencjonalności aktu i jego negatywnego wartościowania.

2. Metafora rozdzielonej osoby

Niektórzy badacze – tak jak Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (1998) – analizowali ten przykład jako przypadek metafory rozdzielającej ludzką osobę na różne aspekty, określane w pracach Lakoffa i Johnsona (Lakoff 1996; Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 267–289) jako PODMIOT (SUBJECT) i JA (SELF).1 Pierwotnie, 1 Tłumaczenie angielskojęzycznego terminu self na „ja” z pominięciem jego ekwiwalentu

“jaźń” w języku polskim, na które zdecydowała się autorka, jest problematyczne. Istnieją bowiem takie koncepcje psychologiczne, filozoficzne i komunikologiczne, w których czło-wiek jako jedność psychosomatyczna jest utożsamiany właśnie z jaźnią. W takim rozumieniu jaźń ma dwie strony, „jaźń materialną (cielesną)” i „ja źń duchową (mentalną)”. Istnieją jed-nakże inne koncepcje, w których to akurat osoba ma dwie strony, „jaźń zewnętrzną (przed-miotową)” i „ja źń wewnętrzną (podmiotową)”. Trzeba ponadto pamiętać, że w języku an-gielskim funkcjonują obok siebie pojęcia I i me (podobnie jak w języku francuskim je i moi); mają one jednak swoje odrębne interpretacje w fenomenologii egzystencjalnej i w interak-cjonizmie symbolicznym. Dodać tu należałoby, iż pojęcie „ja” (oddane w filozofii poprzez łacińskie ego) w języku polskim nie jest jednoznaczne, a w niektórych podejściach wręcz bliższe podmiotowi mentalnemu niż osobie fizycznej, na co wskazują kontekstowe odpo-wiedniki nawet w tłumaczeniach samej autorki. A zatem mniej ryzykowne byłoby gdyby obok terminów angielskich z ośrodkiem self wystąpił w tekście niniejszego artykułu polski odpowiednik „jaźń”. Z omawianym terminem w ujęciu George’a Lakoffa na tle koncepcji

O sposobach analizy semantycznej zwrotu „kopać sobie grób” 45

np. w pracy Sorry, I’m Not Myself Today, Lakoff (1996) przyjmował, że POD-

MIOT (SUBJECT) jest siedliskiem świadomości, niekiedy także sądów i emocjo-nalności, a JA (SELF) obejmuje ciało i wszystkie aspekty fizyczności jednostki, role społeczne, a niekiedy także przeszłe czyny i pamięć człowieka. Jak wska-zywali Lakoff i Johnson w późniejszej pracy, Philosophy in the Flesh, a za nimi także inni badacze, tacy jak Zoltán Kövecses (2005: 55–58), prawdopodobnie wiele elementów tej metafory może mieć charakter uniwersalny. W myśli europejskiej wyodrębnienie racjonalnego podmiotu wiąże się za-pewne z postrzeganiem rozumu jako niezależnego aspektu człowieka, pozosta-jącego nierzadko w konflikcie z popędami ciała czy uczuciami. Lakoff, Johnson i Kövecses przyjęli, że istnieje wielostopniowy system metafor relacji PODMIOT

(SUBJECT) – JA (SELF) oparty na pięciu podstawowych typach: (1) SAMOKONTROLA TO KONTROLOWANIE PRZEDMIOTÓW (SELF-CONTROL IS OB-

JECT CONTROL). Do tej grupy należy metafora SAMOKONTROLA TO POSIA-

DANIE PRZEDMIOTÓW (SELF CONTROL IS OBJECT POSSESSION), na której opiera-ją się takie zwroty, jak „zatraciła się w tańcu”, „pozwolił sobie na to”.

(2) SAMOKONTROLA TO PRZEBYWANIE W SWOIM ZWYKŁYM MIEJSCU (SELF-CONTROL IS BEING IN ONE’S NORMAL LOCATION). W tej grupie znajduje się metafora PRZYJMOWANIE OBIEKTYWNEGO PUNKTU WIDZENIA TO PATRZE-

NIE NA SIEBIE Z ZEWNĄTRZ (TAKING AN OBJECTIVE STANDPOINT IS LOOKING

AT THE SELF FROM OUTSIDE), której przykładem może być zwrot „powinie-neś uważnie przyjrzeć się sobie”.

(3) PODLEGAJĄCA OCENIE RELACJA ‘PODMIOT–JA’ TO PODLEGAJĄCA OCENIE

RELACJA SPOŁECZNA (AN EVALUATIVE SUBJECT–SELF RELATIONSHIP IS AN EVA-

LUATIVE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP). Relacje społeczne wykorzystywane przez metafory z tej grupy są różnorodne: PODMIOT I JA TO PRZECIWNICY (SUB-

JECT AND SELF ARE ADVERSARIES), np. „walczy sam ze sobą, czy to zrobić”, PODMIOT I JA TO RODZIC I DZIECKO (SUBJECT AND SELF ARE PARENT AND

CHILD), np. „dziś rozpieszczam siebie i śpię do dwunastej”, PODMIOT I JA TO

PRZYJACIELE (SUBJECT AND SELF ARE FRIENDS), np. „musisz być swoim naj-lepszym przyjacielem”, PODMIOT I JA TO ROZMÓWCY (SUBJECT AND SELF ARE

INTERLOCUTORS), np. „muszę to sam ze sobą przedyskutować”. (4) PROJEKCJA PODMIOTU (SUBJECT PROJECTION). Do tej grupy należy m.in.

tzw. projekcja doradcza (advisory projection), którą może ilustrować stwier-dzenie „gdybym był tobą, zwolniłbym się z tej pracy”.

psychologicznych można zetknąć się w książeczce Anny Żabickiej z roku 2002 pt. Pojęcie jaźni: konceptualizacja i wyrażanie a język, wydanym w serii: Językoznawstwo kognitywne. Studia i analizy. Tom 3, przez Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas w Krakowie (dopisek red.: ZW).

Agnieszka Libura 46

(5) OSOBA JAKO JEDNOSTKA MAJĄCA ISTOTĘ (PERSON AS AN ENTITY WITH AN ES-

SENCE). W tej grupie wyróżnia się JA WEWNĘTRZNE (INNER SELF), np. „za-mknął się w sobie”, RZECZYWISTE JA ZEWNĘTRZNE (EXTERNAL REAL SELF), np. „przepraszam, nie jestem dziś sobą”, JA PRAWDZIWE (TRUE SELF), np. „wyjechał do Indii, żeby odnaleźć siebie (swoje prawdziwe ja)”.

Nie wdając się w szczegóły metaforycznego systemu relacji PODMIOT–JA

przedstawionego przez Lakoffa i Johnsona, wypada się z nimi zgodzić, że język potwierdza istnienie takiej konceptualizacji osoby ludzkiej, w której różne aspekty człowieka są rozdzielone. Przedstawiona przez Ruiza de Mendozę Ibáñeza (1998) analiza oparta na tej metaforze przypisuje wydzielonym aspek-tom tej samej osoby różne role: agensa i pacjensa. Według niego grób kopie racjonalny PODMIOT dla JA, które umiera. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (1998) pró-buje obronić tezę, że nie ma żadnej sprzeczności między strukturą domeny źró-dłowej i docelowej tej metafory. Jak dowodzi, wbrew opinii wielu innych badaczy, w tym figuratywnym obrazie śmierć nie jest wcale bezpośrednią konsekwencją wykopania grobu, ale wynika z innych nieszczęść. Rozważając przykład [1], utrzymuje, iż zdanie to nie stwierdza, że Jan ostatecznie zrujnował swoją poli-tyczną karierę. Można jedynie, jak sądzi, mówić w tym przypadku o mocnej implikacji, że kariera Jana została zrujnowana.

[1] John has finally dug his own political grave [Jan w końcu wykopał swój własny

polityczny grób]. Although this sentence does not state that John has definitely ruined his political career, it strongly implicates that he has: if he has dug the grave and nobody has stopped him, it means that there was no need to stop the digging; therefore he has come to a point of no return (i.e. he has failed) … death is not the direct consequence of digging, but a highly likely indirect consequence [Chociaż zdanie to nie twierdzi, że John ostatecznie zrujnował swoją karierę polityczną, mocno implikuje, iż tak uczynił: jeśli wykopał swój grób i nikt go nie powstrzymał, to oznacza, że nie było potrzeby, aby zaprzestać kopania, dlatego dotarł on do punktu, z którego nie ma powrotu (to jest poniósł klęskę) … śmierć nie jest bezpośrednią konsekwencją kopania, ale wysoce prawdopodobną niebezpośrednią konsekwencją] (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 1998: 272, tłum. własne: AL).

Także intencjonalność w obu domenach – źródłowej i docelowej, zdaniem Ruiza de Mendozy Ibáñeza, nie jest ze sobą sprzeczna. W domenie źródłowej osoba, która kopie grób, zdaje sobie sprawę z tego, co robi, podobnie jak w domenie docelowej osoba zaangażowana np. w działalność polityczną, ma świadomość, jaki rodzaj aktywności podejmuje. Nie jest tylko świadoma osta-tecznych konsekwencji swoich kroków. Analiza ta nie oferuje, jak sądzę, przekonującego wyjaśnienia ani relacji przyczynowo-skutkowych, ani nieintencjonalności działania agensa, które są kluczem do oceny sytuacji jako pomyłki i głupoty zarazem. Podstawowym bra-kiem rozumowania przedstawionego przez Ruiza de Mendozę Ibáñeza (1998)


jest niemożność wskazania w takiej analizie w domenie źródłowej odpowiednika nierozsądnych działań z domeny docelowej. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez odrzuca bowiem korespondencję między kopaniem grobu a zgubną aktywnością poli-tyczną (lub inną). Co więcej, twierdzi, że kopanie grobu przez racjonalny pod-miot odpowiada przygotowaniom do świętowania sukcesu: “digging corre-sponds to the foolish activity of the subject making arrangements to celebrate a success that will most likely never come [kopanie odpowiada niemądrym działaniom podmiotu, czyniącego przygotowania do uczczenia sukcesu, który najprawdopodobniej nigdy nie nadejdzie]” (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 1998: 271, tłum. własne: AL). Tym samym w ramach tego podejścia trudno jest wyjaśnić zdania, takie jak [2], których eksplikacja, jak dowodzą opinie kompetentnych użytkowników języka, wymaga dostrzeżenia związku między głębokością gro-bu a bliskością klęski (czyli metaforycznej śmierci).

[2] Z każdym kolejnym publicznym wystąpieniem pogłębiasz swój własny grób.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez przekonuje, że w analizie tego typu przykładów należałoby uwzględnić inną korelację. Jak zauważa:

neither in the target nor in the source is there any direct correlation between the depth of somebody’s grave and his chance of dying. There is a different correlation: the deeper the grave the closer it is to completion and to being ready for its purpose (i.e., to receive the dead body of the person who has been acting foolishly) [ani w domenie źródłowej, ani w docelowej nie ma żadnej bezpośredniej korelacji między głębokością czyjegoś grobu a prawdopodobieństwem jego śmierci. Istnieje inna korelacja: im głębszy grób, tym bliżej do jego ukończenia i tym bardziej jest przygotowany do pełnienia swojej funkcji (to jest do przyjęcia zwłok osoby, która podjęła głupie działania)] (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 1998: 273, tłum. własne: AL).

W istocie, interpretując zdanie [2] jako metaforę, trudno byłoby znaleźć w domenie źródłowej lub docelowej korelację między głębokością grobu a bli-skością śmierci. Skoro jednak taki związek jest istotną częścią semantyki analizowanego związku frazeologicznego, czy nie przemawiałoby to na korzyść jego odmiennej interpretacji wykorzystującej narzędzia bardziej skomplikowa-ne od oferowanych przez kognitywną teorię metafory? Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez wzbogaca wprawdzie Lakoffowską procedurę analityczną o interakcje idealiza-cyjnych modeli kognitywnych, a także czyni pewien użytek z zaproponowa-nych przez Fauconniera i Turnera tzw. przestrzeni pośrednich (middle space) (Fauconnier & Turner 1994), jednak – jak sądzę – zbyt dużą wagę przywiązuje do zasady inwariancji, co nie pozwala mu w sposób przekonujący i pełny wyja-śnić niektórych paradoksów związanych ze znaczeniem wyłaniającym się w wyniku rozumienia badanego związku frazeologicznego. Również zaproponowana przez Ruiza de Mendozę Ibáñeza analiza inten-cjonalności wydaje się co najmniej powierzchowna. W domenie docelowej

Agnieszka Libura 48

najistotniejsza jest nieintencjonalność działania agensa: osoba, która prowadzi działalność polityczną lub inną, nie jest świadoma, że jej aktywność prowadzi do klęski. Tymczasem trudno przypuszczać, że grabarz w domenie źródłowej nie zdaje sobie sprawy z tego, co robi. Nieświadomość konkretnych, prostych działań jest w parenetyce oceniania jako głupota. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez pod-kreśla tylko to, co w obu domenach jest intencjonalne, a to z pewnością za ma-ło, aby wyeksplikować znaczenie analizowanego związku frazeologicznego i jego możliwych wariantów. Mimo wszystko zastosowanie metafory POD-

MIOT–JA wydaje się w tym przypadku obiecującym kierunkiem analizy, a niedostatki ujęcia przedstawionego przez Ruiza de Mendozę Ibáñeza wynikają raczej z kurczowego trzymania się zasady inwariancji i prób udowodnienia za wszelką cenę, że nie ma sprzeczności między dwiema domenami metafory.

3. Metafora ze scenariuszem gwałtownej śmierci

Arvo Krikmann (2007) znalazł inny sposób na wykazanie braku sprzeczno-ści między źródłową i docelową domeną metafory. Twierdzi bowiem, że przy-kład ten może wykorzystywać scenariusz nietypowej, nagłej śmierci, takiej jak utrata życia w śmiertelnej pułapce lub zgon skazańca podczas egzekucji.2 W tym drugim przypadku w domenie źródłowej zamiast dwóch osób – grabarza i nieboszczyka – byłaby jedna: ofiara, która przygotowuje swój własny pochó-wek. Interpretacja taka wydaje się niezwykle interesująca, ale jednak co naj-mniej dyskusyjna. Po pierwsze, należałoby wyjaśnić, dlaczego metafora wykorzystująca sce-nariusz gwałtownej, nietypowej śmierci jest tak powszechna w różnych języ-kach. Po drugie, trzeba by wskazać mechanizm prowadzący do oceny kopania przez skazańca własnego grobu jako działania niemądrego, z którego sensu agens nie zdaje sobie do końca sprawy. Pierwszą wątpliwość Krikmann (2007: 58) próbuje wyjaśnić, poszukując związku między grobem z analizowanego frazeologizmu a dołem z biblijnej przypowieści, w której podstępny człowiek przygotowuje pułapkę na sprawiedliwego. Historię tę można znaleźć w Biblii w kilku miejscach, m.in. w Księdze Psalmów, w Księdze Przysłów i w Mądrości Syracha. Scenariusz jest zawsze ten sam: niegodziwiec przygotowuje dół lub 2 “So we could try to extend the domain of death to the cases of violent death as well. A vio-

lent death always involves an Agent, the Killer. There are at least two scenarios that could expand the list of possibilities to endanger ourselves. The first one is the scenario of execu-tion … The other – and in our case more important – is the scenario of hunting and trapping [Moglibyśmy więc spróbować poszerzyć domenę śmierci także o przypadki gwałtownej śmierci. Gwałtowna śmierć zakłada zawsze agensa, zabójcę. Istnieją przynajmniej dwa sce-nariusze, które mogłyby rozszerzyć listę możliwości narażenia się na niebezpieczeństwo. Pierwszy to scenariusz egzekucji … Drugi – i w naszym przypadku ważniejszy – to scena-riusz pościgu i zastawiania pułapek]” (Krikmann 2007: 58, tłum. własne: AL).


inną pułapkę na sprawiedliwego, a w końcu sam w nią wpada, por. np.: „Oto począł nieprawość, brzemienny jest udręką i rodzi podstęp. Wykopał dół i po-głębił go, lecz wpadł do jamy, którą przygotował” (BT, Ps 7: 15–16), „Ten, kto kopie dół, sam w niego wpadnie, a kto zastawia sidła, sam w nie zostanie schwytany” (BT, Syr 27: 26). Gdyby udało się dowieść, że zwrot ten ma biblij-ną proweniencję, można by wyjaśnić – jak sądzę – jedynie obecność tego fraze-ologizmu w podobnej formie w różnych językach. Jednak znaczenie przypisy-wane cytowanym fragmentom Biblii nie okazuje się pomocne w eksplikacji aktualnego sensu zwrotu „kopać sobie grób”. Podstępny człowiek z biblijnej przypowieści zdaje sobie sprawę, czemu ma służyć przygotowywany przez niego dół i dla kogo jest przeznaczony. Tymczasem ważnymi składnikami sen-su współczesnego frazeologizmu jest głupota, ale nie podstępność osoby, która – metaforycznie – kopie grób, oraz jej przekonanie, że robi coś dobrego dla siebie. To pozytywne wartościowanie wydobył w swojej analizie Ruiz de Men-doza Ibáñez, uznając, że kopanie grobu odpowiada przygotowaniom do świę-towania sukcesu. Jest jeszcze jeden powód, dla którego trudno byłoby sprowadzić figurę ko-pania własnego grobu do prostego odwzorowania struktury domeny źródłowej na docelową. Konstrukcja pojęciowa przywoływana przez ten frazeologizm ma wyraźne cechy kontrafaktyczne, łącząc konkretne, proste czynności i brak świadomości ich skutków, nieintencjonalność działań i ich zdecydowanie nega-tywną ocenę. Wiele frazeologizmów o funkcji wartościującej i parenetycznej, takich jak „ktoś porywa się z motyką na słońce”, „słoń komuś nadepnął na ucho”, „ktoś przewraca się w trumnie” itp., które bez wątpienia cechuje obrazo-wość, trudno byłoby zinterpretować jako proste metafory odwzorowujące struk-turę domeny źródłowej na docelową. Analiza tych frazeologizmów, ogranicza-jąca się do wskazania jakiegoś powszechnego doświadczenia strukturyzującego domenę źródłową, byłaby skazana na porażkę. Czy w podanych tu przykładach za doświadczenie źródłowe można by uznać „rzucanie się z motyką na słońce” lub „podeptanie przez słonia”? Konstrukcje te cechuje raczej hiperboliczność i kontrafaktyczność oraz istotne przeorganizowanie treści pojęciowych dostęp-nych w postaci konwencjonalnych ram i innych struktur kognitywnych. Każda rzetelna analiza powinna te aspekty uwzględniać. Zwraca na to uwagę Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (1998: 273, tłum. własne: AL) w konkluzji swojej pracy: “our interpretation of the metaphor is procedural and automatic to such an extent that it becomes extremely difficult to analyse the way different ICMs are called to interact [nasza interpretacja metafory jest do takiego stopnia automatyczna i podporządkowana procedurom, że niezmiernie trudna staje się analiza sposobu interakcji różnych idealizacyjnych modeli kognitywnych]”. Krikmann z tym problemem radzi sobie w swoim artykule, przekreślając jego wagę. Skoro metonimicznie grób łączy się ze śmiercią – przekonuje – to

Agnieszka Libura 50

nie ma sensu poszukiwać powodów odwrócenia relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej, gdyż metonimia pozwala wskazać dany element historii śmierci i pogrzebu za pomocą innych, dowolnych elementów z tego samego scenariu-sza.

[I]f to assume here the copresence of metaphoric and metonymic operations in processing the source domain (or schema, or space), the concrete causal and temporal order lose any importance. What remains important is that the conceptual realization of the image belongs to the grim and dark, axiologically negative domain of death. Exactly which part of the scenario is realized – that before or that after death – does not create any noise in understanding of the figure, simply because the interpretation process will not reach these degrees of precision [Jeśli założyć tu współwystępowanie metaforycznych i metonimicznych operacji zachodzących w domenie źródłowej (lub schemacie, lub przestrzeni), to konkretny porządek przyczynowy i czasowy traci znaczenie. Co pozostaje ważne, to przynależność pojęciowej realizacji obrazu do ponurej i ciemnej, wartościowanej negatywnie domeny śmierci. W żaden sposób nie zakłóca rozumienia figury to, która dokładnie część scenariusza jest uwzględniona – ta przed śmiercią czy ta po niej – ponieważ proces interpretacji po prostu nie osiąga takiego stopnia precyzji] (Krikmann 2007: 56–57, tłum. własne: AL).

Swój wywód Krikmann popiera licznymi przykładami z różnych języków, które figuratywnie ujmują nierozsądne działania prowadzące do klęski jako przygotowania do własnej śmierci czy pogrzebu lub przystrajanie swojego gro-bu. Polskimi ekwiwalentami przytaczanych przez Krikmanna przykładów mo-głyby być m.in. zwroty: „powoli sam się zabijasz”, „celowo szukasz śmierci”, „budujesz sobie szubienicę”, „zbierasz kwiaty na swój grób” itp. Rzetelna eks-plikacja znaczenia tych zwrotów również wymagałaby, jak sądzę, uwzględnie-nia intencji agensa w przestrzeni dotyczącej jego rzeczywistych działań, np. decyzji politycznych, a kontrast między zamierzonymi korzyściami a nieprze-widywaną porażką oraz negatywna ocena sytuacji nie dałyby się objaśnić wy-łącznie dzięki metaforycznym operacjom kognitywnym zgodnie z zasadą inwa-riancji w klasycznym ujęciu Lakoffa. Krikmann twierdzi, że istnienie wielu takich konstrukcji frazeologicznych w różnych językach wiąże się z niemal uniwersalną presupozycją i motywacją przytaczania przysłów, jaką jest założenie, że agens nie rozumie prawdziwego sensu i skutków swoich czynów, co poniekąd zwalnia badacza z obowiązku objaśniania odwróconej relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej. Czy jednak powszech-ność takiej presupozycji nie wymaga szczególnie wnikliwego opisu i analizy związanych z nią osobliwości? Dobrze uzasadnione wyjaśnienie oferuje jednak nie teoria metafory, ale teoria amalgamatów.


4. Amalgamat z nową strukturą wyłaniającą się w wyniku integracji pojęciowej

Fauconnier i Turner analizują frazeologizm „kopać sobie grób” (digging one’s own grave) jako amalgamat (por. Fauconnier 1997: 168–170; Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 131–134), wykazując na tym przykładzie niewystarczalność narzędzi oferowanych przez kognitywną teorię metafory w ujęciu Lakoffa. Opis i ocenę analizy przedstawionej przez Fauconniera i Turnera poprzedzę wskaza-niem najważniejszych podobieństw i różnic między tymi dwoma różnymi po-dejściami. Koncepcja amalgamatów kognitywnych może być uważana za alternatywę dla kognitywnej teorii metafory. W wielu aspektach jest jednak jej rozwinię-ciem. Tak postrzega relacje między tymi modelami John R. Taylor. „Zastoso-wanie teorii amalgamatów pojęciowych wykracza poza metaforę w węższym znaczeniu tego słowa. W rezultacie metafora okazuje się przykładem bardziej ogólnego zjawiska i traci szczególną pozycję, jaką przypisywali jej niektórzy językoznawcy” (Taylor 2007 [2002]: 637). Podobnie uważa Roman Kalisz, wskazując na koncepcje, które przyczyniły się w istotny sposób do powstania modelu Fauconniera i Turnera: „teorie przestrzeni mentalnych, jak i metafory konceptualnej są z jednej strony prekursorami, a z drugiej komponentami teorii amalgamatów (blends)” (Kalisz 2001: 106). Taylor podkreśla prostotę i zrozumiałość podstaw kognitywnej koncepcji metafory. „Istota podejścia Lakoffa jest łatwo uchwytna: metafora zasadza się na relacji odwzorowania pomiędzy dwiema domenami (ściślej, pomiędzy ele-mentami dwóch domen). Domena źródłowa odpowiada tradycyjnemu pojęciu nośnika, natomiast domena docelowa – tradycyjnemu pojęciu tenoru” (Taylor 2007 [2002]: 637). W ujęciu Lakoffa i Johnsona (1980) domena źródłowa, naj-częściej bardziej zrozumiała i prostsza, dostarcza siatki pojęć oraz wzorów wnioskowania, które są wykorzystywane w domenie docelowej, zwykle bar-dziej abstrakcyjnej i skomplikowanej. Każde takie odwzorowanie jest asyme-tryczne i częściowe. Pod wieloma względami integrowanie pojęć przypomina w pierwszej fazie odwzorowanie metaforyczne. W obu modelach punktem wyjścia są dwie struk-tury, zwane przez Lakoffa i Johnsona (1988 [1980]) domenami (domeną źródłową i domeną docelową), a przez Fauconniera i Turnera przestrzeniami wyjściowy-mi. Takie zasady konstytutywne amalgamatu, jak dobór i łączenie odpowiada-jących sobie elementów oraz selektywne przenoszenie struktury wyjściowej – także mają swoje odpowiedniki w procesie metaforycznego odwzorowywania pojęć i zostały dobrze opisane w ramach kognitywnej teorii metafory. O ile jednak odwzorowanie metaforyczne zachodzi między dwiema domenami, o tyle stworzenie amalgamatu wymaga zbudowania siatki integracji pojęciowej złożo-nej z przynajmniej czterech przestrzeni. Co jeszcze bardziej istotne, w kogni-

Agnieszka Libura 52

tywnej teorii metafory domena źródłowa spełnia tylko jedną funkcję: służy jako swego rodzaju magazyn prostych i zrozumiałych struktur pojęciowych niezbęd-nych do jasnego ujęcia domeny docelowej. Odwzorowanie jest tu zawsze jed-nokierunkowe: od domeny źródłowej do docelowej. W koncepcji integracji pojęciowej zakłada się natomiast, że obie przestrzenie wyjściowe stanowią źró-dło struktur potrzebnych do skonstruowania amalgamatu. Są zatem równorzęd-ne, także wówczas gdy celem danego amalgamatu jest przeniesienie nowego znaczenia do tylko jednej przestrzeni wyjściowej. Definicyjny aspekt integracji pojęciowej to łączenie struktury obu pierwot-nych przestrzeni w nową całość, która ma charakter niedeterministyczny. „W teorii amalgamatów ważne jest to – zauważa Taylor (2007 [2002]: 640) – że amalgamat może zostać obdarzony własną dynamiką i cechami, których nie da się przewidzieć ani na podstawie przestrzeni wyjściowych, ani odwołując się do przestrzeni generycznej”. Nowe znaczenie wyłania się w amalgamacie dzięki trzem procesom: kompozycji, uzupełniania i rozwoju, które nie mają żadnych odpowiedników w kognitywnej teorii metafory. Fauconnier zauważa, że narzędzia kognitywnej teorii metafory zawodzą w przypadku analizy zwrotu „kopać sobie grób”. „Now recall the rationale often proposed for metaphor: Readily available background or experiential structure and inferences of the source are recruited to understand the target. By that stan-dard, and in view of the considerable mismatches, digging one’s own grave should be a doomed metaphor [Odwołajmy się teraz do uzasadnienia często proponowanego dla metafory: wiedza lub struktura doświadczeniowa oraz wnioski – bez trudu dostępne w domenie źródłowej – pozyskiwane są do rozu-mienia domeny docelowej. Zgodnie z tym modelem, biorąc pod uwagę znaczne niedopasowanie, kopanie własnego grobu powinno być metaforą z góry skaza-ną na porażkę]” (Fauconnier 1997: 169, tłum. własne: AL). Gdyby tę konstruk-cję analizować narzędziami kognitywnej metafory – twierdzi Fauconnier – oka-załoby się, że nieomal wszystkie istotne właściwości topologiczne,3 takie jak role uczestników, przyczynowość, następstwo czasowe, wewnętrzna struktura wydarzenia, a także intencjonalność, przenośnia ta czerpie z domeny docelowej, a nie źródłowej. Niewystarczalność Lakoffowskich narzędzi analitycznych pod-kreśla także Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, który wykorzystał przestrzenie pośrednie z koncepcji Fauconniera i Turnera, aby – zachowując strukturę domeny źródło-wej i docelowej – nadać nową interpretację różnym fragmentom tej struktury: “the role of the blend is to become the repository where the relevant portions of

3 Topologia domeny pojęciowej w kognitywnej teorii metafory jest zwykle definiowana jako

struktura schematów wyobrażeniowych, które się na tę domenę składają. Zastrzeżenia do ta-kiego ujęcia można znaleźć m.in. w pracy Agnieszki Libury (2000: 63–66). Inaczej rozumie się topologię w teorii amalgamatów, gdzie jest ona utożsamiana z istotnymi relacjami we-wnętrznymi i zewnętrznymi w siatce integracji pojęciowej.


different ICMs can be put together and interpreted in combination [amalgamat pełni rolę przechowalni, gdzie zestawia się i razem interpretuje istotne porcje różnych idealizacyjnych modeli kognitywnych]” (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 1998: 272, tłum. własne: AL). Jeśli u Ruiza de Mendozy Ibáñeza amalgamat jest tylko magazynem, to dla Fauconniera i Turnera (2002: 131–134) analiza tego frazeologizmu jako amal-gamatu zakłada ujęcie dynamiczne. W konstruowanej siatce są dwie przestrze-nie wyjściowe: jedna dotyczy nierozważnych działań, np. politycznych, których skutkiem jest porażka, a druga – śmierci i przygotowań do pogrzebu. Przestrzeń generyczna obejmuje struktury abstrakcyjne: działania podejmowane przez agensa, które prowadzą do skutków dotykających pacjensa. Fauconnier i Turner (2002: 131–134) w swojej analizie koncentrują się na opisie nowej struktury wyłaniającej się w amalgamacie, nie omawiając szczegó-łowo procesów kompozycji, uzupełniania i rozwoju, dzięki którym powstaje nowa, kompletna struktura o swoistych właściwościach. Należy to uznać za pewną słabość tej analizy, ponieważ dopiero dokładniejsze omówienie tych procesów pozwala ukazać, że najważniejsze cechy tego amalgamatu kształtują się już w procesie kompozycji.

(1) Kompozycja. Struktura przestrzeni nierozsądnych działań, np. politycznych, łączy się ze strukturą przestrzeni pogrzebu w ten sposób, że rola nierozsąd-nego polityka zostaje stopiona z dwiema rolami jednocześnie, a mianowicie grabarza i nieboszczyka. Następuje umocnienie metonimicznego związku grobu i śmierci, relacji niezwykle istotnej, którą Fauconnier i Turner (2002: 131–134) pomijają w swoim opisie amalgamatu.4 Kształtuje się nowa rela-cja przyczynowo-skutkowa między przygotowaniem grobu a śmiercią. Dzieje się tak dzięki powiązaniu struktury działań agensa oraz wydarzeń będących ich następstwem z przestrzeni polityki z konkretnymi działaniami i wydarzeniami z przestrzeni pogrzebu, np. złe decyzje polityka odpowiada-ją kopaniu grobu, a klęska – śmierci. Ilustruje to Schemat 1, w którym rela-cje przyczynowo-skutkowe są zaznaczone strzałką oraz skrótem P⇒S (ze znakiem implikacji), a transfer elementów do amalgamatu – linią przerywa-ną. Linie ciągłe symbolizują różnego rodzaju relacje analogii. Przedstawiony tu sposób kompozycji elementów w amalgamacie nie wykorzystuje istnieją-cych analogii temporalnych At, które łączą to, co wcześniejsze w jednej przestrzeni, z tym, co wcześniejsze w drugiej przestrzeni, oraz odpowiednio

4 Ta metonimiczna relacja wydaje się jedną z najistotniejszych właściwości warunkujących

zaistnienie analizowanej figury. Jej rolę zauważają Seana Coulson (2001: 239) i Arvo Krik-mann (2007). Do wyrażeń, jakie przytacza ten ostatni badacz, warto jeszcze dodać polskie przykłady metonimicznego przedstawiania śmierci jako grobu, np. „spocząć w grobie” – ‘umrzeć’; „do grobu” (np. „być wiernym”) – ‘do śmierci’; „wpędzić kogoś do grobu” – ‘przyczynić się do czyjejś śmierci’ (SFJP, NKP).

Agnieszka Libura 54

elementy późniejsze w obu przestrzeniach. Nie wyzyskuje także istnieją-cych analogii przyczynowo-skutkowych Aps, które wiążą złe decyzje ze śmiercią, a klęskę z kopaniem grobu. Opiera się natomiast na analogiach między działaniami Ad, co pozwala powiązać złe decyzje z kopaniem gro-bu, oraz między wydarzeniami Aw, dzięki czemu można połączyć klęskę ze śmiercią.

amalgamat

śmierć nieboszczyk

grabarz kopanie grobu

złe decyzje

polityk klęska

(złe decyzje =) kopanie grobu

P⇒S (polityk =) nieboszczyk

i grabarz (klęska =) śmierć

przestrzeń wyjściowa 2

przestrzeń wyjściowa 1

A t Aps

Ad

Aw

A t Aps

P⇒S P⇒S

Schemat 1. Kształtowanie się relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej (P⇒S) w amalgamacie poję-

ciowym KOPANIA WŁASNEGO GROBU

(2) Uzupełnianie. Jak twierdzą Fauconnier i Turner, strukturę wyłonioną w proce-sie kompozycji uzupełniają przywołane ramy oraz modele kognitywne. W przypadku tego amalgamatu istotne wydaje się wykorzystanie modelu kognitywnego przeciwstawiającego byty ożywione nieożywionym. Konse-kwencją uaktywnienia tego modelu jest zablokowanie możliwości przypi-sania nieboszczykowi aktywności typowej dla osób żywych.5 Skoro po

5 W innych przykładach odwołujących się do scenariusza śmierci i pogrzebu model kognityw-

ny przeciwstawiający byty ożywione nieożywionym może być pominięty, por. np. „przewra-cać się w trumnie” – ‘przypuszczać, że gdyby zmarły żył, zmartwiłby się lub zgorszył czym’ (SFJP).


śmierci nie można kopać grobu, trzeba go przygotować za życia. W ten sposób utrwala się odwrócony porządek temporalny ramy pogrzebu: w amalgamacie najpierw kopie się grób, a dopiero potem umiera. Zmianę taką sygnalizował już na etapie kompozycji osobliwy sposób ukształtowa-nia relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej.

(3) Rozwój. Za istotną część semantyki analizowanego związku frazeologiczne-go trzeba uznać korelację między głębokością dołu a bliskością śmierci, co ilustruje przytoczony uprzednio przykład [2]. Odwołując się do modelu in-tegracji pojęciowej, opisaną tu korelację należy rozumieć jako wynik roz-woju kognitywnego: skoro wykopanie grobu pociąga za sobą śmierć, to jest ona tym bliżej, im bardziej zaawansowana jest czynność kopania grobu. Znaczenie to wyłoniło się w amalgamacie jako dodatkowa struktura razem z nową i wyrazistą aksjologią w postaci oceny agensa i jego działań. Nie ma nieboszczyka, zatem kopanie grobu jest nie tylko zbyteczne, ale i wyjątko-wo nierozsądne, gdyż – zgodnie z logiką amalgamatu – gotowy grób ozna-cza śmierć. Mimo iż agens – podobnie jak w przestrzeni nierozważnych de-cyzji politycznych – nie przewiduje skutków swoich czynów, w amalgama-cie nieświadomość efektów konkretnych działań jest oceniania jako głupo-ta. Jeśli działanie agensa – kopanie grobu – sprowadza się do niezwykle prostych czynności, a ich zakończenie ma oczywisty skutek – śmierć, to nieświadomość tego, do czego się zmierza, jest wyjątkową i niewybaczalną głupotą. Występujące tu kontrafaktyczne połączenie nieintencjonalności działania z możliwością jego surowego osądu decyduje o perswazyjnej sile tego amalgamatu. Wyłaniająca się ocena działania agensa jako głupoty mo-że być następnie przeniesiona do przestrzeni wyjściowej nierozsądnych działań, które prowadzą do klęski polityka.

Konstrukcje kontrafaktyczne nie są w naszym języku wyjątkowe – twierdzą Fauconnier i Turner – a wręcz przeciwnie: wszechświat ludzkiego umysłu wy-pełnia czarna materia nierzeczy. “Our mental universe is populated by a dark matter of nonthings … Nonevents and nonactions are nearly everywhere in our cognition. Physical reality is a material anchor for conceptual blends that typi-cally carry many projections from counterfactual spaces [Nasz umysłowy wszechświat wypełnia czarna materia nierzeczy … Niezdarzenia i niedziałania są niemal wszechobecne w naszej świadomości. Rzeczywistość fizyczna stano-wi materialną kotwicę amalgamatów pojęciowych, które zazwyczaj przenoszą wiele elementów z przestrzeni kontrafaktycznych]” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 245, tłum. własne: AL). Co więcej, tego typu stwierdzenia konstruujące sytu-ację pozbawioną cech prawdopodobieństwa pomagają zrozumieć i ocenić rze-czywistość. W dużej mierze o prostocie i zrozumiałości decyduje kompresja. W amalgamacie zamiast wielu działań określanych jako uprawianie polityki

Agnieszka Libura 56

i okoliczności temu towarzyszących są konkretne czynności – przygotowania do pogrzebu. W tym przypadku kompresja łańcucha przyczynowo-skutkowego, działań, czasu i miejsca jest już dostępna w przestrzeni wyjściowej pogrzebu. Transfer gotowej, skompresowanej struktury pojęciowej z jednej przestrzeni wyjściowej do amalgamatu autorzy The Way We Think nazywają zapożycze-niem kompresującym (borrowing for compression). Kompresja zwykle pociąga za sobą intensyfikację istotnych relacji. Tak jest i w analizowanym przypadku. W amalgamacie intencjonalność i przyczynowość są wyraziste, a czynność kopa-nia grobu – w przeciwieństwie do uprawiania polityki – zajmuje niewiele czasu i odbywa się w jednym miejscu. Kompresja oraz intensyfikacja prowadzą do osiągnięcia nadrzędnego celu kognitywnej operacji integrowania pojęć, czyli do ludzkiej skali doświadczenia (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 346). Powyższa analiza zwrotu „kopać sobie grób", przeprowadzona przez Fau-conniera i Turnera, a uzupełniona przeze mnie opisem kompozycji, uzupełnia-nia i rozwoju amalgamatu, zakłada możliwość przeprowadzenia głębokich zmian w wyjściowych strukturach pojęciowych. Dzięki narzędziom analitycznym ofe-rowanym przez teorię integracji pojęciowej można wyjaśnić zarówno mecha-nizm wyłonienia zaburzonej relacji przyczynowo-skutkowej, jak i kontrafak-tycznego połączenia nieświadomości skutków podejmowanych przez siebie działań oraz ich zdecydowanie negatywnej oceny.

5. Wnioski

Zestawienie tych trzech sposobów analizy związku frazeologicznego „ko-pać sobie grób” pozwala zauważyć, że kompletność oraz adekwatność wyja-śnień zależy od elastyczności modelu. Propozycje interpretacji metaforycznej wypada uznać za mniej trafne od interpretacji tej konstrukcji jako amalgamatu. Krikmann (2007), który ogranicza się do wykorzystania narzędzi kognitywnej teorii metafory, zmuszony jest do poszukiwania domeny źródłowej wśród doświad-czeń o strukturze najbardziej zbliżonej do znanego z frazeologizmu nietypowe-go obrazu śmierci i pogrzebu, takich jak egzekucja i ściganie ofiary połączone z zastawianiem pułapek. Mimo to przedstawiona przez niego konstrukcja my-ślowa pomija najtrudniejsze do wyjaśnienia aspekty semantyki badanego związku frazeologicznego pod pozorem tego, że proces interpretacji nie musi osiągać takiego stopnia precyzji. Analiza, którą przedstawił Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (1998), opiera się zarów-no na kognitywnej teorii metafory, jak i na wczesnej wersji teorii amalgamatów. Uwzględnia interakcje idealizacyjnych modeli kognitywnych w amalgamacie, którego rola – według tego badacza – polega na przechowywaniu odpowiednich fragmentów zestawianych ze sobą modeli. Wiele osobliwości związanych z anali-zowaną konstrukcją frazeologiczną można wówczas wyjaśnić dzięki metafo-


rycznemu modelowi PODMIOT–JA, który przypisuje wydzielonym aspektom tej samej osoby różne role: agensa i pacjenta. Niektóre paradoksy, np. związane z intencjonalnością i oceną działania agensa, pozostają jednak niewyjaśnione, tym bardziej że Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez stara się wykazać, iż opisywana figura została skonstruowana zgodnie z zasadą inwariancji. Najbardziej elastyczny model to bez wątpienia koncepcja integracji poję-ciowej, która dysponuje narzędziami opisu bardzo głębokiej reorganizacji wyj-ściowej struktury pojęciowej. Chociaż przedstawiona przez Fauconniera i Tur-nera analiza nie jest przekonująca we wszystkich szczegółach, to – uzupełniona odpowiednim opisem trzech procesów prowadzących do powstania nowego znaczenia w amalgamacie – umożliwia wyjaśnienie paradoksów intencjonalno-ści i wartościowania, które stanowią istotną część semantyki zwrotu „kopać sobie grób”. Pozwala także ukazać pewne nadrzędne mechanizmy kognitywne: kompresję oraz intensyfikację relacji, upraszczanie skomplikowanych historii i wpisywanie ich w ludzką skalę doświadczenia.

