Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3309

AUTHOR: randy allen harris
TITLE: Figuring out Figuration
SUBTITLE: A cognitive linguistic account
SERIES TITLE: Figurative Thought and Language 14
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: randy harris

SUMMARY
This book attempts a comprehensive cognitive and pragmatic account of “traditional figures of speech” by combining linguistic argumentation with extensive but myopic literature reviews, offering new definitions for each of their core set of tropes, outlining dependency relations among them, focussing on their collocations, and charting their communicative consequences, all very firmly embedded in the Cognitive Linguistics framework. It is a valuable contribution to the immense body of scholarship on the figurative dimensions of language, but it does not come anywhere near to providing the “unified theory of figurative language” (259) to which it aspires. While they slightly expand the purview of figuration common in contemporary linguistics, María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez’s efforts still leave that purview scandalously narrow in light of the ways that rhetorical figures structure human communication, and while it is broader in its research base than most linguistic forays into figuration, dipping modestly into the literary and rhetorical traditions, this book continues to neglect or diminish major contributions to understanding figurative phenomena.
STRUCTURE
Chapter 1, as you would expect, is the “Introduction,” providing an efficient overview of the book’s aims and methods: to build a comprehensive, unified theory of figuration within the Cognitive Linguistics programme and demonstrate its productivity with respect to metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, irony, and related “secondary figures” (3).
Chapter 2, “Figurative thought and language: An overview of approaches,” purports to offer a comprehensive survey of figurative literature but is largely confined to linguistic work of the last few decades; that is, post Lakoff and Johnson (1980), a period they call “The metaphor revolution” (though see Nerlich & Clarke 2001 and Booth 1978 for accounts of other metaphor revolutions). Other fields and periods are either omitted entirely or absurdly truncated and misrepresented. Within the literature they do consider, focussing largely on metaphor, they discuss the so-called literal / figural divide and survey semantic, referentialist, descriptivist, relational, pragmatic, neuroscientific, and cognitive perspectives on metaphor, frequently noting both the value and the limitations of each perspective. Relevance Theory and Blending Theory get particular attention and some psycholinguistic research (on processing cost) is reviewed. The culmination of the chapter is their classificatory scheme for “figures of speech,” partially motivated by what they see (rightly!) as the undue exclusion in linguistics of figures other than metaphor and metonymy. But their scheme is woefully insufficient for their ambitions. They directly invoke a little over twenty figures, sometimes appending a phrase like “and related figures,” with the entire book mentioning well under fifty figures, some of them rather questionable. The rhetorical tradition has a vastly larger inventory. Burton (2016), for instance, defines over 400 figures. The chapter is also insufficient in terms of the cognitive factors they consider.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza's scheme does serve a useful purpose, however, in plotting out several cognitive and pragmatic factors that contribute to the processing of their main figures: (i) the nature of interdomain relationships (e.g., metaphor implicates a cross-domain, source-target relationship; metonymy implicates a within-domain, source-target relationship); (ii) the presence of shared features among figures (determining, for instance, that meiosis and litotes are both types of understatement); and (iii) the role of denotational (semantic) and attitudinal (pragmatic) orientations (e.g. metaphor and metonymy are oriented denotationally, because semantic incongruity is important in their construal, while context is secondary; hyperbole and irony are attitudinal figures because referential and intentional context are central to their construal).
This classificatory scheme is the blueprint for the blended cognitive-pragmatic approach Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza follow for the rest of the book.
Chapter 3, “Foundations of cognitive modeling,“ outlines central cognitive behaviours involved in producing and understanding language, including a taxonomy of cognitive models. These models are only the beginning of the categorizations in this chapter. Conceptualizations sponsored by these models, for instance, come in different levels (primary, low, and high) connected to issues of abstraction and genericity. Situational models might result in descriptive, attitudinal, or regulatory scenarios. And so on. In aggregate, the many factors Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza introduce, distinguish, and combine can seem excessive, and in the final analysis, their framework is far from tidy. But these factors provide resources for very nuanced accounts of how figurative phenomena function.
