Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin, and Mark Turner
1 Introduction
The edited volume resulting from the first Conference on Conceptual
Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL) states that the intention
of the conference was to bring together researchers from both
cognitive and functional perspectives (Goldberg, 1996). This is an excellent goal.
Both cognitive and functional (or usage-based) approaches share the
assumption that language happens within a social and conceptual
context, and that grammar is motivated by use. Cognitive approaches
force us to confront the fact that language is part of general
cognition, while usage-based approaches keep us grounded in the real
phenomena of language. Bringing the two approaches together has
resulted in powerful demonstrations of the value of taking real
language data and building towards a theoretical framework that has
explanatory power (witness the success of construction grammar).
The CSDL conference has a special status for two of the editors of the
volume: CSDL-5 was the first academic conference they attended, and
the unified approach to language they found there deeply inspired them
both. The tenth conference is now approaching, and the field of
linguistics has changed substantially since the inaugural meeting in
1995. It is therefore worth considering the extent to which the
original goal has been achieved, whether it has shifted, and what it
should be for future conferences. In this preface, we will describe
the themes that link the papers in this particular volume, but we will
also reflect on the future of this conference.
2 Changes in the field of linguistics that affect CSDL
The first CSDL conference—at which one of the editors of the current
volume spoke—occurred in 1994, in San Diego. In that era, the
International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) was still
relatively new: ICLA was established during a conference held in 1989
in Germany. That conference was retroactively named the first ICLC,
but the first conference announced as a conference of the ICLA was
held in 1991, in Santa Cruz, California. In the 1990s, there were few
venues in which to present research that was still seen as
non-traditional and often marginal. Cognitive linguistics is now a
thriving approach to the study of language. Fredrick Newmeyer's (2003)
paper in Language explicitly points out that a shift has taken place
in the field towards cognitive and usage-based approaches, and that
this shift has been welcomed by other disciplines, especially
psychology. The size of the ICLA conference (ICLC) and the diversity
of research presented there both testify to the success of the
cognitive approach.
One consequence of the success of cognitive linguistics in general,
however, is that CSDL—ostensibly a union of cognitive and functional
approaches—has become in effect the North American ICLC. In 2005, the
Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Association (CSDLA)
became an affiliate of the International Cognitive Linguistics
Association, in recognition of the fact that CSDL is a major forum for
presentation of cognitive linguistic research.
Cognitive and functional, or usage-based, approaches are naturally
allied. Indeed, it may be difficult to separate them. However,
members of the CSDL research community should consider whether
usage-based approaches are still fully represented at CSDL, and
whether this unique feature of the conference should be
prioritized. If cognitive linguists are no longer being exposed to
research from a functional and usage-based approach, cognitive
approaches increasingly run the risk of overlooking any number of
significant facts about language as it is used, relying on potentially
misleading or incomplete data, and losing sight of the range and
sources of linguistic variation.
CSDL has been affected by a second shift within the field of
linguistics: a movement towards the development and inclusion of
methods for conducting laboratory experiments. The principal method of
science is theory—that is, generalization over data. The data must be
empirical, rather than imaginary. Science requires a second,
all-important, empirical step: the worth of the scientific theory is
to be determined by how well it captures data not used in the
development of the theory, including data that do not yet exist. For
most of science—astronomy, geology, evolutionary descent of
species—data are robustly available, in what are by definition
ecologically valid environments, and they can be gathered. Coming up
with good generalizations—Newton's laws of motion, for example—is the
crucial step. Scientific generalization over language data was very
nearly the exclusive method used by early cognitive linguistics. But
experiments are necessary to elicit data that are not plainly and
indisputably available, and to help us choose between well-thought-out
theories whose implications conflict on points for which there is no
suitable naturally-occurring data to support one over the other. In
choosing Einstein's mechanics over Newton's, we point to the orbit of
Mercury: data gathered, but not from an experiment.