Wykaz literatury Coulson, Seana 2001: Semantics Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning

Constructions. Cambridge, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles 1997: Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, Mark Turner 1994: Conceptual Projection and Middle Space. San Diego, CA:

University of California, Department of Cognitive Science, Technical Report 940. W: www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/research/documents/technical/9401.pdf DW 05.2011.

Fauconnier, Gilles, Mark Turner 2002: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Kalisz, Roman 2001: Językoznawstwo kognitywne w świetle językoznawstwa funkcjonalnego. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Kövecses, Zoltán 2005: Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Krikmann, Arvo 2007: Digging one’s own grave. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 35, 53–60.

Lakoff, George 1996: Sorry, I’m not myself today: the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self. W: Gilles Fauconnier, Eve Sweetser (red.) 1996: Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar. Chi-cago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1988 [1980]: Metafory w naszym życiu. Tłum. Tomasz Paweł Krzeszowski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy [Metaphors We Live By. Chi-cago: Chicago University Press].

Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1999: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Chal-lenge to Western Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Libura, Agnieszka 2000: Wyobraźnia w języku. Leksykalne korelaty schematów wyobrażeniowych CENTRUM-PERYFERIE I SIŁY. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José 1998: On the nature of blending as cognitive phenome-non. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 259–274.

Agnieszka Libura 58

Taylor, John R. 2007 [2002]: Gramatyka kognitywna. Tłum. Magdalena Buchta, Łukasz Wirasz-ka. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas [Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press].

Skróty i źródła BT – o. Augustyn Jankowski (red.) 1980: Biblia Tysiąclecia. Wyd. trzecie poprawione. Poznań,

Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Pallotinum. NKP – Julian Krzyżanowski 1969–1978: Nowa księga przysłów i wyrażeń przysłowiowych pol-

skich. T. 1−4, Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Ps – Księga Psalmów. SFJP – Stanisław Skorupka 1987: Słownik frazeologiczny języka polskiego. Warszawa: Wiedza

Powszechna. Syr – Mądrość Syracha.


MICHAŁ SZAWERNA UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW

Toward a cognitive approach to analyzing comics: The contrasting construals of comics in similarity-based theories of conceptual representation1

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I examine three contrasting construals of the concept of comics – in terms of the classical theory, the family resemblance theory, and the exemplar theory of categorization – with a view to selecting the theory of conceptual representation which provides the most suitable basis for the development of a comprehensive approach to analyzing comics informed by theoretical and applied cognitivism. Specifically, I argue that although these three theories of categorization are progressively more and more suitable for the formulation of a psychologically realistic characterization of comics, they ultimately turn out to be unfit for this task because they conceive of category descriptions as lists comprising unrelated attributes. In the main body of this paper, I substantiate my argument by demonstrating that a purely list-based description of comics cannot account for the multifaceted nature of comics, the varying degree of prominence accorded to the knowledge areas invoked by comics, the varying abstractness of the conceptual representation of comics, the existence of relations holding between the entities figuring in the description of comics, and the dynamics inherent in the process of interpreting comics.

Recent years have witnessed great advances in English-language comics studies, inspired by the increasing recognition of comics as a fully-fledged me-dium of expression, no longer in need of cultural legitimization. As Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (2009: xi–xv) observe, this growth of interest in comics has resulted in an accumulating body of research comprising historical studies, critical appreciations, evaluations of the cultural significance as well as socio-logical value of comics, and – last but not least – theoretical approaches to com-ics art, craft, and form. These theoretical approaches explore the expressive potential of comics by anatomizing the medium. They discuss the forms and functions of the elements making up the comics panel (the frame enclosing the panel, the pictorial repre-sentations, word balloons, and caption boxes situated within the frame) as well as the relations holding between these elements. They also examine the mean-

1 This paper follows Scott McCloud’s (1994 /1993/) usage of the English noun comics, which

became widespread in the field of comics studies. In accordance with this usage, the plural form comics used with a singular verb refers to the entire medium, the singular form comic used with a singular verb refers to an individual comics publication, and the plural form com-ics used with a plural verb refers to a collection of such publications.

Michał Szawerna 60

ingful interactions between an individual panel and its neighboring panels as well as larger units comprising multiple panels (comic strips, pages, double-page spreads, and entire comic books), both in regard to the panel’s spatial properties (the size, shape, and location of the panel) and its temporal character-istics (the virtual time of the situation depicted by the panel and the actual time it takes to process the information it provides). Among other issues addressed in theoretical explorations of comics are those pertaining to the artistic dimension of the medium: the adoption of various visual styles (realistic, abstract, expressionist, etc.) by cartoonists and their em-ployment of color, light, and perspective. On the whole, the ways in which com-ics makes use of pictures and writing, both within individual panels and in pro-gressively more inclusive multi-panel sequences, are regarded as the medium’s storytelling conventions insofar as all of them contribute to the transformation of a story into a comics narrative. Interestingly, the dialogue about the expres-sive potential of comics was initiated by practicing cartoonists – Will Eisner (2008 /1985/), Robert C. Harvey (1994, 1996), and McCloud (1994 /1993/) – who succeeded in “suggesting new avenues of investigation and providing a tool box of terminology that continues to be used to this day” (Beaty & Nguyen 2007: vii). While the contribution to comics studies made by the comics com-munity proved seminal in that it provided “a solid foundation for academic in-quiry into comics” (Varnum & Gibbons 2001: xiii), it has been criticized for its lack of an academic orientation, for “being removed from the scholarly tradi-tions with which it might best intersect” (Beaty & Nguyen 2007: vii). It is my contention that the academic orientation prerequisite for conducting systematic research into the expressive potential of comics is to be sought in cognitive linguistics. Unlike the proponents of such formal approaches to linguistic analysis as generative grammar, cognitive linguists reject the idea that language constitutes an autonomous component of the human mind.2 Instead, they view language as integrated into the rest of human cognition. Besides, they believe that the sym-bolic function of language, whereby all linguistic expressions are meaningful, regardless of their length and complexity, is its central function. Importantly, cognitive linguists maintain that the meanings symbolized by linguistic expres-sions are shaped by the same mechanisms that determine non-linguistic cogni-tion. These mechanisms include categorization, conceptual integration, figure-

2 This paragraph casts a cursory glance at the main tenets of cognitive linguistics. For a more

detailed survey of the field of cognitive linguistics, complete with the names of the leading scholars working in this field and the titles of their major publications, consult the introduc-tory textbooks written by William Croft and D. Alan Cruse (2004), Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green (2006), David Lee (2001), and Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid (2006 /1996/).

Toward a cognitive approach to analyzing comics 61

ground perception, metaphor, metonymy and a host of other cognitive abilities which are grounded in and at the same time constrained by people’s shared experience of themselves and their environment. Of no less importance for cog-nitive linguists is the notion that meaning is not a fixed, static property of lin-guistic expressions. Instead, the meaning of an expression is conceived of as being constructed in a dynamic process referred to as conceptualization. In the course of conceptualization, which is said to proceed on-line, semantically un-derdetermined expressions acquire their uniquely specific meaning by being situated in their (linguistic as well as non-linguistic) context and interpreted in terms of relevant background knowledge (the subset of a potentially open-ended array of knowledge structures that language users have at their disposal). To summarize, cognitive linguists argue that the highly specific semantic representation of a linguistic expression (be it a single morpheme or an entire text) is constructed on-line by the language user, who interprets the semanti-cally underspecified expression with reference to the conceptual representation of its unique context and any number of more stable knowledge structures in-voked by the expression. Importantly, the conceptual representation of the con-text and the knowledge structures a given expression invokes constitute ele-ments of the expression’s overall semantic representation. Arguably, this kind of dynamic, open-ended approach to meaning can be productively applied to the analysis of the expressive potential of comics: a narrative medium which inte-grates pictures and writing in a unique manner. Viewed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, an individual comic (a comic strip or a comic book) can be regarded as a kind of text, with semanti-cally underdetermined linguistic expressions written inside word balloons and caption boxes situated in sequentially arranged panels. The overall meaning of any such expression is fashioned by a human conceptualizer (simultaneously a viewer and a reader), who constructs it on-line with reference to the context of the remaining expressions, the pictorial representation of the situational context provided by the panel, and any amount of background knowledge the contextu-ally situated expression invokes. In comics, however, it is not at all clear where writing ends and pictures begin – comics experts like Eisner (2008 /1985/: 1–5), McCloud (1994 /1993/: 49), and Mario Saraceni (2003: 20–27) point out that writing in comics may take on the iconic characteristics of pictures, and pictures may take on the sym-bolic characteristics of writing, with many images simultaneously exhibiting iconic and symbolic characteristics in equal proportions. To the extent that com-ics merges linguistic and non-linguistic representations, its semantic structure can be comprehensively characterized only by means of constructs that can be applied to the examination of the entire continuum ranging from maximally symbolic to maximally iconic representations. It seems that cognitive linguistics

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is equipped with tools that are appropriate to this task. While some constructs developed by cognitive linguists are applicable to the analysis of comics be-cause they are motivated by the analogies observable between perception and conception, others can be employed in analyzing comics because they concern phenomena that are of pivotal importance to all of human cognition, even though it is their linguistic manifestations that have been of primary interest to cognitive linguists. Constructs of the former kind make up a group comprising such visually motivated semantic notions of cognitive grammar as selection (the distinction between the scope of a predication and its profile), perspective (in-cluding figure/ground alignment and viewpoint), the construal relationship (in-cluding the optimal and egocentric viewing arrangement), abstraction (the rela-tion between a schema and its instantiations), and transformation (including the summary and sequential mode of scanning) (Langacker 1987: 116–146, 1995).3 In turn, constructs of the latter kind make up a group whose members originate from cognitive linguistic research into categorization, metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual integration.4 Due to its broad applicability, the analytical apparatus of cognitive linguis-tics can be utilized with a view to exploring the properties of an individual com-ics panel which are likely to influence the conceptualizer’s interpretation of the panel. Specifically, the components of a comics panel (pictures as well as writ-ing) can be characterized in terms of what is explicitly provided and what is only presupposed (perspective), the degree of prominence accorded to the ele-ments of the panel that are provided explicitly (figure/ground alignment), and the degree of specificity with which these elements are portrayed (abstraction). Additionally, the process of a panel’s interpretation by the conceptualizer can be characterized with reference to more general conceptual mechanisms of metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual integration. For example, in order to make sense of the way in which a comics panel visually simulates the flow of narrated time – in comics, narrated events take the purely spatial form of panels, speech acts are visualized as word balloons, and movement is rendered visually by means of motion lines, image multiplication, and streaking/blurring effects – 3 Note that cognitive grammar was originally referred to by Langacker (1982) as space gram-

mar. 4 In the field of cognitive linguistics, categorization was extensively studied by George Lakoff

(1987) and John R. Taylor (2004 /1989/). As for cognitive linguistic studies of metaphor, they make up a wealth of publications, including the classic book by Lakoff and Mark John-son (2003 /1980/), Joseph Grady’s (2005) seminal article, and the more recent collection of papers edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda L. Thornburg, and Antonio Barcelona (2009). Similarly, there are many cognitive linguistic studies of metonymy, including the classic pa-per by Zoltán Kövecses and Günter Radden (1998) as well as the papers collected in Panther, Thornburg & Barcelona (2009). In the area of research into conceptual integration, the most important publications in book form are the ones by Seana Coulson (2000) and Gilles Fau-connier and Mark Turner (2002).


the conceptualizer has to draw on a system of metaphors which capture the pas-sage of time in spatial terms. Similarly, in order to make sense of a fragmentary pictorial representation, e.g. to correctly interpret the image of a hand holding a gun as an indication of a gun bearer’s presence, the conceptualizer has to re-sort to a metonymy which makes it possible to access the whole entity via its part. As for conceptual integration, it enables the conceptualizer to make sense of a range of blends frequently encountered in comics: talking animals, superhe-roes fusing human and animal characteristics, characters integrating the traits of two or more widely recognizable personages (real or fictitious), and, last but not least, the previously discussed combinations of pictures and writing. Although the panel is without a doubt a fundamental component of comics, the medium cannot be reduced to individual panels: the primary function of the medium, story-telling, is fulfilled by a hierarchy of increasingly inclusive multi-panel sequences: the comic strip, the page, the double-page spread, and the en-tire album.5 Regardless of their size, these sequences present the narrated story by selectively capturing its constitutive events in successive panels. In order to reconstruct a story reduced into a series of discrete panels, the conceptualizer draws on a number of conceptual mechanisms, of which two – metaphor and metonymy – were previously discussed in connection with the conceptualizer’s interpretation of the form and content of individual panels. When it comes to interpreting a series of such panels, the conceptualizer employs metaphor in order to relate the spatial characteristics of the panel series to the temporal char-acteristics of the narrated story: the individual panels to the constitutive events of the narrated story, the length of the series to the duration of the time of the narrated story, the left-to-right and top-to-bottom directionality of the series to the temporal progression of the narrated story, etc. In addition to metaphor, the conceptualizer draws on metonymy in order to make sense of a series of panels. Specifically, metonymy enables the conceptu-alizer to recognize the individual panels arranged in a series as parts of a larger whole, i.e. as discrete representations of the events making up the narrated story (Groensteen 2007 [1999]: 10–11). As for other conceptual mechanisms em-ployed by the conceptualizer in the process of interpreting multi-panel se-quences, inference plays a pivotal role: by inferring that which is not explicitly provided, the conceptualizer can bridge the gaps between the panels in a series. Additionally, the ability to draw inferences from impoverished data allows the conceptualizer to construct the world of the narrated story (the characters, the setting, the relations between the events of the story, etc.) on the basis of the fragmentary iconic and symbolic information provided by the panels of which a series is comprised.

5 This hierarchy was formulated by Thierry Groensteen (2007 [1999]: 30).

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On the whole, then, my idea of a cognitive linguistic approach to comics analysis centers around a human conceptualizer who constructs the semantic representation of a comic by applying a range of general cognitive abilities (metaphor, metonymy, conceptual integration, etc.) to interpret the combined pictorial and linguistic representations situated within individual, semantically underspecified panels and to integrate the panels of which the comic is com-prised into a narrative representation of the story told in the comic. This process is gradual: as the panels making up a comic are interpreted sequentially, in accordance with a prescribed reading protocol, the semantic representation of the comic increases incrementally – panel by panel – until the interpretation of the last panel has been added to the previously constructed summary representa-tion of the preceding panels. Considering the previously cited accomplishments of what may now be referred to as classic cognitive linguistics and the more recent advances in both theoretical and applied cognitivism, including research into conceptual catego-ries, cognitive analysis of discourse, verbal and non-verbal construction of meaning, cognitive poetics, cognitive stylistics, and cognitive narratology, it seems that cognitivism provides an indispensable theoretical basis for the for-mulation of a comprehensive characterization of comics centering around a human conceptualizer engaged in various processes of meaning construction.6 Importantly, the adoption of cognitive linguistics as the basis for the prospective characterization confers onto it the requirement of psychological plausibility, whereby the description becomes a hypothesis concerning the conceptual repre-sentation of comics. In view of the psychological plausibility requirement, the selection of a theory of conceptual representation that is appropriate to the task of characterizing comics becomes a vital prerequisite for the commencement of the characterization. The analytical portion of this paper addresses this vital prerequisite by looking at the definitions of comics found in the self-contained in-depth publications of book length written by recognized comics experts: Martin Barker (1989), David Carrier (2000), Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (2009), Eisner (2008 /1985/), Groensteen (2007 [1999]), Harvey (1994, 1996), 6 The theoretical basis of an approach to comics analysis informed by cognitivism should

incorporate such seminal publications as Lakoff (1987), Lakoff & Johnson (2003 /1980/), Langacker (1987, 1991), and Taylor (2003 /1989/), to name but a few. As for the more recent advances in cognitivism, the theoretical basis ought to include, among other publications, Lloyd K. Komatsu’s (1992) article on theories of categorization, books by Fauconnier (1994 /1985/, 1997) and Paul Werth (1999) on cognitive analysis of discourse, books by Faucon-nier & Turner (2002) and Charles Forceville (1996) on verbal and non-verbal construction of meaning, a collection of papers edited by Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (2009) on the same topic, a book on cognitive poetics by Peter Stockwell (2002) and two collections of papers – edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper (2002) and Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (2003) – on the same topic, and Anna Kędra-Kardela’s (2010) book on cogni-tive narratology.


M. Thomas Inge (1990), David Kunzle (1973), McCloud (1994 /1993/), Roger Sabin (1993), Saraceni (2003), and Coulton Waugh (1991 /1947/). Since they do not explicitly invoke any principles of categorization theory, these defini-tions can be collectively regarded as a set of intuitions that are indicative of the organization of the concept of comics in the minds of a few informants with extensive expertise of the medium. Because these definitions overlap by virtue of sharing a varying number of what the informants consider relevant attributes of comics, they have been broken up into their component attributes, which make up a list wherein each attribute appears only once, regardless of the num-ber of definitions in which it was originally included. The list comprises the following attributes (uniformly phrased as statements):

(1) Comics employs pictorial and linguistic images; (2) Comics integrates words and images; (3) In comics, there is preponderance of image over text; (4) Comics makes use of speech balloons; (5) Comics utilizes the entire icon-symbol continuum; (6) Comics comprise sequences of panels and pages; (7) Comics is a species of the narrative genre; (8) Comics is a dramatic narrative; (9) Comics narratives are episodic; (10) Comics narratives are open-ended; (11) Comics employ recurrent, identified characters, with predictable ranges of

behavior; (12) Reading comics is a skill involving progressive construction of meaning; (13) Comics requires that the reader make reference to external sources of in-

formation; (14) Comics are produced with the use of a reproductive, mass medium; (15) Comics are printed on paper; (16) Comics are of book-size scale; (17) Comics is a representational art; (18) Comics produces an aesthetic response; (19) Comics conveys information; (20) There are various functional kinds of comics: entertainment comics, instruc-

tional comics, storyboards, etc.; (21) Comics tell a moral and topical story; and (22) Comics have a low price.

As the attributes listed above form a set of intuitions indicative of the con-ceptual make-up of comics, some of the characteristics of this set can be re-garded as indications of the overall organization of the conceptual representa-tion of comics. Firstly, the fact that the attributes listed above make up clusters

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pertaining to the form of comics (1–6), the medium’s narrative potential (7–11), the process of interpreting comics (12–13), the production of comic strips and comic books (14–16), the artistic aspects of the medium (17–18), the functions of comics (19–20), their themes (21), and their status as market commodities (22) indicates that the concept of comics presupposes a whole range of knowl-edge areas. Secondly, the fact that these clusters vary in terms of the number of attributes they consist of suggests that the knowledge areas presupposed by comics are not on a par in terms of the extent to which they figure in the multi-faceted conceptual representation of comics. Thirdly, both the fact that the at-tributes vary in terms of their specificity, e.g. attribute (4) is a specific counter-part of the more general (1), and the fact that attributes (7) and (20) refer to notions that are, respectively, superordinate (the narrative genre) and subordi-nate (entertainment comics, instructional comics, storyboards, etc.) with regard to comics indicates that the conceptual representation of comics extends over multiple levels of abstraction. Additionally, the clustering of the attributes as well as their varying abstractness can be taken as indicative of the existence of relations holding between the attributes: (9) and (10) are interrelated in the sense that the episodic nature of comics follows from its open-endedness and vice versa; in turn, (9) and (10) are both related to the more abstract (8) in the sense that they highlight the prominent aspects of the kind of narrative charac-teristic of comics. Relations, however, need not be external to the attributes of comics inasmuch as some of the attributes are inherently relational: attribute (2) refers to the relation between words and images, (6) refers to the relations be-tween panels in a series and pages in a series, (11) refers to the relation between characters and their behavior, etc. Lastly, attributes (12) and (13), which focus on the role of the reader in the interpretation of comics, indicate that the concept of comics cannot be regarded as an entirely static representation and should be pictured instead as a conceptual complex equipped with some kind of knowl-edge-processing apparatus. Insofar as they embody the intuitions of expert informants, the twenty-two attributes of comics discussed above ought to be integrated into any description of the category of comics which aspires to psychological realism. For the same reason, the overall characteristics of comics inferred from these attributes should also be integrated into a description of this kind: these characteristics embody the intuitions of comics experts as well, even though they do so in a decidedly indirect fashion. As the attributes of comics provided by expert informants and the overall characteristics of comics inferred from these attrib-utes ought to be integrated into a psychologically realistic description of com-ics, they can be considered instrumental in determining the selection of the the-ory of conceptual representation which can simultaneously guide and constrain the characterization of comics informed by theoretical and applied cognitivism.


In the remainder of this paper, selected theories of conceptual representation are evaluated with regard to their potential for integrating both the specific attrib-utes of comics and their overall characteristics into a description of the category of comics, with a view to pinpointing the most suitable basis for the prospective formulation of a psychologically realistic characterization of the concept of comics. In a comprehensive overview of categorization theories, Komatsu (1992: 500) distinguishes between five approaches to the description of concepts: (1) the classical theory, (2) the family resemblance theory, (3) the exemplar theory, (4) the schema theory, and (5) the explanation-based theory. Due to the limita-tions imposed on its length, this paper focuses on what Komatsu (1992: 500) refers to as similarity-based approaches to conceptual representation – the clas-sical, the family resemblance, and the exemplar theory – and leaves the discus-sion of the schema and the explanation based theory to its forthcoming follow-up. In the classical theory, concepts are conceived of as discrete, mutually ex-clusive, and internally homogenous categories whose membership is defined in terms of closed sets of individually necessary and collectively sufficient attrib-utes, which are binary, rather than gradable, primitives presumed to derive from a universal inventory (cf. Komatsu 1992: 502; Taylor 2003 /1989/: 20–26). As the twenty-two attributes which were previously said to be indicative of the conceptual make-up of comics are in a number of ways inconsistent with the classical conception of a defining attribute, the formulation of a psychologically realistic description of the concept of comics that would comprise these attrib-utes and, at the same time, meet the requirements of the classical theory seems unfeasible. As for the specific inconsistencies, they are a few. Firstly, many of the attributes are not necessary characteristics of what re-searchers and readers alike consider uncontroversial examples of comics. For example, attributes (1–4) are not individually necessary, given the fact that there are many wordless comics, a lengthy list of which is provided by Groensteen (2007 [1999]: 14–15). Secondly, the attributes are not jointly sufficient to define all existing varieties of comics. To take one example, interactive webcomics like Stu Campbell’s unique hybrid of comics, animation, and video game titled NAWLZ (2008–2010) without a doubt transcend a definition of comics com-prised solely of the twenty-two attributes extracted from expert definitions of comics. Thirdly, while the attributes of the classical theory “are not further de-composable into more basic elements” (Taylor 2003 /1989/: 23), the attributes of comics extracted from expert definitions are not conceptual primitives. In-stead, many of them are conceptual complexes incorporating concepts that are neither irreducible nor discrete, such as art (17), genre (7), image (1–3), infor-mation (19), narrative (7–10), preponderance (3), representation (17), text (3),

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etc. As the attributes constitute internally complex concepts which perspectivize culture-dependent aspects of comics – aesthetic (17–18), commercial (22), communicational (19), etc. – they cannot be said to derive from a universal repository of primitive concepts. Moreover, while the classical theory requires that defining attributes be binary, rather than gradable, some of the twenty-two attributes of comics extracted from expert definitions cannot be regarded as binary: (3), for instance, employs the inherently scalar notion of preponderance, which seems to make the entire attribute gradable, rather than binary. Lastly, the attributes of comics which embody the intuitions of expert informants cannot be thought of as making up a closed set. As many of these attributes are not neces-sary in the classical sense, the existing set of twenty-two attributes could cer-tainly be enlarged, potentially ad infinitum, with the addition of new non-necessary attributes. To the extent that the attributes of comics discussed here deviate from the classical conception of a definitional or criterial attribute – they are neither necessary nor sufficient; they are not binary, primitive, or uni-versal – they cannot be expected to combine into a discrete, internally homogenous description of the concept of comics that would make it possible to determine with absolute certainty what can and what cannot be regarded as an exemplar of comics. What is more, combined in a set the attributes were previously shown to give rise to such overall characteristics of comics as the concept’s multifaceted nature, the varying degree of prominence accorded to the knowledge areas in-voked by comics, the varying abstractness of the attributes, the existence of relations holding between entities figuring in individual attributes as well as relations holding between entire attributes, and the dynamic nature of the con-cept. As the theoretical apparatus of the classical theory is limited to necessary and sufficient attributes, this approach to the description of concepts provides no principled way of integrating the twenty-two attributes extracted from expert definitions of comics and the overall characteristics of comics inferred from these attributes into a psychologically plausible characterization of the category of comics. As for the family resemblance theory, it is said to have replaced the restric-tive requirement of the classical theory whereby all exemplars of a conceptual category share an entire set of necessary and sufficient conditions with a decid-edly less restrictive requirement that an attribute included in the description of a concept be shared by a minimum of two exemplars, which are then said to bear a family resemblance to each other (Komatsu 1992: 504). This family re-semblance requirement is the reason why in this theory attributes differ in terms of their relative prominence, or weight, which is directly proportionate to the number of exemplars a given attribute applies to.


According to Komatsu (1992: 503–504), the variable weights of the attrib-utes describing a conceptual category are an indication of the central tendencies observable within this category for the reason that they are a reflection of the variable similarity observable between an individual exemplar of a conceptual category and the category’s remaining exemplars. The extent to which an ex-emplar is similar to other exemplars of a conceptual category is said to correlate with the exemplar’s prototypicality: the greater the similarity is for a given ex-emplar, the more prototypical the exemplar is deemed to be. To the extent that prototypicality is a matter of degree, category membership is gradable in the family resemblance theory: the exemplars of a conceptual category vary in terms of how representative they are of the category they belong to. Conse-quently, conceptual categories are not discrete in the family resemblance theory and the boundaries between categories are fuzzy rather than clear-cut. With regard to its applicability to the characterization of the conceptual representation of comics, the family resemblance theory has three important advantages over the classical theory. Firstly, since the family resemblance theory does not require that every exemplar of a conceptual category comprise a set of necessary and sufficient attributes, it straightforwardly accounts for the significant variation observable among comics exemplars – comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, mangas, webcomics, etc. – in their form, content, creation, production, distribution, cul-tural status, commodities market value, etc. Secondly, as the family resem-blance theory presupposes no clear-cut boundaries between conceptual catego-ries, the lack of such a boundary between comics and other expressive media – animation, feature film, painting, photography, the video game, etc. – is not problematic in this theory. Thirdly, as the existence of fuzzy boundaries be-tween conceptual categories entails that they merge with one another into more or less continuous knowledge structures of a higher rank, the conceptual repre-sentations of airline flight safety cards, animated comics, cartoons, cycloramas, interactive webcomics, painting cycles, photo-novels, sets of pictorial operating instructions, picture manuscripts, etc. – hybrid media intermediate between comics and the more traditional expressive media referred to previously – can be easily integrated into the description of the conceptual category of comics in the family resemblance theory. Unfortunately, the family resemblance theory cannot solve all problems posed by comics. Like the classical theory, it lacks mechanisms that can account for the concept’s remaining overall characteris-tics: its multifaceted nature, the variable prominence of the knowledge areas it invokes, the varying abstractness of its attributes, the relations between entities figuring in individual attributes as well as between entire attributes, and its dy-namic nature.

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In the last similarity-based approach to categorization – the exemplar theory – attributes characterizing category exemplars do not have to pertain to more than a single exemplar. Consequently, the exemplars of a conceptual category need not share any attributes at all (Komatsu 1992: 507). It seems that the ex-emplar theory has a single, albeit quite important, advantage over the family resemblance theory when it comes to characterizing comics: it allows the cate-gory description to include representations of individual instances of comics, in all their specificity and uniqueness. This seems advantageous for a characteriza-tion of comics informed by cognitivism, a school of thought whose advocates subscribe to the open-ended, encyclopedic view of meaning, because there seems to be no independent justification to exclude unique exemplars of comics from the characterization of the concept of comics. Arguably, it is these unique exemplars that collectively make up the experiential basis on which the concep-tual structure of comics is gradually erected, in a bottom-up fashion, by the conceptualizer. In connection with linguistic categorization, which cognitive linguists con-ceive of as governed by the same principles as the categorization of the non-linguistic world (Taylor 2003 /1989/: ix), this point has been repeatedly taken up by Ronald Wayne Langacker (cf. 1987: 28–29, 1991: 264, 1999b: 92), who argues that a principled excision of exemplars from a category description and the accompanying reliance on abstraction as the sole determinant of categoriza-tion constitutes an arbitrary strategy which he refers to as the “rule/list fallacy” (Langacker 1987: 29). This fallacy is said to be a variety of a more general sim-plifying assumption, referred to as the “exclusionary fallacy” (Langacker 1987: 28), which holds that one analysis, categorization, explanation, etc., must pre-clude another. In Langacker’s usage-based, non-reductive conception of linguis-tic categorization, whereby category descriptions take the form of the so-called schematic network models comprising a finite number of category members and the categorizing relations holding among them, the members are characterized at varying levels of specificity, ranging from “the wholly idiosyncratic to the maximally general” (Langacker 1999b: 92).7 In Langacker’s view, then, fully specific representations of unique category exemplars, situated at the lowest level of abstraction, co-exist in the description of a category with the generalizations made on the basis of these exemplars, situated at higher levels of abstraction (cf. Langacker 1987: 29). Importantly, the lower-level generalizations, or schemas, which are said to embody local regularities of limited scope, are considered conceptually more prominent ele-ments of a category description than high-level schemas, which are said to rep-resent the broadest, most global generalizations (Langacker 1999b: 92–93).

7 For more information on the usage-based character of cognitive grammar consult Langacker

(1988, 1999a).


Langacker’s conception of categorization justifies the hypothesis that unique exemplars of comics and the low-level schemas formulated on the basis of the commonalities observable among these exemplars will be particularly promi-nent members of the conceptual representation of comics for readers who have had minimal exposure to this medium. As their knowledge of comics is rather patchy, such readers are more likely to invoke unique exemplars and low-level schemas (which are bound to be included in their cognitive representation of comics) than high-level schemas (which may be altogether absent from this representation) as conceptual reference points that will guide their categoriza-tion of newly encountered instances of comics. As for the disadvantages of ap-plying the exemplar theory to the characterization of the category of comics, this approach is vulnerable to criticism for the same reasons that have been shown to make the family resemblance theory unfit for the task. Like the family resemblance theory, the exemplar theory takes all exemplars of a category to be comprised of unrelated attributes, provides no mechanism allowing a complex concept like comics to be characterized with reference to a range of knowledge areas that differ in terms of their degree of prominence, and cannot account for the dynamic aspects of the concept pertaining to a conceptualizer’s interpreta-tion of comics. To summarize and conclude, the similarity-based approaches to categoriza-tion discussed in this paper – the classical theory, the family resemblance the-ory, and the exemplar theory – differ principally in terms of the number of cate-gory exemplars to which the individual attributes necessarily pertain. In the classical theory, every attribute must pertain to all category exemplars. How-ever, the family resemblance theory requires that an attribute pertain to a mini-mum of two category exemplars. Lastly, in the exemplar theory an attribute may characterize a single exemplar of a category. While these approaches are progressively more and more suitable for the formulation of a psychologically plausible description of the multifaceted conceptual category of comics – with the classical theory being the least and the exemplar theory being the most suit-able of the three similarity-based approaches – they all fall short of being en-tirely successful for the reason that they conceive of category descriptions as taking the form of lists comprising unrelated attributes. As the preceding discussion has shown, a purely list-based description of comics cannot account for the following characteristics of this category: the multifaceted nature of comics (Comics invokes a whole array of interrelated knowledge areas – art, commerce, communication, culture, history, linguistics, sociology, etc. – specifying various dimensions, or facets, of this expressive medium.), the varying degree of prominence accorded to these knowledge areas (Comics relies on these areas of knowledge to a varying degree for the purpose of its characterization.), the varying abstractness of the conceptual representa-

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tion of comics (The attributes of comics vary in terms of their specificity; some of them invoke levels of categorization that are subordinate or superordinate with regard to comics.), the existence of relations holding between entities fig-uring in individual attributes as well as relations holding between entire attrib-utes (Comics involves many kinds of interplay between a variety of entities: comics panels integrate pictures with words, comics panels make up strips, strips make up comic books, etc.), and the dynamic nature of the concept (Con-ceptualizers gradually construct the semantic representations of the comics they interpret, using a variety of cognitive abilities.).

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LAURA SUCHOSTAWSKA UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW

An alternate construal of humans and nature in deep ecology

ABSTRACT. Deep ecology is a variety of ecological philosophy, created by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Deep ecologists believe that in order to overcome the current global ecological crisis, it is necessary to look for its deeper causes in our culture and civilization and to attempt to change our ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature. Consequently, they try to provide ecological education to the society in an effort to replace the common anthropocentric views with alternative, biocentric ones. The book Odkrywanie natury. Praktyka głębokiej ekologii (2007) by Ryszard Kulik is examined to demonstrate how such an alternate construal of humans and nature is presented through the medium of language. A cognitive semantic analysis of the text comprises conceptual metaphors, image schemas, categorization, and axiological aspects involved in the two construals: the mainstream and the alternative one. Most significantly, the author replaces typical, conventional metaphors with new ones. Those two sets of metaphors are based on different, often opposite image schemas, serving as sources for the metaphors. The changes also include questioning the traditional model of the Great Chain of Being and its axiological implications and offering the metaphor of a network instead.

1. Introduction

Cognitive linguists argue that language is an inseparable part of cognition and that it reflects human ways of thinking. Some maintain that language is a powerful tool that can even influence and possibly modify those modes of thought. The analysis, drawing on cognitive semantics, will demonstrate how an alternate construal of humans and nature is achieved through modifications of the typical construal on various levels. Most significantly, the metaphors shap-ing the conventional construal are replaced by alternative ones. Those two sets of metaphors are based on different, clashing and incompatible image schemas serving as their sources. Being one of the most basic types of construal, image schemas offer “the conceptualization of the very structure of the entities in a scene. These construal operations represent the most basic level of constituting experience and giving it structure” (Croft & Cruse 2004: 63). According to Mark Johnson (1987: 2), embodied sensorimotor experience (i.e. perception, movement, and physical interaction with the external world) provides humans with certain constant, recurring patterns, general and flexible schemas structuring their subsequent perception and interaction with the physical environment. Thus, an image

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schema relates a multitude of various experiences that share the same basic structure. Image schemas are not isolated, but frequently co-occur in experi-ence. As Tomasz Paweł Krzeszowski (1997: 111) argues, many linguistic expres-sions have a particular positive or negative axiological charge because their meanings are based on image schemas “in which the axiological parameter is motivated by our bodily experience and reinforced by various social and cul-tural experiences.” The most important schemas for the present study are: WHOLE (positive), PART (negative), LINK (positive), SEPARATION (negative), and CONTAINER, which is positive when it offers shelter and protection or nega-tive when it constrains and limits what is inside (cf. Krzeszowski 1997: 141–149). Image schemas are frequently imaginatively extended by means of concep-tual metaphors and applied to other, sometimes equally basic but more abstract and less clearly defined domains of experience, e.g. emotional, social, cultural, economic, etc. Such metaphorical ways of understanding one domain in terms of another, more concrete and tangible one, provide the target domain with ba-sic structure borrowed from the source domain and enable people both to reason and to talk about the more abstract domain. According to the Invariance Hy-pothesis, postulated by George Lakoff (1990: 54), metaphorical mappings pre-serve the image-schema structure of the source domain. Since most image schemas are integrated with the axiological plus-minus scale, it might be expected that their plus-minus component will be preserved in metaphors in which the source domain is structured by those schemas. Krzeszowski (1997: 161) extends the Invariance Hypothesis, formulating the Axiological Invariance Hypothesis: “A given configuration of PLUS-MINUS poles in the preconceptual image schemata from which a particular concept arises is preserved in the arising concept, whether directly meaningful or meta-phorically extended.” Moreover, as Krzeszowski (1997: 156) argues, metaphors not only preserve the axiological charge of image schemas, but may even strengthen it. Metaphors constitute a powerful type of construal: “The choice of metaphor to describe a situation in a particular domain construes the structure of that do-main in a particular way that differs depending on the metaphor chosen” (Croft & Cruse 2004: 55). In Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) view, metaphors are not just linguistic phenomena. Conceptual metaphors are reflected in linguistic expressions, but they are essentially a matter of thought. Conventional conceptual metaphors influence not only the way people speak but also, and more impor-tantly, the way they think or even act. If that is the case, questioning metaphors entrenched in a given culture and trying to replace them by means of alternative


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conceptual metaphors, if successful, can result in a new way of thinking, which may in turn modify human actions.

2. What is deep ecology?

Deep ecology is a variety of ecological philosophy, created by the Norwe-gian philosopher Arne Naess in the 1970s. Naess attempted to create a philoso-phical basis for protection of the environment. As Magdalena Dziubek-Hovland (2004: 89) points out, he hoped to make people more involved in environmental issues by overcoming the predominant attitude of alienation from nature. In his view, it is necessary to identify with the whole world and all living beings. That identification will form a basis for people’s respect for and protection of the Earth. Realizing the close connections between all elements of nature and the resulting dependence of all living beings (including humans) on each other should result in a new attitude to the environment. To sum up, deep ecology is “a call to fellow humans to recognize the intractable, like-it-or-not interdepend-ence that subsists between the human and the nonhuman and to tread more lightly on the earth” (Buell 2005: 102). What makes deep ecology “deep” are so called “deep questions,” which, in contrast to the predominant attitudes, probe into the underlying causes of the ecological crisis, as Dziubek-Hovland (2004: 92–94) explains. Deep ecologists believe that more or less isolated and often superficial efforts to protect the en-vironment, undertaken by authorities or organizations in different places, are not enough to save the Earth. According to them, in order to overcome the cur-rent global ecological crisis, it is necessary to look for its deeper causes in west-ern culture and civilization and to attempt to change people’s ingrained ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature. Consequently, apart from practical actions aimed at protecting particular areas and species, deep ecologists try to provide ecological education to the society at large, both spe-cialists and lay people, adults and children, in an effort to replace the common anthropocentric views with alternative, biocentric ones. Such education can take the form of exhibitions, workshops, classes, or the publication of magazines and books. The paper will concentrate on the latter form of eco-education. One such text, Odkrywanie natury. Praktyka głębokiej ekologii (2007) by Ryszard Kulik, an illustrated book intended for a general audience, will be examined to demon-strate how the alternative view of humans and nature is presented through the medium of language. The author tries to challenge the prevailing trends of con-sumerist culture and to stimulate people’s reflection by means of asking various “deep questions.” The present study concentrates on one of the many issues he raises, namely the relation between humans and nature. The author juxtaposes

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two different construals of that relationship. In the common, mainstream view, people are assumed to be owners of nature, who are placed above it and have the right to control and use it as they wish, which usually results in abuse and exploitation. The readers are encouraged to consider an alternative vision of nature, in which humans are seen as an inseparable part of nature, forming unity with all living beings.

