Liesbet, Heyvaert (2000) “Gerundive Nominalization: From Type Specification to Grounded Instance” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 103-121. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Langacker suggests that in a verb group “the specification of tense and modality be analysed as the grounding predication, with the remainder of the group (other auxiliaries and the main verb) regarded as complex clausal head analogous to a head noun.” (1991: 95) – 106

Even though each auxiliary element imposes its own profile on the main verb and thereby derives a higher-order type specification, it is only “the leftmost verb in sequence” (Langacker 1991: 96) which determines the profile of the entire verb group. – 107

action nominals seem to “focus on the event as a physical activity” (e.g. Sam’s washing of the windows was meticulous, Langacker 1991: 32), whereas gerundive nominals seem to imply that the designated events has occurred, that it is a ‘fact’ (e.g. Sam’s washing of the windows was shock to everybody, Langacker 1991: 32) – 118-119

Hampe, Beate (2000) “Facing up to the Meaning of ‘face up to’: A Cognitive Semantico-Pragmatic Analysis of an English Verb-Particle Construction” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 81-101. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

in cognitive grammar terms, in each of these transitive constructions the subject-NP instantiates a trajectory whose ‘active zone’ (the face or front) is situated opposite a landmark which is instantiated by the direct object NP. – 86

It comes as a no surprise that humans can face abstract things the same way as they do concrete objects once the vast and complex conceptual background that is provided by the EVENT-STRUCTURE metaphor is taken for granted. – 86

Sometimes, both literal reading and the reading under the EVENT-STRUCTURE metaphor are simultaneously possible. – 87

the object NPs instantiating the landmark mainly stemmed from the semantic fields of difficulties and problems, indicating that the EVENT-STRUCTURE metaphor indeed provides the basis for the extension of the meaning of ‘to face’. – 87

The particle up in its central sense denotes verticality in oriented physical space, a notion that has arisen out of our bodily experience (of gravity), i.e. the relative position of head and feet to each other when we stand, sit or move. Thus, an experiential correlation exists between verticality and being awake, active and conscious; giving rise to such well-known conceptual metaphors as ACTIVE IS UP, WELL-BEING IS UP, RATIONAL IS UP, CONTROL IS UP. – 89

We can state that the use of up is due to the conceptual metaphor CLOSE IS UP, which captures the experiential fact that things which come closer to an observer rise in his/her visual field, as in: ‘She came up to me.’

any entity approaching another entity being the deictic centre can be seen as coming up the latter. up, therefore, can denote “increasing proximity” or the movement of a trajector to a landmark that is the deictic centre. – 90

Dancygier, Barbara (2000) “How Polish Structure Space: Prepositions, Direction Nouns, Case, and Metaphor” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 27-45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

on is not commonly associated with two-dimensional regions and with concepts such as ‘support’ or ‘attachment’. – 30

spatial construals arise on the basis of information offered by all the relevant subsystems, rather than by any of the system alone. – 30

Athanasiadou, Angeliki & Dirven, Rene (2000) “Pragmatic Conditionals” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997. (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: Pgs. 1- 26. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Very often the term pragmatics is used only in relation to speech acts, but its original meaning, as specified by Charles Morris (1946), is much wider. Morris made the distinction between syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, such that each level involves different relations: syntactics specifies the relations between the signs themselves, semantics specifies the relations between signs and the world, and pragmatics specifies the relations between signs and their users. – 2

Whereas the logical conditionals involve analytical reasoning processes, and as a result the antecedent can only be preposed to the consequent, conversational conditionals involve speech acts in actual discourse or aspects of the discourse such as metalinguistic references to the linguistic choices made by the speakers and the antecedent tends to be postposed. – 5

Berger, Peter L. & Luckman, Thomas (1966) Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books.

