Another construal operation in cognitive linguistics is regarded to be perspective, in which we view a scene in terms of our situatedness.
Deixis [ˈdaiksis] 定冠词、指示代词等 involves linguistic forms that point at something from the speech situation. In cognitive terms, deixis is the use of elements of subject’s situatedness to designate指明something in the scene. There are many other types of deixis: person deixis; social deixis; textual/discursive deixis.
= Categorization范畴化
Categorization is the process of classifying our experiences into different categories based on commonalities and differences. Categorization is a major ingredient in the creation of human knowledge, and it allows us to relate present experiences to past ones. There are three levels in categories: the basic level, the superordinate level, and the subordinate level.
Ÿ Basic level
The categories at the Basic Level are those that are most culturally salient and are required to fulfill our cognitive needs the best. This is the level where we perceive the most differences between “objects” in the world. The information on our interactions with objects in the real world are stored at this level, which means that it is at this level that we conjure up 凭幻想(或用魔法)做出the general gestalt [ɡəˈʃtɑ:lt] 完全形态of the category.
Ÿ Superordinate level
Superordinate categories are the most general ones. The idea is that you actually borrow some features from a basic level category and apply them to the superordinate category. To you the features that you’ve borrowed might seem representative of the entire superordinate category, but in fact they are very small proportion of its members.
Ÿ Subordinate level
At this level we perceive the differences between the members of the basic level categories.
= Image Schemas
Mark Johnson (1987) proposes Image Schemas. He defines an image schema as a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience.
Image schematic structures have two characters: they are pre-conceptual schematic structures emerging from our bodily experience and they are constantly operating in our perceptual interaction, bodily movement through space, and physical manipulation of objects. Image schemas exist at a level of abstraction; operate at a level of mental organization.
Ÿ A center-periphery schema
Ÿ A containment schema
Ÿ A cycle schema
Ÿ A force schema
Ÿ A link schema
Ÿ A part-whole schema
Ÿ A path schema
Ÿ A scale schema
Ÿ A verticality schema
= Metaphor
Metaphor involves the comparison of two concepts in that one is construed in terms of the other. It’s often described in terms of a target Domain and a Source Domain. The target domain is the experience being described by the metaphor and the source domain is the means that we use in order to describe the experience.
For Example: we’re wasting our time here.
This sentence is based on a metaphor “Time is Money” in which the target domain, TIME, is conceptualized in terms of the source domain of MONEY.
Lakoff and Johnson classify conceptual metaphors into three categories: ontological metaphors, structural metaphors and orientational metaphors.
Ÿ Ontological metaphors 实体隐喻
Ontological metaphor means that human experience with physical objects provide the basis for ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc, as entities and substances.
Take the experience of rising prices as an example, which can be metaphorically viewed as an entity via the noun inflation. This gives us a way to refer to experience: Inflation is an entity.
In this case, regarding inflation as an entity allows human beings to refer to it, quantify it, identify it, treat it as a case, act with respect to it, and even believe that we understand it.
Ÿ Structural metaphors
Structural metaphor plays the most important role because it allows us to go beyond orientation and referring and gives us the possibility to structure one concept according to another.
For example, Argument is war. leads to English expression like “He attacked every weak point in my argument.” And many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.
Ÿ Orientational metaphors
Orientational metaphor gives a concept a spatial orientation. They are characterized by a co-occurrence in our experience. The orientational metaphors are grounded in an experiential basis, which link together the two parts of the metaphor.
For example, More is up; Sad is down.
Orientational metaphors are based on human physical and cultural experience. From many examples, we can see that drooping posture typically goes along with sadness and depression, erect posture with a positive state.
= Metonymy
Metonymy, in cognitive linguistics, is defined as a cognitive process in which the vehicle provides mental access to the target within the same domain.
= Blending Theory
Fauconnier & Turner propose and discuss Blending or Integration theory, a cognitive operation whereby elements of two or more “mental spaces” are intefrated via projection into a new, blended space which has its unique structure.
Blending operates on two input mental spaces to produce a third space, the blend. The blend inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent structure of its own.
P Chapter 7 Language, Culture, and Society
« Language and Culture
= The Relationship between language and culture (society)
As Saussure suggested, language is a system of signs that is a union of form and idea, which he called signifier and signified. Or as his dichotomy of langue and parole presented that the former represents the “Absence” and the latter the “Presence” in philosophy terms. So theoretically, the ways of language study should be one formalist and the other functionalist or the combination of these two.
But admittedly, ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the linguistic inquiry of language has been either comparative and historical or structural and formalized in nature. Some change started in the 20th century; schools of Anthropological study of language came into being in England and in North America. Firth regarded language as a means of social life, rather than simply a set of agreed-upon signals. In order to live, people need language to help them do things. So language is part of our social activity, and is part of culture. And then there is Halliday who developed firthian tradition and proposed the famous systemic-functional Grammar, he holds that language is what it is because it has to serve certain functions. In other words, social demand on language has helped to shape its shape. In North America, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is widely known as: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speaker’s unique ways of understanding the world. And Bloomfield’s “Behaviorism” believes that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced.
So, as the development of linguistics, we can see the understanding of the relationship between language and culture or society is developing.
Totally, language reflects the culture or social life of the people who use it, and help form and develop them. Conversely, the knowledge of the culture and the social context may help people comprehend and use one language better and more effectively.
There are Sociolinguistic Study of Society and Sociolinguistic Study of Language. That is to say, language is surely a kind of social phenomenon, and through the observation of a language and its varieties in a speech community, the words change in some fields, the sociolects people use, the popular slangs, language teaching, etc, we will see the social state or development of different cultures or different people, and to see the social life better. Meanwhile, language cannot make itself presence, we use them, and so they exist. That is to say, the better you know the culture or the context of one language, the better you know the structure, the grammar, the process of cognition of the language. It is obvious that language learners who lack sufficient knowledge about the target culture can hardly become active and appropriate language users in their target language.
And we also see, in an epoch of information, digitalization, and globalization, the importance of cross-cultural communication is further highlighted. And during cross-cultural communication, knowing only the grammar or vocabulary or some of the definitions will never make a successful communication. The culture of the target language, the way of its people thinking, the psychological or philosophic aspects of their life etc, all are the factors to make a better communication.
= Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (strong and weak versions)
《语言学习题集》p144
= Culture in linguistic study
= Culture in Language teaching
« Language and Society
= Sociolinguistics
= Language Varieties
The Language Varieties are the result of Language Variation. It is caused by the differences in pronunciation, grammar, or word choice within a language. Variation in a language may be related to region, to social class (social status) and/or educational background or to the degree of formality of a situation (time and place) in which language is used. And they are also called the Dialects, which including: Regional dialect; Sociolect; Standard dialect; Idiolect etc. and we have some other concepts related to language varieties, such as: Register; Stylistic Variety; Pidgin; Creole etc.
Ÿ Register: It is a speech variety used by a particular group of people, usually sharing the same occupation (e.g. doctors, lawyers) or the same interests (e.g. stamp collectors, baseball fans).
A particular register often distinguishes itself from other registers by having a number or distinctive words, by using words or phrases in a particular way, and sometimes by special grammatical constructions (e.g. legal language).
Ÿ Social Dialect or Sociolect : it is a variety of a language used by people belonging to a particular social class and could be further distinguished by gender, age, ethnic group, religion, socioeconomic and/or educational background etc.