3. The mainstream and the alternate construal of humans and nature

Kulik (2007) argues that people usually conceptualize their “self” or “ego” as separate from the rest of the world. He believes that is the reason why hu-mans exploit nature: perceiving the environment as something separate and alien obscures the fact that by destroying nature people eventually do harm to themselves. This conventional construal involves the following metaphorical conceptualizations: (1) separation metaphors – a human is an entity separate from the world; (2) container metaphors – a human is a container with bounda-ries; and (3) war metaphors – the relation between humans and nature is war. The three types of metaphors are related and often occur together.

[1] … podstawowy podział, w którym moje „ja” jest swojskie, a świat zewnętrzny jest obcy. … czujemy się obco i samotnie, a sam świat postrzegamy jako zagrażający. Szczególnie świat dzikiej przyrody [a basic division, in which my „ego” is familiar and the external world is strange. … we feel like lonely outsiders, and the world itself is perceived as threatening. Especially the world of wild nature] (5, trans. is mine: LS).

There is a separation between the “ego” and the world, which is referred to as external. This expression evokes the container metaphor: the “ego” is inside an abstract container, and the rest of the world is outside. The world is also de-scribed as threatening, which suggests the metaphor of war. A boundary is a kind of separation and at the same time a crucial component of the container schema. A container forms a boundary between its inside and outside, hence bounded spaces are typically construed as containers.

[2] Fakt, że zarówno przyroda, jak i my sami ponosimy koszty tego przywiązania do „ja” wskazuje, że ostatecznie granica, którą pierwotnie wytyczamy między sobą a światem jest czymś iluzorycznym [The fact that both nature and we ourselves incur the costs of this attachment to the “ego” indicates that eventually the boundary which we originally draw between ourselves and the world is illusory] (6, trans. is mine: LS).

A boundary can also be associated with the domain of war, which often involves defending the boundaries of one’s territory from outside dangers. The


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container is sometimes instantiated by a more specific concept of armor, which is a kind of container but also an element from the domain of war.

[3] … „ja” staje się rodzajem zbroi, która ma chronić nas przed światem, zbroi, która ostatecznie przejmuje władzę nad nami i dyktuje warunki walki z tym, co na zewnątrz [the „ego” becomes a kind of armor, which is supposed to protect us from the world, armor, which eventually seizes power over us and dictates the conditions of the fight with what is outside] (5, trans. is mine: LS).

Armor is an example of an axiologically ambiguous container: it protects from outside dangers (which is positive) but at the same time it is not comfort-able and constrains the person wearing it (which is negative). Here the armor is also personified, behaving like a dictator or military leader: it has power and orders the person to fight. As a result of separation, nature is perceived as people’s opponent, disturb-ing them and hindering their plans. The conflict is the result of divergent needs of the two sides.

[4] W stanie takiego oddzielonego umysłu ciągle wydaje się nam, że przyroda jest naszym przeciwnikiem i ciągle przeszkadza nam w realizowaniu naszych zamierzeń. Przywiązując się do naszych zachcianek niszczymy nie tylko przyrodę, ale i siebie. I tak oto toczymy permanentną wojnę sami ze sobą. Całe to nasze oddzielenie, cały ten konflikt i sprzeczności są jednak iluzją, są czymś pozornym. Bo tak naprawdę potrzeby przyrody są naszymi potrzebami. … Jeśli jest jakiś konflikt, to jest to dla nas sygnał, że robimy coś niezgodnego z naszą pierwotną naturą, że występujemy przeciwko sobie [In such a state of separated mind, it constantly seems to us that nature is our enemy and continually hinders the realization of our plans. Being attached to our whims, we destroy not only nature but also ourselves. And thus we fight a permanent war with ourselves. However, our separation, that conflict and contradictions are an illusion, something false. Because in reality the needs of nature are our needs. … If there is any conflict, it is a sign for us that we are doing something at variance with our primeval nature, that we are acting against ourselves] (36, trans. is mine: LS).

When there is a war, both sides suffer, and the same happens in the target domain. The author argues that the conflict of interests is an illusion: what is bad for nature is ultimately bad for humans too. While all other organisms in-fluence the environment only as much as is necessary for their survival, humans have more and more artificial and sophisticated needs. It is satisfying those “unnatural” needs that requires excessive exploitation and destruction of nature and leads to the conflict (Kulik 2007: 36). Moreover, the metaphors of separation and war are not only employed in the construal of the relation between humans and nature but also projected on the understanding of relations within nature, among all kinds of living organ-isms.

[5] … spostrzegamy przyrodę jako składającą się z oddzielnych części, osobników, istnień. Jest tak, ponieważ sami dla siebie wydajemy się być oddzielni. Ta nasza osobność jest

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matrycą rozumienia całego wszechświata, który widziany jest jako zbiór oddzielnych i oddzielonych elementów. To właśnie z tej perspektywy widzimy zabijanie, rywalizację, walkę, cierpienie. Zawsze jest ktoś, kto zjada innego, kto się ściga z innym. Nieustanna wojna! [we perceive nature as consisting of separate parts, specimens, beings. It is so because we seem separate to ourselves. Our separateness is a pattern for understanding the whole universe, which is seen as a set of separate and separated elements. It is from this perspective that we see killing, competition, fight, suffering. There is always someone who eats another one, who chases another one. Constant war!] (17, trans. is mine: LS).

The predominant view of competition and struggle between different spe-cies as well as individual organisms may eventually turn out to be the result of human projection. The author believes that the construal presented above should be discarded. This can be achieved by means of eliminating artificial boundaries and discovering connections. In the proposed alternate construal, there are no separate elements but unity, in which everything is linked and forms a coherent whole. This conceptualization results in a new vision of nature, one of harmony rather than conflict. Rejecting the metaphors of separation, containment within boundaries, and war, the author employs metaphors with quite opposite source domains. The alternative construal involves the following metaphorical conceptualizations: (1) link metaphors – humans are linked to nature; (2) whole metaphors – nature is a unified whole and humans are part of it; (3) cooperation metaphors – the relation between humans and nature is cooperation. These formulations may help us see the contrast between the two construals, but they are misleading. Actually, if the alternative construal is taken seriously, it is no longer possible to talk about humans and (the rest of) nature. Thus, the construal should be re-stated in a more general form: (1) all living beings and elements of the envi-ronment are linked to each other; (2) nature is a unified whole; (3) the relation between parts of nature is cooperation. The process of overcoming the old construal is metaphorically described as crossing the boundaries separating us from the world, as getting out of a con-tainer, in order to form connections with the whole world.

[6] Już najwyższy czas przekroczyć to oddzielenie, wyjść z tej ciemnej kryjówki, w której czujemy się samotni i połączyć się z sobą i całym wszechświatem [It is high time we overcame this separation, got out of that dark hiding place, in which we feel lonely, and merged with ourselves and the whole universe] (10. trans. is mine: LS).

The link metaphor is closely connected with the metaphor of a whole, since parts of a whole are all linked to it and to each other. In this construal, nature is a whole and humans are its parts, which could not function without it.

[7] … przemawia do nas sama przyroda uświadamiając nam, że czy tego chcemy, czy nie, cały czas jesteśmy jej częścią [nature herself speaks to us, making us realize that, whether we like it or not, we are always her part] (18, trans. is mine: LS).


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As the author suggests, the close connection between humans and nature is easier to realize when we pay attention to our own bodies. The same matter circulates in the whole world and is exchanged between organisms and the envi-ronment. Our embodiment reminds us that all living beings, including humans, must be constantly connected to their environment to survive. The link and whole metaphors are both involved here: our body links us to the natural world because it is a part of nature, a larger whole.

[8] Mi ędzy ciałem a dziką przyrodą jest bardzo ścisły związek. … ciało jest najbliższym nam kawałkiem dzikiej przyrody. Łączy nas z całym wszechświatem, bowiem składa się z materii, tej samej, co gwiazdy, drzewa, rzeki, zwierzęta i kamienie. Mało tego – przez nasze ciało nieustannie przepływa cała ta materia [There is a very close connection between the body and wild nature. … our body is a piece of wild nature closest to us. It links us to the whole universe because it consists of the same matter as stars, trees, rivers, animals, and stones. Moreover, all that matter constantly flows through our body] (9, trans. is mine: LS).

Several important metaphors employed by the author are more specific instances of the schematic concept of a whole with linked parts. Their source domains are human relations: community, friendship, family, which are them-selves metaphorically understood in terms of those image schemas. People are encouraged to make friends with the world, to discover kinship with other be-ings. The Earth is presented as our home and all living beings as our family. Such metaphors suggest an entirely different approach to nature: instead of fighting and controlling their supposed enemies, people become their friends or even relatives.

[9] … przed nami stoi zadanie ponownego zaprzyjaźnienia się ze światem, poczucia się na tej planecie jak u siebie w domu … odkrywać pokrewieństwo, współzależność i bliskość z innymi formami życia. Bo w rodzinie … każdy ma swoje miejsce [our task is to make friends with the world again, to make ourselves at home on this planet … to discover kinship, interdependence and closeness with other forms of life. Because in a family … everyone has their own place] (48, trans. is mine: LS).

On the other hand, the container metaphor need not be rejected but can be modified: the container is not removed, but its boundaries are so extended that they embrace the whole world. What used to be outside is discovered to be in-side us:

[10] … odkrywanie w sobie tego wszystkiego, co pozornie znajduje się poza nami [discovering in ourselves all that is seemingly outside us] (6, trans. is mine: LS).

Redefining the container affects categorization, another type of construal (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004: 54–55). The new model requires changes in categori-zation: there are no longer two separate categories of humans and nature. There is only one category of nature (including humans).

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[11] JESTEŚMY przyrodą. … Patrząc na płynącą rzekę, na chmury … obserwując ptaki widzimy samych siebie [We ARE nature. … Looking at a flowing river, at clouds … watching birds, we see ourselves] (10, trans. is mine: LS). [12] … skały, rzeki, drzewa, chmury, miejsce, w którym żyję, inni ludzie, zwierzęta, a ostatecznie cała Ziemia, to wszystko jestem JA. … naturalnie i spontanicznie troszczymy się i opiekujemy się tym, czym jesteśmy. Jestem lasem, jestem rzeką, więc staję w ich obronie tak samo, jakbym bronił siebie [… rocks, rivers, trees, clouds, the place where I live, other people, animals, and ultimately the whole Earth, it is all ME. … we naturally and spontaneously take care of what we are. I am the forest, I am the river, so I stand up for them in the same way I would defend myself] (6, trans. is mine: LS).

Finally, in the new construal of nature, the common human understanding of the natural world in terms of separate individual elements in a state of war and competition is discarded. It is replaced by an entirely different set of meta-phors: a whole with multiple connections, its parts complementing and cooper-ating with each other. What is perceived as violence and cruelty from the point of view of a single, separate being turns out to be harmony from the perspective of the all-encompassing whole.

[13] Z wąskiej perspektywy toczy się wojna, z szerokiej natomiast właśnie ta walka jest fundamentem harmonii i współdziałania. Z perspektywy całości lokalne walki przestają być czymś nagannym, stają się nawet czymś korzystnym [From a narrow perspective, a war is going on, from a broad one, on the other hand, this fight is the foundation of harmony and cooperation. From the perspective of the whole, local fights are no longer something reprehensible, they even become beneficial] (17, trans. is mine: LS). [14] … w przyrodzie każdy ma swoje miejsce. Poszczególne organizmy i gatunki nie tyle rywalizują ze sobą, ile przenikają się wzajemnie, uzupełniają i współpracują […in nature, everyone has their own place. Individual organisms and species interpenetrate, complement each other and cooperate rather than compete with each other] (48, trans. is mine: LS.).

From the axiological point of view, the author’s choice of image schemas and metaphors is very effective. The ones used to describe the typical construal (separation, a constraining container, war) are negatively charged, while the advocated construal employs positively charged schemas and metaphors (whole, link, cooperation). Thus, readers are likely to be encouraged to reject the negative view and adopt the positive vision. Another crucial metaphor in-troduced by the author, however, might be a little more difficult to accept. The link and whole schemas are neatly combined in the network metaphor: a network is a kind of whole in which all parts are linked. All the parts of the network of nature are dependent on each other and none of them can exist iso-lated from the rest.

[15] Patrząc wnikliwie na poszczególne elementy środowiska stopniowo zaczynamy dostrzegać złożoną sieć wzajemnych zależności [Looking carefully at individual elements of the environment, we gradually begin to discern a complex network of interdependence (18, trans. is mine: LS).


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The network metaphor is offered as an alternative to the conventional con-ceptualization of the world as a kind of hierarchy of higher and lower beings, and this aspect of the alternative construal of nature clashes with the axiological model ingrained in our culture. The hierarchical order of the Great Chain of Being “still exists as a contemporary unconscious cultural model indispensable to our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our language. … We think of humans as higher order beings than animals, animals as higher than plants, and plants as higher than inanimate substances” (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 167). Ac-cording to Krzeszowski (1997: 64), in our culture the Great Chain of Being plays an important role in axiology and valuation. It forms a basis of the hierar-chy of values, one of the two dimensions in the “Domain of Values” – the verti-cal one (the horizontal one is a scale of values ranging from negative to posi-tive). As Krzeszowski (1997: 69) points out, “the hierarchy of values related to the Great Chain is culturally accepted to the extent to which the Great Chain itself is accepted.” Embracing or discarding the model, then, has a significant impact on the assignment of values. In Kulik’s (2007: 6) opinion, the belief that humans are exceptional and superior to other living beings and inanimate nature results in the conviction that people have the right to control and manipulate nature. This attitude even-tually ends with exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. Reject-ing the traditional hierarchy, Kulik (2007: 48) points out that all species have some special abilities and because of them are better than others in a particular respect. But since their gifts are different, it is difficult to compare them and to create any kind of hierarchy. Moreover, if a holistic perspective on nature is adopted, it becomes pointless to try to determine who is superior or inferior. All living beings, as indispensable parts of a unified whole, have their own place, their own function, and are equally important and necessary. Deep ecology of-fers an alternative model of the world: biocentrism. As Kulik explains in one of his recent articles, biocentrism rejects the hierarchical order of the world, since a hierarchy always presupposes inequality, while lack of hierarchy means equal-ity of all beings. The anthropocentric metaphor of the Great Chain of Being, with humans at the top, is replaced by a biocentric metaphor of a circle or a network, where no being is more or less important than others (cf. Kulik 2010: 36).

4. Conclusion

In his book, Kulik invites readers to question the typical, mainstream con-strual of the relation between humans and nature, in which they are both sepa-rate from it and situated above it. He encourages them to adopt an alternative view of humans as part of nature, or rather to abandon the dichotomy altogether,

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so that there are no longer humans and nature but unity of all. It is hoped that seeing the world through this alternate model will result in a different attitude to nature and will influence not only people’s thoughts but also their actions. If the current state of the environment is fundamentally the result of peo-ple’s attitude to it, then only a change in their minds can have any far-reaching and long-lasting effects. As Lawrence Buell argues, saving the Earth is not just a task for science but for the whole culture. In his view, “vision, value, culture, and imagination are keys to today’s environmental crises at least as fundamental as scientific research, technological know-how, and legislative regulation” (Buell 2005: 5). He explains that “[f]or technological breakthroughs, legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of transformed envi-ronmental values, perception, and will” (Buell 2005: vi). Thus, language and, more specifically, books, articles, or lectures may eventually turn out to be powerful tools in the hands of ecologists.

References Buell, Lawrence 2005: The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Liter-

ary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell. Croft, William, D. Alan Cruse 2004: Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Dziubek-Hovland, Magdalena 2004: Przyroda nie należy do człowieka: Sylwetka i ekofilozofia

Arne Naessa na tle norweskiej filozofii ekologicznej [Nature does not belong to man: The profile and ecophilosophy of Arne Naess against the background of Norwegian ecological philosophy]. Bystra: Stowarzyszenie Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot.

Johnson, Mark 1987: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Krzeszowski, Tomasz Paweł 1997: Angels and Devils in Hell: Elements of Axiology in Semantics. Warszawa: Energeia.

Kulik, Ryszard 2007: Odkrywanie natury. Praktyka głębokiej ekologii [Discovering nature: The practice of deep ecology]. Bystra: Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot.

Kulik, Ryszard 2010: Czy biocentryzm jest groźny dla człowieka? [Is biocentrism dangerous for man?]. Dzikie Życie. June 2010, 36–37.

Lakoff, George 1990: The Invariance Hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image-schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1 (1), 39–74.

Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1980: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1999: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Chal-lenge to Western Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Lakoff, George, Mark Turner 1989: More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.


ALEKSANDRA SZUDY-SOJAK TORUŃ SCHOOL OF BANKING

A cognitive perspective on Naomi Klein’s Fences and Windows

ABSTRACT. The aim of the paper is to implement the most significant cognitive linguistic constructs into discourse analysis of Klein’s (2002) Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. A brief presentation of its main tenets, along with the acknowledgement of the embodied, imaginative, ecological and gestalt dimensions of cognitive processes, will buttress the dominant argument of cognitive linguistics that language is not an independent cognitive faculty but is instead governed by the same processes as other cognitive abilities, while meaning, which is speaker/recipient involved, emerges from conceptualization and interpretation, thus being construed rather than objectively given. Subsequently, a concise presentation of Klein’s background and profile will appear to facilitate the means and codes she uses to comprehend and describe the world, which will be followed by this author’s selection of the instruments to be employed in the cognitive analysis of the proposed fragments of Klein’s collection of articles and essays. Because social and political reality is predominantly understood via metaphors, cognitive linguistics seems to offer appropriate apparatus to explore Klein’s declaration of the consequences of globalization. Due to the limited scope of this paper, a detailed study through the cognitive perspective will focus on selected semantic phenomena (emphasis will be placed, in particular, on dominant metaphors, prevailing metonymies, frames and blends) in order to clarify Klein’s approach by revealing hidden aspects of the content and describe the pattern that dominates her narratives. The cognitive perspective offers a great potential to analyze strategies of meaning construction. By exploring the interface between personal and cultural experience and linguistic coding, it facilitates the description of meaning construction and mechanisms of subjectification. In the case of Klein’s texts, the occurrence and categories of lexical items dominating her idiolect illustrate the frames within which she grasps the anti-corporate movement she reports on. The metaphors the objects under scrutiny live by highlight certain aspects and, at the same time, hide other features of the reality they refer to.

Analyzing the discourse of a writer through the prism of cognitive linguis-tics offers great potential to investigate their strategies, both conscious and un-conscious, of meaning construction. The well-established field of the cognitive approach towards the study of language presents a set of instruments bound to facilitate the description of the idiolect in question, not only by examining the language, which is just the tip of the iceberg of the cognitive processes going on, but also by exploring the interface between personal and cultural experi-ence, and will interwoven in the linguistic coding. The aim of this paper is to implement selected tenets of cognitive linguistics in the discourse analysis of Naomi Klein’s (2002) Fences and Windows: Dis-patches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate and, most impor-

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tantly, to pinpoint the predominant metaphor which suffuses Klein’s discourse and thus shapes the opinions of her readers, and consequently to follow the most crucial aspect of the motivation of meaning pervading her line of reason-ing. Bearing in mind George Lakoff’s leitmotif, which has lately reverberated most significantly in The Political Mind (2008), that repetition of words and expressions, the overall recurrence and use of the same metaphors strengthens neuron connections and literally shapes our brains, one is confirmed in the be-lief that there is actually no variance between a person’s words, thoughts, and deeds. Or, taking the Machiavellian perspective, a language user might employ certain language constructions in order to activate the preferred areas of the brain in their interlocutors in order to achieve the desired objective. The ques-tion raised in this paper is whether the anti-corporate movement Klein reports on in the collection of articles is really at war, or does it simply result from the omnipresent structural metaphor that ARGUMENT IS WAR and its entailments? Are we not limited by the metaphors we live by? Are we able to create and comprehend our reality by the conscious choice of linguistic items? But who is Klein? She is an award-winning Canadian journalist, known for her criticism of globalization and sharp political analyses. She found herself the focus of public attention with the publishing of No Logo in 2000. The book, a manifesto of the anti-corporate movement, accusing well-known, large com-panies of unethical exploitation of workers in third-world countries in pursuit of greater profits, became an international bestseller. In 2002, she published Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. This book is a collection of articles, covering protests against corporate power, starting with the 1999 Seattle protests, which in most cases were eye witnessed by the writer herself. Cognitive linguistics, an umbrella term for the research in the areas of lexi-cal semantics and the semantics of the grammar which explores the relationship between linguistic form and the range of embodied and imaginative cognitive processes with a view to explaining the nature of meaning, seems appropriate for investigating meaning motivation processes in Klein’s discourse. The theory leaves behind the traditional beliefs that grammar is a matter of pure form and meaning, a question of truth, and consequently emphasizes the causative role that language plays in shaping reality. Contrary to other approaches to the study of language, cognitive linguistics does not only investigate the restricted field of linguistics, nor does it simply operate within the traditional constrained meta-language. It exceeds the limits of traditional linguistics by drawing on recent findings from neuroscience and psychology. It also shifts the focus of linguistic attention from what metaphorically can be referred to as pure parsing to a more complete description of the relation between content and form. Moreover, it sheds light on previously marginalized linguistic phenomena, such as metaphor.


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In the traditional approaches, metaphors were regarded as rhetorical flourishes and consequently constrained to literary studies. Cognitive linguistics is grounded on the belief that both bodily and imaginative concepts are central to reason, which is best understood through the concept of metaphor. It is assumed, following Waldemar Skrzypczak (2006: 72), that cognitive linguistic analysis can be discussed under two rubrics: cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar. However, due to the limited scope of this paper, my objec-tive in what follows is to explore only selected tenets of cognitive semantics. This paper aims to follow Klein’s discourse in terms of the most prevailing metaphors and metonymies, and grasp the writer’s motives behind their usage. I should mainly refer to the works of Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier that provide the basic foundations of my account. I should, however, briefly acknowledge that Ronald Wayne Langacker’s and Leonard Talmy’s research on construal operations, classified respectively as focal ad-justments and imaging systems, along with Langacker’s redefinition of basic grammatical categories, his discussion of the nature of symbolic units and in-sightful analysis of conceptual archetypes, also seem remarkably useful in in-vestigating and grasping the meaning of Klein’s discourse. As Langacker points out “linguistic meaning does not … reside in the content alone, for we are able to construe the same content in alternate ways, resulting in substantially differ-ent meanings” (1999: 5). Under close scrutiny it seems that the real message lies behind the conscious choice of grammatical constructions. The particular choice of linguistic expressions and constructions invokes the desired content and profiles a reported scene. Alternate ways of depicting a scene or describing someone outline the alternate aspects of the objects in question, and as a result, a sentence communicates events as perceived by language users, along meta-phorical paths in their cognitive systems. In Fences and Windows, Klein’s choice between the use of the active and the passive voice seems remarkable. It is worth noticing, for instance, that when Klein describes the anti-globalization activists in the first essays, reporting on the birth of the movement, she often uses the passive voice construction, which – reinforced by metaphorical bugs, lambs, and foot soldiers – compels readers to view the protesters as victims [1a]–[1c]. The passive, fortifying construal of victimization additionally strengthens the dominant metaphor.

[1a] “they (the activists) have been bitten by the globalization bug” (Klein 2002: 4). [1b] “The young activists who went to Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization and to Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been getting hammered in the press as tree-wearing, lamb-costumed, drumbeating bubble brains” (Klein 2002: 14). [1c] “At the moment, the anti-corporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, eager for the opportunity to enlist activists as foot soldiers for their particular vision” (Klein 2002: 26).


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On the other hand, the use of the active voice construction in the subsequent accounts, emphasizes the strength the movement has gained [2a]–[2c].

[2a] “The student anti-sweatshop movement, for instance, has rapidly moved from simply criticizing companies and campus administrators to drafting alternative codes of conduct and building a quasi-regulatory body, the Workers Rights Consortium in partnership with labour activists in the global south” (Klein 2002: 19). [2b] “Most activists agree that the time has come to sit down and start discussing a positive agenda” (Klein 2002: 25). [2c] “All over the world, activists are saying, “Yes, we get it. We’ve read the books. …. We’ve studied the octopus-like charts in The Nation that show that Rupert Murdoch owns everything. And guess what? We’re not going to feel bad about it. We are going to do something about it” (Klein 2002: 29).

Metaphor and metonymy have been in focus of cognitive linguistics ever since Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner moved them from the domain of poetics into the mainstream of linguistic analysis, by proclaiming their pervasiveness in language, thought, and action:

Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omnipresent: metaphor suffuses our thoughts, no matter what we are thinking about. … It is conventional: metaphor is an integral part of our ordinary everyday thought and language. It is irreplaceable: metaphor allows us to understand our selves and our world in ways that no other modes of thought can (Lakoff & Turner 1989: xi).

It is not words that constitute particular metaphors, but mappings across conceptual domains. The process of mapping, as defined by Fauconnier and Turner in their Blending Theory, involves four mental spaces: two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space (Croft & Cruse 2004: 37, 207) and thus leads to “the essence of metaphor [which] is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 5). Metaphors we live by are so deeply grounded in our physical and cultural experience and so conventionalized that their figurative character does not stick out unless we elaborate on the linguistic expression. For instance, it takes some conscious effort to activate the PLANT domain in the meaning of ‘local branch’ or the BODY domain in association with the meaning of ‘head office’. Similarly, we are not aware that the physical basis of the drooping posture that goes with sadness and depression and the erect position associated with a positive emo-tional state is the source of the HAPPY IS UP / SAD IS DOWN metaphor, elaborated by such English statements as “My spirits rose”, “I’m feeling up/down”, “My spirits sank”. Similarly, metonymy pervades our thoughts and language. To Lakoff (1987: 77), metonymy is “one of the basic characteristics of cognition. It is extremely common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of


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something and use it to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it”. There are some things that metaphor and metonymy have in common. First of all, both are conceptual in nature. Besides, both can be conventionalized, and processed in our cognitive systems automatically and effortlessly by means of (respectively) cross-domain and intra-domain map-pings (cf. Skrzypczak 2006: 87). Metaphor involves two conceptual domains, whereby one is understood in terms of the other, with the logic of the source domain being mapped onto the logic of the target domain. In contrast, metonymy involves only one conceptual domain and consists in using one entity to refer to another, which is related to it. Both phenomena are kinds of cognitive shortcuts, offering a quicker and shorter way of comprehending the world, which is possible because the human concep-tual system is basically metaphorical, as Lakoff & Johnson (1980) claim in Metaphors We Live By. Klein’s discourse abounds with metaphorical expressions. In fact, in Klein’s discourse readers will come across numerous metaphors previously identified and labeled by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) ([3a], [3b], [3c]). Below, I quote spe-cific examples:

[3a] Orientation and container metaphors, as in: “A virtual fence goes up around schools in Zambia when an education ‘user fee’ is introduced on the advice of the World Bank, putting classes out of the reach of millions of people” (Klein 2002: XVIII), “democracy sometimes bursts out of council meetings and close-door committees” (Klein 2002: 57, emphasis is mine: AS-S) [3b] IDEAS ARE FOOD, for instance: “It’s a plan cooked up by the World Bank” (Klein 2002: 46, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [3c] LIFE IS A GAME: “In the age of Woodstock, refusing to play by the state and school rules was regarded as a political act in itself” (Klein 2002: 5), “big players are still making the rules” (Klein 2002: 81, emphasis is mine: AS-S).

In Klein’s discourse, there are also examples of metaphtonymy, yet another type of conceptual process, discussed after other authors by Skrzypczak (2006: 86) as well as William Croft and D. Alan Cruse (2004: 218), which involves both metaphorical and metonymic mappings in the process of the construal of meaning. In “healthy job markets” (Klein 2002: 72), for instance, we have the metonymic OBJECT USED FOR USERS, blended with the ontological metaphor viewing the job market as a body undergoing different states and stages of physical condition. In turn, in the “economic model swallows everything – cul-ture, human rights, the environment, democracy itself” (Klein 2002: 78), we have a combination of the extended IDEAS ARE FOOD metaphor with the meto-nymic PRODUCT FOR PRODUCERS (economic model stands for people responsi-ble for it). Moreover, there are metaphorical entailments of the Great Chain of Beings in simple expressions like “swarms of people” (Klein 2002: XVI, emphasis is


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mine: AS-S). The example concerns the animalization process down the spec-trum regarding “the successive and gradual accumulation of attributes” (Skrzypczak 2006: 89) within cross-domain mappings, and involves biological and instinctual traits, describing behavior of an aggregate of animals (people) moving (in terms of physical and intellectual processes) in one direction. The more complicated metaphtonymic “the market swallows the commons” (Klein 2002: 84), implies deification processes embodying the qualities of a cruel and ravenous god, which is coherent with further patterns appearing throughout the collection of articles, for instance “the market may be satisfied with their sacrificial lambs” (Klein 2002: 98). Furthermore, Klein’s discourse contains numerous examples of vivid blends, for example in “Capitalism comes out of the closet” (Klein 2002: 7), “modern-day Bastille” (Klein 2002: 56), and “Foot and Mouth’s Sacrificial Lambs” (Klein 2002: 95). Mental space theory tackles the meaning of such expressions by demon-strating “how utterances evoke not just semantic frames but also spaces repre-senting the status of knowledge (beliefs, desires, hypotheticals, counterfactuals) relative to reality, how language uses links between different spaces in referring to individuals, and how knowledge can float between spaces” (Croft & Cruse 2004: 39). Thus, mental spaces are mental states which resemble containers with topological properties that build up our mental world and allow our thoughts and communication in all forms to float and anchor safely at what we can poetically refer to as the final destination of meaning construal. As Faucon-nier & Turner remark, “[m]ental spaces are small conceptual packets con-structed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. They are interconnected, and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold” (1996: 113). In contrast, blending is a process of integrating known concepts (spaces) into a new one, the process of mappings across domains. It minimally involves a generic space, two input spaces, and a blended space. Fauconnier claims that it is “inherent in all of our thought processes, and especially in the permanent construction of meaning that we engage in effortlessly as we con-ceive the world around us, act upon it, talk about it, and stray beyond it in wild leaps of imagination, fantasy, and creativity” (2001: 256). The most common conceptual metaphor, and the most noticeable one in Klein’s discourse, however, is the trite (considering how much has already been said and written on the subject) ARGUMENT IS WAR. Although arguments can be seen in many different ways other than a battle, this concept permeates Klein’s articles and thus shapes the way Klein’s readers approach the face-offs between anti-corporate demonstrators, mostly in “carnival mood” (this expression, an example of the LIFE IS A PLAY metaphor, recurs in several other – apart from Klein’s – reports of the events, for example in The spirit of Seattle (Internet pages), and politicians in their impeccable suits, behind policemen in riot gear.


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What constitutes this particular war metaphor is the mapping, i.e., a systematic set of correspondences from the source domain of war to the target domain of argument. For the analytical purposes useful might be here two types of correspon-dences, distinguished by Croft & Cruse (2004: 196), namely, (1) ontological, which connect elements of the domains, and (2) epistemic, which link relations between elements in the domains and include encyclopedic knowledge about them: (1) The ontological correspondences:

Source: WAR battlefield win/lose battle attack/counterattack enemy’s position defend our own position use plan of attack people we are fighting with: op-ponents

Target: ARGUMENT dispute win/lose argument attack/counterattack opponent’s line of reasoning defend our own line of reasoning plan/use strategies people we are arguing with: oppo-nents

(2) The epistemic correspondences: At war, on a battlefield, oppo-nents attack positions of their enemies, and defend their own. They use plans of attack in order to gain ground, and win the battle. If they lose ground, they lose the battle. If they destroy their en-emy’s weapons, they win the war.

During a dispute, opponents attack the line of reasoning of their adversaries, and defend their own. They plan and use strategies in order to gain ground and win the argument. If they lose ground, they lose the argument. If they demolish their opponent’s argu-ment, they win the argument.

An inquisitive researcher can notice that the very subtitle of Klein’s collec-tion of articles explicitly relates to the war metaphor. Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate translates into ‘Messages sent quickly be-tween military officers from an area where fighting takes place during a war’, and construes the summit meetings between NGOs, anti-globalists, and G8 politicians in terms of a battlefield. Consequently, the whole collection abounds with military vocabulary. The following excerpts ([4a]–[4i]) constitute some representative examples:

[4a] “a state of emergency has been declared in Seattle, the streets look like a war zone and the negotiations have collapsed” (Klein 2002: 3, emphasis is mine: AS-S).


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[4b] “the proponents of accelerated free trade immediately went on the offensive, attacking the protesters as enemies of the poor” (Klein 2002: 8, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4c] “But if there is a lesson of Washington, it is that a barricade can be stormed in spirit, as well as in body. Monday’s sleep-in wasn’t the nap of the defeated, it was the well-deserved rest of the victorious” (Klein 2002: 12, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4d] “bombarding Shell Oil with faxes and e-mails” (Klein 2002: 19, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4e] “tactics (p.20) initiatives face an uphill battle” (Klein 2002: 25, emphasis is mine: AS-S) [4f] “head-on attack against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF” (Klein 2002: 35, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4g] “democracy in shackles” (Klein 2002: 44, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4h]“those numbers aren’t his friends they are his worst enemies” (Klein 2002: 65, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [4i] “ fight the brand wars” (Klein 2002: 88, emphasis is mine: AS-S).

Conceptual metaphors are not limited to a number of linguistic expressions. The conceptual structure is accomplished linguistically, however, as in the case of the AGRUMENT IS WAR metaphor: we do not only talk about arguments in terms of war, but what we do in arguing is to some extent organized by the con-cept of war (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 4). Coherence between domains fully satisfies the purpose of the metaphor, which consists in understanding a concept by means of blending. Metonymic constructions, in which the entities call to mind the most rele-vant associations the discourse participants need to focus on or which some-times invoke quite complex connotations, also support the dominant war meta-phor. A few selected examples are listed below:

[5a] INSTITUTIONS FOR PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE: “the IMF is demanding” (Klein 2002: 51); “the IMF should see, the IMF wants” (Klein 2002: 52, emphasis is mine: AS-S); “our government favours” (Klein 2002: 74, emphasis is mine: AS-S); “British Petroleum found this out” (Klein 2002: 105, emphasis is mine: AS-S). [5b] PLACES FOR EVENTS: “there was Windsor and Detroit on June 4, 2000” (Klein 2002: 24, emphasis is mine: AS-S); “there are clear remedies available to prevent future Walkertons” (Klein 2002: 111, emphasis is mine: AS-S) [5c] PRODUCERS FOR PRODUCTS: “I wasn’t thrilled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service quoted my book in its new report on the anti-globalization threat” (Klein 2002: 129, emphasis is mine: AS-S).

Metaphors, prototypes, frames, alternate grammatical structures – these are all elements of a wider phenomenon which Lakoff (2008) labels as narrative in The Political Mind. He recognizes some narratives that prevail in American culture, such as the rags to riches narrative, the nice family narrative, the rein-venting the self narrative, the women’s lot narrative, the troubled life narrative, the rescue narrative, and finally the war narrative, which is crucial for my ar-gument. We are not born with these narratives, but we learn to recognize them


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just as we learn everything – space, time, moving, speaking, and the culture surrounding us – thus shaping our brain by neuron connections that fire together. Consequently we live by the narratives. Thus a doctor might see himself not just as a doctor, but as a hero rescuing the sick. A nurse, on the other hand, may see herself as a helper to the hero doctor, or as a victim of sexism in medicine. Nar-ratives help us understand politics, culture, and ourselves. Lakoff (2008) ob-serves that most people are bi-conceptual, i.e., they have modes of thought which mutually inhibit one another. What is more, they are able to evoke con-flicting narratives concerning one matter. Which one is brought to mind de-pends on the language that activates it: “If we hear the same language over and over, we begin to think in terms of the narratives and metaphors activated by that language” (Lakoff 2008: cd 1, track 11). Language frames reality and seems to offer the means to trigger the most wanted world views and inhibit the unwanted ones. The question a writer pre-occupied with important social issues might ask is not “What should I say?” but “How should I say it?” Klein’s report of the anti-globalist movement is not a simple chronicle of “the largely subterranean movements that entered into mainstream consciousness in the industrialized world” (Klein 2002: xiii), but rather – according to its subtitle – a succession of dispatches from the front line of a battle. Although the title of the collection of essays, Fences and Windows, relates to the ARGUMENT IS A BUILDING metaphor (entailing the conventional-ized foundations and buttressing, but also extending to novel fences – means of closing, inhibiting – and windows – means of opening, starting), this path is not followed. The imagery of fences and windows appears most visibly only in the titles of subsequent chapters: “Windows of Dissent”, “Fencing in Democracy”, “Windows to Democracy”, but the language of narration within is that of AR-

GUMENT IS WAR. Klein’s choice of words and language structures frames the war narrative. The reason might be that the war construal of argument is more prominent than its alternate construals. It activates a trauma, connects to fear, and thus motivates readers to action more readily than other possible construals might.

References Croft, William, D. Alan Cruse 2004: Cognitive Linguistics Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics). Fauconnier, Gilles 2001: Conceptual blending and analogy. In: Dedre Gentner, Keith James

Holyoak & Boicho Nikolov Kokinov (eds.) 2001: The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 255–286.

Fauconnier, Gilles, Mark Turner 1996: Blending as a central process of grammar. In: Adele Eve Goldberg (ed.) 1996: Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 113–130.


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Klein, Naomi 2000: No Logo. London: Flamingo. Klein, Naomi 2002: Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization

Debate. New York, NY: Picador. Lakoff, George 1987: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the

Mind. Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George 2008: The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with

an 18th-Century Brain. Audiobook read by Kent Cassella. Tantor audio. Lakoff, George, Mark Johnson 1980: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press. Lakoff, George, Mark Turner 1989: More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald Wayne 1999: Grammar and Conceptualization [Cognitive linguistics research

14]. Berlin & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. Skrzypczak, Waldemar 2006: Analog-Based Modelling of Meaning Representations in English.

Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press. The spirit of Seattle. In: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1305060.stm ED 05/2001.


MATEUSZ MARECKI UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW

The actual, the possible and the hypothetical: The significance of the 2nd conditional for the creation of multidimensional worlds in Bruce Boston’s speculative poems

ABSTRACT. Speculative poetry, which has only recently gained critical recognition, deals with presenting novel viewpoints that both speculate about alternative futures and reflect on the present. One of its most acclaimed representatives is Bruce Boston, the author of “what if?” poems (e.g., “Gray People”, “Chess People”, or “Parchment People”). On the one hand, Boston’s poems are imbued with utopianism; but on the other, by touching on such subjects as communal memory, inequality within society, ageing and climate change, they serve as a social critique of the reality as we know it. What is less obvious is the very function of the 2nd conditional clauses in creating poetic worlds, which becomes clear when the poems are read in light of cognitive poetics and Text World Theory: the use of 2nd conditional clauses generates three main and interconnected mental spaces: (1) spaces of the real world (implied metaphorically), (2) projected spaces and (3) hypothetical spaces (speculative extensions). Such a space blending combines the actual, the possible, and the impossible in one. As a result, by providing multidimensional alternate construals, speculative poetry enables the reader to look at the actual world from at least three different cognitive perspectives. What is also characteristic of the “what if?” poems is the absence of a base text-world; thus, the deictic projection occurs directly from the discourse world to the wish/epistemic world, preventing readers from finding the initial textual context to which they could refer in the course of reading. Likewise, because of this lack of a base text-world, it remains unclear whether Boston, when using the pronoun “we” in the apodosis part of conditional clauses, addresses humanity in general or rather some elitist group of people. Debatable is also whether the apodosis part results in generating material processes (either intention or supervention processes) or mental processes. In this presentation I discuss in detail the application of the above-mentioned theoretical categories to Boston’s poems and compare the selected texts to his other two poems: “Last Alchemist”, in which 1st conditional clauses appear, and “Dystopian Dusk”, in which 3rd conditional clauses are present. I argue that although from the grammatical point of view the 1st and 2nd conditionals enable the expression of either a more probable future or a past which cannot be changed, it is the 2nd conditional that makes the “what if” poems epistemologically closest to the discourse world.

