LINGUIST List 3.673

Mon 07 Sep 1992

Disc: Iconicity Summary, Cognitive, Physics

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1. "Itamar Even-Zohar, Porter Chair of SemiB10TAUNIVM.TAU.AC.IL, Re: 3.664 Summary: iconicity
2. Scott Delancey, Re: 3.667 Queries: Crow, Juxtaposition, Cognitive
3. bert peeters, Physics: culture dependent or independent

Message 1: Re: 3.664 Summary: iconicity

Here is one more useful reference for "iconicity", with
extensive bibliographies, and a few valuable papers:

*Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture: Festschrift
for Thomas A. Sebeok on His 65th Birthday* 1986.
Eds Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner.
Tuebingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.

Itamar Even-Zohar
Porter Chair for Semiotics
Tel Aviv University

Message 2: Re: 3.667 Queries: Crow, Juxtaposition, Cognitive

Bert Peeters asks (as I understand it) for the difference between
"so-called "cognitive linguistics"" and just plain vanilla linguistics.
If this is the question, it's the wrong one, exactly the same confusion
of levels as asking the difference between, say, Government and Binding
and linguistics. A more legitimate question, which should be answerable,
would ask the difference between cognitive linguistics and generative
linguistics. I think Bert, at least, was around back in the first
days of Linguist when essentially that question was the topic of an
extended argument, which ended up not getting much of anywhere. I'm
not eager to start that up again, but -- the essential differences
are at a relatively high level of abstraction, having to do with the
degree to which language is seen as autonomous with respect to vs.
one of many manifestations of general principles of cognition. (Obviously
my phrasing makes assumptions about the existence of "general principles
of cognition" which might seem illegitimate to some of the modularist
persuasion).
	So, though there are some differences in what particular kinds
of research problems, and what approaches to them, are of more
immediate interest to linguists of the cognitive persuasion or to
generativists (as there are between, say, GB linguists and Relational
Grammarians), there should be no surprise in seeing that at thlevel of
analysis of specific linguistic data (is that what you were talking
about?) everybody recognizes relative clauses when they see them, etc.

Scott DeLancey

I would like to thank all of the following for sharing with me their views
on the culture-dependency of physics:

Karen Kay, Cliff Miller, Brett Rosenberg, John Hedgcock, Eileen Knabe,
Thierry van Steenberghe, John Limber, Larry Trask, Eric Ringger, Robert
D Hoberman, John Cowan, Paul Purdom, Avery D Andrews, Tom Lai, William A
Bennett, J Robertson (?), Janet Sutherland, William J Ashby, Oliver Seely,
Bruce E Nevin, Esa Itkonen, Stavros Macrakis, Ellen Contini-Morava, Charles
Mahler, Mark Peterson

It would be impossible to summarise the views uttered by these colleagues:
they range from full support to radical scepticism, with just about all
intermediary positions possible. Those who are interested are invited to
send me their snail-mail address, and I will provide a slightly edited
version (with probably quite some typos remaining) of answers received.
As there are costs involved (the sum total is 14 pages of single-space
print!!) in xeroxing and mailing out, I would welcome any suitable material
in exchange such as your list of publications, offprints of your papers
or reports (preferably in the areas of linguistic theory at large, semantics
and syntax) or anything like that.