Society determines the presence but not the nature of ideas. -  20

human knowledge is given in society as an a priori to individual experience, providing the latter with its order of meaning. This order, although it is relative to a particular socio-historical situation, appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world. Scheler called this ‘relative-natural worldview’ of a society. – 20

Weber observes: ‘Both for the sociology in the present sense, and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action. – 30

Every name implies a nomenclature, which in turn implies a designated social location. To be given an identity involves being assigned a specific place in the world. As this identity is subjectively appropriated by the child, so is the world to which this identity points. Subjective appropriation of identity and subjective appropriation of the social world are merely different aspects of the same process of internalization, mediated by the same significant others. – 152

two general types of reality maintenance – routine maintenance and crisis maintenance. The former is designed to maintain the internalized reality in everyday life, the latter in situations of crisis. – 168

It would, therefore, be a mistake to assume that only significant others serve to maintain subjective reality. But significant others occupy a central position in the economy of reality-maintenance. They are particularly important for the ongoing confirmation of that crucial element of reality we call identity. – 170

The significant others in the individual’s life are the principal agents for the maintenance of his subjective reality. Less significant others functions as a sort of chorus. – 170

The relation between the significant others and the ‘chorus’ in reality-maintenance is a dialectical one; that is, they interact with each other as well as with the subjective reality they serve to confirm. A solidly negative identification on the part of the wider milieu may eventually affect the identification offered by the significant others. – 171

the significant others may eventually have an effect on the wider milieu – a ‘loyal’ wife can be an asset in several ways as the individual seeks to get across a certain identity to his business associates. Reality-maintenance and reality-confirmation thus involve the totality of the individual’s social situation, though the significant others occupy a privileged position in these processes. – 171

language objectifies the world, transforming the panta rhei of experience into a cohesive order. In the establishment of this order language realizes a world, in the double sense of apprehending and producing it. Conversation is the actualizing of this realizing efficiency of language in the face-to-face situations of individual existence. In conversation the objectification of language become objects of individual consciousness. Thus the fundamental reality-maintaining fact is the continuing use of the same language to objectify unfolding biographical experience. In the widest sense, all who employ this same language are reality-maintaining others. – 173

Eagleton, Terry "Literary Theory: An Introduction"

phenomenological criticism aims instead at a wholly ‘immanent’ reading of the text, totally unaffected by anything outside of it. – 51

Lakoff, George (2004) Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressive. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing

When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. – 03

When you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame – and it won’t be the frame you want. – 03

Framing is about language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary – and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas. – 04

A do-gooder is someone who is trying to help someone else rather than herself and is getting in the way of those who are pursuing their self-interest. Do-gooders screw up the system. – 08

To be accepted, the truth must fit people’s frames. If the facts do not fit the frame, the frames stays and the facts bounce off. – 17

Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. – 17

If you keep their language and their framing and just argue against it, you lose from your perspective. – 33

Each of us, in the premotor cortex of our brains, has what one called mirror neurons. Such neurons fire either we perform an action or when we see the same action performed by someone else. There are connections from that part of the brain to the emotional centers. Such neural circuits are believed to be basis of empathy. – 54

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors – conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and facts ignored. - 73

Reframing is not just about words and language. Reframing is about ideas. The ideas have to be place in people’s brains before the sound bite can make any sense. – 105

Hazel, Don (2004) “Introduction” in Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressive. By George Lakoff: xi-xiv. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing

 And when you control the language, you control the message, and the corporate media does the rest. – xii

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. – xv

All words are defined relative to conceptual frames. When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain. – xv

Pinker, Steven (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New Delhi: Penguin Books

Preface

This is not going to be one of those books that says everything is generic: it isn’t. The environment is just as important as the genes. – 12

Part 1: The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

The blank slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. – 21

Chapter 1: The Official Theory

Chapter 2: Silly Putty

There is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of English language and compare it with others: it seems to be positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of the grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it… Otto Jespersen (1905) – 29

Berkley formulated the theory of idealism, the notion that ideas, not bodies and other hunks of matter, are the ultimate constituents of reality. – 35 (23)

Idealism allowed Boas to lay a new intellectual foundation for egalitarianism. The differences among human races and ethnic groups; he proposed, come not from their physical constitution but from their culture, a system of ideas and values spread by language and other forms of social behavior. Peoples differ because their cultures differ. – 35 (23)

Boas wrote, “I claim that, unless the contrary can be proved, we must assume that all complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary.” – 35 (23)

Boas showed that languages of primitive peoples were not simpler than those of Europeans; they were just different. Eskimos’ difficulty in discriminating the sounds of our language, for example, is matched by our difficulty in discriminating the sounds of theirs. True, many non-western languages lack the means to express certain abstract concepts.  They may have no words for numbers higher than three, for example, or no word for goodness in general as opposed to goodness of a particular person. But those limitations simply reflect the daily needs of those people as they live their lives, not an infirmity in their mental abilities. – 35-36 (23-24)