In most student books designed to teach English grammar, suffice it to men-tion Virginia Evans’ CPE Use of English 1 for the Revised Cambridge Profi-ciency Examination (2002) or Raymond Murphy’s English Grammar in Use Intermediate (1994 /1985/), the 2nd conditional is reduced to a structure refer-ring to advice or imaginary situations in the present and future alike, which are unlikely to occur. Audrey Jean Thomson and Agnes V. Martinet, in their hand-

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book A Practical English Grammar (2008 /1960/: 198–199), provide a more detailed definition, by pointing out that type 2 conditional is used “when the supposition is contrary to known facts” and “we don’t expect the action in the if-clause to take place”. Whereas the two just presented traditional viewpoints put emphasis on the interpretative aspect, the cognitive point of view (Dancy-gier & Sweetser 2005; Gavins 2007) dissects the discussed conditional con-struction into the protasis (the if-clause) and apodosis (the main clause) parts, with the former “setting up a theoretical situation and marking it as remote from actuality” (Gavins 2007: 120) and the latter being a linguistic realization of an action consequent on a prior condition. As the analysis that follows has been conducted on the basis of two cognitive frameworks, namely cognitive poetics (Stockwell 2002; Carter & Stockwell 2008; Brône & Vandaele 2009) and Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007), it is consistently the analytically-oriented cognitive definition of the 2nd conditional that is taken advantage of here. Also, for the sake of clarity, it is essential to briefly explicate some key notions appearing throughout the paper. Of crucial significance is the discourse world, understood by Peter Stock-well (2002: 94, 136) as both common ideological ground that the participants (e.g., the reader, the author and characters) in a specific discourse happen to share and “the mediating domain for reality as well as projected fictions”, which underlies a number of possible text-worlds. Such a multitude of text-worlds constitutes a network of “mental representations” (Gavins 2007: 10) that are constructed of a discourse in the reader’s mind. This mental network stems from the base text-world,1 functioning as a central point of reference of every text-world structure. Through certain world switches2 (also called space builders), such as the subordinating conjunction if, the reader may, on the conceptual level, access new text-worlds. Dependently on the linguistic expression used, these newly created mental representations, or mental spaces,3 instantiate, ipso facto, different alternative worlds4 generated by literary characters. For instance,

1 The term is my own invention. I have employed it for the sake of clarity. Usually the base

text-world can be easily identified, since it becomes frequently reiterated and reinforced in a text through linguistic references to “the zero reference point of subjectivity” (Gavins 2007: 36) or Karl Bühler’s (1990 [1934]: 117) origo, positioning itself with the phrase I am now here. It may be then inferred that the base text-world should be predominantly associ-ated with sections within a text deploying present-tense and first-person narration.

2 See Gavins (2007: 46–48) for more details. 3 Notwithstanding that the construct of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994 /1985/) traditionally

ascribes to the studies of metaphor (see Gavins 2007: 146–164), Text World Theory makes no clear distinction between mental spaces and the category of text-worlds. Thus, in this pa-per both notions are used interchangeably.

4 In his Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2002: 94–95), Stockwell distinguishes six types of alternatives: “epistemical worlds (knowledge worlds, beliefs), speculative extensions (antici-pations, hypotheses), intention worlds (plans for change), wish worlds (wishes), obligation

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the above mentioned conjunction if alone gives birth to a speculative extension (Stockwell 2002), a category encompassing hypotheses and anticipations. Each textual entity within a text-world structure, in turn, contains either material or mental processes. If the former, signaled in text-world diagrams in the form of vertical arrows, refer to “any type of action or event in discourse” and include “some kind of Actor” (Gavins 2007: 56), the latter, represented graphically by horizontal arrows, entail “activities in the mind rather than physical actions of the body” (Gavins 2007: 62) and imply the role of the participant as that of Sen-sor. In other words, while material processes find their linguistic realizations in verbs expressing action (e.g., kick off, exploded, fell over), mental processes are described by means of verbs of perception (e.g., listen, see, feel), cognition (e.g., think, remember), existence (e.g., be) or reaction (e.g., like, hate). Equipped with these terms, this paper explores the significance of the 2nd con-ditional for the creation of multidimensional worlds in Bruce Boston’s specula-tive poems and elucidates on how the scrutinized grammatical construction affects the interpretation of the analyzed texts. Yet, before the presentation of the analysis results ensues, it is still essential to expound what hides under the speculative poetry label and who Boston is. It was not until 1978 and the foundation of Science Fiction Poetry Association that the term speculative poetry officially came into common use. Just like other related genres, to mention science fiction poetry above all, it both speculates on “the nature of reality, perception, language and the future” (Vanderhooft 2007) and, as aiming to bombard readers with novelties, “conveys a sense of wonder” (Dutcher 2004). However, unlike science fiction poetry, speculative poetry re-frains from the scientific legacy and rather than to the future, turns its attention to “the present apparent reality” (Gavins 2007: 42). In an attempt to portray the actual world in a figurative way, speculative authors make extensive use of projection, by means of which we not only “imagine ourselves viewing from other perspectives than our own”, but we also become “another being” (Dutcher 2004). This is also the case in the works of Boston, one of the most acclaimed representatives of speculative poetry5 and the author of a ground-breaking essay entitled “The Failure of Genre Poetry”. His bibliography embraces more than forty books and chapbooks, suffice it to mention Dark Matters (2010a), North Left of Earth (2009b), Double Visions (2009a) or Quanta (2001). With his works published in countless magazines (e.g., Strange Horizons, The Pedestal) and numerous awards received,6 Boston should be viewed as a prolific poet in

worlds (different versions of the world) and fantasy worlds (the worlds of dreams and vi-sions)”.

5 The list of American speculative poets also includes Robert Frazier, Andrew Joron, Mike Allen, and John Grey.

6 Only recently has Boston’s Dark Matters (2010) received the 2010 Bram Stoker Award.

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the first place. Yet, his portfolio also includes novels, like Stained Glass Rain (1993). In this paper, the poet’s “what if?” poems, such as “Gray People” (2004b), “Parchment People” (2006) or “Surreal People” (2009k), are taken under examination. Although in a modest number of 15 they constitute only a small part of Boston’s work, they, nonetheless, serve as the most conspicuous examples of speculative poetry, since they represent the fullest exemplification of the statement that the discussed genre is an elaboration of “what if?” in verse. Beginning with the short, 1- or 2-line, hypothetical if-clauses, all of them elabo-rate in the lengthy apodosis parts on what could happen if a condition contained in the protasis part were fulfilled.7 The analysis has indicated that the 2nd conditional construction, and, more specifically, both of its constituents – the protasis and apodosis parts, in each of the examined works generates the three following spaces: (1) spaces of the real world, (2) projected spaces and (3) hypothetical spaces (speculative extensions). To illustrate this, take, for instance, the first two lines from “Asteroid People” (2009c): “If asteroid people / were the world”. It is through references to “peo-ple” and “the world” that the space of the real world is conceived. Only then, with mere “people” turning into their “asteroid” incarnations, does the projec-tion occur. To add the space builder if results, in the final outcome, in the crea-tion of a speculative extension. Such a space blending offers three different cognitive perspectives, which, in turn, gives the reader an opportunity to discern the hypothetical, the actual and the possible versions of the world as we know it. In Boston’s “what if?” poems, the hypothetical dimension emerges when the texts are interpreted literally. In other words, from the examined works in their entirety emanates the impossible. Reading that as “Gray People” (2004b) “we would wait for others to colorize” or coming to realize that being “Parchment People” (2006) “we would yellow with age”, one takes the portrayed scenes as pure speculation. In like manner when in “Assassin People” (2010b) Boston humorously depicts a world which would be inhabited by “connoisseurs / in the art of murder, / poisoners extraordinaire” (derived from the apodosis part) or puts forward a risky claim that in the role of “Dream People” (2008) “we would inhabit a singular / consciousness that would / be pulled through one inexplica-ble scenario”, it becomes evident that neither of the visions is likely to come true. If construed symbolically, from the “what if?” poems can be additionally elicited the actual and the possible dimensions. While the former enables the

7 For example, “Surreal People” (2009j) is composed of a 1-line protasis section („If surreal

people were the world”) followed by a 27-line apodosis section. In the last stanza of the poem, the line „If surreal people were the world” recurs to be immediately followed by the final remark contained in the apodosis part – „the wonders and horrors of existence / would forever begin anew”.


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reader to make interpretations with social-critical overtones, the latter opens a space of discussion for predictions concerning the future of the current world.8 Drawing a portrait of the actual world, Boston deliberately uses only dark tones. In “Ghost People” (2004a) or “Parchment People” (2006), the poet’s critical remarks on environmental issues and the human negligence can be found. Depicted are disturbing, but also familiar, scenes “we would watch” of “the fine artifice of man … collapsing … into rubble” and “the / toxins in the atmosphere / and the poisonous elements / in our own composition”. In “Rat People” (2010c), it is also politicians who come in for a scathing criticism: Bos-ton likens them to “fat and whiskered” rodents. Though clichéd, the examined works do not evade universal and timeless motifs, such as social inequality or human helplessness in the presence of God (“Puppet People”, 2009g). That the hierarchical ladder appears an inherent attribute of humanity be-comes manifest in “Marble People” (2009d) and “Chess People” (2009e), where allusions are made either to people who “would strike others with great force” or a society consisting of “ some women” who “would be queens, … certain men in highly repose” and “pawns, immured in the fray”. Nonetheless, the “what if?” poems, in a great majority, take under scrutiny the flaws of the cur-rent society, of Zygmunt Bauman’s (2005) “Liquid” People. The titles them-selves imply that charges are cast on commonplace selfishness (“Star People”, 2009h), alienation (“Asteroid People”, 2009c) and the human proclivity to be emotionally unstable (“Wind People”, 2009j). Finally, interesting is also Bos-ton’s portrayal of humanity falling into the vacuum of “countless transforma-tions … our bodies would undergo … from the grotesque to the sublime” (“Sur-real People”, 2009k) and suffering from omnipresent “anonymous shades in an / anonymous crowd we would / watch one another constantly” (“Gray People”, 2004b). If the reflection of the actual world brings about many concerns, then pre-dictions of the future gleaned from a reservoir of interpretations that the possi-ble dimension offers to the reader seem even more devastating. Abundant in apocalyptic visions, some of the scenes in “Rat People” (2010c) or “Assassin People” (2010b) bear a resemblance to those from Doris Lessing’s (1974) The Memoirs of a Survivor. Encapsulated in constant terror, the future world will, as Boston’s version suggests, be populated not only by “model citizens” who “would train and practise … to maintain their status” and “avoid termination”, but also by “double or triple agents / in constant fear of exposure” (the latter lines are preceded by the phrase “we would all lead lives / of”). Similarly, pre-dictions are made as regards the treatment of culture and the excessive uniform-

8 For the sake of clarity, it has to be highlighted that all of the quoted extracts below, even if

they are devoid of the “would” particle, have been derived from the apodosis parts of the examined poems.

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ity within modern society. While in “Parchment People” (2006) Boston, by dramatically announcing that books “would become indecipherable / except to a clever few”, envisages the annihilation of literature, in “Dream People” (2008) the vision of a community which “would inhabit / a singular consciousness”, being a direct repercussion of omnipresent anonymity, comes as another men-ace. More plausible scenarios, even from today’s perspective, one encounters in “Ghost People” (2004a) and “Bird People” (2009f), where humanity both suc-ceeds in “finding the stars / and other worlds beyond our own” and discovers “strange species” which would “evolve / to stranger incarnations”. Finally, liv-ing in “Chess People’s” (2009e) land, infested with “maps of our cities” that “would be truly rectilinear, / numbered and lettered”, verges on perfection, but only deceptively so, because the invented world scares rather than delights. Besides generating multidimensional textual worlds, the use of the 2nd con-ditional results in the absence of a base text-world in the majority of “what if?” poems. In other words, the projection goes, through the conjunction if immedi-ately triggering the construction of new spaces, directly from the discourse world to the wish text-world, preventing readers from finding the initial textual context they could refer to in the course of reading. This process may be dem-onstrated on the example of “Puppet People” (2009g). Even if certain references visible on the lexical level, like “people” and “the world” (both bracketed in the protasis part) or “Gothic heaps” and “humans” (both found in the apodosis part), may allude to the reader’s reality, the poem lacks any grammatical cues of the present or past, both of which occur to be indispensable for the mental crea-tion of a base text-world. Instead, “Puppet People” (2009g) from the very outset commences with the conjunction if. In effect, the reader is immediately faced with the conceived hypothetical space. This lack of preparatory stage and – what follows – a considerable epistemic distance one has to overcome when dealing with the selected texts result from the protasis part of the conditional, which – as already mentioned – marks a hypothetical situation as distant from actuality. In this context, the lines “would have learned nothing from Darwin” (“Sur-real People”, 2009k) and “flora thrive and/ civilizations rise” (“Star People”, 2009h), functioning as expressions of situations in the past and present accord-ingly, turn out to be exceptions to the tendency indicated in the previous para-graph. Along with their role as points of references to the reality comes, as may be surmised, their status as base text-worlds. In a similar vein the explicit re-marks about the past in “Parchment People” (2006) (the lines “Yet as the years passed / and we endured the changing / light and heat around us” that are incor-porated into the apodosis passage) provide some initial textual and conceptual context for further comprehension of the hypothetical space. It is, however, another case – the concluding phrase “herds as we will” in “Rat People”


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(2010c) – that sparks confusion. The difficulty arises whether to regard the quoted extract as a sign of base text-world or rather as an expression of situation emerging as a consequence of the hypothetical situation in the poem. Owing to the prevalent lack of a base text-world in most of “what if?” po-ems, there springs up opaqueness about the significance of the plural pronoun “we” that emerges, without fail, in all of the discussed works in the apodosis part of conditional clauses. It may be inferred from the texts that by “we”, Bos-ton may mean either humanity (or some alternative creation) as a whole or only some elitist community. On the one hand, the pronoun “we” preceded by the phrase “if … people were the world”9 implies the involvement of all human beings (or some alien equivalent); on the other, in the texts emerge other enac-tors10 (their number ranging from 1 to 5), which occurs to refute the former suggestion and operate to the latter’s advantage. When in “Rat People” (2010c) the deictic perceptual projection from “we” to “you” ensues (the reader initially perceives the “rat” world through the eyes of “we” who “would dominate / streets and fields” to later view it from the perspective of “you” who “could ride / and devour the human”), one does not have even a shadow of doubt that there are two separate groups in question. Likewise, the poem “Assassin People” (2010b), with references made to “we”, “your”, “model citizens”, “Machiavelli” and “the Borgias” points to even a more diverse community. In addition, it remains unclear whether the apodosis part results in generat-ing material or mental processes. Even though the discussed part of the condi-tional construction is said to “contain a material intention process” (Gavins 2007: 120), debatable is whether actions taking place within mental spaces have any bearing on one another. Moreover, in the apodosis part of the “what if?” poems verbs of senses and the verb to be predominate, which, as containing zero energy, are considered to convey mental processes. To recapitulate, as a result of the analysis three main observations have been made. Firstly, the use of type 2 conditional in the examined works leads to the creation of multidimensional text-worlds. Both the protasis and the apodosis parts of the discussed grammatical construction generate three main and inter-connected mental spaces – spaces of the real world, projected spaces and hypo-thetical spaces (speculative extensions). In effect, such a space blending com-bines the actual, the possible and the impossible in one, enabling the reader to

9 Dependently on the chosen poem, the dotted space could be filled in with different kinds of

“people”. Consider, for example, “Asteroid People” (2009b) and “Bird People” (2009e), which start with the lines “If asteroid people / were the world” and “If the bird people / were the world”, respectively.

10 Enactors are those characters who exist in a literary text, “at different conceptual levels of a discourse” (Gavins 2007: 41). In the case of “what if?” poems, the reader counts only as a participator, not an enactor, because the worlds or, more specifically, mental spaces he/she comes across in the course of reading are enactor-accessible.

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look at the real world from at least three different cognitive perspectives. Sec-ondly, Boston’s “what if?” poems are, in the majority of cases, devoid of a base text-world, which hinders readers’ conceptualization and re-creation of worlds they encounter. Finally, owing to this absence, it remains unclear whether the poet, when using the pronoun “we” in the apodosis part of conditional construc-tions, addresses some community as a whole or rather some elitist social group. All in all, it may be concluded that notwithstanding their syntactical simplicity and consistency, the examined poems set a number of readerly traps regarding the conceptualization (cognitive processing) of Boston’s alternative text-worlds. On the other hand, the multidimensionality of meanings found in “what if?” works opens a wide array of interpretative possibilities for the speculative po-etry reader. In the light of the results obtained from the above presented analysis, the question arises how the “what if?” poems work when put together with Bos-ton’s “The Last Alchemist” (2009i) and “Dystopian Dusk” (2010d), based on the 1st and the 3rd conditional, respectively. As such a comparative analysis would require more space, even another paper, for its proper motivation, this issue therefore needs to be deferred. Herein, my sole intention is to shed some light on the problem. One main observation that can be made on the strength of the preliminary comparative analysis is that although from the grammatical point of view the 1st and 3rd conditionals make possible the expressions of more probable a future and a past for ever fixed, it is the 2nd conditional that makes the “what if?” poems epistemologically closest to the discourse world. In “Dystopian Dusk” (2010d), references are made to: (1) the unreal past (“if it happened all at once, … we would have raised an alarm”), (2) a situation in the past (“yet each turn of the screw / that tightened the bonds”) and (3) a situation in the present (“now we wait”). Notwithstanding both the presence of a base text-world and implicit metaphors alluding to the reality, with no definite set-ting provided, a world created in the poem seems hardly graspable. The scenar-ios of “ontological questions” that “will become passé” or “metaphysics” that “will be reduced to no more/ than a bedtime game”, envisioned in “The Last Alchemist” (2009i), are even less convincing. Equipped with both the inevitable “when” and the conviction about the ultimate – “the laws of physics” that have nailed and sealed/ the universe” or “the final truth” that “has been signed and delivered” – coming true, the poem makes it evident that the future predicted by Boston remains only mere speculation. Having in mind the above presented remarks, one can only wonder what makes the reader perceive a hypothetical situation manifested linguistically by the 2nd conditional as epistemologically closer to a safe anchor of the discourse world than poetical lands set in the un-defined past (3rd conditional) and future (1st conditional).


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References Bauman, Zygmunt 2005: Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boston, Bruce 1993: Stained Glass Rain. Denver, CO: Ocean View Books. Boston, Bruce 2001: Quanta: Award Winning Poems. Napa Valley, CA: Miniature Sun Press. Boston, Bruce 2004a: “Ghost People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040621/ghost.shtml

ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2004b: “Gray People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20041004/graypeople-

p.shtml ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2006: “Parchment People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060327/bostonp.-

shtml ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2008: “Dream People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20081110/bostonp.-

shtml ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2009a: Double Visions. Colusa, CA: Dark Regions Press. Boston, Bruce 2009b: North Left of Earth. Cedar Rapids, IA: Sam’s Dot Publishing. Boston, Bruce 2009c: “Asteroid People”. In: Boston 2009b, 66–67. Boston, Bruce 2009d: “Marble People”. In: Boston 2009b, 21. Boston, Bruce 2009e: “Chess People”. In: Boston 2009b, 18–19. Boston, Bruce 2009f: “Bird People”. In: Boston 2009b, 10–11. Boston, Bruce 2009g: “Puppet People”. In: Boston 2009b, 20. Boston, Bruce 2009h: “Star People”. In: Boston 2009b, 68. Boston, Bruce 2009i: “The Last Alchemist”. In: Boston 2009b, 14–15. Boston, Bruce 2009j: “Wind People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090525/bostonp.-

shtml ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2009k: “Surreal People”. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20091026/bostonp.-

shtml ED 06.2010. Boston, Bruce 2010a: Dark Matters. Anaheim, CA: Bed Moon Books. Boston, Bruce 2010b: “Assassin People”. In: Boston 2010a, 50–51. Boston, Bruce 2010c: “Rat People”. In: Boston 2010a, 45. Boston, Bruce 2010d: “Dystopian Dusk”. In: Boston 2010a, 46–47. Brône, Geert, Jeroen Vandaele (eds.) 2009: Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter. Bühler, Karl 1990 [1934]: Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language.

Trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins [Sprachteorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart & New York: Fischer].

Carter, Ronald, Peter Stockwell (eds.) 2008: The Language and Literature Reader. London & New York, NY: Routledge.

Dancygier, Barbara, Eve Sweetser 2005: Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Construction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 8).

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tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vanderhooft, JoSelle 2007: Interview: Bruce Boston. In: www.strangehorizons.com/2007/2007-

0618/boston-int-a.shtml ED 06.2010. Werth, Paul 1999: Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.


ADAM BIAŁY UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW

On the construal of prepositional phrases

ABSTRACT. The idea that natural language is a system which is both universal and diverse is a common denominator of most generative theories on language, e.g., the Principles and Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981), the Minimalist Framework (Chomsky 1995). This approach entails that natural language is characterised by two types of features: those that are language universal and those that are language specific. These features may differ in form, but we are going to follow the assumption that the set of all features is a closed one and that the grammar of a particular language, or groups of languages, specifies the manner in which these features are realised. Thus typological differences between languages and groups of languages are a matter of ‘fine tuning’ (i.e., parameter setting) in the system and not of an altogether different system. Traditionally the greatest amount of diversity is ascribed to the verbal and nominal domains. However, more recent accounts indicate that other syntactic categories (e.g., adjectives) can also be associated with a complex structure (cf. Bennis 2004, McNally & Kennedy 2008). Even more recently quite rich structure has been proposed for prepositions and prepositional phrases (e.g., Koopman 2000; Svenonius 2007, 2010; Talmy 2000). It appears that prepositional phrases reveal a number of characteristics which were reserved for verbal and adjectival constructs, like the ability to take arguments. The paper focuses on a syntactic, morphological and semantic analysis of prepositions and prepositional phrases in representatives of Germanic and Slavic languages (i.e., English, Czech, and Polish). Following the approaches where typological differences in grammar between languages are assumed to reflect different realization patterns in the syntax, the analysis of prepositional phrases needs to be uniform on the one hand, but account for the discrepancies on the other. The results of such a comparative analysis should indicate whether the hypothesis that prepositional phrases reflect general patterns of syntactic realization, otherwise reserved for the verbal and nominal domains, can be maintained.

1. Introduction

From the perspective of Generative linguistics, natural language is charac-terized by the bifurcation between universality and diversity of its system. Lan-guage is universal at the level of the meaning it can convey but diverse at the level of morphology. This discrepancy between semantic function and surface realization has been a long standing struggle for typological analyses. Following generative theories of language, such as the Principles and Parameters frame-work (Chomsky 1981) and the Minimalist Framework (MF) (Chomsky 1995), the dual nature of language system can be accounted for by reference to two types of syntactic features: those that are language universal and those that are language specific. The novelty of current approaches amounts to the claim that languages share a universal syntactic structure, but the grammar of a particular

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language determines which parts of that structure are realized at the surface and in what fashion (cf. Starke 2009). As a result, typological differences between languages are the matter of parameter setting in the morphological system and not of an altogether different syntactic system. Thus, the diversity that charac-terizes the structure of language is systematically limited. Traditionally the greatest amount of diversity is ascribed to the domain of verb phrases and noun phrases. However, other syntactic categories (e.g., adjec-tives) are also associated with a complex structure (cf. Bennis 2004, Kennedy & McNally 1999). Quite rich structure has been proposed for prepositional phrases as well (e.g., Koopman 2000; Svenonius 2007, 2010; Talmy 2000), which struc-turally assimilates them to other types of syntactic categories. The paper focuses on P(prepositional)-elements, which are usually realized by prepositional phrases (PP), but also as verb particles or verbal affixes. The analysis will involve the syntactic, morphological and semantic characteristics of such elements. Examples from English, Polish and Czech will be discussed with the aim of providing a comparative account. The specific aim of the paper is to investigate whether the structure of P-elements supports the hypothesis that typological differences in grammar leading to different surface realization pat-terns may result from a uniform syntactic projection.

2. Contemporary view on prepositions

This section presents selected current analyses of P-elements. The common denominator of the proposals to be discussed (i.e., Talmy 2000, Zwarts 2005, Svenonius 2008) is that they posit a complex structure for P-elements similar to other types of major syntactic categories.

2.1. Location, Path, and Motion

Leonard Talmy (2000: 24) postulates that language consists of two subsys-tems: grammar and lexicon. Grammatical forms are used to “structure concep-tion”, whereas lexical forms “provide conceptual content”. The structural aspect is quite general (or semantically underspecified), e.g., past tense in John met Mary (two minutes/years ago). Additionally, Talmy (2000) makes a distinction between closed-class items (i.e., grammatical forms) and open-class items (i.e., lexical forms). Closed class items are ascribed the following features: they are token neutral, bulk neutral, and substance neutral. As illustrated by [1a],[1b], and [1c] these features are shared by PPs, which indicates their affinity to closed-class items.

[1a] The book is on the table / shelf / ground / bestseller list. [1b] John looked across the room / valley / plain.


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[1c] The soldiers marched through the minefield / forest / mud.

According to Talmy (2000), the structure of natural language does not di-rectly relate to reality, but it is linked to it via conceptualization. This approach is clarified in the following quotes: “the structural schemas expressed by lin-guistic closed-class forms (i.e., those pertaining to space and force) are also fictive representations, relative to the fictive character of the objects and arrays that a language user understands them to pertain to” (Talmy 2000: 163), and “one main characteristic of language’s spatial system is that it imposes a fixed form of structure on virtually every spatial scene” (Talmy 2000: 181). These assumptions can be illustrated by referring to the asymmetric distinction be-tween Figure and Ground, which is guided by ontological knowledge shared by the speakers.

[2a] The car stood in front of the house. [2b] ?The house stood behind the car. [2c] The tree stood next to the house. [2d] The house stood next to the tree.

The semantic domain of motion is structured in a similar way: “only when the observer sees both objects [Figure and Ground] within a framework … can she know which object is stationary, which object moves, by how much, and along what path” (Talmy 2000: 313). The relationship between meaning and surface expression is summarized by Talmy (2000: 21) in the following way: “This relationship [between semantic elements and surface elements] is largely not one-to-one. … We find here a range of universal principles and typological patterns as well as forms of dia-chronic category shift or maintenance across the typological patterns”. Since the same range of semantic elements may be realized by different surface elements, it is not surprising to find that such elements of meaning like ‘Motion’, ‘Path’, or ‘Manner’ may be realized lexically by the lexical verb or morphologically outside the verb root. The typological pattern of a given language will dictate whether this will be done by means of an adposition or a satellite. As a result, what one language expresses by means of PPs, another language may express by means of satellite elements (i.e., verbal particles, or affixes).

2.2. Prepositional aspect

Joost Zwarts (2005) claims that PPs are not merely modifiers but they can contribute to the event structure of sentences. The contribution is a mapping from the aspectuality of PPs to the aspectuality of the sentence. Zwarts (2005: 740) postulates that the domains of aspect and space may be linked in a direct way “by treating the denotation of a directional PP as an alge-

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braically structured set of paths that is thematically mapped to a mereology of events along the lines of Pinon (1993), Krifka (1998) and Rothstein (2004)”. The bounded and unbounded distinction in the domain of prepositional aspect influences the aspectual interpretation of verbs, as can be illustrated by examples [3a] and [3b].

[3a] John ploughed the field in an hour. (culmination) [3b] John ploughed the field for an hour. (no culmination)

According to Zwarts (2005: 753), cumulativity is the key feature distin-guishing bounded concepts from unbounded concepts: (a) A PP is unbounded if and only if it has cumulative reference, and (b) A PP is bounded if and only if it does not have cumulative reference. This assumption is related to Rothstein’s (2004) work on event structure. Following Zwarts (2005: 757), “if two events are spatiotemporally adjacent, then this operation [of concatenation] fuses them into another ‘singular’ event. So, if John swam from 1 am to 2 am from A to B and from 2 am to 3 am from B to C, then we can concatenate these events into one swimming event (from 1 am to 3 am, from A to C)”.

2.3. The structure of PP

Peter Svenonius (2008), in the vain of current generative theories, postu-lates a direct relation between semantic elements and structural projection. In his analysis, the standard PP is rewritten by him as a series of projections which are associated with specific elements of meaning. The two most important are Place and Path. The typological differences between languages result from the fact that the structural projections may be connected with different morphologi-cal realizations. In the spirit of neo-constructionist theories, a given structural projection is associated with a particular element of meaning. In the domain of P-elements, it is Path and Place that should be assigned a specific position in the structure because “when Path and Place elements co-occur, Path is morphosyntactically outside Place; either further away from the nominal stem, in a local case system (cf. Kracht 2002), or further away from the noun phrase, when they are un-bound morphemes” (Svenonius 2010: 127). Particular elements may acquire more complex interpretation by head movement to higher projections. The range of projections proposed by Svenonius (2010) is the following: Dir > Path > p > Deg > Deix > Loc > AxPart > K > DP. The relevant projections are associated with the following interpreta-tion. Category K is responsible for functional prepositions and case-markers (e.g., genitive case assignment in some languages; the equivalent of English of,


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as in east of London); category AxPart is responsible for shape characteristics of the Ground; category Loc is responsible for mapping Grounds to vector spaces; category Deix is responsible for introducing deictic information about proximity to a contextual center; category Deg accounts for constructing regions on the basis of vector spaces; category p accounts for the expression of the configura-tional relation between the Figure and the space; category Path determines the realization of prepositions like to and from; and category Dir is responsible for the realization of particles. The structural hierarchy works in the following way. Place elements (which constitute the lower sequence of the hierarchy below p), for example, can acquire the interpretation of Path when they combine with a null Path element with the meaning similar to the preposition to. This null element may be checked overtly by the preposition to, or covertly by the seman-tics of verbs of movement, like drift. Svenonius (2008) devotes particular attention to particles. According to him, the basic meaning of particles is as a “Path-to-Path function”, and a parti-cle combines with a DP only when the DP itself can be construed as a Path. As a result, particles are compatible with verbs which do not specify Path in their semantics, e.g., I walked (up) the Appalachian Trail. Verbs which are inherently Path oriented are not compatible with particles, e.g., ?John entered (in)to the room. This can be explained by postulating that Path can be checked only once in a single derivation. Thus, we can get a struc-ture with complex semantics containing Path as part of its meaning. What is not possible, though, in a single derivation is for two separate morphemes to repre-sent the Path element of meaning. The picture that emerges from the analyses presented in the sections above is that P-elements make systematic contributions to the meaning of other phrases. They can influence the aspectuality of verbs in a similar way that nominals do, and analogies can be drawn between the bounded–unbounded distinction and the count–mass distinction. In the following section, we are going to develop the predicate status of P-elements as well as present some challenges to its universality.

3. Prepositions as predicates

The most important developments with respect to the analysis of P-elements in the accounts presented above concern the functional nature of their projec-tion. Most generally, the main function of P-elements is to relate the subject of the P-projection with its complement. These are called respectively Figure and Ground by Talmy (2000). Another feature of P-elements is that they make a contribution to the mean-ing of verbs (or nouns) with which they co-appear. This characteristic is directly related to their qualification as close elements (Talmy 2000: 24) and the fact

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that they tend to be lexicalized in many languages. For example, the aspectual nature of P-elements often leads to their being realized as particles or verb pre-fixes. With respect to P-elements, it is the lexicalization patterns that lead to typological differentiation between languages. In the sections below common realization patterns for P-elements will be presented, and this will be related to the typological continuum represented by prepositions, particles, and verbal prefixes.

3.1. Prepositions

PPs may make a strong contribution to the aspectual meaning of the verb with which they combine. However, not all PPs function as complements. Gen-erally, it is the structural and pragmatic context which determines whether a given PP will be analyzed as a modifier [4a] or complement [4b].

[4a] I saw your jacket in the wardrobe. [4b] I put your jacket in the wardrobe.

In languages such as English, the standard realization for complements is in the form of NPs. Because of the fact that English has poor inflectional mor-phology, many locative or directional functions are realized by prepositions.

[5a] I bought the book for Mary. (Mary = Recipient/Beneficiary) [5b] I bought Mary the book.

Certain ditransitive verbs, like buy, allow two types of realization patterns. The Recipient argument may be realized either as indirect object NP [5b], or as a PP [5a].

[6a] John read the book for an hour. [6b] John read the book in an hour.

Verbs like read are underspecified with respect to their aspectuality. With such verbs, the structural or pragmatic context may contribute to their aspectu-ality and set the value either as bounded or unbounded. For example, the aspec-tual interpretation of verbs like read is determined by the direct object argu-ment, which is referred to as ‘incremental theme’ (cf. Dowty 1991). The inter-pretation of the NP is mapped onto the overall aspectual structure of the predi-cate and it may determine the aspectuality of the verb as either bounded or un-bounded.

[7a] Mary read the sentence for an hour. [7b] Mary read the sentence in 5 seconds / one hour. [7c] Mary read for an hour / *in an hour.


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The aspectuality of verbs which are lexically bounded (e.g., achievement verbs) cannot be influenced by PPs.

[8a] The guest arrived in an hour. [8b] *The guest arrived for an hour.

The examples above can be contrasted with the analysis of Zwarts 2005 (cf. section 2.2) and indicate that it is too strong, since in [8a] and [8b] the inherent eventuality of the verb is decisive in determining the aspectual interpretation of the PP and the overall predicate. In Slavic languages, this is even more visible as aspectual marking is morphologically overt and only perfective verbs are compatible with bounded PPs. This is illustrated on the basis of the verb czytać ‘read’ below.

[9a] Janek czytał książkę przez godzinę / *w godzinę. Janek-Nom read-Past book-Acc for hour / in hour ‘Janek read the book for an hour / in an hour.’ [9b] Janek przeczytał książkę *przez godzinę / w godzinę. Janek-Nom read-Perf-Past book-Acc for hour / in hour ‘Janek read the book for an hour / in an hour.’ [9c] Janek (*prze)czytał przez godzinę / *w godzinę. Janek-Nom read-Perf-Past for hour / in hour ‘Janek read for an hour / in an hour.’

Unlike in English, in Polish a bounded PP cannot by itself set the aspectual-ity of a sentence as telic. In order to achieve a telic interpretation, the verb must appear in its perfective form, as indicated in [9b]. Interestingly, when the object argument is elipted, as in [9c], only the unbounded PP is possible. This indi-cates that it is not only the morphological form of the verb which is decisive but the interpretation of the object, which needs to be bounded as well.

[10a] Janek pił (piwo) przez dwa lata / *w dwa lata. Janek-Nom drink-Past (beer-Acc) for two years / in two years ‘Janek drank (beer) for two years / in two years.’ [10b] *Janek pił dwa kufle piwa przez 15 minut / w 15 minut. Janek-Nom drink-Past two pint-Pl beer-Gen for 15 minutes / in 15 minutes ‘Janek drank two pints of beer for 15 minutes / in 15 minutes.’ [10c] Janek wypił dwa kufle piwa w 15 minut / *przez 15 minut. Janek-Nom drink-Perf-Past two pint-Pl beer-Gen for 15 minutes / in 15 minutes ‘Janek drank two pints of beer in 15 minutes / for 15 minutes.’

3.2. Particles

In comparison to prepositions, particles display stronger characteristics of functional elements. Most significantly, they are not phrasal categories. On many accounts, prepositions are analyzed as being projected closer to the NP,

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which is their governing category, while particles are governed by the verb which licenses them (cf. Svenonius 2007, 2010). Both can introduce arguments otherwise not licensed by the verb, as illustrated in [11a] and [11b].

[11a] John ran into Mary at the conference dinner. [11b] John ran up huge debts because of the poorly doing business.

Adding a particle to a verb quite often changes its subcategorization frame (and its event structure) forming a polysemous verb, which indicates that parti-cles can directly affect the aspectuality of the verb. This is often not the case with complement PPs. The overall effect that prepositions and particles have on the VP may be the same: an unbounded event becomes bounded. This indicates that they occupy the same position in the structure. Such assumption is further strengthened by the fact that prepositions and particles which affect the aspectu-ality of the verb are in complementary distribution. This is an expected result of the assumption that they play the same function in the projection. The aspectual nature of prepositions and particles is also indicated by the fact that they do not co-occur with lexically bounded verbs, as illustrated in [12a], [12b], and [12c].

[12a] ?Tom broke the crate up into smithereens. [12b] *Tom destroyed the crate up. [12c] *Tom arrived up at the airport on time. (cf. Tom turned up at the airport on time.)

3.2.1. Separable and inseparable particles

What needs to be mentioned at this point is the distinction between separa-ble and inseparable particles. The most important question concerns the deriva-tion of both structures as presented in [13a] and [13b].

[13a] John drank up his wine. / John drank his wine up. [13b] John ran up huge debts. / *John ran huge debts up.

Here we are going to follow Nicole Dehé (2002), who postulates that the distinction between separable and inseparable particles is closely related to the Information Structure of sentences. According to Dehé (2002), the continuous order is the underlying one, and the discontinuous order is derived when the object argument is ‘de-emphasized’. In such a case, it is shifted from the focus phrase and, as a consequence, it needs to move to the position before the parti-cle. The continuous derivation and the discontinuous derivation of [14] and [15] have been diagrammed by Dehé (2002) on pages 243 and 245, respectively.

[14] What did Nate put away? [15] Nate put the phone away.


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Dehé’s account explains why object pronouns tend to appear in the discon-tinuous order. The reason is that pronouns normally refer to background knowl-edge and they are normally non-focused elements. When contrastive stress is applied to object pronouns, the continuous order tends to prevail, as illustrated in [16c].

[16a] John drank it up. [16b] *John drank up it. [16c] John drank up it.

The facts above indicate that the underlying order is the one where the verb and the particle form a unit. The distinction between the two orders of particles in English can be also analyzed from a diachronic perspective. According to Maatje Barbara Elenbaas (2007), particles in English developed from prefixed verb complexes, which initially turned into inseparable complexes and later on into separable complexes.

3.3. Prefixes

Verbal prefixes are the P-elements which are morphologically integrated with the verb. This itself indicates their functional nature. Following the ac-counts of Peter Svenonius (2007) and Petr Biskup (2009), verbal prefixes and verbal particles should be given a uniform account, as they serve the same range of functions. However, we would like to argue that even though verbal particles and ver-bal prefixes share a number of characteristics, they are not identical. This results from the fact that they are associated with different projections. Prefixes always affect the aspectuality of the verb and lead to perfectivity, whereas particles do not necessarily have such an effect. An interesting account of prefixes is presented by Biskup (2009). He argues that Czech prefixes and corresponding prepositions are derived from the same structural position and they are copies of the same P-element. This is illustrated in [17], where do is realized both as a prefix and preposition within one clause.

[17] Do-jedem do Kvasin u naší babičky. to-go to Kvasiny-Gen at our grandmother ‘We will come to Kvasiny near our grandmother.’

This account is inspiring from the perspective of other Slavic languages and particularly Polish. What seems to be significant in the context of Polish pre-fixes is that even though the prefix and the corresponding preposition may be homophonous this is not a rule. The examples in [18a] and [18b] illustrate cases of prefix-preposition homophony and semantic identity. This is however not the

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case in [19a] and [19b], where the prepositions are different and there are no grounds to postulate that the prefix and the preposition are derived from one another. Moreover, their appearance is not correlated, as prefixation does not always require the presence of a supporting PP, as indicated by the examples in [22c] and [22d]. The primary function of verbal prefixes is to introduce perfec-tive interpretation, whereas complementation by a PP relates to directed move-ment interpretation, as indicated by [21a].