Figuration is barely mentioned in Chapter 3. I’m not sure if the motivation for this largely non-figurative chapter is to make the following point, or if this is just a side effect of their approach, but it does serve to reinforce an absolutely fundamental axiom in figural studies: that figuration is the product of basic cognitive orientations and social processes, not something that requires specialized abilities or talents.
Chapters 4 – 6 are dedicated to specific figure complexes: 4 to metaphor, metonymy, and related analogical or correlational figures; 5 to hyperbole and related scalar figures; 6 to irony and related oppositional intentionality figures.
Chapter 4, “Metaphor and metonymy revisited,” continues the trend of being jam-packed with concepts and categorizations. Again, they are largely worth the attention of anyone investigating the sociocognitive aspects of figurative phenomena, but I will note only on the four most central, by which they define and distinguish metaphor and metonymy. The basic claim in the chapter (and throughout) is that cross-domain correlation and resemblance are the cognitive operations responsible for metaphor, while metonymy manifests within-domain expansion and reduction. Admirably, they draw several other “figures” into the discussion. Those scare quotes are necessary because not all of the phenomena to which they give that label are in fact figures, properly understood. Nor do Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza invest much rigor in how they treat those phenomena.
Chapter 5, “Hyperbole,” marks one of the book's central achievements. It focusses on figurative phenomena sponsored by our neurocognitive affinity for perceiving, categorizing, and reasoning along scalar clines. Hyperbole pushes any given scale out of the bounds of basic accuracy. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” one might say, or “That Tom Ford blazer is to die for;” or one might type something like “a;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs” on a keyboard, which I have recently learned means ‘I’m so excited/angry/speechless by this thing that all I can do is slam my hands/head/body against the keyboard.’ As these examples show, hyperbole is a mode of figuration, not a specific figure. “Eat a horse” is chiefly metonymical, leveraging a large edible thing, too large for any individual to eat at one sitting. “To die for” is chiefly metaphorical, leveraging a scenario that likens the speaker to a patriotic soldier willing to sacrifice themselves for the protection of their kith and kin. “A;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs” is a kind of metaplasm, a suite of figures of phonological or orthographic derangement, but it functions more like a riddle or noema. The meanings conveyed by the first two work primarily by semantic incongruity, but the third depends much more fully on context.
Chapter 5 is also valuable for bringing in constructions, a highly neglected area in the linguistics of figuration. Many, many constructions are highly figured. Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza highlight the X is not Y but Z construction, exemplified by expressions like
She is not a woman, but an angel! (202)
A celibate of such spotless chastity is not a human being, but God indeed. (202)
The discussion is helpful but also very underdetermined as an argument for the inter-penetration of figures and construction. It's helpful because all of their data exemplify hyperbole and leverage our cognitive affinity for scalar conceptualizing and because the analysis is rich and nuanced. It is less than ideal, however, because the construction is not itself hyperbolic, or even inherently scalar—in the way that, say, the ‘let alone’ construction is essentially scalar (Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor 1988), in which the second item is necessarily higher up some conceptual cline. The X is not Y but Z construction is just a corrective, as easily neutral as scalar:
She is not a pediatrician, but a podiatrist!
Felix is not German but Swiss.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza miss the opportunity to engage with constructions that more intimately incorporate figuration. Most conspicuous in its absence is Turner's (1987) fundamentally metaphoric XYZ construction, illustrated by familiar colligations (5) and literary expressions (6):
Money is the root of all evil.
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
Chapter 6, “Irony,” charts a group of ''figures'' associated with irony. Irony has received considerable attention from pragmatics scholars, rightly so. Similar to hyperbole, irony is a pragmatic communicative mode. It has two distinctive characteristics. Just like hyperbole, the denotation of irony is out of alignment with the beliefs of the speaker, so that the hearer needs a theory of mind which (1) recognizes that the speaker's intentions do not correspond with the entrenched code the speaker deploys, and (2) recognizes that there is a dimension of play to this misalignment, that the speaker does not seek to mislead the hearer, just to participate in some degree of feigning an attitude or belief.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza follow their established pattern here, working through the literature, including various theories of pretense, mock deception, and echoing, a range of ‘historical uses’ of ''irony'' (Socratic, rhetorical, satirical, dramatic, and metafictional), and so on, to endorse, but never actually articulate, a ‘synthetic’ account of irony, one that bridges superficially competing pragmatic accounts.