Boas’s students insisted not just that differences among ethnic groups must be explained in terms of culture but that every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture. – 36 (24)

Emile Durkheim – “The determining causes of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.” – 36 (24)

The Last Wall to Fall

The first bridge between biology and culture is the science of mind, cognitive science. – 43 (32)

Here are five ideas from the cognitive revolution that have revamped how we think and talk about minds. – 43 (32)

The first idea: The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback. – 43 (32)

A second idea: The mind cannot be blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. – 45 (35)

A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. – 45 (35)

Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures. - 48 (37)

Humans speak some six thousand mutually unintelligible languages. Nonetheless, the grammatical programs in their minds differ far less than the actual speech coming out of their mouths. – 48 (37)

A fifth idea: The mind is complex system composed of many interacting parts. – 50 (40)

Spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or thousands of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention. – 61 (54)

Culture Vultures

Experiment show that one-and-a-half-year-old babies are not associationists who connect overlapping events indiscriminately. They are intuitive psychologists who psych out other people’s intentions before copying what they do. – 68 (63)

Our minds, then, are filled with mechanism designed to read the goals of other people so we can copy their intended acts. – 69 (64)

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak out. – 76 (72)

The Slate’s Last Stand

In a section called “Connectoplasm” in How the Mind Works, I laid out some simple logical relationship that underlie our understanding of complete thought (such as the meaning of a sentence) but that are difficult to represent in generic networks. One is the distinction between a kind and an individual: between ducks in general and this duck in particular. - 83 (81)

A second talent is compositionality: the ability to entertain a new, complex thought that is not just a sum of the simple thoughts composing it but depends on their relationships. – 84 (81)

A third logical talent is quantification (or the building of variables): the difference between fooling some of the people all of the time and fooling all of the people some of the time. – 84 (81)

A fourth is recursion: the ability to embed one thought inside another, so that we can entertain not only the thought that Elvis lives, but the thought that the National Enquirer reported that Elvis lives, that some people believe the National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, that it is amazing that some people believe that the National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, and so on. – 84 (81)

A final elusive talent is our ability to engage in categorical, as opposed to fuzzy, reasoning: to understand that Bob Dylan is a grandfather, eventhough he is not very grandfatherly, or that shrews are not rodents, though they look just like mice. – 84 (81)

The Holy Trinity

The Fear of Determinism

The Fear of Nihilism

Part IV: Know Thyself

In Touch with Reality

“We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory!” – Benjamin Lee Whorf – (208-209)

Ihara, Hiroko & Fujita, Ikuyo (2000) “A Cognitive Approach to Errors in Case Marking in Japanese Agrammatism: The Priority of Goal ­–ni over the Source –kara” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 123-140. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Agrammatism is a syndrome that occurs in aphasia by brain damage. It is generally admitted that one of its characteristic is the omission of, or errors in, function words. – 123

In Japanese agrammatism, case particles are very often omitted or incorrect case particles are sometimes substituted for them in spontaneous speech. – 123

The aim of this paper is to show that the priority of the dative –ni representing the goal role over the ablative –kara representing the source role in the sentences produced by Japanese agrammatic patients is in accord with the goal orientedness observes pervasively in human language. – 123

It also aims to show that the priority of the dative –ni can be explained using the notion of action chain proposed in Langacker (1991) – 123

2. Outline of case particle in Japanese

Japanese is an SOV language and grammatical and semantic relations between a predicate and its participants are in principle realized as case particles placed after hours. – 123

[in Japanese] word order is relatively free except for the position of verbs. – 123

the nominative –ga and the accusative –o indicate that the accompanying nouns are the subject and the object of the sentence respectively. The other case particles represent semantic roles. As far as transfer-of-possession verbs are concerned, the dative –ni in principle represents the goal in GIVE-type verbs and the ablative –kara represents the source role in RECEIVE-type verbs. – 124

the dative –ni can be substituted for the ablative ­–kara with a limited number of RECEIVE-type verbs. – 124