[18a] Dzieci do-biegły do szkoły na czas. Children-Nom run-Perf-Past to school in time ‘The children reached school on time.’ [18b] Zosia na-kleiła znaczek na kopercie. Zosia-Nom glue-Perf-Past stamp on envelope ‘Zosia glued the stamp on the envelope.’ [19a] Dzieci w-biegły do szkoły. children-Nom run-Perf-Past into school ‘The children ran into the school.’ [19b] Nowi studenci przy-jechali do Wrocławia na stypendium. new students-Nom come-Perf-Past to Wrocław-Gen on scholarship ‘New students came to Wrocław on a scholarship.’ [20a] Janek pisał list. Janek-Nom write-Imperf-Past letter-Acc ‘Janek was writing a letter.’ [20b] Janek na-pisał / pod-pisał / za-pisał list. Janek-Nom write / under-write / over-write-Perf letter ‘Janek has written / signed / written over the letter.’ [21a] Autobus jechał na parking. coach-Nom drive-Imperf-Past on car park ‘The coach was heading for the car park.’ [21b] Autokar w-jechał na parking. coach-Nom drive-Perf-Past on car park ‘The coach drove into the car park.’ [21c] Autokar stał na parkingu. coach-Nom stand-Past on car park ‘The coach stood on the car park.’ [22a] Tomek w-biegł *(do swojego biura). Tomek-Nom run-Perf-Past (into his office) ‘Tomek ran into his office.’ [22b] Protestujący prze-skoczyli *(przez płot). Protesters-Nom jump-Perf-Past (over fence) ‘The protesters jumped over the fence.’ [22c] Drzwi się gwałtownie otworzyły i wbiegła młoda dziewczyna, z hałasem otupując nogi

z błota o próg. ‘The door opened suddenly and in rushed a young girl, shaking the mud off her shoes.’

(IPI PAN Corpus1) [22d] Po czym wbiegło kilku nagich, zbrojnych we włócznie, i jeden z krótkim mieczem.

1 The IPI PAN Corpus of Polish is available online at http://korpus.pl/.


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‘After that rushed in a couple of naked ones, armed with spears and one with a short sword.’ (IPI PAN Corpus)

On the basis of an analysis of Czech, Biskup (2009) argues that prefixes and prepositions in Slavic share the semantic function of location. What differenti-ates the two is that with prepositions the semantics of location is realized in spatial terms, while with prefixes it is handled temporally. In the view of Biskup (2009: 3), “prepositions localize the first argument … with respect to the second argument … P elements as prefixes attached to a verb localize the reference time with respect to the event time in a certain way”. We would like to argue that Biskup’s (2009) analysis of prefixes and prepo-sitions, which conflates spatial notions and temporal notions cannot be adopted for all Slavic languages, as it overgeneralizes at least in the context of Polish P-elements. In accounts such as Svenonius’ (2007), the two domains are associ-ated with different structural projections. Temporal functions occupy the top-most part of the projection, whereas spatial notions are associated with the bot-tom of the verbal projection. In accounts like Susan Rothstein’s (2004), spatial notions may be mapped onto temporal notions, and in this way contribute to perfectivity, but they are still differentiated structurally. Thus, the characteristic of verbs of movement where prefixes are associated with temporal functions, and PPs are associated with spatial notions constitutes a structural discrepancy rather than a similarity. Another argument in favor of the dissociation approach is the semantics of prefixes. In Polish, many verbal prefixes have lost their se-mantic value of location and tend to be associated only with the aspectual func-tion of perfectivity, as illustrated by the examples in [23a] and [23b].

[23a] Ania za-kręciła słoik z dżemem. Ania-Nom twist-Perf-Past jar-Acc with jam ‘Ania twisted on the jar with jam.’ [23b] Tomek wy-pisał długopis. Tomek-Nom write-Perf-Past pen-Acc ‘Tomek finished the pen.’

In Polish, verbal prefixes seem to play a different function from that of cor-responding PPs. This is not surprising and reflects a more general linguistic tendency to avoid synonymy and not to spell out two structural elements bear-ing the same function, as exemplified in [24], where the Genitive function is realized twice.

[24] *His car of John stood in the drive.

Additionally, the difference between prefixes and prepositions is indicated by their structural projection. Prepositions are structure projecting elements, and they project a phrase, which is not always the case with verbal prefixes. This

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discrepancy is discussed by Corrien Blom (2005), who focuses on Dutch pre-fixed verbs. These verbs reveal characteristics associated both with words and phrases. According to Blom (2005), they represent an intermediate category between a phrase and a word. This analysis is supported by diachronic data from Dutch. Blom (2004) and Blom and Geert Booij (2003) claim that Dutch prefixes developed from particle verbs and these developed from PPs in the process of gramaticalization. Prefixed verbs are non-projecting words and they represent the stage between a phrase and a word. What is relevant in the devel-opment of prefixes is both gramaticalization and lexicalization, where the de-velopment along those two scales does not have to be parallel. This is indicated by the two clines in [25] and [26] (Blom 2004: 61).

[25] Gramaticalization of the pattern XP-V into prefix-V: structural pattern: […XP V0]VP > …[X-V0]V’ > …[prefix-V0]V

0 preverbal element:projecting word > particle > prefix [26] Lexicalization development of individual phrasal combinations: completely free > partly fixed, partly > completely fixed combinations free combinations combinations

On the basis of the analysis of Dutch, Blom (2005) postulates that prefixed verbs may occupy different positions on the two scales which is indicated by the fact that they are both conventional and compositional. This approach can be also related to the analysis of Polish verbal prefixes. In Polish, like in other Slavic languages, at least two types of verbal prefixes can be distinguished. The two types of prefixes that have been proposed for Slavic are the lexical and the superlexical prefixes (Filip 2000, Romanova 2004, Svenonius 2004). Both types share the function of making an atelic verb telic. However, this effect is gained by different means, as the two types originate in different positions in the deri-vation. With lexical prefixes, the prefix originates inside the VP, in the R(esultative)-projection. This projection is then mapped onto the AspP turning it perfective. Since lexical prefixes originate inside the VP, they have influence on the verbal semantics, specifying the spatial frame of the activity described by the verb.

[27a] Dzieci we-szły do cukierni. children-Nom go-Perf-Past into bakery ‘The children went into the bakery.’ [27b] Straż pożarna wy-jechała z remizy. fire brigade-Nom drive-Perf-Past from fire station ‘The fire brigade drove out of the fire station.’

Superlexical prefixes seem to occupy a different position on the lexicaliza-tion scale, as their ability to combine with verbs is more productive. Superlexi-cal prefixes are claimed to originate in the high position of the derivation, above the VP, as the specifier of AspP making the whole structure perfective in a ‘di-


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rect’ way. By being realized in this position, superlexical prefixes have a lesser effect on the semantics of the VP. In essence, superlexical prefixes are more productive than lexical prefixes, as they can combine with any imperfective action verb. The assumption that superlexical and lexical prefixes are derived in different structural positions explains their possible co-occurrence. However, there is one condition which has to be met. A verb which already contains a lexical prefix needs to undergo secondary imperfectivization before it can combine with a superlexical prefix, as illustrated in [29d]. Verbs which are lexi-cally perfective, like zgnić ‘rot’, do not take superlexical prefixes, as in [29e].

[28a] Janek po-czytał gazetę i wyszedł na spacer. Janek-Nom read-Perf-Past paper-Acc and go-Perf-Past for walk ‘Janek read the paper for a while and went for a walk.’ [28b] Dzieci z-jadły śniadanie i wybiegły na podwórko. children-Nom eat-Perf-Past breakfast-Acc and run-Perf-Past on yard ‘The children ate their breakfast and went into the yard.’ [29a] Sportowcy w-biegli na stadion. sportsmen-Nom run-Perf-Past on stadium-Acc ‘The sportsmen ran into the stadium.’ ]29b] Sportowcy po-biegali sobie. sportsmen-Nom run-Imperf-Past themselves ‘The sportsmen ran for a while.’ [29c] *Sportowcy po-w-biegli na stadion. sportsmen-Nom run-Perf-Past on stadium-Acc ‘The sportsmen ran into the stadium for a while.’ [29d] Sportowcy po-w-biegali na stadion. sportsmen-Nom run-Imperf-Past on stadium-Acc ‘The sportsmen ran into the stadium one by one for a while.’ [29e] *Więźniowie po-zgnili w więzieniu. prisoners-Nom rot-Perf-Past in prison-Loc ‘The prisoners rotted in prison for a while.’

The discrepancy between lexical and superlexical prefixes can be accounted for by postulating their different levels of development on the scales as dis-cussed by Blom (2005) (cf. [25] and [26]). In short, it can be claimed that super-lexical prefixes developed from lexical prefixes as a result of gramaticalization and they occupy the end of the scale in [25]. Lexical prefixes, on the other hand, stand at least one position earlier in the gramaticalization process. The semantic bleaching of superlexical prefixes further supports such an account. For exam-ple, the meaning of po-+Verb (as in po-czytać ‘read for a while’) is ‘perform an action for a while’, and the prefix is compatible with any verb referring to an activity.

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4. Concluding remarks

In this paper, we focused on different typological structuring of P-elements whose main function is to relate to the spatial domain. We presented theories which take the spatial domain as constituting a significant part of meaning rele-vant to syntax and which ascribe to it a separate structural representation. Be-cause of typological differences, spatial notions are realized by different means in different languages. We enumerated the most common ways of expressing those notions in English and Dutch, as representatives of Germanic languages, and Polish and Czech, as representatives of Slavic languages. The comparison revealed three most common ways of expressing P-elements, i.e., by means of PPs, particles and verbal prefixes. The fact that prepositions, particles and verbal prefixes are associated with different structural representations leads to the situation that they contribute in various ways to the meaning of the clause. This is in line with constructionist approaches to grammar, where grammar is interpretative in a systematic way. Prepositions, particles, and prefixes may be seen as occupying different posi-tions on the same scale of grammatical development ranging from open ele-ments to closed elements. This development is associated both with increasing grammaticalization and decreasing semantic content. Thus, PPs may change the aspectuality of the VP, but only in the cases where it is underspecified by the VP itself. Particles seem to occupy an inter-mediate position on the scale of development, as some particles reveal charac-teristics of phrases, whereas other particles are non-projecting. In all cases, par-ticles are associated with a resultative projection and affect the aspectuality of the VP when this projection is mapped onto AspP. Verbal prefixes represent the end of the scale, as they may influence the aspectuality of the clause in a direct way by being derived directly at the AspP level. The analysis presented in this paper and the diachronic data indicate that proposals like Biskup’s (2009), which postulate that prepositions, particles and prefixes are copies of the same projection, face certain problems. First of all, the three types of P-element mentioned have different functions when they appear in a particular derivation. Second of all, it appears that the co-existence of prepositions and prefixes in Slavic languages is not a widespread phenomenon. However, the validity of this claim needs to be verified by a thorough dia-chronic analysis tracing the origins of prefixes and patterns of co-occurrence with PPs, which is beyond the scope of this paper. There also appears to be another major problem that accounts such as Svenonius’ (2007) and Biskup’s (2009) face with respect to the analysis of pre-fixes. Namely, they postulate a derivative nature of prefixed verbs in all Slavic languages. However, in Polish, at least, it seems that prefixed verbs form lexi-calized elements together with the host verb. In many cases, the interpretation


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of prefixed verbs does not seem to be compositional and postulating a deriva-tive nature for such forms appears to be too strong a claim.

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Zwarts, Joost 2005: Prepositional aspect and the algebra of paths. Linguistics and Philosophy 28, 739–779.


JOLANTA MACHOWSKA UNIWERSYTET PEDAGOGICZNY W KRAKOWIE

Alternatywne konstrukty w opowiadaniach uczniów w młodszym wieku szkolnym

STRESZCZENIE: Przedmiotem badań w niniejszym artykule są alternatywne konstrukty parametryczne występujące w pisanym dyskursie wczesnoszkolnym uczniów klas II i III w domenie zaczarowana kropla. W podejściu badawczym do tej niekonwencjonalnej jednostki miary istotna jest perspektywa kognitywna, ponieważ umożliwia ona opisywanie imaginatywności języka, która pozwala na różne sposoby konceptualizowania danego pojęcia, a co się z tym wiąże konstruowania sceny. Podstawę rekonstrukcji pojęć związanych z procesami parametryzacji świata stanowi wykładnik tekstowy, czyli domena tematyczna zaczarowana kropla (parametr topikalizacji), a w tym zjawisko kompozycjonalności oraz elastyczności znaczeń, które powoduje, iż wyodrębnione konstrukcje i konstrukty parametryczne można odnieść do szeroko pojętej kompetencji kulturowej.

Zagadnienie stanowiące przedmiot opracowania wyrasta z prowadzonymi przez autorkę dociekań nad językowymi sposobami parametryzacji świata, obecnych w tekstach uczniów klas II i III w młodszym wieku szkolnym (Ma-chowska 2006, oraz Machowska-Gąsior 2008, 2010, 2011). Przez pojęcie pa-rametryzacja rozumie się tu za Beatą Chachulską „zabiegi językowe podejmowa-ne w celu określenia ilości substancji i obiektów lub ich wielkości” (2003: 3). Podstawę metodologiczną niniejszych rozważań stanowią założenia języko-znawstwa kognitywnego, postulującego definiowanie jednostek języka i opisy-wanie wyrażeń językowych w odniesieniu do kontekstu. Jest to konceptuali-styczna lub, jak ją określa Ronald Wayne Langacker (2005: 11–12), doświad-czeniową teoria znaczenia, w której to zdarzenie mowne związane jest zawsze z użyciem języka w określonym kontekście. Język ukazuje tu procesy poznaw-cze, zachodzące w umyśle człowieka i „jest traktowany jako jedno z narzędzi ludzkiego poznania”, jak to formułuje Renata Przybylska (2002: 17). Zainteresowania dotyczące istoty języka, działania jego energii mieszczą się w szeroko rozumianej semantyce kognitywnej, rozwijanej w Polsce przez Renatę Grzegorczykową (2001 /1990/), a za granicą przez Annę Wierzbicką 2006 [1996], w której to słowa stają się odzwierciedleniem myśli, wyobraźni i działań użyt-kowników języka, jak to podsumowuje w swoim leksykonie Vyvyan Evans (2010 [2007]: 141–142). Przedmiotem omawianych badań są alternatywne konstrukty parametryczne występujące w dyskursie pisanym uczniów klas II i III w młodszym wieku szkolnym na temat zaczarowanej kropli, które są związane z procesami mereo-logicznymi. W nawiązaniu do pracy Agnieszki Libury (2000) przyjmuje się, że

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to procesy imaginatywne, czyli różne sposoby obrazowania, czy też konstru-owania sceny przez użytkowników języka decydują o tworzeniu odmiennych struktur kognitywnych w odniesieniu do badanej domeny – w tym przypadku „zaczarowanej kropli”. W niniejszym artykule termin domena rozumie sie za Langackerem (1995: 18) jako pojęcie stanowiące konceptualne złożenie, które, w przypadku „zaczarowanej kropli”, przywołuje jeszcze inne domeny, a mia-nowicie domenę żywiołu – „wodę” oraz domenę ilości – „kroplę” . Aby przejść do zagadnień dotyczących owych konstruktów, należałoby odwołać się do terminu konstrukcja. Według Langackera (2006: 22, 30), są to jednostki leksykalne, symboliczne zespoły (lub inaczej konstrukcje czy ramy), pojawiające się w konkretnych kontekstach, a według Johna R. Taylora (2007 [2002]: 673) – dowolne struktury, dające się rozłożyć na części składowe. Czym są alternatywne konstrukty – tu parametryczne? Są one efektem rela-cji zachodzących między myślą a językiem, który, według Arkadiusza Guta (2009: 9), ma „w sobie moc rozszerzania naszych zdolności kognitywnych”. To właśnie one powodują, iż pojęcia znajdujące się na płaszczyźnie gramatyczno-semantycznej zostają „zanurzone” zarówno w makro-, jak i mikrostrukturze tekstów. Makrostruktura, jak to ujmuje Urszula Żydek-Bednarczuk (2005: 122), powołując się na Teuna Adrianusa van Dijka, „to reprezentacja globalnego od-czytania tekstu, a buduje ją superstruktura, stanowiąca rodzaj ramy, szkieletu, organizująca w ujęciu linearnym całość” , natomiast mikrostruktura to „po-szczególne tematy w tekście zawarte w zdaniach”. Zatem w niniejszym ujęciu konstrukty to reprezentacje globalnego odczytania tekstu. Owe konstrukty są schematycznymi obiektami powstałymi dzięki procesom kategoryzacji, które, jak twierdzi Georges Kleiber (2003 [1990]: 13–17) są mentalnym odbiciem naszej percepcji. Innymi słowy z dyskursu tekstowego, rozumianego jako wie-loelementowe złożenie symboliczne (konstrukcja złożona) (por. Evans 2010 [2007]: 177), wyłaniają się konstrukty mające często charakter rozszerzeń meta-forycznych lub metonimicznych, wyekscerpowanych z całego tekstu. W niniejszym artykule konstruktami alternatywnymi są różne sposoby kon-ceptualizacji „zaczarowanej kropli” w tekstach dzieci, znajdujące się w obrębie ich kompetencji kulturowej, w której to mieszczą się szeroko rozumiane teksty kultury odnoszące się do toposu wody. Alternatywne sposoby konstruowania zaczarowanej kropli uzależnione są przede wszystkim od tego, co mówiący pragnie uwypuklić w swojej wypowiedzi i stąd też biorą się między innymi różne sposoby idealizacji owej kropli, na co wskazuje Ewa Dąbrowska (1983: 38). Analizowany materiał badawczy pochodzi z dyskursu pisanego obejmującego opowiadania twórcze uczniów klas drugich i trzecich w młodszym wieku szkolnym w domenie tematycznej zaczarowana kropla. W celu uzyskania materiału empi-


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rycznego posłużyłam się dyskursem działaniowym nawiązującym do metodolo-gii Grace Wales Shugar (1995: 41–77), gdzie rysunek zaczarowanej kropli wy-konują dzieci, i tematyczno-tekstowym, gdzie brane są pod uwagę twórcze wy-powiedzi pisemne uczniów na temat zaczarowanej kropli. Zatem w procesie badawczym wykorzystałam metodę przekładu intersemiotycznego, jaką zapro-ponowała Anna Dyduchowa (1988: 18–41). Według owej metody dzieci naj-pierw tworzyły rysunki na temat wyimaginowanej kropli, a następnie przekła-dały stworzone przez siebie znaki ikoniczne na płaszczyznę języka, czyli ukła-dały opowiadania twórcze na ten sam temat. Można powiedzieć, używając terminologii Barbary Greszczuk (2005: 232), że w wyniku zastosowanych zabiegów powstał dyskurs intersemiotyczny rozu-miany tu jako konceptualizacja jednego tworzywa na tle drugiego. Badania w tym zakresie były prowadzone w latach 2008–2010. Objęły sześć klas dru-gich (86 osób) oraz pięć klas trzecich (74 osoby). Ogólnie zbadano 160 osób.1 Jeżeli chodzi o samo słowo kropla to należy ono, w ujęciu Adama Bednarka (1994: 88), do niekonwencjonalnych jednostek miary i definiowane jest jako: (1) kropla x-a: najmniejsza część tego, o czym mówię; mówiąc x (2) myślę o tym jako o czymś małym i kulistym. Jednakże w przedstawionym tutaj postę-powaniu badawczym termin kropla dookreślony przez leksem zaczarowana winien być zredefiniowany, bowiem uczniowskie konceptualizacje, jak już wcześniej wspomniano, odnoszą się do motywu wody, a zatem przede wszyst-kim do znaczeń peryferyjnych wyrazu woda, niosących ze sobą w głównej mie-rze treści symboliczne. I tak w ujęciach słownikowych „woda” to: symbol cha-osu, niestałości, zmienności, przeobrażenia, rozpuszczania się; bezmiaru moż-liwości, uzdrowienia, źródła życia, odrodzenia ducha i ciała, zmartwychwstania, potęgi, płodności … prawdy, mądrości; dobra i zła … magii; jej naczelną cechą jest płynność (por. Kopaliński 1990: 475–479; Cirlot 2000 [1958]: 456–459). Podstawę do stworzenia konstrukcji i konstruktów „zaczarowanej kropli” dadzą, jak sadzę, istotne elementy występujące w obrazach badanej domeny stworzone przez dzieci, wynikające z przyjętych przez nie punktów widzenia oraz, co się z tym łączy, z określonej perspektywy opisu. Owe konceptualizacje „zaczarowanej kropli” stworzone przez uczniów klas II i III w młodszym wieku szkolnym pozwalają na wyodrębnienie w materiale empirycznym następujących typów konstrukcji parametrycznych:

1 Przy dokumentacji materiału empirycznego zastosowano następujące skróty na oznaczenie

poszczególnych szkół: kl. II: Jad. – SP w Jadownikach (Jad., imię dziecka, kl. II), Jod.– SP w Jodłówce (Jod., imię dziecka, kl. II), M. – SP nr 2 w Mielcu (M., imię dziecka, kl. II), P. – SP w Podolanach (P., imię dziecka, kl. II), Zb. – SP w Zbludzy (Zb., imię dziecka, kl. II), NT. – SP w Nowym Targu (NT., imię dziecka, kl. II), kl. III: K. – SP nr 100 w Krakowie )K., imię dziecka, kl. III), Miel. – SP nr 2 w Mielcu (Miel., imię dziecka, kl. III), Pod. – SP w Podolanach (Pod., imię dziecka, kl. III), Pis. – SP w Pisarzowej (Pis., imię dziecka, kl. III), Z. – SP w Zgłobicach (Z., imię dziecka, kl. III).

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[I] Konstrukcja implikowana działaniem samej kropli:

[i] czynności antropomorfizacyjne: – bawi się: „Odtąd bawiliśmy się długo i szczęśliwie” (M., Krzysztof, kl. II); – jeździ: „Jeździła na kolorowej deskorolce” [M., Krzysztof, kl. II); – nosi garnitur: „Nosi garnitur na co dzień” (Pis., Beata, kl. III); – pomaga: „Zawsze pomagała ludziom” (M., Asia, kl. II); „Kropelka ma nogi i ręce, żeby pomagać ludziom. Pojawia się wtedy, kiedy ktoś chce pić. Pamięta o tym, żeby dbać o to, żeby wszyscy byli czyści…” (P., Tomek, kl. II); „Kropelka lubi pomagać ludziom” (Pis., Iza, kl. III); – reklamuje: „Ta kropla ma na imię Reklamiak. Reklamuje te rzeczy co się da. Ostatnio reklamował kapustę pekińską. Najwięcej razy reklamował rybę, aż 327” (Pis., Adam, kl. III); – rozmawia z człowiekiem (tu: z dzieckiem): „Spytałem ją czy ma przyjaciół. Odpowiedziała mi…” (M., Krzysztof, kl. II); – spaceruje: „…kropelki porannej rosy spacerowały po wiosennej trawie” (M., Karolina, kl. II); – wędruje: „Ta kropla wędruje po świecie. Wyprysnęła się [sic!] z Wisły, a teraz wędruje po: oceanie Atlantyckim, oceanie Spokojnym, oceanie Indyjskim, rzekach, strumieniach i po jeziorach” (Pis., Beata, kl. III); – zachowuje się jak człowiek: „Także zachowuje się jak prawdziwy człowiek, tylko w postaci kropli wody” (Pis., Beata, kl. III); – proponuje: „Pobawmy się w chowanego zaproponowała kropelka” (K., Marysia, kl. III)’ – puka: „…jedna kropelka zapukała w szybę. Dziewczynka zdziwiła się, że kropelka wody mówi” (K., Marysia, kl. III); (ii) czynności magiczne: – czaruje: „Przyleciałam z nieba, żeby zaczarować cały świat”. „Chcę zaczarować kwiaty, lasy, aby były zieleńsze … mogę rozganiać chmury” (Zb., Kinga, kl. II); – czyni szczęśliwym: „To jest kropelka uśmiechu. Jeżeli spadnie ona na głowę dziecka, to będzie szczęśliwy [sic!] przez całe życie” (Jod., Wiktor, kl. II); – dowiaduje się: „Dowiedziała się że ma magiczną moc uzdrawiania…” (NT., Wiktoria, kl. II); – nadaje kolory: „Kropelka … nadała im wszystkie kolory tęczy” (Miel., Kasia, kl. III); – ożywia: „Kropelka ożywiła kwiatki…” (Miel., Kasia, kl. III); – spełnia życzenia: „Kropelka spełniła jej życzenie (M., Kasia, kl. II); „Spełnia tylko trzy życzenia. Ma na głowie magiczny wianek. Kropelka lubi pomagać ludziom” (Pis., Iza, kl. III); – uzdrawia: „Rybie po buzi spływały magiczne krople i matka została uleczona” (K., Sara, kl. III); – wpływa na wzrost drzewa: „Płynąca po policzku kropla łzy dziewczynki spadła na drzewko zaczęło rosnąć. Zamieniło się w ogromne drzewo… [sic!]” (Miel., Karolina, kl. III); – zamienia się: „Kiedy spadła znikła w kałuży. Kropla zamieniła się w chodzącą kropelkę” (K., Tomek, kl. III); „… zamieniła się w motyla” (NT., Wiktoria, kl. II); – zmienia się w przedmiot: „Zmieniłam się w auto. Potem w ciężarówkę” (Zb., Patryk, kl. II).

[II] Konstrukcje implikowane przez wygląd zewnętrzny kropli:

[i] antropomorfizacyjny: „Ubrana była w pomarańczową sukienkę w kropki. Miała żółte włosy i niebieski kwiatek na głowie. Nosiła białe okulary” (M., Asia, kl. II); „Kropelka ma nogi i ręce…” (P., Tomek, kl. II); „Nosi garnitur na co dzień” (Pis., Beata, kl. III); [ii] niezwykły: „Pewnego razu spotkałam zaczarowaną kropelkę. Była błyszcząca…” (M., Klaudia, kl. II); „Zaczarowana kropelka przypomina mi spadającego ludzika” (P., Gabriela, kl. II); „Zosia wskoczyła raz do wody … Jak wskoczyła zamieniła się w piękną, małą kropelkę. Zobaczyła siebie jako kroplę wody … Pobiegła na plac zabaw. Zjechała na


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ślizgawce kilka razy a potem poszła na huśtawkę. Karuzela jej się najbardziej spodobała. Zmieniła się znów w postać” (K., Kinga, kl. III).

[III] Konstrukcje implikowane przez cechy wewnętrzne kropli:

– emocjonalne: „Pewnego razu spotkałam zaczarowaną kropelkę. Była … wesoła. Od jej śmiechu i jej radości poweselał cały ogród” (M., Klaudia, kl. II); – impresyjne: „Zaczarowana kropelka była … uśmiechnięta” (M., Asia, kl. II).

[IV] Konstrukcje implikowane działaniem ludzi lub fantastycznych postaci:

– zawarcie przyjaźni człowieka (dziecka) z kroplą: „Postanowiłem zostać jej przyjacielem” (M., Krzysztof, kl. II); – zaczarowanie kropelki przez niezidentyfikowaną istotę: „… nagle ktoś zaczarował mnie. Zmieniłam się z niebieskiego koloru na żółto-niebieski” (Zb., Piotr, kl. II); – czynności magiczne czarownika: „Czarownik rzucił na mnie ogień i zamienił mój kolor na fioletowy” (Zb., Gosia, kl. II); – zaczarowanie kropelki przez wróżkę: „Kropelka wybrała się nad rzekę, bo tam była wróżka i kropelka chciała żeby ją zaczarowała” (M., Ania, kl. II); „Kiedy tańczyła zobaczył ją książę, którego matka była wróżką i która uczyniła kropelkę księżniczką i pozostali na zawsze razem” (NT., Zuzanna, kl. II).

[V] Konstrukcja implikowana działaniem świata przyrody:

– transformacja kropelek w krasnoludki: „Wędrując po krainie spotyka przyjaciela, który także jest kropelką. Zauroczeni swobodą i zabawą zjadają owoc z zaczarowanego drzewa. Moc tego drzewa sprawiła, że kropelki stały się krasnoludkami” (NT., Szymon, kl. II).

[VI] Konstrukcja implikowana działaniem magicznego przedmiotu:

– kapelusz pozwalający spełniać życzenia: „Zaczarowana kropelka wędrując po zaczarowanej krainie spotkała małego elfa, który nosił duży kapelusz”; „Jest to kapelusz który ma magiczną moc”; „Kto go nosi może spełniać życzenia”; „Kropelka i elf chodzili w kapeluszach i spełniali życzenia dobrych elfów” (NT., Kamil, kl. II).

[VII] Konstrukcja implikowana działaniem wody na człowieka:

– transformacja człowieka w kroplę: „Zosia wskoczyła raz do wody … Jak wskoczyła zamieniła się w piękną, małą kropelkę. Zobaczyła siebie jako kroplę wody… Pobiegła na plac zabaw. Zjechała na ślizgawce kilka razy a potem poszła na huśtawkę. Karuzela jej się najbardziej spodobała. …zmieniła się znów w postać” (K., Kinga, kl. III).

Ukazane konstrukcje w domenie zaczarowana kropla stały się przesłanką do wyznaczenia następujących konstruktów parametrycznych o charakterze metonimicznym i/lub metaforycznym:

A. Kropla to człowiek i/lub człowiek to kropla:

– x (kropla) jest y (człowiekiem), gdyż zachowuje się jak y (dziecko): „Jeździła na kolorowej deskorolce”; – także zachowuje się jak prawdziwy człowiek, osoba dorosła-wędrowiec: „Ta kropla wędruje po świecie)”, lub

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– wygląda jak y (ma części ciała człowieka i ubiera się jak on): „Kropelka ma nogi i ręce…”; „Ubrana była w pomarańczową sukienkę w kropki”; „Miała żółte włosy i niebieski kwiatek na głowie”; „Nosiła białe okulary”; – y (człowiek) staje się x (kroplą) i x (kropla) staje się y (człowiekiem): „Zosia wskoczyła raz do wody … Jak wskoczyła zamieniła się w piękną, małą kropelkę … zmieniła się znów w postać…”

B. Kropla to postać baśniowa:

– y (wróżka) powoduje, że x (kropla) staje się z (księżniczką): „była wróżką i która uczyniła kropelkę księżniczką i pozostali na zawsze razem”; – y (moc drzewa) powoduje, że x (krople) stają się z (krasnoludkami): „Moc tego drzewa sprawiła, że kropelki stały się krasnoludkami”.

C. Kropla to byt mający niezwykłe i magiczne właściwości:

– x (kropla) powoduje, że y (ludzie, mama, rośliny itd.) stają się zdrowi, zmieniają kolory, rosną, ożywają itp.: „Dowiedziała się że ma magiczną moc uzdrawiania…”; „Rybie po buzi spływały magiczne krople i matka została uleczona”; „Płynąca po policzku kropla łzy dziewczynki spadła na drzewko i zaczęło rosnąć”; „Zamieniło się w ogromne drzewo…,”; „Kropelka … nadała im wszystkie kolory tęczy”; „Kropelka ożywiła kwiatki”.

D. Kropla to byt posiadający magiczne atrybuty:

– y (kapelusz) powoduje, że x (kropla) spełnia życzenia: „Jest to kapelusz który ma magiczną moc. Kto go nosi może spełniać życzenia”; „Kropelka i elf chodzili w kapeluszach i spełniali życzenia dobrych elfów”.

E. Kropla to owad:

x (kropla) staje się y (owadem): „… zamieniła się w motyla.”

F. Kropla to barwa:

– y (ktoś) powoduje, że x (kropla) jest z-owy (żółto-niebieski) i zaczarowany: „Nagle ktoś zaczarował mnie. Zmieniłam się z niebieskiego koloru na żółto-niebieski”; wariantem tego konstruktu jest kropla mająca swoją proweniencję w tzw. świecie na opak, bowiem tu żywioł ognia wpływa na kroplę: „Czarownik rzucił na mnie ogień i zamienił mój kolor na fioletowy.”

G. Kropla to przedmiot:

– x (kropla) staje się y (przedmiotem): „Zmieniłam się w auto. Potem w ciężarówkę.”

H. Kropla to ruch:

– x (kropla) porusza się, zmienia się w y szybko: „Ta kropla wędruje po świecie. Wyprysnęła się [sic!] z Wisły, a teraz wędruje po: oceanie Atlantyckim, oceanie Spokojnym, oceanie Indyjskim, rzekach, strumieniach i po jeziorach.” „Kiedy spadła znikła w kałuży”; „Kropla zamieniła się w chodzącą kropelkę”; „Ta kropla wędruje po świecie”.

Przedstawiona w niniejszym artykule próba ukazania alternatywnych kon-struktów parametrycznych w wczesnoszkolnym pisanym dyskursie intersemio-


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tycznym w domenie zaczarowana kropla stanowi jedynie przyczynek do dal-szych rozważań w tym zakresie. Relewantne zależności zachodzące między poszczególnymi konstrukcjami, a mianowicie kompozycjonalność znaczeń złożonych (por. Taylor 2007 [2002]: 116), które to dotyczą między innymi wy-boru ścieżek kognitywnych przez podmiot doświadczający oraz elastyczności znaczeń (por. Taylor 2007 [2002]: 117) powodują, iż wyekscerpowane kon-strukty z materiału empirycznego posiadają charakter modelu sieci radialnej, bądź też stanowią ich amalgamat, jak to można byłoby określić w kontekście rozróżnień Barbary Lewandowskiej-Tomaszczyk (2006: 7–9). W analizowanym dyskursie pisanym wyróżnione konstrukcje stały się podstawą dla stworzenia konstruktów parametrycznych. Obraz „zaczarowanej kropli” w twórczych tekstach uczniów klas II i III w młodszym wieku szkolnym jest strukturą wieloaspektową o zróżnicowanych wariantach nazwanych dla potrzeb tejże analizy konstruktami parametrycznymi wyłonionymi z poszczególnych konstrukcji mereologicznych występujących w opowiadaniach dzieci. Właściwie motyw „zaczarowanej kropli” w pracach uczniów klas II i III w młodszym wieku szkolnym został przedstawiony jako tło toposu wody; tra-jektorem porządkującym dyskurs pisany, czyli figurą, stał się motyw wody wpi-sany w topos Arkadii dzieciństwa (por. Papuzińska & Leszczyński 2002). „Za-czarowana kropla” w tekstach uczniów wiąże się z baśniowym obrazem świata (występują tu czarodzieje, wróżki, magiczne przedmioty, rośliny itd.) a także jawi się jako konstrukt związany z antropocentrycznym oraz bodycentrycznym obrazem świata, o którym pisze Jolanta Maćkiewicz (2006: 12–29), gdzie „za-czarowana kropla” posiada nie tylko cechy zewnętrzne i mentalne człowieka, ale i zachowuje się jak człowiek, najczęściej jak dziecko. Ten dziecięcy punkt widzenia stanowi główny element, mający wpływ na konceptualizację „zacza-rowanej kropli”, a co się z tym łączy z jej różnymi – alternatywnymi – kon-strukcjami parametrycznymi. Zatem w pracach badanych dzieci dominuje aspekt kulturowo-aksjologiczny (topos wody, motywy magiczne, kropla jako byt czyniący dobro) i antropocen-tryczny (kropla to człowiek), co znalazło swoje odzwierciedlenie przede wszystkim w konceptualizacji kropli: jest ona kroplą życia, darem natury, odra-dzaniem się, czymś cennym, wymagającym ochrony, zabawnym, przychylnym człowiekowi oraz czymś wartościowanym melioratywnie (dominuje tu przede wszystkim radość). W opowiadaniach twórczych uczniów klas II i III w młod-szym wieku szkolnym „zaczarowana kropla” łączona jest również z postaciami fantastycznymi (czarownik, wróżka) lub z zantropomorfizowanymi roślinami (np. z drzewem, które posiada moc spełniania życzeń). Ukazane przykłady ujawniają, że ta sama z pozoru „kropla” może być, w zależności od przyjętej przez dziecko perspektywy, czymś odmiennym. Kro-

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pla w tekstach dzieci, podobnie jak w kulturze ludowej ogień czy gwiazdy itp., które opisuje Jolanta Szadura (1998: 330), jest bytem zindywidualizowanym, świadomym i rozumnym, co wynika z magicznego myślenia młodych autorów tekstów. W tworzeniu różnych konstruktów parametrycznych „zaczarowanej kropli” można zaobserwować, jak już zostało nadmienione, wyraźny antropocentryzm – tu człowiek porządkuje świat, dokonuje własnej projekcji przekonań na świat obiektów pozaludzkich, jak to ująłby Ryszard Tokarski (1991: 48–49). Uczniow-skie konceptualizacje „zaczarowanej kropli” tworzone są zatem z punktu widze-nia jej działań, wyglądu oraz użyteczności, podobnie jak to ma miejsce w tekstach ludowych dotyczących różnych motywów związanych między in-nymi z żywiołami, o których pisze Jerzy Bartmiński (2007: 157).

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Tokarski, Ryszard 1991: Poziomy konotacji semantycznej. W: Jadwiga Puzynina, Jerzy Bartmiń-ski (red.) 1991: Język a kultura. Tom 2. Zagadnienia leksykalne i aksjologiczne. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 45–52.

Wierzbicka, Anna 2006 [1996]: Semantyka. Jednostki elementarne i uniwersalne. Lublin: Wy-dawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. Tłum. Adam Głaz. [Semantics. Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press].

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Żydek-Bednarczuk Urszula 2005: Wprowadzenie do lingwistycznej analizy tekstu. Kraków: Towa-rzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas.


ANNA CISŁO UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW

Between tradition and innovation: The alternative Gaelic script1

ABSTRACT. By the end of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of Anglicisation, most Irish people had adopted English as their first language. Thus a fundamental difficulty encountered by the Irish as they attempted to reconstruct their national identity on the eve of the establishment of an independent Irish state, was that of redefining the status of their national language, which was inevitably connected with the ambition of making it a mode of printed literature. The paper addresses the question as to whether the Gaelic type employed was at that time part of authentic Irish culture, representing the unbroken Gaelic tradition, or whether it was revived, redesigned and employed to facilitate the formation of national distinctiveness.

In Ireland, certain symbols serve as a reminder of an alternative unfolding of history from that which did occur. The Irish flag serves as an illustration. The tricolor of green, white, and orange signifies the union between older Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Ireland, represented by the green, and the newer Protestant Planter Ireland, represented by the orange, whereas the white – in the words of Thomas Francis Meagher – symbolizes “a lasting truce between the Orange and the Green” (Curley 1999: 97). Meagher, an Irish nationalist, received the tri-color as a gift from the citizens of France when he became the leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848. Initially the flag of the Young Ire-land movement, it came to be identified as the Irish national flag in the after-math of the Easter Rising in 1916, when it was flown from the headquarters of the insurgents – the General Post Office in Dublin. The aims of the rising, set against the backdrop of British rule in Ireland, were expressed in the proclamation of a republic, which promised that in the new state “all the children of the nation would be cherished equally” (Ó hEithir 1997 /1989/: 55). This event resulted indirectly in the Irish war of independence a few years later, finishing in 1921 with the Anglo-Irish Treaty abandoning the idea of an island state: six of the nine counties of Ulster were given the status of a separate state, under the British crown with its own parliament. Although in the Irish civil war of 1922–1923 the republicans continued fighting for the all-Ireland republic, it has never come into being, leaving the Orange Irish on the other side of the border. Thus, the Irish national flag represents what seemed to

1 The project is financed from the resources of Narodowe Centrum Nauki.

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be a real political alternative, which was, however, not realized. This paper will focus on another visual symbol, the Gaelic script, which – today largely repre-sented only in the streets of Ireland or used as an ornamental writing style, e.g., on some Irish book covers – at the time of the Irish struggle for political auton-omy was promoted in print not only as an indicator of Irishness but also as a genuine contender for use in printed Irish literature to be established in an independent Irish state. In order to understand why we can talk about the innovatory character rather than the tradition of the use of the Gaelic script at the turn of the twenti-eth century, it is necessary to briefly review the employment of both writing systems and printing types in the country of Ireland. It is generally accepted that the history of the Irish book began sometime in the sixth century, after the in-troduction of Christianity had brought the Roman alphabet to Ireland, where it came to be used for both Latin and Irish writings. Although Mary Casteleyn (1984: 1) notes that there are references in the oldest extant Irish literature – both secular and religious – which prove that the Irish had books long before the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century, none of those pagan books have survived. On the other hand, it is certain that the ancient inhabitants of Ireland had knowledge of letters and practiced a unique form of writing called ogham. However, the ogham script, consisting of a num-ber of short straight or slanting lines drawn along a longer central line, was not used for recording literature.2 Thus, the earliest written literature in Irish, as Breandán Ó hEithir (1997 /1989/: 19) puts it, “dates from the sixth century and consists of poems by pro-fessional writers who were heirs to the druids”. Irish monks working in scripto-ria recorded this earliest material in manuscripts. Writings prior to the use of paper and print were compiled on vellum in two distinct styles of lettering, both being forms of the Roman alphabet. The half-uncial style, more frequently used for Latin texts, was characterized by “full, well rounded forms with short blunt ascenders and descenders normally contained within the body height of the other letter” (McGuinne 1992: 1). The second script, known as the Irish minus-cule, was “more angular with a pronounced vertical emphasis” (McGuinne 1992: 2) and was used customarily for smaller books and usually for the tran-scription of Irish texts to mark the difference between them and the ones in Latin.3 Later these insular scripts exerted influence on Irish printing types, the

2 The ogham writing system has been preserved in stone and examples are found in many

places in Ireland, especially in Cork and Kerry. For more details see Damian McManus (1997 /1991/).

