Date: 18-Jun-2010
From: Michael Crombach <michael.crombachgmx.at>
Subject: How Words Mean
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-3687.html
AUTHOR: Evans, VyvyanTITLE: How Words MeanSUBTITLE: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning ConstructionPUBLISHER: Oxford University PressYEAR: 2009
Michael Crombach, Nuance Communications Austria
SUMMARY
''How Words Mean'' is an ambitious attempt to integrate different cognitiveapproaches to semantics and grammar under the roof of a ''Theory of LexicalConcepts and Cognitive Models'' (LCCM Theory). Evans intends to demonstrate thatmeaning is a construct emerging in utterances through situated language use. Thebook is organized in five parts, each part with a short introduction. The wholebook is subdivided into 16 chapters, each again with introduction and summary.This is helpful as it enables the reader to quickly skip through the book andselect parts of particular interest. Evans (xii) states that he has fourdifferent readers in mind, (a) the general linguist, (b) the (general) cognitivescientist, (c) the cognitive linguist, and finally (d) the ''educated layreader''. This classification is fitting, although (unavoidably, and perfectlyunderstandably) each of these target groups will tend to skip certain knownaspects, while experiencing some of the chapters as challenging, even difficult.But they will be rewarded with interesting and inspiring thoughts in this book.Basically, Evans integrates ideas presented by other researchers such as Lakoff& Johnson (1980, 1999), Langacker (1987), Croft (2002), Goldberg (2006) andothers. Evans carefully and diligently presents those theories and integratesthem into his personal conclusions, while adding new aspects.
Part I introduces the LCCM Theory and explains cognitive theories of wordmeaning, while rejecting the standard approaches to semantics, which he labels''literalism''. Evans follows many others (e.g. Lakoff 1987) in believing thatthis traditional ''approach to meaning construction suffers from a fatal problem:the principled separation between context-independent (sentence) meaning andcontext-dependent (speaker) meaning'' (8). A central claim in this section isthat ''words do not in fact have meaning'', but that ''meaning results fromsituated acts of communication'' (84). Evans puts forth his idea that lexicalconcepts facilitate access to cognitive concepts: ''My claim is that theessential distinction between lexical representation and meaning is that whilemeaning is a property of the utterance, lexical representations consist of themental abstractions which we infer must be stored as part of the language user'sknowledge of language: symbolic units, together with the range of cognitivemodels, the semantic potential to which a lexical concept offers access'' (73).
Part II deals with ''lexical representation''. Here Evans presents the dichotomybetween ''linguistic system'' and ''conceptual system''. The ''linguistic system'' canbe split into ''open'' and ''closed'' class items (as introduced by Talmy 2000).''Closed'' class items can be described as ''function words'', e.g. English 'a','the', etc. ''Open-class lexical concepts afford access to conceptual content'' (106).
Part III is devoted to ''semantic compositionality'', one of the key aspects ofcognitive grammars. ''LCCM Theory can then be viewed [...] as complementing theresearch perspectives provided by [...] constructional accounts of grammaticalorganization'' but it differs from these approaches ''in that it *is* concernedprecisely with the nature of semantic representation and the mechanics ofsemantic composition'' (239). In LCCM Theory the appropriate lexical concept isselected by constraining factors, given by the context, and once selected itmust be matched with the conceptual structure accessed by this lexical concept.On pp. 245-266 Evans lists ten ''Principles of lexical concept integration'', andfigure 13.7 on page 267 gives a very helpful overview of this very dense subjectmatter.
Part IV applies LCCM Theory to ''Figurative Language and Thought''. The twochapters provide an in-depth analysis of two well-known phenomena: metaphor andmetonymy, and the linguistic approaches to ''time''. Here Evans argues thatmetaphor, metonymy, and literal language understanding are continuous. Metaphorand metonymy rise when the primary cognitive models involved fail to analyze anutterance; as a consequence the search domain is enlarged. Evans distinguishesmetaphor and metonymy by means of the figurative target (signifié) andfigurative vehicle (signifiant). In a case of metonymy the figurative vehiclegives direct access to the lexical concept, while metaphors ''arise due to adivergence between figurative vehicles and targets across two distinct lexicalconcepts'' (297).
Part V concludes the book and embeds LCCM Theory in the ensemble of othercognitive approaches to language.
The book further contains a glossary of technical terms ''that are either novelto LCCM Theory or which assume a special interpretation'' (343). This is - due tothe very dense nature of the book - not only useful, but necessary, as sometimesthe reader might have lost track in the jungle of terminology. Evans himselfemphasizes this situation within cognitive linguistics (336f).