Chapter 7, ''Conclusion,'' is an efficient, summative account of the book.
EVALUATION
The book’s virtues are substantial. It is a solid compendium of Cognitive Linguistics instruments in the context of figuration, including Frames, Idealized Cognitive Models, Image Schemata, and Blending Theory, with notable supporting insights brought in from Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatic subfields (especially Relevance Theory), and, albeit with a major drop off at this point, also Rhetorical and Literary Studies. It very thoroughly reviews the cognitive and pragmatic literature for a few prominent tropes, sifting through that scholarship for methods, findings, and opportunities to integrate superficially competing positions or theories into a coherent framework. It places a high premium on cognitive operations and situational inferencing, and it is especially important for its emphasis on collocations of figurative phenomena and also for the efforts it makes to integrate figurative phenomena with grammatical constructions. While it can move dizzyingly back and forth among claims and observations in a way that might be unnecessarily complex for beginners and does not always land on clear positions, it is impossible even for experts to read Figuring out Figuration without gaining a better understanding of figurative phenomena. Sometimes, however, that understanding runs at cross-purposes to the authors’ claims.
The book’s liabilities are equally substantial but cannot be hung entirely around the necks of the authors, who are positively radical in their receptivity to other research traditions and admirably ambitious in their attempts to expand the linguistics of figuration. Rather, those liabilities are endemic to Cognitive Linguistics, which has its roots in Lakoff and Johnson’s justly but lamentably influential Metaphors We Live By (1980). It is justly influential because of the systematic way in which the authors bring linguistic rigor to figurative phenomena. It is lamentably influential because of the way they misrepresent the millennia-long rhetorical, literary, and grammatical traditions that first identified and investigated figurative phenomena. Their palpable disdain for those traditions strongly but wrongly implies not only that previous research can be ignored, but also that any value of figurative phenomena for linguistics is confined to a tiny handful of tropes, foreclosing major research opportunities. They also unfortunately misapply the labels for those tropes, leading to decades of distorted and insular research in the very rich domain of figuration. Coming out of that programme, Figuring out Figuration is therefore full of false claims and confusions about earlier research and is riddled with omissions. For instance, a hugely important trope for language and thought is ignored, antithesis, and one unquestionably cognitive, extensively investigated class of figures, which rhetoricians call ''schemes,'' is wholly overlooked. Again, this perspective characterizes the larger framework in which Figuring out Figuration is situated, rather than the book alone, which tries rather earnestly to buck these trends. But since the LINGUIST community is full of scholars developing that framework, this review is a good place to voice these complaints. I can address the importance both of antithesis and of schemes by way of Construction Grammar, as a brief illustration of how impoverished linguists' current notions of figuration are.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza introduce a figure they call ''merism,'' without definition or citation, which they exemplify with the phrases ''rich and poor,'' ''young and old,'' ''kind and cruel,'' ''near and far,'' and so on; that is, an X and Y syntactic frame where the variables represent antonyms of each other. The name largely, and the form vaguely, aligns with the figure known as ''merismus,'' a figure of thought in which information from one phrase is unpacked and distributed into others, as in ''He alienated both his brothers, one by his uncouth behavior, the other by his meanness'' (Erasmus, in Christiansen 2013, 273). The communicative function of merism is, Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza claim, to invoke extremes in a domain such that they ''stand … for the whole of it'' (173). In fact, that function is served by the Coordinated Antonymy suite of constructions—including constructions like ‘both X and Y’ and ‘X and Y alike’, along with plain old vanilla ‘X and Y’—which signal ''exhaustiveness of the scale involved'' (Jones et al. 2012, 106). That suite leverages antithesis, and the very ubiquity of antonymy in language reflects the intimate relation of antithesis to cognition, every bit as close as the celebrated one shared by metaphor and cognition. Antithesis is a trope. Schemes—figures of material salience, like rhyme and alliteration—are every bit as cognitively underpinned and every bit as pervasive as tropes in all varieties, genres, registers, and forms of language. On rhyme and alliteration, for instance, see Benczes (2019), and for other phonological figures Rubin (2009). But consider sentences like these:
You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl. (Hilderbrand 2011, np)
Elon proves you can take the boy out of apartheid but you can’t take apartheid out of the boy (Wise 2022)
These examples, utterly swarming with figures, represent the A-out-of-B, not B-out-of-A construction (Harris 2022). Most obviously for trope-centric Cognitive Linguists perhaps are the two analogical phenomena in the second clauses: ''the trailer park'' and ''apartheid'' are reified into objects that can be manipulated (i.e., are 'ontological metaphors'), while ''the girl'' and ''the boy'' are figured as containers (i.e., manifest the people are containers 'conceptual metaphor') from which those objects can in principle be removed but which the construction says cannot be done. But for most everyone else, the reverse repetitions (the figure is antimetabole), the clause-initial repetitions of ''you can / can't take'' (epanaphora), and medial repetitions of ''out of'' (mesodiplosis) may be somewhat more obvious. It is also crucial that the syntactic structure of both clauses is the same (parison). What is especially important to notice here is that the meaning of this construction (roughly, that the relevant institutional or geographical ethos is incorrigible for the relevant class of individuals) is inescapably figurative. Critically, the reverse repetition (antimetabole) within parallel syntactic structures (parison) swaps the semantic roles (the relevant terms have opposite trajector and landmark assignments in the two clauses), while the medial repetition (mesodiplosis) maintains the semantics of the trajector/landmark relation and the negation (antithesis) precludes the second trajector/landmark relation.
In short, I recommend reading María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez’s Figuring out Figuration carefully, but not as the definitive and comprehensive treatment of linguistic figuration they believe it to be; rather, as a valiant but flawed expansionist programme that needs desperately to be filtered through rhetorical and literary works, like Christiansen (2013).
REFERENCES
Benczes, R. 2019. Rhyme Over Reason: Phonological Motivation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Booth, W. C. 1978. Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation. Critical Inquiry, 5(1), 49–72.
Burton, G. 2016. Sylva Rhetoricae. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.
Christiansen, N. 2013. Figuring Style: The Legacy of Renaissance Rhetoric. Columbus: University of South Carolina Press.
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. 1988. Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone. Language, 64(3), 501–538.
Jones, S., Murphy, M. L., Paradis, C., and Willners, C. 2012. Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, R.A. 2022. Grammatical Constructions and Rhetorical Figures: The Case of Chiasmus. 2022. LACUS Forum 46(1), 35-61.
Hilderbrand, E. 2011. Silver Girl: A Novel. Ebook. New York: Little, Brown.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D. 2001. Mind, Meaning and Metaphor: The Philosophy and Psychology of Metaphor in 19th-century Germany. History of the Human Sciences, 14(2), 39–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526950122120952.
Rubin, D. C. 2009. Oral Traditions as Collective Memories: Implications for a General Theory of Individual and Collective Memory. In P. Boyer & J. V. Wertsch Eds., Memory in Mind and Culture pp. 273–287. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511626999.017.
Turner, M. 1987. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wise, T. [@timjacobwise]. 2022. Elon Proves You Can Take the Boy Out Of Apartheid but You Can’t Take Apartheid Out Of the Boy…Welcome to Twatter. Twitter. (October 28, 7:22 PM) https://twitter.com/timjacobwise/status/1586136411455033344.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Randy Allen Harris, University of Waterloo, has advanced degrees in literature, experimental psycholinguistics, technical communication, and rhetoric (the doctorate); his research integrates all of those fields. His books include Routledge Handbook on Language and Persuasion (Routledge), co-edited with Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetoric and Incommensurability (Parlor), Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces (Elsevier), and The Linguistics War: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Debate over Deep Structure (Oxford).