3 For a sample of insular majuscule (a form of half-uncial script used in early Christian Ire-land) as well as of insular minuscule see Albertine Gaur (1987: Plate VI).

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earliest one employed being known as Queen Elizabeth’s type, described by Edward W. Lynam (1969 /1924/: 6–7) as “a very curious one”:

Only nine letters (d, e, f, g, i, p, r, s, and t) and some of the capitals pretend to be Irish, a is italic, and nine letters are Roman. Of the capitals, b and d are uncials and m a nondescript hieroglyphic. The resemblance of the nine Irish letters to the Anglo-Saxon letters which were used from 1567 onwards by John Day for the Anglo-Saxon works which Archbishop Parker was having printed has led some bibliographers to state that they were taken straight from Day’s fount. The resemblance is misleading, for all the letters, except s are different in the two founts. The 20-line measurements are also different. Consequently at least eight new letters and three capitals must have been cut. Since nothing is known, however, about the designer of these letters, and since they were cut in England, they may have been modelled to some extent on Day’s Anglo-Saxon letters.

As the above description indicates, Queen Elizabeth’s type was only par-tially genuinely Irish and as such cannot be considered “a serious attempt to reproduce the Irish manuscript letters in print” (Lynam 1969 /1924/: 3). It serves rather as an indication of Elizabeth I’s desire to employ Irish for convert-ing purposes: the country was provided with a printing press and fonts in order to print the Bible and religious texts facilitating the reformed Church of Ireland, and the fonts were to resemble Irish manuscript letters to persuade the Irish-speaking population to accept the content of the printed material. Yet, as noted by Brian Ó Cuív (1969: 25), Elizabeth I’s effort to promote the Protestant faith in Ireland was ineffective, which, according to Richard English (2007 /2006/: 54), was due to the fact that it came too late, when English had already been established as the language of status by the edict of Henry VIII, which enacted that “every person or persons, the King’s true subjects, inhabiting this land of Ireland … shall use and speak commonly the English tongue and language” (An Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language, 1537, quoted in Crowley 1999: 22). The Reformation required popular evangelism but a catechism in Irish did not appear until 1571 nor did the Irish version of the New Testament emerge until 1603. “Evangelism through English”, says English (2007 /2006/: 54–55), “to a largely Irish-speaking audience … only tended to reinforce the idea that Protestantism was alien … it was subsequent Counter-Reformation Catholicism … conducted in the language of most of the people [that] came to be seen as their natural religion”, especially when, as noted by Lynam (1969 /1924/: 3), the latter was supported by the printing production as well:

Her [Elizabeth I’s] action at once roused the exiled Irish monks in Belgium to make another Irish type from which to print Catholic books for circulation in Ireland. Though religious propaganda was their main object, it may be that they aimed too at preserving what they would regard as the national inheritance against the all-pervading Roman type of the invader. At any rate, their type was a good one, and the books which they have printed in the Irish

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character at Louvain and Rome and circulated in Ireland for a hundred of years effectively established that character as the correct vehicle for the Irish language.

Although Lynam (1969 /1924/: 3) subsequently concludes that in this way “the contest for the souls of the Irish people … produced one result for which [the Irish] may be entirely grateful”, a modern scholar, Niall Ó Ciosáin (2004–2006: 81), tends to be sceptical, stating that many of those Catholic productions printed in the Irish character “were probably owned by priests who stayed on the Continent, so that the books never came to Ireland” and points to the fact that the scarcity of the Louvain books in Ireland resulted in their being copied into manuscripts in the eighteenth century. Indeed, as at the end of the seven-teenth century the printing of books in Irish was proscribed under the Penal Laws, from then to at least the middle of the nineteenth century Irish literary tradition, with some exceptions, continued to be transmitted in manuscripts, more specifically in handwritten simple paper notebooks, copied by profes-sional scribes. It is believed that in the 1820s every Munster village possessed its Gaelic manuscripts, which, as given by Robert Welch (1996: 357), included not only devotional writings but also tales of various types, bardic poetry, sto-ries of Cú Chulainn or Fionn, Gaelic historiography, aislingí and Jacobite po-etry. The agitation for the repeal of the Penal Laws gradually bore fruit, which indirectly increased the production of printed texts in Irish. Ó Ciosáin (1997: 158–159) claims that its pinnacle occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century and he identifies three categories of publications in Irish: (1) Catholic religious texts, (2) Protestant religious texts, and (3) broadside ballads. Accord-ing to him, typographically “the Protestant texts were heirs to the manuscript tradition, while the literacy implicit in the Catholic and secular printed texts is closer to literacy in English” (Ó Ciosáin 1997: 160). Protestant religious texts and broadside ballads were printed in the Roman type, with simplified spelling (sometimes phonetic spelling was used), their title pages were frequently in English (although the main text was entirely in Irish), and so were the instruc-tions given to readers concerning, for instance, the ways the texts were sup-posed to be sung.4 This points to the fact that literate speakers of both Irish and

4 The best example is Timothy O’Sullivan’s Pious Miscellany, religious poems by Tadhg

Gaelach Ó Súlleabháin, first published in 1802, which “went through numerous editions, in-dicating their popularity among the Irish-speakers of Munster” (Welch 1996: 460). The in-troduction to its edition in 1858 explains why the editors had decided to adopt Roman in-stead of Gaelic characters: “if we did adopt the Irish, those for whom the work is intended would not be able to use it, being entirely unacquainted with this character, whereas every peasant who speaks Irish and reads English can master the work in its present form” (Ó Súil-leabháin, Tadhg Gaelach 1858: Pious Miscellany: Containing Also a Collection of Poems on Religious Subjects together with Patrick Denn’s Appendix, edited by John O’Daly. Dublin: O’Daly, quoted in Ó Ciosáin 1997: 160).


English must have been already abundant, a consequence of the establishment of the national schools5 as well as of the extensive use of the English language within the Catholic Church.6 In contrast was the typography of texts printed by Protestant evangelical organisations established from about 1820 in reaction to the French Revolution and the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The main objective of the Society for Promot-ing the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Lan-guage (called also the Irish Society), the Hibernian Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society and others was to encourage people in obedience through the dis-tribution of religious books. Some of these organisations, involved in what was known as the ‘Second Reformation’ or the ‘Protestant Crusade’, “concentrated on missionary activity in Irish, establishing schools to teach reading in Irish and distributing bibles and tracts printed in Irish” (Ó Ciosáin 2004: 11). Gaelic scribes were employed and, as stated by Ó Ciosáin (2004–2006: 87), “it was therefore not surprising that the publications of the society returned to scribal norms, using newly manufactured Gaelic typefaces and older forms of spell-ing”. The activity of the evangelical societies, which as such did not result in the growth of Protestant religion, declined with the Great Famine and officially ended with the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869. The printing and distribution of books in Irish changed markedly in the second half of the nineteenth century because of the Great Famine in 1845–1849 (cf. Connolly 1999 /1998/: 228–229). The market changed when the country had faced a decline of the Irish language caused by the death of c. 1 million and mass emigration of c. 1,5 million Irish speakers. In addition, the system of na-tional schools, in which English continued to be the only medium of education, began to be supported by Irish parents, who hoped for better prospects for their children in an English-speaking state. In 1851 the first Census of Population that included a question on language issues showed that the number of Irish speakers had decreased to just below 25% of the population (1,524,286 in total), and according to the census of 1891, the percentage of Irish-speakers in the area which is now the Republic of Ireland had fallen to 19,2% (664,387 in total), the percentage of Irish-speakers under ten years of age being only 3,5% (cf. Ó Mur-chú and Ó Murchú 1999: 2–3 and Ó Riagain 1997: 5). Although the precipitant shift to English was clearly under way, there were at least two reasons that helped Irish survive, as stated by Welch (1996: 266): 5 Because from the beginning of the nineteenth century Ireland and England were one political

state with dominant English culture, “national” meant “English”, and the national schools es-tablished in the 1830’s used English as the only language of instruction and disregarded chil-dren’s Irish environment; nevertheless, they played a major part in promoting literacy in Ire-land (cf. Connolly 1999 /1998/: 384).

6 The principal seminary for the training of Irish Catholic priests, St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth established in 1795, used English as the language of instruction (cf. Purdon 1999: 33).

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Firstly, the rate of language shift slowed as it encountered around the western seaboard the densely populated areas, officially at the time called ‘congested districts’, in which communities were almost autonomous in their subsistence economies and had little access to competence in English. These are the areas, known collectively by the term Gaeltacht, where an Irish-speaking tradition has continued. Secondly, towards the end of the 19th cent., there emerged a vigorous Irish-language restoration movement. The latter contributed significantly to a renewal of the idea of political separatism, and the aims of achieving the political independence of Ireland and of restoring the Irish language became for a time indistinguishable.

Within the language revival movement several societies that came to be active in encouraging the use of Irish, promoting the development of modern literature in this language, and advocating its teaching in primary schools were founded, of which the most influential was Conradh na Gaeilge – the Gaelic League established in 1893 under the presidency of Douglas Hyde (later the first president of Ireland, 1938–1945). The objective of the Gaelic League, as was stated in an early pamphlet in 1896, was twofold: (1) “the preservation of Irish as a National language of Ire-land, and the extension of its use as a spoken tongue”; (2) “the study and publi-cation of existing Irish literature, and the cultivation of modern literature in Irish” (Ó Fearaíl 1975: 6). In 1894 the League took over the publishing of the bilingual Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. The journal published prose and poetry from manuscripts as well as from the oral tradition and provided language enthusiasts with a forum in which to develop their ideas and to discuss the form that Irish should take as a revived language of written communication. Because printed Irish had – by that time – almost ceased, many spelling and grammatical forms in written Irish were archaic in comparison with the variants of everyday speech of Gaeltacht residents, which caused numerous problems related to the restoration of Irish as a modern writing medium. According to Ó Cuív, “[t]o compound the difficulties further, the surviving Irish-speaking districts were isolated from each other and dialect differences had developed” (Ó Cuív 1951,7 quoted in Ó Riagáin 1997: 7). For this and other reasons, publications in the national language of the Irish people were inevita-bly accompanied by debates about the possible forms of a print culture in Irish. Typographically, a choice had to be made between using the Roman and Gaelic types. Several arguments were put forward in favour of the Gaelic type. It was considered to be beautiful and to have more grace than the Roman one. Used for several centuries, it was believed to be easier for the Irish eye to read. Some claimed it should be preserved for patriotic reasons even if using it in print was more expensive and, as such, less practical.8 Others argued that in

7 Ó Cuív, Brian 1951: Irish Dialects and Irish-Speaking Districts. Dublin: Institute of Ad-

vanced Studies. 8 For these and similar arguments see McGuinne (1992: 183–186).


practice, “writing in Irish letters was more time-consuming and thereby more expensive to set, … mistakes were more likely to occur in Irish type”, there were no italics or their equivalent to supplement Gaelic fonts, “pupils required more time learning to write the Irish character” and “the writing was so wretched as almost to deter a person from reading it” (McGuinne 1992: 185).

Figure 1. A page from Ag séideaḋ agus ag iṫe – the book of children’s stories written for primary Irish teaching by Peter O’Leary and published in the Gaelic character in Baile Átha Cliath [Dublin] by Brún agus Nuallán in 1917 (collection of the author)

In 1883 the policy of the editors of the Gaelic Journal was that its contribu-tors could decide themselves which characters they wanted to be employed (McGuinne 1992: 186). Still, numerous shorter texts as well as the vast majority

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of books appeared in the Gaelic type (see Figure 1), chosen probably as an indi-cator of the distinctiveness of Irish culture. It was used by the major publishers of Irish books, such as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, the Gaelic Union, and, of course, the Gaelic League.9 In the officially bilingual Irish State established in 1922, however, as Brian Ó Cuív (1969: 26) points out, “there was a tendency from the outset to use Ro-man type”, which was due to financial calculations related to the costs of the use of two types of fonts both in printed and typewritten materials. Formal deci-sions were made at a meeting of the Executive Council in 1924: the Roman type was to be used generally throughout the Civil Service except as regards Inter-mediate examinations papers, in which case Gaelic lettering was to continue as long as text books were printed in that manner (cf. Ó Cearúil 1999: 27). It is surprising that when, under the auspices of the Irish Government, An Gúm, a state organ for the publication of texts in Irish, was established as a pub-lishing arm of the Department of Education, most of the books published within the first thirty years of its activity employed the Gaelic character, not Roman. This was due to the fact that the conservative opposition to the use of the latter continued: in 1928 the Gaelic League passed a resolution that “it [was] better for Irish that no great change be made in the type or the spelling of Irish until the language [was] out of danger of death or destruction” (Ó Cuív 1969: 29). Consequently, when the Irish Constitution of 1937 was issued, it was printed in the Gaelic type (cló gaelach) and featured many outmoded spelling and word forms. The Constitution “established Irish as the country’s first language (English received recognition as second of second official language), replaced the gover-nor-generalship with a presidency and changed the country’s name into Éire” (Pašeta 2003: 93–94). It was not insignificant that the Constitution was com-posed almost entirely by Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) – one of the dominant political figures in twentieth-century Ireland, serving as the head of the gov-ernment of the Irish Free State as well as the head of the government and the head of the state of Ireland, and representing Fianna Fáil, a party of who Senia Pašeta (2003: 91) describes as “political extremists”. After Fianna Fáil had won the elections in 1932, many decisions of the previous government were revoked, among others those concerning the use of publishing types:

any existing regulations prohibiting the use of Gaelic script in official communications or publications, including publications under the Department of Education’s schemes for the

9 The Irish printing trade that, in the years preceding the restoration of the book in Irish, had

functioned almost exclusively in English, procured new fonts, the best-known of which was commissioned from Figgins of London in 1897 to be used for An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light, a new bilingual paper issued in 1899–1930) and many other Gaelic publica-tions (cf. McGuinne 1992: 124–128).


preparation of books in Irish, shall be cancelled and that the use of Gaelic or Roman script should in future be optional.10

Figure 2. A street name in the Gaelic character, Dingle 2011 (photo by Anna Cisło)

In May 1941 de Valera acknowledged that political rather than linguistic considerations dictated the mode in which the Constitution got published and expressed regret for that decision. ”We did it because I did not want to have controversy on what appeared to me to be a minor point”, said de Valera during the Seanad Éireann debate on 14 May 194111 and soon indicated the direction for new linguistic standards to be worked out for the sake of the national lan-guage revival, which, however, took several more years. The existing Roman letters were officially sanctioned as late as in the early 1960s, following the simplification of Irish spelling in the fourth decade of the twentieth century and the regulations on Irish grammar in 1958. Concluding, the employment of the Irish character in print in the twentieth century did not result from the un-broken tradition of its use, as both Catholic and secular books in Irish had been – for a long time – printed in the Roman type, the Gaelic one being used by Protestant publishers. The reason for which it was given national significance was due to a political conflict, which contributed to the need for what Seán de Fréine calls “national parallelism”.

10 See the Letter from the Secretary of the Executive Council to the Private Secretary of the

Department of Education, 2/4/1932 (quoted in Ó Cearúil 1999: 30). 11 In: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1941/05/14/00003.asp#N309 ED 11.2011).

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Figure 3. The Gaelic script – a sentimental writing style in Ireland today, Dingle 2011 (photo by Anna Cisło)

“With the national revival”, says the author (de Fréine 1978 /1965/: 52–53), “it was natural to assert that the Irish … were no less endowed than their con-quers. They could not claim as theirs anything which was characteristic of Eng-land, because that might weaken their claim to separate nationality”.12 Declan Kiberd (1995: 151) develops de Fréine’s idea stating that “Ireland became not-England” – a construct in which cultural elements were sought to stand in bi-nary oppositions to what was representative of Englishness: “It mattered little whether those devices had a secure basis in Irish history, for if they had not previously existed they could be invented”. The Gaelic type existed but only as an alternative to the Roman one fre-quently employed for printing books in Irish. It was a new national meaning that led it to evoke emotional responses in Irish nationalists, which in conse-quence slowed down possible language reforms. In the second half of the twen-tieth century, Ó Cuív (1969: 26) commented on the use of the Gaelic script:

In the last two decades there has been a more realistic approach to the problem and there now seems to be general agreement in publishing and educational circles that it would be to the advantage of the Irish language that Gaelic type should be laid aside to take its place with

12 Seán De Fréine (1978 /1965/: 52) uses the opposition between the Roman script and the

Gaelic script as one of the examples of what he calls “national parallelism”, others being English language – Irish language, Common law – Brehon law, Soccer – Gaelic football, Trousers – Kilt.


Ogam as something belonging to another era, or, at most, should be used in inscriptions and the like where its antiquarian and decorative features can have appeal on aesthetic and sentimental grounds.

Today, many of those who visit the country of Ireland do not realise that what they perceive as merely decorative (see Figures 2 and 3) was once held by Irish nationalists against the colonial rule as an icon of Irishness and for years was supported as a real alternative to be used by the national publishing industry.

References Casteleyn, Mary 1984: A History of Literacy and Libraries in Ireland: The Long Traced Pede-

gree. Aldershot Hants: Gower Publishing Company Ltd. Connolly, Sean J. (ed.) 1999 /1998/: The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. Crowley, Tony (ed.) 1999: The Politics of Language in Ireland, 1366–1922: A Sourcebook. Lon-

don: Routledge. Curley, Helen (ed.) 1999: Local Ireland Almanac and Yearbook of Facts. Dublin: Local Ireland. De Fréine, Seán 1978 /1965/: The Great Silence. The Study of a Relationship between Language

and Nationality. Dublin, Cork: The Mercier Press /Dublin: Foilseacháin Náisiúnta/. English, Richard 2007 /2006/: Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland. London: Pan

Books /London: Macmillan/. Gaur, Albertine 1987: A History of Writing. London: The British Library. Kiberd, Declan 1995: Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape. Lynam, Edward W. 1969 /1924/: The Irish Character in Print 1571–1923. Shannon: Irish Univer-

sity Press /First published in The Library, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 4th Series, Vol. IV, No. 4, March, Oxford University Press offprint/.

McGuinne, Dermot 1992: Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

McManus, Damian 1997 /1991/: A Guide to Ogam. Maynooth: An Sagart. Ó Cearúil, Micheál 1999: Bunreacht na hÉireann: A Study of the Irish Text. Dublin: The Station-

ary Office. Ó Ciosáin, Niall 1997: Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850. Basingstoke: Macmillan

Press. Ó Ciosáin, Niall 2004: Creating an audience: Innovation and reception in Irish language publish-

ing, 1880–1920. In: Clare Hutton (ed.) 2004: The Irish Book in the Twentieth Century. Dub-lin, Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 5–15.

Ó Ciosáin, Niall 2004–2006: Print and Irish, 1570–1900: An exception among the Celtic lan-guages? Radharc: A Journal of Irish and Irish-American Studies 5–7 (2004–2006), 73–106.

Ó Cuív, Brian 1969: The changing form of the Irish language. In: Brian Ó Cuív (ed.) 1969: A View of the Irish Language. Dublin: Stationery Office, 22–34.

Ó Fearaíl, Pádraig 1975: The Story of Conradh na Gaeilge: A History of the Gaelic League. Baile Átha Cliath [Dublin]: Conradh na Gaeilge.

Ó hEithir, Breandan 1997 /1989/: A Pocket History of Ireland. Dublin: The O’Brien Press. Ó Murchú, Helen, Máirtín Ó Murchú 1999: Irish Facing the Future. Dublin: The European Bu-

reau for Lesser Used Languages (European languages 8). Ó Riagáin, Pádraig 1997: Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland 1893–1993. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

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Pašeta, Senia 2003: Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Purdon, Edward 1999: The Story of the Irish Language. Cork: Mercier Press. Welch, Robert (ed.) 1996: The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


PAUL J. VAN DEN HOVEN UTRECHT UNIVERSITY TILBURG UNIVERSITY

A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there: About the semiotics of the trivial

ABSTRACT. David’s famous line is a brilliant philosophical statement. Crucial is the seemingly simple word “even”. Someone is lingering on that trivial chair he or she has never consciously observed when the other was still there. But the chair is released from its trivial function that makes it invisible now that no one is actually sitting on it anymore. Suddenly the chair becomes an aesthetic object, just being there. However – maybe because the sadness of the observer disturbs the esthetic perception – the object falls back in its being a chair, though one consciously observed and reflected upon. The theoretical conclusion is that a chair is still a chair, even when there is no one sitting there. This is one of the endless series of statements that make a full theoretical description. In this paper, I want to analyze the esthetic appearing and the theoretical appearance and what I call the trivial appearance. I am fascinated by the trivial, by the deep cultural nesting of so many objects and situations which we just seem to ignore without observing them. Their being there and being what they are is trivial. But why is the trivial so strongly associated with the esthetical? Can we account for this in a theoretical semiotic way? I attempt to account for the relations between the trivial, the aesthetic and the theoretical from the perspective of Peircean semiotics. In Peircean semiotics we may associate the trivial with firstness. When the interpretant confirms the mental object that is initially activated by the sign, this initial object seems to be all there is; secondness (the indexical) and thirdness (the symbolic) disappear. However, Peircean semiotics is based on the fundamental insight that every semiosis applies a full semiotic cycle. The word “even” in Bacharach’s line indicates exactly this. The interpretations of the object as just a chair is not only the simile (the icon, firstness) but also what is associated with it on the basis of our experience (the indexical, secondness) and all that is conventionally learned about it (thirdness). So the chair – that is just a chair – acts: it represents, indicates and symbolizes. When in a specific semiosis just iconicity seems to remain, this is a very specific outcome of a very specific actor relation chair-interpreter. The trivial is a highly marked, empirically and culturally articulated semiotic position.

1. An interesting controversy

“A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there”. This line from the 1964 song “A House Is Not a Home” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is no doubt by David, who actually wrote most of the lyrics. Even though he is not very likely to be aware of it, and probably would not give it a second thought, the statement betrays a serious difference of opinion between him and Stillman, the city walker in Paul Auster’s City of Glass (first published in 1985, known later as part one of The New York Trilogy, cf. Auster 1990 /1985–1986/).

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During Quinn and Stillman’s first meeting, the latter reveals his project. He is in the process of inventing a new language. “A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world”. The words have not adapted themselves to the new reality in which things have bro-ken apart, are shattered, and have collapsed into chaos. Stillman illustrates his point with the example of an umbrella.

When I say the word “umbrella”, you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is the umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function – in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that is serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving (Auster 1990 /1987/: 93).

And a chair is for sitting, David might add. Stillman’s point is that when an object no longer performs its function, we fail to alter or change the word ac-cordingly.

Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? (Auster 1990 /1987/: 93).

Stillman’s answer is clear and without reserve: if it can no longer perform its function, it no longer is. However,

In general, people do [continue to use the same word]. At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal (Auster 1990 /1987/: 93).

Basically, the difference of opinion between Stillman and David lies in Stillman’s conviction that semiotics must be defeated and in his disgust at its obviously unimpaired existence in a rotting New York.1 The sign hides, the sign revolts, and thus the sign in a sense imposes its will on the thing. The sign is not in harmony with the thing, as Chinese philosophers would put it. And that, ac-cording to Stillman, is not what signs are there for. If a broken umbrella no longer expresses the will of man, then at least the sign that refers to it should yield to this inadequacy instead of revolting against it.

1 The novel and especially the fragment quoted here inspired Hamish Robertson to develop his

project Defeating the Object, see: www.defeatingtheobject.com/.

About the semiotics of the trivial

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Stillman does not deny semiotics. He acknowledges its relevance. But that does not keep him from being sincerely anti-semiotic, dead against it, in fact.2 He is prepared to dedicate his life to fighting semiotics, to eliminating the very possibility of alternate construals. David, by contrast, as becomes apparent from that simple single line, reveals himself as a semiotician pur sang. A chair is still a chair, even when there is no one sitting there. “Even” cannot but be construed as a sign of polyphony.3 There is the prototypical ‘be-seated-on’ chair and there is this empty chair, just as there are umbrellas that protect you against the rain and broken ones. Because its designated function is not fulfilled, the chair’s prototypical cultural values become manifest. Because of this polyphony the chair is no longer a trivial object that can be overlooked. The chair acts, it re-volts. “What? Am I the expression of the will of man? Ha! Look at me; I am still a chair even if no one is sitting on me!” David’s line underlines the fact that an empty chair evokes the concept of CHAIR even more strongly than a trivially functioning chair, just as a broken umbrella evokes the prototypical UMBRELLA more strongly than an unperceived umbrella on a rainy day.4 Stillman’s hermetic pursuit rejects interpretation as an intrinsically com-plex, dynamic process, as a dialogue between interpreter and interpreted objects that encompasses the possibility of hardly predictable meanings. David’s emo-tionally charged line, on the other hand, is a reflection on these dynamics. The sad singer’s lingering on the chair lifts this object out of its imperceptibility. It ceases to be a trivial object. Our singer could even linger on the chair as an object appearing as an aesthetic object, turning the chair into conceptual art. But the singer does not. He determines the object as an object meant to be seated on and therefore still as a chair. However, this time there is nothing trivial anymore in this explicit theoretical classification.

2. A Peircean model

It requires a Peircean semiotic model to explain the dynamic relations be-tween these distinguishable interpretations of a chair, an umbrella or indeed any phenomenon: its trivial interpretation, its aesthetic interpretation and its theo-

2 As a young man Stillman wrote a thesis about 16th and 17th century views of the New

World The Garden and the Tower. 3 Polyphony is used here in the meaning developed by Jean-Claude Anscombre and Oswald

Ducrot (1983). Even indicates polyphony because there is an alternate world sounding in that word, a world in which the chair is no longer a chair if it is empty, the ideal world of Still-man.

4 I treat the relations between interpreter, object, and sign and so on as an actor network in the meaning developed by Bruno Latour (1999, 2005) (cf. van den Hoven 2010a).


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retical interpretation. A systematic explanation needs to recognize at least the following seven characteristics of every episode in a process of interpretation:

(1) A process of interpretation is a cognitive process that presupposes mental signs. To explain that a broken umbrella, as well as one whose cloth is half torn, an opened as well as a closed umbrella, an upside down umbrella, a mini toy-umbrella, a chocolate umbrella are all recognized as umbrellas and to explain that a Thai muà can be described as a wooden head that func-tions as a kind of umbrella, we need to assume that the form that the inter-preter registers via his senses matches sufficiently the mental sign UMBRELLA.

(2) A process of interpretation is an episode embedded in a continuous process. That an imperfect, underspecified, ambiguous sense impression can be “recognized” as matching a mental sign in a highly specific way can be ex-plained by the fact that other cognitive elements are already active. An in-terpreter forms expectations in an ongoing process. The interpreter – know-ing that he has opened a box of old family pictures – has already spotted his grandmother and subsequently identifies the half-covered back in the dark as his grandfather. Evidently, this is a guessing game, based on adding in-formation from sense impressions incrementally to what is already avail-able. We need this assumption to explain the considerable adequacy of the interpretation process, but also to explain the numerous temporary mistakes that are made (as it happens, it is uncle Arnie, not grandfather) but that are usually repaired quickly and virtually automatically.

(3) A process of interpretation is triadic in the sense that in every cycle a sign, an object and an interpretant can be distinguished. A specific form initially activates an available prototypical mental object, a generalization from for-mer experiences. But through blending with other active elements and through inferences the form may get a meaning that differs from the initial object in a motivated way. The form is an umbrella, but a broken one with-out any cloth. This can be explained by assuming a triadic relation that not only involves a sign and an initial object but also an interpretant, which re-sults from the dynamic relations between the sense impression, the object and other related active elements. This triadic relation explains that the re-sult can be polyphonic. When the interpreter forms an interpretant BROKEN

UMBRELLA, then obviously the concept PROTOTYPICAL PERFECT UMBRELLA must also be active. The sign, the object and the interpretant (and some-times more) are cognitively available in their relations to each other (rela-tions of rejection, confirmation or transformation). Stillman’s defeat of semiotics is his claim that one form should not activate such a polyphonic complexity.

(4) A process of interpretation is triadic in the sense that successively an iconic, an indexical and a symbolic cycle can be distinguished. Not only is a proto-


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typical object activated on the basis of an iconic similarity, so are (all kinds of) elements that are indexically related on the basis of the interpreter’s ex-periences as well as elements that are conventionally related. An umbrella is meant to protect you against the rain, is often made in China, can have many colors but should be black when covering the Prime Minister, tends to be forgotten on days that it starts to rain in the afternoon, shows selfishness when used in large crowds, may be used by elderly ladies when attacked by a bag snatcher, is seldom used by soldiers in combat, has a name that is spelled with ten letters and sounds as /əm’brelə/, and so on. This is ex-plained by assuming that the iconic cycle functions as a starting point for an indexical cycle in which empirically related elements may be activated as an object. This indexical cycle functions as a starting point for a symbolic cycle in which culturally determined habits that are associated with the in-dexical interpretants may be activated. In the umbrella example, I deliber-ately gave a few very specific elements that may become active in specific contexts to illustrate that the indexical and symbolic cycles are full interpre-tative cycles in which specific motivated interpretants can be formed out of initially activated indexical or symbolic objects that blend with other avail-able elements.5 We can prove the plausibility of this model on empirical grounds.

(5) A process of interpretation is a series of connected cycles that may all leave traces in the form of polyphonic structures. Both the object and the interpre-tant, as well as elements involved in the motivated relation between initial object and interpretant of each cycle remain available during the interpreta-tion process. Preceding cycles can therefore be influenced by the results of later cycles. The hypothesis about the iconic interpretant can change under the influence of information from the indexical or symbolic cycle. Such an amended iconic interpretant may lead to ‘new’ indexical and symbolic cy-cles. Blending processes involving other active elements can take place in each of these cycles. This can be explained by assuming a rich connectivity in the cognitive system. Such connectivity is supported by independent em-pirical arguments. Many polyphonic construals can be explained from this model. The linguistic form broken umbrella is polyphonic. It activates a de-formed umbrella in a contra-relation with a perfect prototype, as in the more explicit formulation “This is an umbrella, but it is broken”. A visual form of

5 The concept of blending is, in my opinion, compatible with Peircean semiotics (cf. van den

Hoven 2010b). It is used in the sense developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). When we encounter the utterance “The thief feared the lady’s umbrella”, an indexi-cal interpretant UMBRELLA = PROTECTION AGAINST AN INTRUDER may result from a blend be-tween the umbrella’s prototypical telic role PROTECTION AGAINST RAIN as an input and the causal structure of A FRIGHTENS B as an input.


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a broken umbrella results in a similar polyphonic interpretation. Responses to visual encounters such as: “She looks like my granny but she isn’t, so maybe she is not a granny at all” reflect complex processes of polyphony that can be explained by the model.

(6) Although every process of interpretation runs an iconic, an indexical and a symbolic cycle, in the awareness of the interpreter usually the dynamics of one cycle dominate. Although we have to assume that every process of in-terpretation runs an iconic, an indexical and a symbolic cycle that may lead to polyphonic representations, this does not mean that the interpreter is aware of each of these cycles. Generally speaking, we can say that as long as all cycles are running smoothly, one of the cycles will be dominant. This dominancy suppresses the awareness of the other cycles. A cycle runs smoothly when the initially activated object is confirmed as the interpretant without any friction. The initially activated object fits in the context; the initially ac-tivated object is confirmed as adequate. In conventional sign systems (for example language on the level of syntactic parsing within clause boundaries or on the level of lexical parsing), the symbolic cycle is usually dominant – if and only if the cycles run smoothly! There is evidence that socialized in-terpreters in such systems even develop direct relations between the iconic sign and the symbolic object as a kind of ‘short-cut’. In the basic interpreta-tion of pictorial elements, the iconic cycle appears to be dominant – if and only if the cycles run smoothly. The picture of a boat on the beach is char-acterized as: “This is a boat on the beach”. In situations in which the iconic interpretant seems fully replaced by the empirically related phenomenon that it indicates, the indexical cycle is dominant, if and only if the cycles run smoothly. The tracks that indicate the animal, the hair that gives away the perpetrator of the crime, these are “signs”, but (here) in the use of that word in daily life.

(7) Mental signs are formed, confirmed, changed or in other ways developed and developing in and through processes of interpretation. The dynamics between an initially activated object and a resulting motivated interpretant further develop the object and therefore the sign. An interpreter “learns” from interpretation processes. If the interpretant equals the initial object, the validity of this object as a prototype is confirmed and will be strengthened. If the interpretant deviates from the initial object, this may contribute to a revision of the object and thus to a restructuring of the sign. Obviously, not every motivated deviation of the interpretant from the initially activated object has severe consequences for the future functioning of the sign. Cases which stay within the margins of the initial object will not lead to adjust-ments of the object. Cases in which the interpretant deviates from the initial object in a way that the interpreter perceives as rare and exotic are not ex-


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pected to influence the initial object as a prototype. Cases that are perceived as a figurative extension such as the term umbrella projected onto the con-cept of INSURANCES will not lead to a restructuring of the prototypical meaning of ‘umbrella’. But sometimes the object that is initially activated does indeed get restructured significantly, especially in contexts in which an interpreter encounters an unknown situation. An example would be a north-ern European child for the first time encountering an umbrella being used as a tool for protection against the sun; he or she may significantly adjust the telic role in the qualia structure.6

This model helps us to explain how different kinds of information play a role in interpretation processes. From (1) it follows that both the physical ob-ject that is supposed to ‘cause’ the sense impressions plays a role as well as the mental sign plays a role; from (2) it follows that information (‘meaning’) from ongoing processes plays a role; from (4) it follows that the iconic information of the object plays a role, as well as the categories that are indicated by it and the values attached to it. What is more important for the topic of this paper is that the model explains how seemingly very different information is systematically related. The model explains why the following can be said about a text: “It is an intriguing story, although not very realistic and stylistically poor; but beautifully printed”. “It” can refer to very different aspects here because these are all so closely related that a single anaphor can be used.7 The model also explains how similar infor-mation can play different roles. From (3) it follows that the initial object (that is the prototype that is internalized as a starting point up to that moment) can be confirmed as the interpretant (if it fits) or can become a sound in a polyphonic structure when the interpretant deviates form the initial object according to (5), or the initial object can become part of the dynamics of an adjustment of the

6 For this concept of qualia structure and its roles, see James Pustejovsky (1995). 7 Empirical observations show that readers of a verbal text make several mental rep-

resentations of that text. In the literature this observation is usually explained refer-ring to the theory of Teun Adrianus van Dijk and Walter Kintsch (1983). Their model is included as a standard model in the Handbook of Psycholinguistics (Fletcher 1994). In this model, three representation types are theoretically distin-guished. Elements of the text form are represented in a surface model; a reader of-ten remembers – at least for some time after – some parts of the text verbatim. Also, a more or less coherent representation of the propositions in the text is at-tempted by the reader in a text based model; a reader often remembers – at least for some time after – whether a proposition was present in the text or not. And a rich representation is formed in which the textual information is integrated with prior knowledge and beliefs, the situational model. Together (2) and (4) account for the three mental representations and their interrelations (cf. van den Hoven 2010b).


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sign according to (7).8 It further explains how one textual form can result in deviant interpretations between interpreters. From (1) it follows that former experiences determine the starting point of an interpretation, experiences that will differ between people and may differ more substantially when people come from different socio-cultural backgrounds. From (6) and even more so from (7) it follows that signs develop in a way that is related to the experiences a subject encounters (van den Hoven 2008). Finally, the model explains how and why an interpreter can neglect, overlook or even deny that he or she is strongly deter-mined by experience and culture (van den Hoven 2010b). This follows directly from (6) and it is related to the concept of the trivial that will be analyzed in the remainder of this paper. The topic of this paper is how the trivial interpretation, the aesthetic inter-pretation and the theoretical interpretation are related. It will be demonstrated how the Peirce-inspired semiotic model explains why aesthetic interpreting is only possible in a context in which also a theoretical interpretation is at hand – as Friedrich Nietzsche convincingly argues, this is inevitably the case.9 And how it explains why the aesthetic and the trivial interpretation cannot coincide, just as the theoretical and the trivial interpretation cannot. Finally the model helps us understand why nevertheless the trivial and the aesthetic interpretation seem to be so closely related.

3. The trivial, the theoretical and the aesthetic

It is difficult – at least for someone who is not a specialist in this philoso-phical or cultural field – to find literature specifically on the trivial. Searching the literature for relevant observations on the trivial, one ends up finding litera-ture on its counterpart, namely the analysis of aesthetic meaning. As far as I have been able to find in my explorations, the trivial has never been developed as an autonomous theme. This makes sense if we accept that the trivial gets its mean-ing as one of the poles of an antithesis. But even as the counterpart of the aes-thetic, the trivial is treated more or less implicitly.

8 The model helps us to understand the different interpretative functions that Pustejovsky’s

qualia fulfill. The telic role of CHAIR for example can serve the interpreter to identify the icon. When an interpreter sees a strongly distorted form in a visual text, or a ‘form’ is im-plicit in a verbal text (“He walked in and sat down”) often the telic explains the recognition. The same role however can also serve to identify an indexical or symbolic aspect. When somebody uses a chair to protect himself against an intruder, the interpreter perceives po-lyphony; this is indexical or symbolic polyphony.

9 Nietzsche argues for that in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1993 [1872]), particularly in his analysis of Schopenhauer’s position when he discusses the awe of losing this theoretical Apollonian ways of comprehending (Nietzsche 1993 [1872]: 16f). This prob-lem was already mentioned in this paper in section 1.


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In Aesthetics of Appearing (2005 [2000]), Martin Seel characterizes aes-thetic interpretation10 (a) by its lingering on and (b) by its indeterminacy and inexhaustibility. He explores a counterpart of the aesthetic interpretation to help to clarify its specifics. But this counterpart, which he names theoretical inter-pretation, is derived uniquely from the last two characteristics of the aesthetic interpretation. Theoretical interpretation, interpretation of the form in its being-so, according to Seel is determinate and final. The characterization of the aes-thetic interpretation as ‘lingering on’, however, invites another counterpart, namely the interpretation as ‘fleeting’. Seel does not discuss this concept. I will develop this last interpretation as the trivial. We need to start with the important insight that Nietzsche formulates in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1993 [1872]). He argues that it is works of art in particular that reveal their origins. They stimulate or even en-force a distancing to the ordered, the classified. But – and this is crucial – dis-tancing oneself from something by its very nature presupposes that something. So dealing with a work of art in the realm of the aesthetic is being stimulated or enforced not to classify, not to categorize in terms of an order – which presup-poses the being there of an order, a theoretical realm. Seel (2005: 8) puts it thus: “Without the presupposition of established cul-ture, it would not be possible to step out of the confines of convention”. An interpretation that is free from the experiences and habits that we are “condi-tioned” to attach to a form, presupposes all experiences and habits that we are “conditioned” to attach to it. Seel (2005: 8) again: “It is only within a context of meanings that remain within reach that this departure can be experienced as an abysmal moment of ecstasy”. In other words, an aesthetic interpretation presup-poses and even encompasses the simultaneous “resonance” of a “context of meanings”. Seel’s (2005: 25) project is to investigate “how aesthetic perception relates to conceptually articulated perception”. Conceptually articulated interpretation, better known as theoretical interpretation, is the interpretation of the object as being so. Theoretical interpretation is determined. “Every determination under which we grasp an object leaves many other aspects of its constitution out of consideration; otherwise it would not be a determination. … Every determina-tion of being-so of something remains dependent upon the theoretical and prac-tical interests of this determination” (Seel 2005: 52). But an interpreter can overcome the limitations of these interests and linger on the appearance of the

10 Martin Seel (2005 [2000]) uses the term perception. I replace the term by interpretation

except in literal quotes. I prefer this term because Charles Sanders Peirce uses perception in a specific way, namely for processes that might coincide with what I analyze as trivial, situa-tions in which the interpretant immediately follows from the object without any ‘argumenta-tion’.