3. Characteristics of agrammatism

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage after a language has been acquired, and agrammatism is one kind of aphasic syndrome. It very often overlaps with one traditionally classified type of aphasia known as Broca’s, “resulting from a lesion of the anterior part of language zone of the dominant (in most cases) left hemishphere” (Tonkonogy 1986: 53). The characteristics of agrammatism are speaking effortfully with phonemic distortion and producing sentences with minimal syntactic structure (Schwartz et al. 1987). It is also generally agreed that one of the characteristics is the omission of or misselection of grammatical markers and function words. (Caramazza & Berndt 1985; Linebarger 1990). 124-125

In the case of Japanese agrammatism, it is reported that in spontaneous speech case particles are frequently omitted and sometimes substituted, and in elicited speech case particles are very often substituted. – 125

4. Experiments and results

4.1 Experiment

Purpose: To see whether there is any difference between the rates of errors made in supplying the dative –ni and the ablative ­–kara by agrammatic aphasics as far as transfer-of-possession verbs are concerned, and how the errors are made. – 125

Materials: A picture description task was used. – 125

Procedure: The subjects were asked to describe each picture orally in a complete sentence, using a given verb. – 125

Subjects: Three Broca’s aphasics, and two normal controls served as the subjects of the study. All the subjects were native speakers of Japanese. The aphasic patients were all right-handed, had lesions in the left hemisphere. – 125

4.2 Results:

It shows that the rate of the dative ­–ni correctly supplied is significantly higher than that of the ablative ­–kara correctly supplied. – 125

1. There is a significant difference between the rate of the goal –ni correctly supplied and that of the source –kara correctly supplied.

2. When –kara is not produced, in most cases either ­–ni or –ga is substituted for –kara incorrectly. – 127

5. Discussion

5.1 Goal-orientedness

The results show a tendency for the goal –ni to have priority over the source –kara in sentences produced by agrammatic aphasics. – 127

The priority of goal –ni over the source –kara can be pervasively observed in Japanese, and similar phenomena showing goal-orientedness can be observed in other languages. – 128

According to Nishida (1977), -kara was used as a case particle representing the source in the Heian period (794-1192) but –yori was more frequently used at that time. It was after the Muromachi period (1338-1573) that –kara was more frequently used as a source marker. On the other hand, -ni was used as the goal marker as early as the Nara period (710-794), but it was not used as the source marker until the middle of the Edo period (1603-1867) as far as we surveyed. This historican phenomenon suggests a strong possibility that the goal marker –ni has been substituted for the source marker ­–kara. -131

5.2 Explanation

It is clear that the asymmetry between the goal –ni and the source –kara observed in the sentences produced by agrammatic aphasics is not aberrant but is one of the linguistic phenomena showing goal orientedness. – 132

According to Langacker’s billiard-ball model (Langacker 1991), the world is viewed as a space full of physical objects making contact with one another. Some objects move driven by energy from internal sources, while others put themselves in motion with energy coming from outside. When one object makes physical contact with another object as a result of motion, energy is transmitted from the moving object to the other one, which may then be put in motion. – 132

Goal-orientedness boils down to the way verbs with the goal marker are conceptualized: their conceptualization is in accord with an action chain in terms of flow. – 133

GIVE-type   -ga                    -o                    -ni Subject            Object           Goal            Perspective Prototypical

RECEIVE-type   -kara                   -o                    -ga Source            Object              Subject            Perspective Non – prototypical -134

The head of the action chain is intrinsically salient because it serves as the starting point with respect to energy flow. On the other hand, the subject can be defined as the most prominent participant in a selected predication according to the cognitive point of view. Therefore, the prototypical subject represents the starting point of an action chain. – 133

In the case of GIVE-type verbs, the subject represents the giver, who is the starting point of an action chain. On the other hand, in the case of RECEIVE-type verbs, the subject represents the receiver, who is the tail of an action chain. Therefore, the –ga that represents the subject of GIVE-type verb is prototypical and the –ga that represents the subject of RECEIVE-type verbs is nonprototypical. – 133

The results of the experiment where –ni was supplied correctly in all cases, while –kara was supplied correctly only in one case reflects the prototypicality of –ga, -o, -ni and the nonprototypicality of ­–ga, -o, -kara. In other words, the prototypical case-marking se t is preserved or reconstructed in agrammatism. - 134

-ga or –ni may be substituted for ­–kara when –kara is not correctly produced. In the case of the substitution of –ga for –kara, -ga representing the subject erroneously assigned to the head of an action chain for RECEIVE­-type verbs, which assign the subject to the tail. – 134

6. Concluding remarks