Recently in cognitive linguistics, the method of scientific
generalization-and-evaluation has come to be supplemented with methods
for conducting laboratory experiments. This marriage of experimental
procedures with methods of scientific generalization has been
fruitful. The use of methods from psycholinguistics to evaluate
theoretical frameworks has provided further evidence that cognitive
approaches are on the right track. As always, it is a struggle to keep
the laboratory experiments free of the standard weaknesses:
experimenter effects, elicitation via abnormal affordances in the
laboratory, invalid linguistic environments, invalid motivational
structures for subjects, inadequate statistical measures, and so
on. It seems to us that cognitive linguistics has embraced the need to
design laboratory experiments in ways that finesse or at least manage
these potential limitations.
Experimental procedures are only one tool for doing research, and
don't provide the only answer to a question. They can lead to, as
Wallace Chafe puts it, "...a preoccupation with unnatural data and
disregard for even the most obvious properties of conscious
experience" (1994, p. 20). A shift towards experimental methods may
also have the effect of alienating those who use observational
methods, collect naturalistic data, or whose research centers on case
studies or detailed analyses of small samples of language, and such
researchers may be less likely to submit papers to CSDL.
Functional and usage based approaches have a long tradition of using
empirical methods, particularly in corpus studies, and there have been
many exciting advances in corpus linguistics in recent years. However,
corpus studies may induce a focus on data—which are themselves
inert—rather than theory. The laudable advances in statistical
analysis that characterize some of the best recent work in corpus
linguistics may also threaten to eclipse qualitative methodologies,
which provide important information about sociological and dialectical
variation, as well as other contextual factors affecting language use
and structure.
What cognitive linguistics needs above all is the work of good minds,
engaged in active, intelligent research and in conversation with one
another. It will be so much the better if these good minds have
available to them as many methods as possible for testing their
thoughts. In our view, cognitive linguistics currently has the
opportunity to pursue an integration of good theoretical,
quantitative, qualitative, and experimental research, the whole being
stronger than the parts, and cognitive linguistics in the current
moment is engaged with the framework for this integration.
3 Recommendations
The goal of uniting cognitive and functional or usage-based approaches
is a worthy one. Concrete steps can be taken to prioritize this goal,
and we believe these efforts would have a salutary effect on both the
organization and future research.
It is noteworthy that CSDL 8, 9, and 10 will all have been hosted in
departments of cognitive science. Hosting the conference in a
department of linguistics might encourage a balance in the
representation of different methods, including both theoretical and
quantitative work. In addition, the call for papers should explicitly
note the goal of the conference, and should include the phrase
usage-based. It has been absent in recent years, including the call
for papers circulated by the current editors. Finally, at the time of
this writing, the proposal for the next CSDL indicates that the
conference will center on experimental methods. Such a conference
would be an asset to the field, as it would help to ensure that
researchers interested in exploring those methods have an opportunity
for training. However, it might be of value to the field as a whole to
have a future conference that provides training and focus on
non-experimental methods. These methods are at the heart of our
field.
4 This volume
The ninth conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language
was held October 18-20, 2008, at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio, under the theme "Meaning, Form, and Body." It focused
on two central, related research areas in the study of language. The
first is the integration of form and meaning, and the second is the
relationship between language and the human body—topics that intersect
naturally, as in the study of grammatical constructions, conceptual
integration, and gesture.
An obvious starting point for a volume that proposes to say something
meaningful about the relationship between language and bodies is an
investigation into the relationship between linguistic representations
and perceptual experience. This collection thus begins, in its first
chapter, with a vigorous argument that direct perceptual simulation
indeed plays a pervasive and fundamental role in all language
comprehension. Sarah Anderson and her collaborators present several
pieces of experimental evidence for sensorimotor involvement in the
processing of even the seemingly amodal linguistic operator of
negation. Moving in the opposite direction, Caleb Everett's study of
event classification in speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Karitiâna
provides evidence for the effect that grammatical categories can have
on speakers' perception of objects in the world.
The construction of linguistic perspective is another tantalizing
arena for exploring the importance of embodied experience for meaning
construction and linguistic structure. In his chapter, Adam Głaz
argues that Vantage Theory, which connects linguistic behavior to
speakers' fundamental embodied experience of their own orientation in
space and time, can serve as a psychologically plausible and useful
approach to this phenomenon. His analysis extends Vantage Theory's
range of application beyond its original confines of color
categorization and brings it to bear on the rhetoric of political
discourse.