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object. This is called aesthetic interpretation. “[T]he decisive difference is lo-cated in the existent or nonexistent fixation on conceptual knowledge. A per-ception that is theoretical in the broadest sense carries this fixation through; aesthetic perception, in contrast, desists from it” (Seel 2005: 48). When we listen carefully to Nietzsche and Seel, we hear the dynamic triadic structure of the cognitive semiotic model. I will try to characterize, succes-sively, theoretical interpretation, aesthetic interpretation and trivial interpreta-tion in terms of the semiotic model. Theoretical interpretation is deliberately recognizing the object as related to a prototype (characteristic 1) that is adequate in the ongoing interpretation proc-ess (2). Theoretical interpretation is therefore at the very least an indexical phe-nomenon, because this is the cycle in which experiences, biased or unbiased, can guide the interests that Seel mentions (4). Because theoretical interpretation is a determined and deliberate process, interpreting the form as a being-so implies an indexical polyphony. This may require further explanation. As follows from characteristic 3, there is always the triadic relation between sign, object and interpretant. The interpretant may differ from the initial object, which is expected to leave a trace in the form of polyph-ony (5). However, when the interpretant in the ongoing interpretation process (2) confirms the initial object as adequate in the given context (the prototype fits), then characteristic 6 predicts that probably no polyphony is experienced. But this can never be the case in theoretical interpretation, because theoretical interpretation is a deliberate process! This is what ‘deliberately’ means here. The theoretical interpreter is like the academic scholar who classifies speci-mens, one by one, consciously observing that a specimen does indeed fit into a specific category and therefore not in another, deliberately observing in other words that the interpretant does indeed confirm the initial object. This is po-lyphony too, although it is limited to a resonance on the level that any classifi-cation of a specimen in a particular category presupposes the possibility of clas-sifying it otherwise. This is crucial. The interpreter recognizes a form as a chair (iconic) and activates a set of indices that represent his relevant experience attached to this concept (index). Even when these indices fit into the communicative situation without any tension, even when there is no tension at all between initial indexi-cal object and interpretant, there will be polyphony in theoretical interpretation. In an artificially explicit formulation the interpreter declares: “I hereby deter-mine that this form meets the iconic, indexical and symbolic characteristics of the prototypical CHAIR and therefore can without any friction be taken as a chair”. This is what is meant by ‘theoretical’, this analytical reflection that postulates the possibility of tension, even if it concludes that in this case there is none.


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When tension arises between initially activated indexical objects and result-ing interpretants, it follows from characteristic 5 that there is necessarily a cer-tain measure of polyphony, so that in that case we inevitably meet the require-ments of a theoretical interpretation, as we saw in the examples of the empty chair and the broken umbrella. The line by David illustrates that this polyphony may also be located in the symbolic cycle if we interpret the line as: “I deter-mine this form as a chair because in my cultural perception being-seated-on is a default telic role (index), but not a normative requirement (symbol)”. In contrast to the theoretical interpretation, the aesthetic interpretation aims at escaping ‘the presupposition of established culture’. The aesthetic interpreta-tion is never ‘complete’, it is inexhaustible. In terms of the model, this means that the interpreter in a way runs the semiotic cycles according to characteristics 3 and 4 time and again because he or she never fixates the triadic relations to bring the process to a (temporary) close. When the interpreter tries to escape the ‘theory’ of indicated experiences and conventionally attached values, this can be characterized as a lingering on firstness. Of course this is merely a figure of speech as we know that every process of interpretation runs all three cycles. As we argued above, according to Nietzsche, aesthetic interpretation presupposes a theoretical interpretation. What we mean here is that the interpreter tries to block out all preconceived notions and ap-proaches the form in such a way that it can act unconstrained. The interpreter lingers on the form to desist from his culturally determined fixation. This is an attempt to break the relation between an iconic cycle and its attached indexical and symbolic cycles (4), an attempt to let the iconic freely associate with all kinds of experiences and habits. The elegance of this analysis is that it implies that aesthetic interpretation is an imperfect endeavor. The interpretation of conceptual art such as Marcel Duchamp’s Roue de bicyclette or his Fountain evokes precisely this sensation of imperfection. As interpreter you know that the “text” invites you, almost compels you, not to end up with the determined theoretical interpretation of a WHEEL or a PISSOIR, but to linger on them in their firstness. However, know-ing this does not mean that you are able to perform this aesthetic act. In line with Nietzsche’s11 thesis, the theoretical interpretation will keep on sounding no matter how hard you try to ignore it. From this imperfection results a compli-cated form of polyphony: “But it is a pissoir, is it not?” So the model also ex-plains why an aesthetic experience is always polyphonic in the sense that the theoretical interpretation remains available, an essential element in the (aes-thetic) dynamics of ready-mades. This experience is not limited to art forms. You are lingering on a tree in the morning fog, when suddenly you realize it is ‘just a tree’. David’s chair or 11 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher.


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Stillman’s umbrella can become ‘conceptual art’ when we linger on them as aesthetic objects, but they also remain a chair and an umbrella. Stillman’s rage, according to this model, is in fact self-contradictory in the sense that he can only be enraged because he is consciously aware of the polyphony. Finally, we can try to capture trivial interpretation in terms of the semiotic model. The densest characteristic of the semiotics of the trivial is that a meaning is trivial if in the semiotic cycle neither indexical nor symbolic polyphony is perceived. No relation either to specific experiences or to culturally specific habits is perceived in the process of interpretation. According to characteristic 6 this may be the case when all three cycles run smoothly. This is so when the initially activated object ends up as the interpretant, without any motivated rea-soning having taken place. In that case only firstness seems to remain and there is no dialogue with the object. The object is just what it is and cannot be any-thing else.12 Auster’s Stillman will not be satisfied until all interpretation is trivial, when the will of man is expressed adequately in the object, when man attaches a name to the object and that makes it the unmarked name of the prototype. Personal experiences and cultural determinations vanish, seem absent. The form is sim-ply what it is. In text production, the author of a verbal text often dispenses with a form to represent the trivial. “He walked into the room and sat down”; no CHAIR is mentioned. This semiotic analysis explains why the aesthetic and the trivial interpreta-tions are so closely related and yet so far apart at the same time. Both interpreta-tion processes share the dominancy of firstness, of the iconic. Where they differ, however, is that in the aesthetic interpretation secondness and thirdness is rec-ognized: the interpreter is aware of the fact that he is determined by experience and culture. This is what he attempts to put aside. In the trivial interpretation, these cycles are disregarded. It is this denial of experience and culture that makes the trivial so fascinating. The theoretical and the aesthetic interpretations can coincide in an unstable polyphonic struggle because they both recognize secondness and thirdness. But the trivial and the aesthetic interpretations and even more the trivial and the theoretical interpretations can never coincide be-cause recognizing secondness and thirdness renders trivial interpretation impos-sible.

12 Compare the final conclusion and plea for literacy on this point in van den Hoven (2010a). It

is in the processes in which seemingly only firstness is at hand where culturally determined indices and symbolic values are confirmed time and again without the interpreter being aware of it, unless a ‘semiotic literacy’ has been developed.


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4. Projecting a camera

In this section, I will try to apply these insights into the relations between trivial, theoretical and aesthetic interpretation to the concept of the camera in the interpretation of moving pictures. The camera presents one of the intriguing problems in film theory. The camera as a text element involves not just the presence of a physical tool in its production, nor merely the awareness of the interpreter that there must have been such a tool, or musings as to where the tool must have been positioned, and so on. The camera represents a highly complex mental projection of the viewer. Even in films in the production of which no film cameras are used (animations of whatever kind) the viewer usu-ally projects a camera that moves, that follows characters, that narrates in im-ages. At the same time, viewers systematically disregard the (presence of a) camera as a physical reality. A person can be filmed in extreme close-up with-out being disturbed, no problem with that! The fact that the narrative space is limited to the frame – outside the frame there is just the crew, trash, trailers and the camera! – is simply ignored. Many more examples can be added. Edward Branigan in Projecting a Camera: Language Games in Film The-ory (2006) presents eight major conceptions of the camera.13 His analysis of the use of the term in film theory as a Wittgensteinian language-game is impressive and with a little too much credit perhaps going to film theory in this respect. One of the problems of the large number of theoretical conceptualizations cur-rent in film theory is that the analysis of their interrelations often remains sketchy, and Branigan’s book is no exception in this respect. The semiotic model cannot solve this problem, nor can it “capture” the entire conceptual phenomenon of the camera in one coherent scheme. But the semiotic relations between some seemingly impalpable metamorphoses of the concept of CAMERA can be ex-plained. The conceptualizations of the absent camera, the motivated camera and the extremely personified camera can be related to the three distinguished forms of interpretation. This helps to clarify their interrelations in a theoretically well-founded way and it explains how specific scenes can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, even by one and the same person. The concept and the dynamics of the absent camera can be prototypically associated with trivial interpretation. The motivated camera in the sense of André Bazin (2003 /1958–1962/) can be prototypically associated with theoreti-cal interpretation. An extremely personified camera can be prototypically asso-ciated with aesthetic interpretation. This is more than just a renaming. The the-ory behind the model clarifies the relations and possible transitions between these three conceptualizations.

13 In addition to detecting fifteen different meanings of FRAME and several meanings of SU-

TURE, related to the concept of the CAMERA.


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In our Western media culture, the absent camera has become default, ex-cept for some specific genres. It has become an instructive experience these days to watch Dziga Verov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and feel what it means to make the act of filming and its semiotics an explicit element of the movie. It is an adequate way to grasp what is meant by the absent camera. TV shows in particular, like the news, talk shows, “tell-sell” programs and so on, make viewers completely oblivious to the presence of a camera. Similarly, re-cordings of police interrogations invite the interpreter to project the camera as absent. The continuity editing techniques of the classical Hollywood movie have made Western viewers so familiar with the conventions involved that we disregard its presence unless it presents itself unequivocally. The camera in its various meanings (narrator being the most important here) can be absent when it is trivial. The conditions for a trivial interpretation are analyzed in characteristic 6. The text form matches an iconic sign that activates a prototype. The prototype fits into the situation, which means that the iconic interpretant is similar to the initial object without any friction. An example of this would be the anchor man looking into the camera and speaking to you. It occurs when you are put in a position of a silent observer (registration camera), but also when the camera follows highly conventionalized narrative devices, such as shot – reverse shot dialogues (cf. van den Hoven 2010b: 32–36), shots that on less conventionalized occasions may be interpreted as theoretical. From the work of Bazin (2003 /1958–1962/) we learn that the category of the motivated camera is both broad and diverse. The text form may invite the interpreter to project the camera as a material object that was present when shooting the footage, as was done by Verov and by some modern documentary makers. This is not a frequent option, however. More often than not, a moti-vated camera is an agent in the post-filmic viewing situation, determinately leading the viewer into the perspective of one of the protagonists (point-of-view shots), or expressively focusing the viewer’s attention (“zooming in”) on bodily and mental states (Branigan 2006: 95). Phrased in alternative terminology one might say that the camera is motivated as a present and emphatic narrator, rep-resenting an articulated internal point of view or explicitly commenting through external focalization (cf. Bal 1997 /1985 [1980]/). This motivated camera is prototypically associated with theoretical interpretation. The interpreter deter-mines the camera in its being-so. This is what cinematographic theory is about, this is what we are talking about when we start consciously reflecting, classify-ing, analyzing. Several times in Verov’s Man with a Movie Camera the camera becomes extremely personified. The text form invites the interpreter to make the camera an ‘alter ego’ enabling him or her to linger on the representation of the mise en scène or on cinematographic characteristics of this representation, stimulating


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them to escape former experiences and conventionally associated values, stimu-lating an aesthetic interpretation. The textual form is like a pissoir in a museum. An extremely personified camera, a camera that invites the interpreter to linger on firstness, is often found in art movies, but also in the cinematographical art work of video clips, for example, and in spectacular sequences in high-concept movies. Text forms are invitations to project the camera in one of these ways. Of course interpreters are no helpless victims of text forms. The semiotic model accounts for this. An interpreter can project a camera “meant” to be perceived as absent in a determined, theoretical way.14 In this case, the interpreter is not ‘seduced’ to disregard his or her socio-cultural conditioning, but consciously reflects upon it, a result of visual literacy. At the same time the model also ac-counts for the fact that many interpreters do not perform a theoretical interpreta-tion when analytically we may identify a motivated camera. The experiential and cultural conditioning (and of course the goals) of interpreters of classical Hollywood movies will in many instances cause them to run all semiotic cycles in the interpretation of such cinematographic forms smoothly and without re-flection. This may result in a trivial interpretation. What you see is what is there. There is no awareness of the conditioning effect of experiences or cultural hab-its.15 The perception of motivated instances of camera use as trivial when watching the classical Hollywood films may even be stimulated by modern productions that explore camera techniques in an abundant, highly personalized way. One of the side-effects of this development can be that in more “conven-tional” motivated uses the narrative convention is no longer perceived as a socio-culturally conditioned perception.16 When a viewer engages in reflection sufficiently to enter the theoretical, he or she will construct polyphony. Awareness of an internal focalization through a point-of-view shot, for example, implies polyphony as predicted by the model.

14 This is an explicit goal in Regina Austin’s Visual Legal Advocacy project. Legal profession-

als need to develop an elaborated semiotic system of indices and symbolic values that are part of the cinematographic signs. This enables them to perform theoretical interpretations at moments where a lay person tends in reality to perceive the camera as trivial. See www.law.-upenn.edu/cf/faculty/raustin/.

15 A spectacular instance of this phenomenon occurs when the interpreter no longer ‘theorizes’ on very specific ways in which the main character perceives the world – as shown to the in-terpreter by an articulated internal focalization by means of eye-line shots, for example – be-cause the interpreter fully identifies with the main character. If a spell like that is broken – because the main character’s interpretation of the world becomes too weird, for instance – the interpreter may even feel slightly betrayed by the camera, which seemed absent and now suddenly manifests itself as highly present.

16 This speculation about narrative conventions can be generalized to the very broad context of Western modernistic science, law, politics, when we focus on the assumption of a coherent causality (cf. Latour 1999, 2005).


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Internal focalization is intrinsically polyphonic in the sense that alternative points of view are presupposed. As argued above, this intrinsic polyphony is according to Nietzsche and Seel the minimal condition for projecting the cam-era as an extremely personified ‘alter ego’. But this aesthetic interpretation al-ways coincides with the theoretical, as explained above. How very different is the horrifying and harrowing documentary scene in which we see how Nick Ut shoots his famous pictures of Kim Phuc, the naked girl who together with other children is running to escape the flames after a napalm bomb has been dropped on her village. This scene illustrates the theo-retical counterpart.17 Every interpreter will determine the camera as an instru-ment in the hand of a cameraperson, present there and then, seeing and smelling what he or she is filming, making a conscious choice to film and not to assist, following the girl and finally letting go. From the moment the children come running down the road, the iconicity of the camera movements creates a signifi-cant tension with prototypical camera work, resulting in a non-prototypical in-terpretant and therefore in iconic polyphony. Even stronger is the polyphony resulting from the tension between the ‘prototypical’ response to Phuc’s pre-dicament (“Help her!”) and the actual response on the part of the cameraman (who continues filming). This results in indexical and symbolic interpretants that deviate from the initial objects.18 The strong theoretical determination at the same time – though never per-manently – blocks an aesthetic interpretation. As the model specifies, aesthetic interpretation presupposes theoretical reflection, but also requires letting go, overcoming the theoretical determination. As long as the theoretical determina-tion is too dominant, aesthetic interpretation is not possible. “Big enemy force repulsed by GI’s”, a news reel from April 4th 1967,19 may illustrate the trivial interpretation, even though at the moment that we start to reflect upon such an interpretation it vanishes as such. Instead of being sur-prised at the large number of coordinated cameras present at the positions visi-ble in the news reel, most interpreters will not (even) be aware of their presence, the camera simply vanishes in the mise en scène, due to the conventions used. This is exactly how the trivial works. The determination brought about by ex-perience and culture is so dominant that indexical and symbolic cycles run smoothly enough to create a seemingly sole firstness. Things are interpreted as being precisely what they appear to be. What we are seeing is exactly what hap-pened. In fact the news reel is the product of careful editing of footage from several cameras on several occasions. The moment one becomes aware of the

17 See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev2dEqrN4i0. 18 It must be emphasized that immediately after he took his pictures Ut did everything he could

to save the life of Phuc. But this is not in the text form presented to the interpreter. 19 See: www.archive.org/details/1967-04-04_Vietnam.


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clash between the expected forms of war journalism and the actual reel, the possibility of projecting an absent camera is blocked and trivial interpretation vanishes. The last example is a scene that can be interpreted aesthetically, but also dominantly theoretically. As the semiotic model predicts, this makes a trivial interpretation virtually impossible. The aesthetic camera should not be uniquely associated with the art cinema, as Branigan (2006: 95) summarizes. It can be found even in the most commercial Hollywood products. An example is a scene in the movie Death on the Nile, based on Agatha Christie’s novel of 193720 (1978, directed by John Guillermin). After about 42 minutes, the viewer is con-fronted with a scene in which the main characters, in couples or alone, are walk-ing in the famous columned (hypostyle) hall of the ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak. The camera starts to create a kind of choreography, playing with persons and perspective lines, a play that lasts for more than two minutes, underscored by music that also invites one to “linger”, culminating in a series of photographic stills. Surely the scene fits into the narrative (every single charac-ter had the opportunity to kill and is therefore a possible suspect), but the em-phasis on the spectacle creates time and opportunity for the aesthetic.

References Anscombre, Jean-Claude, Oswald Ducrot 1983: L’Argumentation dans la langue. Bruxelles:

Mardaga. Auster, Paul 1985: City of Glass. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press. Auster, Paul 1990 /1985–1986 /: The New York Trilogy. London, New York, NY: Penguin Books /

Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press/. Bal, Mieke 1997 /1985 [1980]/: Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edi-

tion. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press [De Theorie van vertellen en verhalen. Muiderberg: Coutinho].

Bazin, André 2003 /1958–1962/: Qu’est-ce que le cinema? Paris: Les Éditions du CERF. Branigan, Edward 2006: Projecting a Camera: Language Games in Film Theory. London:

Routledge. Christie, Agatha 1937: Death on the Nile. London: Collins Crime Club. Dijk, Teun Adrianus van, Walter Kintsch 1983: Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. London;

Academic Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, Mark Turner 2002: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s

Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books. Fletcher, Charles Randy 1994: Levels in representation in memory for discourse. In: Morton Ann

Gernsbacher (ed.) 1994: Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press, 589–606. Hoven, Paul J. van den 2008: Cultural discourse analysis and the cognitive process. In: Thorsten

Botz-Bornstein (ed.) 2008: Culture, Nature, Memes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2–34.

20 Known as Dame Agatha Christie, born as Miller, and named as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller

Christie (1890–1976) was a British crime wiriter.


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Hoven, Paul J. van den 2010a: The intriguing iconic sign. Interstudia 6: Cultural Spaces and Identities in (Inter)action, 37–50.

Hoven, Paul J. van den 2010b: Peircean semiotics and text linguistic models. Chinese Semiotic Studies 3, 201–226.

Latour, Bruno 1999: Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno 2005: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1993 [1872]: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Harlow: Penguin Classics [Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch].

Pustejovsky, James 1995: The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seel, Martin 2005 [2000]: Aesthetics of Appearing. Trans. John Farrell. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press [Ästhetik des Erscheinens. München, Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag].


IVAN KASABOV NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY, SOFIA

Words’ connotations and semantic construals

ABSTRACT. Within a semantic approach to different aspects of language experience language phenomena need to be revealed in their significance. In particular, what should be clarified is the common sign-structures of things and words at three different levels: of theoretical form, of actual existence and of socio-cultural values. This will help overcome the main referential illusion of dealing with “existent objects” irrelevant to their significance, or the sign-valued understanding. Respectively, the illusionary semantic study of word-meanings irrespective of their anthropological, social and psychological value-connotations would be avoided. The claim in this paper is that in human experience we have access to actual objects via sensations of physical, material character but we perceive or apprehend these objects as signs. Without being a sign, an object is not recognizable, nor communicable or understandable. This means that to become a sign, every single object has to identify some other object or any object like it, or be understood as presented in its specific features in an actual act of communication of any form. Such objects are predicative signs of speech or thought. A thing obtains its reality as an object on the level of cultural values or social functions as a sign-type with its own name, meaning and connotations. These connotations as values of meanings (or of values) govern the dynamics of object and word-transformations. As a result of a connotative analysis of word semantics, it may be possible to clarify the general types of word meaning: iconic-metaphorical, object-symbolical and symbolic-allegorical. Finally, it is necessary to extract the main semantic features (or marks), understood as named substantiated qualities like soundness, lightness (darkness), substantiality, formality, corporeality, humanity, etc. in their construal function as words’ iconic etymons. On these grounds – on the grounds of sign-words’ meanings – it is possible to build lexico-semantic architectonic categorization and systematization of words’ meanings in order to establish a lexico-grammatical system of language and to understand lexico-semantic development of values, transformations of meanings and word-formation processes.

1. Introduction

From the semiotic point of view, it is especially important to investigate the main relation between words as signs and the objects which they signify. We have to establish if signified common natural objects and everyday artifacts are signs in their own right and, if they are signs, what they mean. In general then, we have to ask ourselves: is an adequate cognition of words’ meanings possible without correspondence to meanings and values of signified objects and vice-versa? In other words, it is necessary to clarify the common sign-structures of things and words. Such an enterprise will be successful if we single out three interconnected but different levels of existence: of theoretical form (as architec-tonics or theory of sign possibility), of actual existence (as praxis), and of socio-

Ivan Kasabov 162

cultural values (as knowledge or language competence). This will help over-come the main referential illusion of dealing with “existent objects” irrelevant to their significance, or the sign-valued understanding. Respectively, the illu-sionary semantic study of word-meanings irrespective of their anthropological, social and psychological value-connotations would be avoided. In this paper, the argument is put forward that in human experience we have access to actual objects via sensations of physical, material character but we perceive or apprehend these objects as signs. Without being a sign, an object is not recognizable, nor communicable or understandable. This means that to be-come a sign, every single object has to identify some other object or any object like it, or to be understood as presented in its specific features in an actual act of communication of any form. Such objects are predicative signs of speech or thought. A thing obtains its reality as an object on the level of cultural values or social functions as a sign-type with its own name, meaning and connotations. These connotations as values of meanings (or of values) govern the dynamics of object- and word-transformations.

2. Predicative word being

First of all we have to outline the modes of words’ being. Besides having actual existence (in an actual utterance), every single word (as well as every single object) has its (imaginary, virtually or theoretically) possible existence and its realized existence as a socially established meaningful and understand-able word-symbol. In actual situational (contextual) utterances, we are on the level of sentence predication, governed by the deictic verb-copula to be. Such a predicative saying (something about something) provides what is being said with a modus of actual existence as actual reality. But this is not mere pragmat-ics and particular reality of language from which eventually a language system is abstracted. Predication actualizes meaningful word-symbol’s semantics not only by determining one of its meanings in the case of situationally and contex-tually influenced denotation (theme), but also by putting a word-symbol in a predicative position (rheme). This is practical language experience leading to semantic knowledge, “sedimented” in the meanings of words. Predication in the sentence supplies the understanding of the predicate as an actual existence of the act and as the objectivity of the subject-word, notably as an actually exist-ing, separate, generalized and characterized object. The sentence predicative phrase provides not only the actuality of its words’ existence (by means of ob-jectivation by virtue of other words connected with the phrase) but also infor-mation, transmitted by means of the word order.

Words’ connotations and semantic construals 163

3. Attributive word being

Language predication acts explicitly – in sentences, and implicitly – in sig-nification (as internal predication in the word), that is, attribution. Attribution, being the act of ascribing implicitly (“naturally”) an essential property to one separate thing, is a natural language-logical act of an object’s characterization that becomes the grounds on which to make the lexico-grammatical categoriza-tion of the object (as a word class or a part of speech). Attribution, then, is of crucial importance to the word-sign constitution because this process of ascrib-ing is the fundamental motif in the formation of signification of both an object’s icon and the phonological complex in a sign’s (symbolic) unity of the whole word. Thus, (according to the principle of the sign) the signifier is a sign of the signified. Correspondingly, the signified object is accepted not only as a sign of all the objects of the same class, but as a sign of itself or of its essence (accord-ing to the principle of autonymy). From an actually ostensive single sign (token) it develops into a really existing sign-type of all objects in its class that, by their essence, get identified with it in its name. In this way primary (implicit) attribu-tion is internal, sign-sensible, language-nominative (signifying) predication. It is manifested as actual and concrete in single speech sentence-utterances, but is governed by the object’s essence in the object’s image as word’s meaning (cf. Kasabov 2006). The meaning is understanding (to a certain degree) an object’s essence of the sign, that is, internal-predicative, attributive interpretation. The interpreta-tive understanding of such a sign has much in common with the new concept of construals, being either “an interpreting” (in the case of facts, data, a statement) or “interpretation” (here genealogy and taxonomy rest partly on admitted facts, but partly on the construal of facts) (cf. Kroeber 1923: 1939). Similar to the problems of construals are the problems presented by the modern concept of so-called plastic invariants (or figural expressive and content differential features of structure, colors, and forms), investigated in the field of visual semiotics (cf. Floch 1990, 1995; Lévi-Strauss 1979), where the distinction is made “between two levels of analysis in visual texts: the figurative level, which uses some ob-jects of the real world in order to create a fictional world; and a plastic level, where no object of the real world is recognizable. The plastic level, though, contains a network of non-figurative features, such as positions, forms and col-ors” in their oppositions and relations (cf. Leone 2010). In other words we have to deal with the problems of facts recognition in their interpretations by respec-tive signs. Hence the main problem is to single out the constitutive and con-structive elements of the sign.

Ivan Kasabov 164

4. Signification and nominative (naming) word being

The well known Peircean signs’ divisions into three trichotomies and three correlations with reference to 3 types of signs in their 3 correlations (cf. Peirce 1998: 296) can be jointly presented in one matrix, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. An integrated matrix scheme of the sign

SIGN 1ST TRICHOTOMY: in relation to itself (as a Type of sign)

2ND TRICHOTOMY: in relation to its Object

3RD TRICHOTOMY: in relation to the Interpretant

1ST CORRELATE First-ness

1 QUALISIGN

2 ICON

3 RHEME

2ND CORRELATE Second-ness

4 SINSIGN (SIGN-TOKEN)

5 INDEX

6 DICENT

3rd CORRELATE Third-ness

7 LEGISIGN (SIGN-TYPE)

8 SYMBOL

9 ARGUMENT (interpretative sign-symbol’s understanding)

A similar matrix – named as the semiotic nonagon – has been elaborated by Claudio Guerri (2009: 7):

Table 2. The matrix of the semiotic nonagon

SIGN 1ST TRICHOTOMY: COMPARISON POSSIBILITY IMAGINARY FORM

2ND TRICHOTOMY: PERFORMANCE ACTUALIZATION REAL EXISTENCE

3RD TRICHOTOMY: THOUGHT NECESSITY SYMBOLIC VALUE

Form 1ST CORRELATE THEORETICAL

POSSIBILITY

1. Form of Form DIFFERENCE QUALISIGN

2. Existence of Form ICON

3. Value of Form RHEME

Existence 2ND CORRELATE ECONOMICAL PRACTICE

4. Form of Existence SINSIGN

5. Existence of Existence DIFFERENT INDEX

6. Value of Existence DICENT

Value 3RD CORRELATE CULTURAL STRATEGY

7. Form of Value LEGISLATION

8. Existence of Value SYMBOL

9. Value of Value DIFFERENTIATION ARGUMENT

This matrix illustrates clearly the three types of sign’s existence, namely: of imaginary form, of actual existence and of symbolic values – each intersecting with three correlates (theoretical possibility, economical praxis and cultural strategy). For our purpose here it is important to emphasize the left to right di-


agonal positions (difference – different – differentiation) in the matrix and to suggest giving more attention to the right to left diagonal positions. In the fol-lowing matrix (Table 3), these positions are marked congruence (systematiza-tion) – different – type of sign forms, respectively:

Table 3. Тhе matrix of the semiotic nonagon in further development


2ND TRICHOTOMY: PERFORMANCE ACTUALIZATION REAL EXISTENCE


Form 1ST CORRELATE THEORETICAL POSSIBILITY

1. Form of Form DIFFERENCE QUALISIGN

2. Existence of Form ICON

3. Value of Form CONGRUENCE (SYSTEMATIZATION) RHEME

Existence 2ND CORRELATE PRACTICE

4. Form of Existence SINSIGN

5. Existence of Existence DIFFERENT INDEX

6. Value of Existence DICENT

Value 3RD CORRELATE CULTURAL

STRATEGY

7. Form of Value TYPE-FORMS LEGISIGN

8. Existence of Value SYMBOL

9. Value of Value DIFFERENTIATION ARGUMENT

In order to be understood, the sign has to be considered in its status nas-cendi. From the point of view of human necessity, a given sign (for instance car or home) could be considered as something different, a result of the process of elementary (that is based on habitual everyday experience) differentiation of a “means of transport” or “place of residence” from other things and places. Such a process would involve evaluating a given means of transport or a place of residence as suitable (comfortable, good, euphoric) or unsuitable (uncomfort-able, bad, dysphoric) for a particular purpose. Differentiation, then, would be reduced to noticing a difference in the quality of transportation or living condi-tions in relation to everything else. From the opposite point of view – that of possibility – the sign home could arise from the abstraction or from the qualisign “habitableness”. This theoretical point of view is very similar to the position of the architect who has to transform this qualitative possibility into an actualized possibility. From the abstract qualisign “habitation” achieved is an iconic sign-imagination standing for something with the same quality, or an object’s icon with its specific scheme, form and figure. Such a presentation is an icon of the imagination or some kind of constructive (imaginable) “blueprint” scheme, or

Ivan Kasabov 166

model-imitation of “something convenient for habitation” and it could be named with a specific acoustic-iconic construct to become a possibly meaning-ful sign-word like home, house, palace, dome, etc. These are just theoretical possibilities for the creation of the sign: a qualisign (as an etymological possi-bility), an iconic sign (as an icon-acoustic possible imagination) and a (possibly meaningful) word-sign. In other words, this is the area of architectonics-design of the sign, corresponding in principle to the architectural design of a house in a project.

Table 4. The developed matrix of the semiotic nonagon


2ND TRICHOTOMY: PERFORMANCE ACTUALIZATION REL EXISTENCE


Form 1ST CORRELATE THEORETICAL

COGNITON (epistêmê)

1. Form of Form essential quality QUALISIGN (etymon)

2. Existence of Form imaginative form, figure, frame ICON (eidos)

3. Value of Form word-form as name RHEME (onoma)

Existence 2ND CORRELATE PRACTICE

4. Form of Existence individual (pronounced) word, naming object in actual situation SINSIGN

5. Existence of Existence deictic word, name, object-pointing image, drawing, model INDEX (eidôlon)

6. Value of Existence predicative word in sentence-phrase (explanatory word’s content expression) DICENT (logos)

Value 3RD CORRELATE CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

7. Form of Value type-forms LEGISIGN

8. Existence of Value word’s meaning SYMBOL

9. Value of Value interpretative word-symbol’s understanding ARGUMENT (doxa)

Thus, for a house to be represented as its actual existence, it has to be lexi-cally, graphically or physically materialized or to be built (at least once) from appropriate materials and following a suitable technology for completing an architectural project. Similarly, to be presented as actually existing, every single sign has to be materialized – as far as it is physically, technologically and per-ceptually possible – in the form of a tactile, visual, acoustic sinsign, represent-ing another object that is similar or related to it. Such a sinsign, when used as an index, may represent something different. Such a sign-(named)-object as a sign-index is actualized in a sentence-phrase that predicatively ascribes existence and distinctive features to the object named dicent.


Table 5. A detailed representation of Form of Form (intersection 1 in Table 4)


Form 1ST

CORRELATE

THEORETICAL COGNITION (epistêmê) that is, SEMIO-LINGUISTIC QUALI-QUANTIFICATION that is, possible relationships of pure form (in 3-dimentional imaginative space with structure, extent and discrete forms, figures, elements, states and in time-durational forms)

1. Form of Form QUALISIGN (etymon) essential quality with such possible (imaginable) essential qualities as: I. structural, i.e. positive (+) / negative (–) or between points only: positional (+) / oppositional (–); II. proportional, i.e. between couples of points / lines (and metrics between) the parts and the whole; III. symmetric, i.e. between twin-parts and formations in relation to line, plane, centre: 1. corporeal: a) visual: space-objectual; b) tactile: hardness / softness (roughness / smoothness) or solidity / non-solidity; 2. non-corporeal / iterative-periodic: a) waves of visibility: lightness / darkness and oppositions and gradation between colors; b) acoustic waves: sonority / soundlessness (noises) and oppositions and gradation between tone;s c) differential qualities of taste and smell.

In order to become a real and permanent sign (rather then momentary and actual), an object-sign together with its word-sign, has to acquire the form of a sign-type and thus to begin to really exist as a word sign-symbol with its per-manent meaning within the network of other word-symbols in the language. And finally, such a sign has to become a consciously used word-symbol, inter-preted and understood as an acoustically perceivable indexical-iconic symbol with its socially established connotations (rooted in commonly shared opinion, that is doxa) as values or as sign-arguments. It is possible to develop the matrix in Table 3 using Plato’s (Letter VII) terms for the four levels of the object’s cognition: onoma, logos, eidôlon as in principle different but necessary for the achievement of true cognition – that is epistêmê (theoretical form) – of the true idea in its eidos. The developed matrix is presented in Table 4. Consequently we can establish the place of what is the main concern of this paper: the sign’s invariant construals. They should be located in the area Form of Form (internal form) of the sign in our matrix (intersection 1 in Table 4). This form, shared by the sign-object and the word-sign, is a possible, imaginary form of theoretical cognition or epistêmê. It is presented in detail in Table 5.

Ivan Kasabov 168

Very similar to the problems of sign’s qualities presented in Table 5 are the problems connected with singling out plastic invariants, which were discussed above, as pertaining to the field of visual semiotics (cf. Floch 1990, 1995; Lévi-Strauss 1979). The area Existence of Form (intersection 2 in Table 4) may be described in a more elaborate way too. A proposal of such a description is presented in Table 6.

Table 6. A detailed representation of Existence of Form (intersection 2 in Table 4)

SIGN 2ND TRICHOTOMY: PERFORMANCE ACTUALIZATION (POSSIBLE) REAL EXISTENCE

Form 1ST CORRELATE THEORETICAL COGNITION (epistêmê) that is, SEMIO-LINGUISTIC QUALI-QUANTIFICATION that is, possible relationships of pure form (in 3-dimentional imaginative space with structure, extent and discrete forms, figures, elements, states and in time-durational forms)

2. Existence of Form imaginative form, figure, frame ICON (eidos) I. outlined (schematic) shape-forms, i.e. imaginative diagrams; II. figures (in focus, with back-grounds), i.e. imaginative figures (1) with specific formal iconic qualities (Gestaltqualitäten), such as static / dynamic, vivid / animate / personification and (2) with properties, such as colors, tones, sounds, noises, gestures, poses; III. configurative-compositional and (con)textual-harmonic frames; IV. iconic-acoustic associative forms; V. figurative (metaphorical) and combined (fantastical) forms and synesthetic iconic-acoustic (gustatory, olfactory, tactile) associations.

As to the area Value of Form (intersection 3 in Table 4), its fuller descrip-tion is given in Table 7. For the purpose of this paper it is not necessary to develop the row of the second correlate in the sign’s matrix (intersections 4, 5, and 6 in Table 4). In-stead, which seems to be much mоre interesting, let us apply further Peircean signs’ divisions (Peirce 1998: 296) to expand the descriptions of the third row (intersections 7, 8, and 9 in Table 4). Thus, the area Form of Value (intersection 7 in Table 4) might include three sub-trichotomies (being three types of legisign): type-objects’ associated forms, type-words’ associated forms and type-words; and three sub-correlates: anthro-pological prototypes, social stereotypes and psychological archetypes. In this way, as we can see in Table 8, it would split into nine, more specifically deter-mined areas (intersections 7.1–7.9 in Table 8).


Thanks to what is depicted in Table 8, one can spot a general peculiarity of the language. The peculiarity is rooted in the dynamics of objects’ and words’ transformations from the forms of the sacral (such as totem, fetish, idol) to the forms of the profane in everyday language vocabulary and vice versa. For example, to realize the semantic relevance of metaphors and other rhe-torical tropes one needs to have in mind anthropologically prototypical magic and mystic prejudicial forms like “mana”, “totem”, “idol”, “fetish” and the so-called nomina-omina together with their corresponding language forms (taboo, euphemism, etc.) of still undistinguished syncretic word-objects. Similarly, in order to understand social connotations we have to investigate emblematic so-cial stereotypes like “heroes”, “(stage)-divas” and “(movie)-stars”, attributes and brands with their corresponding language forms like slang and argotic words or pseudonyms. For the understanding of individual stylistic connota-tions, we need to deal with archetypical psychological symbolic forms like gifts (and sacrifices) and language forms like acronyms, anagrams, puns (calem-bours, paronomasia) or paronymous, exotic and poetic word-forms.

Table 7. A detailed representation of Value of Form (intersection 3 in Table 4)

SIGN 3RD TRICHOTOMY: THOUGHT NECESSITY SYMBOLIC VALUE

Form 1ST

CORRELATE

THEORETICAL COGNITION (epistêmê) that is, SEMIO-LINGUISTIC QUALI-QUANTIFICATION that is, possible relationships of pure form (in 3-dimentional imaginative space with structure, extent and discrete forms, figures, elements, states and in time-durational forms)

3. Value of Form RHEME (onoma) that is, word-form as name that is, acoustic-iconic word-forms (names) in their architectonic (formal-figural) congruence, structural (paradigmatic-syntagmatic) systematization and (aesthetical) harmonization

Every single sentence on its own is an act of assertive expression, an act of a sender’s assertion directed to a receiver, in which the verb-predicate or name-rheme in the complex predicate are asserted as actually existing and having certain qualities (cf. Peirce 1998: 292–293, 296). These assertions are narratives organized in stories and have not only actual, but almost real existence as well. Eventual assertions made by the receiver (responses) occurring in numerous dialogical situations establish in the speaker’s mind opinions about words’ con-nections and about the actual existence of words that are uttered for objects.

Ivan Kasabov 170

Then, such words can be put together to form a sentence on the basis of how they are related to objects’ qualities, functioning as meanings of the uttered words.