EVALUATION
A fascinating aspect Evans does not pursue in depth, is the idea that languageevolved (in an evolutionary sense) as an ''index function'' to conceptualknowledge (43, 106, 188). This is a view that certainly is worth pursuing. Iflanguage makes access to ''encyclopedic knowledge'' easier, opening new ways toretrieve this information internally and externally, then this is a very goodargument for what the evolutionary ''advantage'' of language might have been.An important aspect missing in Evans' approach: the emotional component oflanguage. Evans touches on emotions by mentioning Damasio 1994 (177f), butemotions are still underrepresented in semantic theories. In my view, meaning issomething that BECOMES. It is not out there in the world, it is not learned.Meaning matures in a speaker's biography; meaning is experienced. Words can beemotionally loaded for one person, while being meaningless to others: the''Rosebud'' effect. If we assume that language is organized in a ''smallworld''-manner, so that it only takes very few steps to have a bridge betweenwords (Ferrer i Cancho & Sole 2001), and that there are not only sledges, thatare affectively experienced, but also friends and lovers, foes and fears, thenthe whole lexicon becomes a remarkable reflection of the emotional developmentof a speaker. In this respect there is certainly further research possible thatcan add to LCCM Theory, especially as this aspect strengthens Evans' view that''meaning is not a property of words [...,] meaning arises as a function of theway in which words (and language) are deployed by language users insocioculturally, temporally, and physically contextualized communicative events''(22), which is essentially the idea of Wittgenstein 2006/1952 (262).
Another aspect of meaning construction not handled extensively enough in thisbook is frequency. Evans (95) touches on frequency as a ''decision and wordselection'' mechanism (following Langacker 1987), but frequency is a complicatedissue. Not only because frequency is heavily dependent on what is counted, howit is counted and why it is counted, but also because frequency is somethingthat wears off. Frequency makes the ''small words'' ''meaningless''; e.g.prepositions (analyzed in very great detail by Evans 153ff) are articulated andunderstood differently depending on their relevance. Imagine a child looking forher Barbie: when the doll is lying *under* the table instead of the moreexpectable (and frequent) *on* the table, the prosody of the answer to thequestion: *Where’s my Barbie?* will be completely different. While the stress inthe standard answer will be on the noun *table* it will be on the preposition*under* in the more unusual reply. Only in such very special situations do these''small words'' have more than a purely functional dimension. Evans touches on''manner of utterance'' (16), but then does not pursue this aspect any further.Prepositions and other function words (as opposed to ''names'', e.g. 'snake','bite' and ''indices'', e.g. 'this', 'there') are very important for thegrammatical correctness of sentences, but often irrelevant in the meaning orunderstanding of utterances. Another dimension of frequency is that each speakerhas her personal ''favorites''. Some words are used more frequently by one userthan by other users, giving language a personal flavor, sometimes providing eventhe basis for a spitting image of a person (think of *fascinating* uttered bySpock in the TV series Star Trek). These aspects of frequency (which should notbe confused with Quantitative Linguistics) also have to be taken into account,to improve the collection of ''theoretical constructs'' (xi), that make up LCCMTheory.
Finally, a general observation: There seems to be an ''Uncertainty Principle'' inlinguistics. When approaching language from the semantic side, like Evans doeswith this book, the structural aspects of language seem to blur; while a formal(syntactic) approach to very similar questions (e.g. Boeckx 2010) brings aboutuncertainty on the semantic side. Somehow it seems impossible to handlestructure and content at the same time with the same precision. This could be achallenge to overcome in the next steps of a linguistic theory.
In sum, ''How Words Mean'' is an inspiring contemporary account of semantic andcognitive issues that is worth reading.
REFERENCES
Boeckx, Cedric. 2010. Language in Cognition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Croft, William. 2002. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory inTypological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.London: Vintage.Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon & Sole, Richard V. 2001. The Small World of HumanLanguage. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268, 2261-2265.Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization inLanguage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press.Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press.Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mindand its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Langacker, Roland W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume I.Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge. MIT Press.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2006/1952. Philosophische Untersuchungen. In: WerkausgabeBand 1. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Michael Crombach is research & development engineer at Nuance Communications Austria, working on statistical language models and phonetic transcriptions for speech recognition systems. He has a background in historical linguistics (Ph.D.) and biology. His main interests are biology and evolution of language, statistics and language, theory and history of linguistics.
Page Updated: 18-Jun-2010
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