The bodies of speakers play complicated roles in two papers that
investigate the boundaries and interactions between "gestural" and
"linguistic" performance in the same communicative modality. The
studies presented in Marcus Perlman's chapter suggest that speech rate
often functions as an iconic vocal gesture accompanying (indeed,
inseparable from) speech, perhaps arising from underlying sensorimotor
simulations. Leland McCleary and Evani Viotti, meanwhile, analyze an
extended narrative in Brazilian Sign Language and argue that
idiosyncratic, gestural, or otherwise non-verbal elements play a
larger role in signed discourse than generally recognized in the
linguistics literature. The body tells secrets the conscious mind does
not know in Svetlana Gorokhova's study of slips of the tongue, in
which linguistic performance may provide unexpected clues about the
activation processes that lie behind language production as well as
language comprehension. Finally, the body also takes center stage in
Judit Simo's cross-linguistic study of body part metaphors in
Hungarian and American writing about chess, an unusually thorough and
detailed catalog of metaphors in which the human body serves as the
source domain.
The study of metaphor and metaphoric blends continues to figure
prominently in the research represented at both the CSDL conference
and in this volume: Vito Evola examines the idiosyncratic use of
conceptual metaphors in the speech and gesture of two individuals
discussing their personal religious beliefs. Anna Pleshakova provides
a conceptual blending account of a recently emergent and wildly
popular metaphor used in Russian media to refer to corrupt officers of
law enforcement agencies, "werewolves in epaulettes." At the border of
the blending-metaphor interface, Karen Sullivan and Eve Sweetser
address the long-standing question of when, and whether, "Generic is
Specific" blends should be considered metaphors at all. Vera Tobin's
analysis of English constructions for expressing causation and change
also makes use of blending theory, though its focus is on conceptual
compression, rather than the relationship between metaphors and
blends.
Other cognitive accounts of individual constructions make up a
significant portion of this collection. Ron Langacker's analysis of
the construction day after day extends a discussion he began, in
brief, over ten years ago. This detailed account deploys the tools of
Cognitive Grammar to demonstrate how a construction can indeed fit
into the general patterns that characterize English grammar, despite
defying the apparent constraints of constituent structure. Carol Moder
and Naoki Otani, in two separate chapters, also consider sets of
constructions in English, both from a usage-based standpoint. Moder's
chapter takes on expressions using like to introduce a noun phrase,
observing that previous accounts in cognitive linguistics have placed
an emphasis on metaphoric uses that is not borne out by the relative
frequency of these uses in natural language (making her paper an
interesting and useful counterpoint to the several papers on metaphor
in this volume). Otani discusses discourse-organizing functions of the
particle aside, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative
corpus analysis to put together an account of the grammaticalization
of these constructions in contemporary American English.
Several other papers take a similarly close look at lexical items in
languages other than English. Tuomas Huumo and Jari Sivonen present
the case of the Finnish deictic verbs tulla ("come") and mennä ("go"),
and their complicated, only partially metaphorically motivated,
historical extension to abstract senses. Nina Yoshida considers
another closely linked pair of lexical items, Japanese mono and koto,
and their semantic extensions in constructions marking deontic and
epistemic stance. Hélène Mazaleyrat and Audrey Rudel discuss the
French adjective curieux, the conceptual motivations for its different
primary senses, and its sensitivity to different constructional
contexts. Takeshi Koguma's chapter proposes a new account of
nominative/genitive conversion in Japanese, using Cognitive Grammar to
explain both historical phenomena and existing constraints in a single
framework.
5 Procedural details
Proposals to present a paper at the conference were submitted to a
process of selection governed by blind peer review. After the
conference, presenters were invited to submit their papers to a
process of selection for inclusion in this volume, also governed by
blind peer review. This volume is the result of those successive
processes.
References
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and
Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking
and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A. (Ed.). (1996). Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and
Language. Stanford: CSLI.
Newmeyer, F. J. (2003). Grammar is grammar
and usage is usage. Language, 79(4), 682-707.
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