Table 8. A detailed representation of Form of Value (intersection 7 in Table 4)

SIGN 1ST TRICHOTOMY: COMPARISON POSSIBILITY (REALIZED) FORM

7. Form of Value LEGISIGN

Value 3RD CORRELATE

Type-objects’ associated forms

Type-words’ associated forms

Type-words

7.1 Anthropological Prototypes type-objects of magic, mystic imaginations, divinations, superstitions: mana, totem, idol, fetish

7.2 taboos, euphemisms, exorcisms, ethno-pseudonyms, proper names

7.3 Autonyms: nomina-omina (sacral↔profane)

7.4 Social Stereotypes type-objects, person-names as social emblems of groups of people: brands, attributes, heroes, (movie)-stars, (stage)-divas

7.5 argot slang, jargon, calques, socio-pseudonyms, eponyms

7.6 Heteronyms: synonyms, homonyms, proper↔common names

Types of nomination Form-content relation SEMIO-LINGUISTIC QUALIFICATION of CULTURE and KNOWLEDGE Symbolic Functions (Values Objectives) that is SOCIO-CULTURAL

SIGNS’ FUNCTIONS

7.7 Psychological Archetypes type individual-evaluative objects’ transformations with manipulative effect on emotions of individuals or groups: gifts, sacrifices

7.8 anagrams, acronyms, puns (calembours), emotional- expressive words-compositional variants

7.9 Paronyms: diminutive, augmentative, exotic, poetic words

Narrative repetitions not only create opinions about words’ connections and their object’s meanings, but also transform the opinions into persuasive judg-ments about their real existence. Thus we come to understand words in a lan-guage not only as actual signifying word-symbols with objects’ meanings, but also as commonly shared opinions, based on numerous repetitions of argumen-tative understanding-persuasions (doxa) of those symbols that are really (not


only possibly and actually) existent valuable word-signs for thing-objects. When these words are repetitively used for a given type of objects (and for con-crete objects of that type), we arrive at persuasive conclusions about the legiti-macy of words’ meanings and their significations – conclusions of the inductive type.

Table 9. A detailed representation of Existence of Value (intersection 8 in Table 4)

SIGN 2ND TRICHOTOMY: PERFORAMNCE ACTUALIZATION REAL EXISTENCE

Value 3RD CORRELATE

8. Existence of Value SYMBOL that is, word’s meanings

Iconic Symbol figurative, iconic metaphorical meaning

Indexical Symbol word’s idea as system-associative, attributive-identificational relation between a verbal object’s icon and named object’s type objectual meaning in polysemic relations

Types of nomination Form-content relation SEMIO-LINGUISTIC

QUALIFICATION of CULTURE and KNOWLEDGE Symbolic Functions (Values Objectives) that is, SOCIO-CULTURAL SIGNS’ FUNCTIONS

Symbolic Symbol metaphorical objectual-meaning’s second cultural symbolization allegoric-personificational meaning

In the same vein developed may be the area Existence of Value (intersection 8 in Table 4). There, as one can see in Table 9, it is also possible to introduce three sub-correlates: an iconic symbol, indexical symbol, and symbolic symbol. Finally, the area Value of Value (intersection 9 in Table 4), might be ren-dered more precisely as including the three sub-correlates of rhetoric connota-tions, common connotations, and emotional connotations (see Table 10). Man’s ability to legitimately signify a given type of objects (in any single utterance) with a certain word and the practice of denoting concrete objects of this type with a particular word are the grounds on which persuasive conclu-sions of the deductive type get established. Usually, however, one arrives at persuasive conclusions of this kind intuitively, on the basis of associative (para-digmatic) relations between meaningful word-signs and following the principle

Ivan Kasabov 172

of emblematic (synecdoche principle) examples or rhetorical tropes. Such con-clusions result from probability-conclusions (that may be drawn thanks to the rhetoric argumentative figure of the so-called enthymeme) based on possible-probable premises, established as commonly shared opinions, that is, as hypo-thetical (abductive) conclusions. This type of persuasion is a result of the recip-rocal influence of numerously repeated rhetoric inductive, deductive, and hypo-thetical argumentative interpretations.

Table 10. A detailed representation of Value of Value (intersection 9 in Table 4)

SIGN 3RD TRICHOTOMY: THOUGHT NECESSITY (REAL) SYMBOLIC VALUE

Value 3RD CORELATE

9. Value of Value ARGUMENT (doxa)

Rhetoric innovative expressions, inverted and transformed signs (parody) tropes, figures, irony, archaization, neologization Rhetoric connotations

Interpretative word-symbol’s understanding, stylistic-synonyms: social status (slang) functional registers Common connotations

Types of nomination Form-content relation SEMIO-LINGUISTIC

QUALIFIACTION of CULTURE and KNOWLEDGE Symbolic Functions (Values Objectives) that is, SOCIO-CULTURAL SIGNS’ FUNCTIONS

Individual stylistic cultural and personal preferences, ‘sense of language’ common sense ‒ Argument (doxa) Emotional connotations

These interpretations, appear thanks to common functional connotations and unconscious intuitive cultural and personal preferences (the “sense of language”), which, together with the emotional-valuation connotations’ motifs, establish the shared common opinions (doxa). These opinions play the role of veritable knowledge about the objects’ essence or about the meaning of every single word and tend to later become the knowledge of the truth (the idea) about the word-symbols’ essence – and thus about the object signified.


5. Words’ connotations as cultural symbols’ interpretations

The understandings of the persuasions of word-meanings discussed above are regarded here as connotations. There have been numerous attempts to define the term connotation. It is usually assumed that the connotation is a kind of a word’s co-meaning, something like a barely sensible and difficult to define aureole around a word’s meaning, or additional, associative semantic feature. But connotations could be explained much better as constituting the internal center, the core and “spirit” or motif of a word’s meaning that persuasively in-fluences a word’s understanding. One of the most adequate definitions of con-notations (of a word-term) is: “a term is said to be connotative if, when one of the features of the concept considered in terms of its comprehension is named, that term points to the concept as a whole” (Greimas & Courtés 1982 [1979]: 53). From the semantic point of view, a signification is connotative when, by means of an emblematic semantic feature (or attribute or a seme, if we see it from the viewpoint of its interpretative understanding), presented can be the whole meaning (sememe) of the word-semanteme. In other words, connotation acts metonymically – more precisely, in a synecdochic way. Thus, connotations appear to be of the rank of a value system – the system of language values (valeurs). These values are not only differential semantic features, but values or valorizations of word-meanings, that is values of meanings or of values.

6. Value differentiation and types of connotation

One type of connotations could be based on an image feature in rhetoric figures of comparison and epithet (compare the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, allegory and others). If connotations are based on an indexical-denotative addi-tional feature (with valorization relation to the signified object), they are social and are realized in slang and sociolectal vocabulary. If connotations have as their basis unconscious symbolic-cultural valorizations and personal emotional preferences, they are realized in emotional-expressive vocabulary. Some of these values could be of the iconic type and get explicitly manifested in lan-guage in the form of rhetoric tropes or “connotators”. Others could be of the indexical-denotative communicative type and function as shared by the mem-bers of a society evaluative understandings of words’ meanings and certain qualities of the signified objects. Usually such a society is value-consolidated according to the so-called “lifestyle” and social status based on consumption preferences for different object-artifacts. These are social connotations. And finally, connotations could be of the symbolic type. In this case they are cultural and personal preferences resting on fundamental modal basis and frequently remain unconscious (e.g. euphoric or dysphoric).

Ivan Kasabov 174

7. Conclusions

As a result of such a connotative analysis of words’ semantics, it may be possible to clarify the general types of word meanings: iconic-metaphorical, object-symbolical and symbolic-allegorical. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to extract main semantic features, or marks, as named substantiated qualities (such as sonority, lightness / darkness, substantiality, formality, corporality and animate, spiritual, personification, etc.) in their constructive function as words’ iconic construals, plastic invariants or etymons. However, it will not be possible to define these structural invariant-construals without any reference to connota-tions, discussed above as cultural symbols’ interpretations and personal prefer-ences founded on modal basis. On these grounds – on the grounds of sign-words’ meanings – it is possible to build lexico-semantic architectonic categorization and systematization of words’ meanings in order to establish a lexico-grammatical system of language and to understand lexico-semantic development of values, transformations of meanings and word-formation processes.

References Floch, Jean-Marie 1990: Sémiotique, marketing et communication. Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France. Floch, Jean-Marie 1995: Identités visuelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Greimas, Algirdas, Joseph Courtés 1982 [1979]: Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary.

Trans. Larry Crist, Daniel Patte, James Lee, Edward McMahon II, Gary Phillips, Michael Rengstrof. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press [Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette].

Guerri, Claudio 2009: The Semiotic Nonagon and the Graphic Language TSD: an operative model for qualitative research and the scope of a new graphic language. Presentation at the XV Early Fall School of Semiotics: “Sociosemiotics III”, 5–15 September 2009, Sozopol, Bulgaria.

Kasabov, Ivan 2006: Gramatika na semantikata [The grammar of semantics]. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press.

Kroeber, Alfred 1923: Anthropology. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Kroeber, Alfred 1939: Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley, CA: Uni-

versity of California Press. Leone, Massimo 2010: The concept of semi-symbolism: a concise introduction. Presentation at

the XVI Early Fall School of Semiotics: “Imagining & Understanding”, 4–12 September 2010, Sozopol, Bulgaria.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1979: La voie des masques. Paris: Plon. Peirce, Charles Sanders 1998: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Volume 2

(1893–1913). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.


ERIK VOGT TRINITY COLLEGE IN HARTFORD UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

Speaking the inhuman in the human: The testimonial structure of language “after” Auschwitz

ABSTRACT. In light of continuing debates in contemporary French, German, and Italian philosophy regarding the question of the (non-)presentability of Auschwitz, this article examines in some detail the contribution to this very issue by Giorgio Agamben. Taking as its reference points Agamben’s writings on the homo sacer and on the impossibility and/or possibility of bearing witness to Auschwitz, this article attempts to demonstrate that, for Agamben, the question of witnessing, of (survivor) testimony at Auschwitz, has to be related to the experience of some fundamental and constitutive aporia of language as such. Bearing witness, giving testimony, is thus to be conceptualized not only as engaging in an experimental discourse in face of a historical situation where the traditional semantic and syntactic rules for connecting life and death, for narrating their connection, have been destroyed, but also as revelation of and reflection on the event of language. That is to say, Agamben’s interrogation of (the impossibility of) bearing witness at Auschwitz extends beyond this specific historical context and leads to the formulation of a transcendental postulate concerning the structure of linguistic signification itself. However, since Agamben renders poetic speech as paradigmatic of witnessing and linguistic signification as such, his transcendental enterprise reveals itself ultimately as a problematic aestheticizing gesture that reduces Auschwitz to a mere ontic instance for more fundamental ontological claims regarding language and subjectivity.

It has become common doxa (opinion) that the question as to representa-tions “proper” to the events at Auschwitz continues to haunt contemporary his-toriographic, political, philosophical, and artistic discourses. For with Ausch-witz, the project of representation seems to have encountered a limit, thereby putting into question the very possibility of representation. That is to say, since representation can no longer be taken for granted in an unproblematic and naive sense, the determination of the mode of representation that still can maintain a certain “authority” regarding the rendition of Auschwitz has become the cen-tral task. While narrative and/or figurative representations of Auschwitz have often been condemned for their risk of idolatry, the discourses of traditional historiog-raphy and of political theory, on the other hand, seem to harbor a different kind of danger in that they, by inscribing the Nazi genocide into a continuum or even progressivism of history, might bleach the memory of past suffering, silencing the (already silent) victims again and potentially turning this new victimization into a profane form of theodicy. In light of these two lacunae, testimony has recently been mobilized as a mode of presentation that, according to Emmanuel

Erik Vogt 176

Levinas, often employs a “prose of rupture and commencement”, that is, a saying that is marked by the “breaking of rhythm” and that “preserves the discontinuity of a relationship, resists fusion and where response does not evade the question” (Levinas 1969 [1961]: 203). Examples of this new discourse fo-cusing on and enacting the question of testimony and witness in the face of and “after” Auschwitz can be found in the writings of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Geoffrey Hartman, Lawrence Langer, Dominick LaCapra, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida.1 However, it is perhaps the work of Giorgio Agamben that has attempted to pursue in the most pronounced manner the question of witnessing, of (survivor) testimony, in light of the experience not only of the impasses of a discourse of facts and knowledge, but, even more importantly, of some fundamental and constitutive aporia of language as such. Bearing witness, giving testimony, is to be conceptualized not only as engaging in experimental discourse in face of a particular historical situation where the traditional semantic and syntactic rules for connecting life and death, for narrating their connection, has been de-stroyed, but also as revelation of and reflection on the event of language. That is to say, Agamben’s interrogation of (the impossibility of) bearing witness to Auschwitz extends – as will be demonstrated – problematically beyond this specific context to a (quasi-)transcendental postulate concerning the structure of linguistic signification itself. Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Life (1998 [1995]) and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999 [1998]) constitute two milestones in his historic-philosophical project regarding the biopolitical paradigm culminating in Auschwitz and permeating contemporary political and ethical thought. Revolving around the central twin figures of the sovereign and homo sacer that are both conceptualized in terms of the exceptional logic of inclusive exclusion, Agamben’s Homo Sacer demonstrates that the state of ex-ception, as the zone of indiscernibility between inside and outside, has become the nomos [law] of modernity, functioning within and in place of the normal political order. It is in this “absolute indistinction of fact and law” that the state of exception has become the norm, and the paradigmatic site and materializa-tion of this indistinction is the Nazi concentration camp: “The camp … is the structure in which the state of exception … is realized normally” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 170). That is to say, the Nazi concentration camp attests to the final and ultimate absorption of politics into biopolitics: “Insofar as the inhabi-tants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized,

1 See Felman & Laub (1992), Hartman (2002), LaCapra (1994), 1998, 2001), Langer (1991),

Lyotard (1988 [1983]), and Derrida (2005). The first two or so pages are taken in a modified form from Vogt (2005: 74–103).

Speaking the inhuman in the human 177

in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (Agam-ben 1998 [1995]: 171). The intelligibility of the Nazi concentration camp con-sists in its exemplification and fulfillment of that very logic that has been pre-pared from the beginning of the classical political order. Biopower has brought about a state of bareness, meaning lawlessness that is systematic and lethal. The inhabitant of the Nazi concentration camp is not the other to modern society, but its dark symbol. The biopolitical logic of moder-nity has produced – potentially everywhere and at all times – human beings reduced to bare life, a logic that also permeates contemporary democracies in their attempt to find a form of life to accommodate bare life, insofar as this very goal determines the specific aporia of the democratic ideal for “it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place – ‘bare life’ – that marked their very subjection” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 9–10). That is, Agamben sees ubiquitous actualizations of the instances of bare life in the current debates over abortion rights, the rights of neomorts, and the status of the rights for im-migrants and refugees. Given this pervasiveness of bare life, how can it then be grasped as such? How can its bareness be delimited, especially since it is “without any media-tion”? Since the being of bare life can be grasped in terms of a “threshold of articulation between nature and culture” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 181), it is then not surprising to read that Agamben’s account of bare life affirms it as being “indeterminate and impenetrable” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 182). However, Agamben’s Homo Sacer barely addresses the issue concerning the representability of this “threshold” of bare life and its most extreme figure, the Muselmann, except to confirm “Hölderlin’s statement that ‘at the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the conditions of time and space’ holds to the letter” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 185). Nonetheless, some scattered remarks seem to point to a certain affinity between the paradox of sovereign exception with its two forms of inclusive exclusion and the paradox of language. One remark de-scribes the sovereign exception as “the figure in which singularity is represented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable” (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 24). Another one claims that inclusive exclusion, the form in which this unrepresentability is represented, marks the very point at which the paradoxes of biopolitics and language converge:

The thought of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of exception in every area. Language’s sovereign claim thus consists in the attempt to make sense coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two in which language can maintain itself in relation to its denotata by abandoning them and withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the linguistic “state of exception”). This is what deconstruction does, positing undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every possibility of signification. (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 25)

Erik Vogt 178

This excess, that is, language as “what must necessarily presuppose itself” (Agamben 1999 [2005]: 42), is addressed by Agamben in his Remnants of Auschwitz (1999 [1998]) where the question of witnessing and of survivor tes-timony is pursued in light of the experience of some fundamental aporia lodged in the heart of language. From the outset, Agamben posits an irreducibility of testimony that resists the assimilation and abstraction constitutive of, for instance, the historian’s dis-course. The witness’s testimony cannot be reduced to the language of facts and documents; it is an event in its own right that ultimately cannot be sundered from the events it recounts. Felman argues that it is for this reason that the witness bears a unique bur-den: “Since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by another without thereby losing its function as testimony, the burden of the wit-ness – in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses – is a radically unique, non-interchangeable and solitary burden” (Felman & Laub 1992: 3). The burden of the witness is thus to be both irreplaceable, in that no one else can speak for him or her, and incommensurate with any other witness, to the extent that the vantage point occupied by the witness and from which he or she speaks cannot be assimilated by any other. Testimony, in this sense, is both irreducible and singular. Traditionally, the structure of bearing witness, of giving testimony, has been predicated on a double presence, that is, on the witness’s presence at the event witnessed and on the witness’s presence at the moment of testifying. If these criteria of presence are not met, one is not, strictly speaking, dealing with testi-mony. Thus, one can say that the traditional conception of testimony has as its basis the requirement of a double presence and the – at least implicit – claim to the authenticity of both the witness and the event witnessed. However, what happens to testimony if those conditions of presence are marked by a double impossibility; that is, if one is dealing with an attempt at bearing witness in which neither a third party present to some event to be wit-nessed nor a witness who would have experienced the event to be witnessed from beginning to end could be invoked? That is precisely what happened to testimony at Auschwitz, an event that, according to Felman, produced no wit-nesses “in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness from the inside – since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice – and from the outside – since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 35). To reformulate this deep lacuna of testimony in terms of the following host of questions: Who could bear witness for the witness? And how could testi-mony as language ever bear witness for the event without witnesses? What kind of language would be required so that the victims of the event without witnesses


are not suffering for insights articulated by testimony; that they do not serve as proof for a philosophy of history, a positive theodicy, derived from them? What kind of language would be required so that the victims are not poeticized as witnesses, thereby taking into account the danger of instrumentalizing the vic-tim as witness by ascribing to him or her some privileged truth? Taking Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1961 [1958]) as his Ariadne’s thread through the aporia of bearing witness to Auschwitz, Agamben’s attempts to think through the relation between language and witnessing subject in light of the very problematic Levi sees operative in testimony. To quote Levi: “Wit-nesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privi-lege. … No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible for him to survive. … I have also described the common prisoner when I speak of ‘Muslims’; but the Muslims did not speak” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 33). Already this passage puts into question the traditional mean-ing of testimony based upon the presence as well as the identity and authenticity of the witnesses. For Levi continues: “I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. … We speak in their stead, by proxy” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 33–34). For Levi, the “true”, “complete” witness is the one who did not and could not bear witness. Thus, the survivor finds himself in the paradoxical structure of bearing witness to a missing testimony that can be responded to only “by bear-ing witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 34). The first impossibility for the survivor to bear witness – after all, he is not the one who experienced the event from beginning to end; he thus cannot make any claim to presence and authenticity – is further complicated by a second impossibility for the pseudo-witness to bear witness to what seems at best an inarticulate babble, a kind of non-language. Agamben refers here to Levi’s desperate attempt to listen, understand and thereby bear witness to the “word” “ mass-klo” or “mastikko” that was repeated again and again by the child Hurbinek (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 38). Hurbinek “cannot bear witness, since he does not have language” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 39), thereby embodying what seems an empirical impossibility of bearing witness to his own story that re-mains untold. However, beyond the actual impossibility of testifying, the sound uttered by the child Hurbinek is to be grasped as non-language “to which lan-guage answers, in which language is born” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 38). What precisely is this non-language, this language of sound but no sense whose semantic register is empty and absent? It seems that non-language here captures what Agamben conceptualized in an earlier text called Infancy and History (1993 [1978]) as the experience of infancy. Although infancy as an experience of speechlessness might suggest that infancy signifies primarily a kind of chronological stage that “one could undergo once and for all, the con-

Erik Vogt 180

text in which Agamben develops his notion of non-language suggests rather that non-language/infancy conditions the very possibility of taking up the position of speaking subject in any moment of speaking” (Mills 2008: 25).2 Against the central claim of an ancient tradition, according to which the human being is the animal which has language, Agamben asserts not only that the human being, deprived from language, receiving it thus from elsewhere, from outside, is born (in-)capable of speech, but that this condition of infancy inhabits every utter-ance; thus, infancy is internal to the very process of acquiring language – it “coexists with language and is expropriated by it in the moment of the appro-priation of language in discourse” (Mills 2008: 25). Infancy, the impossibility of speech or non-language, suggests thus not some kind of ineffable that cannot be articulated in speech; rather, it reveals that the human being is a speaking being precisely because, in contrast to animals, it is capable of not having language, of “its own in-fancy” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 146). Interlacing these two impossibilities – the impossibility for the survivor to serve as witness and the transcendental impossibility that seems to emerge from instances of non-articulation, of a non-language somehow concealed by or with-drawn from an already established language – Agamben then writes: “The lan-guage of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signify-ing, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance – that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition can-not bear witness” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 39). Agamben proceeds to elaborate further on the first of the two impossibilities of bearing witness by addressing the Muselmann as the one to whom no one has borne witness. He quotes several documents regarding the Muselmann that all seem to mark him as a zone of indistinction where all traditional distinctions between man and non-man, life and death, human and inhuman, have collapsed. “Walking corpses”, “living dead”, and “mummy-men”, the Muselmaenner [Muslims] occupied the point at which human beings, “while apparently re-maining human beings, cease to be human” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 55). However, against any facile exclusion of the Muselmann from humanity that leaves humanity intact only by committing again the crime of cynically handing over the Muselmann to the realm of monstrosity, indignity, and non-language, Agamben insists on taking into account the Muselmann as the true cipher of Auschwitz (and for an ethics “after Auschwitz”): “The Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 55). The Muselmann makes visible the “unrepresentable singularity” of bare life; a making visible that, however, complicates any easy representation inasmuch as the Muselmann

2 I owe the following insights into Agamben’s notion of infancy to Mills’ book. See also

Leland de la Durantaye (2009: 90–94).


(as well as his/her witness) makes visible nothing other than non-visibility. Thus to bear witness to the Muselmann is to know and see “the impossibility of knowing and seeing” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 54). The structure of testimony has to articulate exactly this non-coincidence of the human and the inhuman: “That precisely this inhuman possibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away – this and nothing else is testimony” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 54). In other words, testimony arises “in the non-coincidental currents of the human and the inhu-man, as the human being’s bearing witness to the inhuman” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 89). Agamben’s text then turns away from the figure of the Muselmann embody-ing the ultimate biopolitical substance of bare life, and toward the figure of the survivor and his “dominant sentiment – shame” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 88). Without going here into the details of Agamben’s account of shame, I would like to quote a passage from Levinas that contains the very definition of shame Agamben appropriates for his own purposes: “What is shameful is our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves. It reveals not our nothingness but the totality of existence. … What shame discovers is the Being that discovers itself” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 105). This overcoming of the “I” by its own passivity, its sensibility, which is at the same time a summoning to its own presence, is then reformulated by Agam-ben in terms of a dialectic of expropriation and appropriation, of desubjectifica-tion and subjectification constitutive of the subject. He writes: “In shame, the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double move-ment, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame” (Agam-ben 1999 [1998]: 106). In other words, shame, “a kind of ontological sentiment that has its place in the encounter between man and Being” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 106), reveals the bipolar structure of subjectivity – desubjectification and subjectification, to be subjected and to be sovereign. This bipolar structure of subjectivity can be identified not only in the origi-nal structure of modern subjectivity that has to be deciphered as auto-affection, an experience of one’s own passivity or receptivity to the second degree, but – and this is what concerns us here primarily – it can also, once a kind of linguis-tic turn is performed concerning the relation of auto-affection, revealed in acts of speech – as we will see shortly, in glossolalia as “absolute desubjectification … of the event of language” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 114). But it can also be identified more generally in structuralist linguistics’ distinction between lan-guage and discourse, insofar as in the latter case the passage from language to discourse is made possible by the very renunciation and silencing of the (psy-chosomatic) individual for the sake of constituting itself as the subject of enun-

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ciation. Once the subject of enunciation occupies the position of enunciation, it realizes that its being silenced does not lead to the possibility of speaking, but rather to its impossibility: it is silent again, however now in the realm of dis-course. Agamben draws the following conclusion: “This can also be expressed by saying that the one who speaks is not the individual, but language; but this means nothing other than an impossibility of speaking has, in an unknown way, come to speech” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 117). Agamben’s difficult reflections on (the event of) language open up the pos-sibility of a rehearsal of the relation between Muselmann and survivor, between the inhuman and the human, within the context of what his phenomenology of testimony has established so far – with the addition that those relations are now reread in light of bearing witness as an expressly linguistic event. That is, the infrastructure of testimony with its poles of Muselmann and survivor, the inhu-man and the human, receives a further inscription: the relation between living being and speaking being. Thus, the survivor (the one with speech) can be said to bear witness to the Muselmann (the one without speech) – however, since the survivor serves as proxy, one would also and at the same time have to say that it is the Muselmann who bears witness: “Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the human, enter into a zone of indistinction” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 120). This “zone of indistinction” necessitates furthermore a rethinking of the relation between the individual living being, its “I”, and language. Put simply, the psychosomatic individual has to erase or desubjectify itself as an individual in its identification with grammatical shifters or pronouns so that the appropria-tion of language can bring about the constitution of the subject in language. Referring to linguistic analyses, cited by Catherine Mills (2008), Agamben ar-gues that

pronouns operate as grammatical shifters, or ‘indicators of enunciation’ that have no substantive reference outside of themselves, but that allow a speaker to appropriate and put language to use. Hence terms such as ‘I’ and ‘you’ indicate an appropriation of language without referring to a reality outside discourse. Instead, their sole reference point is to language itself, and particularly the very taking place of enunciation (Mills 2008: 91).

Thus, the individual does not speak but remains silent; however, not even the subject of enunciation speaks; that is to say, since it exists as grammatical shifter in discourse alone, it always already finds itself anticipated and preceded by a “glossolalic potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 116). Agamben states: “The mode of Being of this ‘I’, the existential status of the speaking-living-being is thus a kind of ontological glossolalia … in which the living being and the speaking being, subjectification


and desubjectification, can never coincide” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 129). This glossolalia is ontological insofar as it characterizes the general relation between life and language, living being and speaking being, subjectification and desub-jectification. This relation is marked by nonidentity, and it is its non-coincidence that, according to Agamben, makes possible testimony. “But precisely this im-possibility of conjoining the living being and language … the inhuman and the human … is what allows for testimony. The intimacy that betrays our non-coincidence with ourselves is the place of testimony. Testimony takes place in the non-place of articulation” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 130). The disjuncture between the human as living being and as speaking being provides, in other words, the condition of possibility of testi-mony; testimony reveals that the “place of the human being is divided ... the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 130). Silence and speech, the inhuman and the human, are located in a zone of indistinction in which they relate to each other in terms of a non-coincidence. And precisely the implications of this non-coincidence, as the condition for the possibility of both witness and testimony, are to be elaborated further in the direction of the question of survival, on the one hand, and of the relation be-tween the sayable and the unsayable on the other hand. As to the question of survival, Agamben regards the non-coincidence be-tween the human and the inhuman in terms of a caesura “that can transform life into survival and all survival into life” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 133). While this caesura casts some more light on the relation between the Muselmann and the survivor – the Muselmann as the inhuman capacity to survive the human; the survivor as the one who survives the inhuman – it fully illuminates Levi’s para-doxical statement, according to which “they, the Muselmaenner, the drowned, are the complete witness”. This is how Agamben now translates Levi’s paradox: “The human being is the inhuman; the one whose humanity is completely de-stroyed is the one who is truly human” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 133). It is pre-cisely because of this non-coincidence between the human and the inhuman, their nonidentity, that the complete destruction of humanity bears witness to the impossibility to fully destroy the human, that is, to a remainder: the witness. And this indestructibility of the human has nothing whatsoever to do with some supposed human substance or essence, but rather brings to the fore a certain potentiality. A structurally similar argument brings to light a certain potentiality in lan-guage. The non-coincidence between language and its taking place, between the pure possibility of speaking and its existence as such, allows Agamben to dis-cern a caesura within language as potentiality of speech that “divides it into a possibility and an impossibility, into a potentiality and an impotentiality”

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(Agamben 1999 [1998]: 145). Impotentiality is not to be understood, however, as the opposite of potentiality, but as something that is retained within it as its very enabling condition, that is, as “contingency, as capacity not to be” (Agam-ben 1999 [1998]: 145). Here one can discern how the relation between testi-mony and witness and the relation between language and human being in gen-eral are related to each other: both the witness’s possibility of bearing witness, of giving testimony, and the human subject’s possibility of speaking are grounded in contingency as the “event of a potentiality as the giving of a cae-sura to be and a capacity not to be. In language, this giving has the form of sub-jectivity. Contingency is possibility put to the test of a subject” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 146). This dialectic of subjectification and desubjectification constituting subjec-tivity has therefore to be reformulated in terms of the “ontological operators” of possibility, impossibility, contingency, and necessity. Briefly, while possibility and contingency are the operators of subjectification – they allow for the consti-tution of “my” world – impossibility and necessity function as the operators of desubjectification bringing about the destitution and destruction of the subject, thus marking off a world that is not “mine”. Read in light of those ontological operators, the historical fate of the subject at Auschwitz can thus be described in terms of a rupture within the dialectic of subjectification and desubjectification, insofar as Auschwitz is to be deciphered as “the existence of the impossible, the most radical negation of contingency; it is, therefore, absolute necessity” Agamben 1999 [1998]: 148). This absolute necessity is nothing other than the fully realized, physically silenced and silent absolute biopolitical substance – mere survival cut off completely from life – whose cipher is the Muselmann. Hence the urgency of testimony, if the Musel-maenner are no longer to be kept in the very isolation the Nazis imposed upon them. How then can there be testimony to Auschwitz? That is, what preserves a link between Auschwitz and language so that one can bear witness to the event Auschwitz? It is at this point that Agamben introduces the third and deci-sive meaning of “witness”, by means of an etymological interpretation of the term auctor, “author”. (Towards the beginning of his text, he already examined both two Latin words for “witness” – terstis and superstes – as well as the Greek word for “witness” – martis). Agamben demonstrates that the Latin auc-tor, which he takes to be, above all, “the completion of an imperfect act”, con-tains within itself the meanings of advisor, seller, and witness. Auctor signifies the authorization of something that, without it, would remain incomplete and invalid. At the same time, this specific meaning of “author” has nothing what-soever to with the fantasy of creatio ex nihilo: “authorship” in this sense is rather always “co-authorship” since it presupposes something preexisting that


can then be authorized. In short, the author as co-author takes on the function of the witness completing and rendering valid some lack or insufficiency, while at the same time this function of witnessing remains dependent on that which pre-cedes it, that which provides it with its meaning. This mutual dependence, this being coextensive of survivor (the one who can witness) and Muselmann (the one who cannot bear witness), can thus be summarized in the following manner: “The survivor and the Muselmann, like the tutor and the incapable person and the creator and his material, are inseparable; their unity-difference alone consti-tutes testimony” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 150). It is this division and inseparability of survivor and Muselmann that testi-mony bears witness to, insofar as it attests to the incapacity of the Muselmann to speak other than through the survivor who, in his speaking, attest precisely to the impossibility of speaking. What is more, testimony as bearing witness to the impossibility of witnessing maintains not only the link between inhuman and human, living being and speaking being, that the isolationism of biopolitics attempts to disrupt once for all, but, in giving voice to what it refuses language, to what is an impossibility of speaking, it renders, against negationism, the proof of Auschwitz:

Let us, indeed, posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness. If the witness bears witness for the Muselmann, if he succeeds in bringing to speech an impossibility of speech … then the denial of Auschwitz is refuted in its very foundation. … If the survivor … speaks only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz – that to which it is not possible to bear witness – is absolutely and irrefutably proven (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 164).

Agamben’s meditations on the status of testimony “to” and “after” Ausch-witz testify to an incessant vigilance regarding any construction of Auschwitz in terms of a speculative philosophy of history, with its surreptitious claim that life “at” and “after” Auschwitz could still be narrated in a meaningful manner. Against any variation on a philosophical theodicy, Auschwitz appears rather as a kind of negative theodicy: that is, Auschwitz resists affirmative thinking tout court, both in its transcendent and in its historical version. It is neither meta-physically nor epistemologically nor theologically privileged – hence Agam-ben’s warning that Auschwitz must not be made to disappear under the topic of “unsayability”, for this very move fails to recognize Auschwitz in its exemplar-ity – nor is it simply to be subsumed under and included into some progressivist and continuist conception of the historical evolution of humanity, for the latter entails at least implicitly that Auschwitz has somehow already been overcome. This, however, does not mean that Agamben does not retain some kind of his-torical frame; after all, his historico-genealogical account of the emergence of biopower describes a general historical trend constitutive of European culture.

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But this general historical frame is constantly disrupted by the insistence on discontinuous elements: thus, Agamben employs the dual gesture of construct-ing the history of Auschwitz (the history of the biopolitical production of bare life) and of denying it by means of the conception of testimony. In short, the site of Auschwitz represents both the apotheosis of biopolitics and the turning point toward a different, alternate understanding of the relation between humanity and language. The conundrum thus posed by Auschwitz necessitates the demand to hold together its biopolitical occurrence, its empiri-cal narratives, and the ethics of testimonial language without overlapping them in such a way that the latter would become again a cornerstone upon which a “new” speculative philosophy of history would be erected. Agamben’s thought attempts to respond to this demand by bringing different and heteroge-neous elements and concepts into conjunction with each other around the name “Auschwitz” so as to address and preserve the singularity of that name. Hence what Agamben calls his “perpetual commentary” on testimony might be likened to Saul Friedlander’s description of commentary as “disrupting the facile linear progression of narration, introducing alternative interpretations … withstanding the need for closure” (Friedlander 1993: 132). Nonetheless, a certain tension or oscillation between the transcendental and the historical traverses Agamben’s thought. This can be demonstrated with re-gard to the relation between the human and the inhuman on one hand, and lan-guage as testimony on the other hand. Regarding the first relation, consider the following statement: “The human also endures the non-human. … This means that humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman, that their spirit contains at the very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atro-ciously assigned to its own being capable of everything” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 77). It is in reference to passages like this one that the suspicion arises that the inhuman is not seen as the historical experience of the destruction or dehumanization of the human, as the stripping away of the human, but rather erected as a kind of transcendental marker: the inhuman becomes something like the necessary condition for the possibility of the human that is simultane-ously its impossibility. This suspicion only hardens once it is recalled that it is precisely at this point that Agamben brings into play Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian subjectivity in terms of auto-affection, thereby suggesting that the inhuman constitutes in advance the possibility/impossibility of the human. No longer a social or historical product, it becomes something like an irreducible violence, an imposition that is “always already” the precondition for any hu-manity whatsoever: that is, it becomes a de facto invariant. Moreover, if the experience of the inhuman, of the unbearable physical agony in the historical experience of bodily suffering, is transcendentalized in that manner, the suffering runs the risk of becoming mere abstraction. That is to


say, it becomes extracted from its particular historical site and social context of violence. “Taking the Muselmann in isolation from his or her context” (LaCapra 2007: 137), Agamben’s account never “veers off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain: from the victim to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to the ethical dispositions of those who set upon reducing the human to the inhuman” (Bernstein 2004: 7). That is to say, Agamben removes “from consideration the historical, the political and above all the moral frames through reference to which some understanding of the meaning of the Muselmann might be achieved” (Bernstein 2004: 12). What is more, by transforming the negative element of human experience – suffering – into a constitutive element of humanity, the experience of suffering is not only silenced, but, through its affirmation, it also loses its antithetic char-acter, its capacity to become a turning point with regard (and a resistance) to Auschwitz: transcendentalism as an anaesthetic. This transcendental gesture is repeated by Agamben with regard to the relation between language and history. Recall that “only if language bears witness to something to which it is impossi-ble to bear witness, can a speaking being experience something like a necessity to speak” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 65). The relationship between infancy and speech, the impossibility of speaking and the possibility of speaking, becomes legible for Agamben only in terms of a “transcendental history” that itself cannot be “historicized, because it is itself historicizing, and itself founds the possibility of there being any ‘history’” (Agamben 1993: 50, 49). This means that infancy is “the very transcendental origin of language. … The ineffable is, in reality, infancy. Experience is the mysterion which every individual intuits from the fact of having infancy” (Agamben 1993: 51). Infancy as the transcendental origin of language is at the same time the tran-scendental origin of history. It constitutes the condition of the possibility of language and history. But what is the condition of the possibility for this tran-scendental inquiry? What is the experience that makes possible the transcenden-tal inquiry that is to provide the conditions of the possibility of experience (in-fancy)? Can this experience really be an invariant “ineffable”? And if the his-toricity of this “transcendental history” cannot be historicized, insofar as it is prior to and qualitatively distinct from any merely ontic history, does this imply that Auschwitz, once relegated to ontic history, has left the “ineffable” actually intact? Testimony’s imperative is to maintain the relation between infancy and language, Muselmann and survivor – the relation that is division and insepara-bility, unity-difference. It is to bear witness by bearing witness to the impossi-bility of bearing witness. What or who then brings to speech the impossibility of

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speech? Ultimately, Agamben’s answer is that this is accomplished by the au-thor. But what or who is the author? The obvious response seems to be: language itself. But how precisely is that possible? At this point Agamben’s reflections on language as remainder become pertinent. Recalling Hannah Arendt’s claim that what “remains is the mother tongue”, he sets out his investigation by means of the following two questions: “How can a language survive the subjects and even the people that speak it? And what does it mean to speak in a remaining language?” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 159). Ultimately, both questions receive an affirmative response through an em-phasis on the gift of poetry. Thus, testimony does not only become “the exem-plary modality of the realization of subjectivity ... but also a privileged model of authority and poetry” (Librett 2007: 31). Reinterpreting Hoelderlin’s famous “what remains is what the poets found”, Agamben writes: “Poets – witnesses – found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking” (Agamben 1999 [1998]: 161). The poet is thus the author par excellence, the exemplary witness. It is in and through poetry that one can bear witness to the Muselmann, for, as Agamben suggests in another text, poetry renders exactly this transcendental experience of infancy, the desubjectification and subjectification in the medium of language:

The experience of the poet … affirms that … poetry and life … become absolutely indistinct at the point of their reciprocal desubjectivization. And – at that point – they are united not immediately but in a medium. The medium is language. The poet is he who, in the word, produces life. Life, which the poet produces in the poem, withdraws from both the living experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species (Agamben 1999 [1996]: 93).

Poetic testimony, which has now been revealed as testimony par excellence bearing witness to a transcendental or even metaphysical theory of language, recovers thus both the taking place of a language as the event of subjectivity and poetry’s essential task of authorizing history – a history in which, however, the “specific silence of the Muselmann and his or her specific and extreme suf-fering, as well as the specific and self-acknowledged inadequacy of the survi-vor’s testimony, have been effaced” (Librett 2007: 31). Furthermore, this im-plies in the last instance that Auschwitz is (re-)turned, in a problematic aestheti-cizing gesture, into a testimonial for poetic language’s allegedly uninterrupted transcendental orientation: that is, for its supposed and unbroken continuance as the transcendental and original source for (historical) meaning.


References Agamben, Giorgio 1993 [1978]: Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz

Heron. London & New York, NY: Verso [Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienze e origine della storia. Turin: Einaudi].

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Bernstein, Jay M. 2004: Bare life, bearing witness: Auschwitz and the pornography of horror. Parallax 10 (1), 2–16.

De la Durantaye, Leland 2009: Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques 2005: Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Felman, Shoshana, Dori Laub 1992: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanaly-sis, and History. New York, NY: Routledge.

Friedlander, Saul 1993: Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe. Bloom-ington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Hartman, Geoffrey 2002: The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan.

LaCapra, Dominick 1994: Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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LaCapra, Dominick 2001: Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

LaCapra, Dominick 2007: Approaching limit events: Siting Agamben. In: Matthew Calarco, Steven DeCaroli (eds.) 2007: Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty and Life. Stanford, CA: Stan-ford University Press, 126–162.

Langer, Lawrence 1991: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Librett, Jeffrey 2007: From the sacrifice of the letter to the voice of testimony: Giorgio Agam-ben’s fulfillment of metaphysics. Diacritics 37 (2–3), 11–31.

3 This collection of essays has been first edited in the English translation. Then they have been

published in original Italian, with additional essays (editor’s note: ZW).

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Lyotard, Jean-François 1988 [1983]: The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press [Le Différend. Paris: Éditions de Minuit].

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Vogt, Erik 2005: S/citing the camp. In: Andrew Norris (ed.) 2005: Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Durham: Duke University Press, 74–103.

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