Most people modify their ways of speaking, writing, texting, and e-mailing, and so on, according to the people with whom they are communicating. This fascinating book asks why we 'accommodate' to others in this way, and explores the various social consequences arising from it.
AUTHOR: James W. Underhill TITLE: Creating Worldviews SUBTITLE: Metaphor, Ideology and Language PUBLISHER: Edinburgh University Press YEAR: 2011
Heather Walker Peterson, Department of English and Literature, Northwestern College, St. Paul, MN
SUMMARY
A follow-up to ''Humboldt, Worldview, and Language,'' James W. Underhill’s book ''Creating Worldviews'' is divided into two parts: part one is a review and critique of metaphor theory, and part two consists of three case studies that tie together discourse analysis and metaphor theory. The book includes a 44-page glossary (providing explanations with examples of his and other scholars’ key terms), a bibliography, and a brief index.
Part one begins with Underhill’s explanation of worldview. In chapter 1, “Metaphor and World-Conceiving,” he reviews his past argument, heavily influenced by Humboldt, that worldview regarding language and individuals is best characterized by five divisions: “world-perceiving,” “world conceiving,” “cultural mindset,” “personal world,” and “perspective.” While “world-perceiving” has to do with people’s understanding of language, “world-conceiving” has to do with people’s forming a worldview as they talk and write about their thoughts and emotions (pp. 7 & 203). “Cultural mindset” is a worldview of a political or religious institutions, “personal world” is that of an individual, and “perspective” emphasizes the constant shifting of an individual’s world conceiving and perceiving. Underhill affirms Humboldt’s pursuit of conceptual connections within language: “the paths offered up by the language system to its language community” (p. 11). As an example of these “networks,” he mentions the word “freedom,” which brings up different images and historical notions in the U.S. versus in the former Czechoslovakia (p. 10). Getting into these networks is how we begin to comprehend other worldviews, a point of view that privileges translators and philologists over formal linguists comparing structures.
Chapter 2, “A Concern for Metaphor,” and chapter 3, “Metaphors We Live By,” are two brief chapters focused on reviewing Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) work. Although Underhill commends Lakoff and Johnson for their contribution of thought as “embodied,” he points out that two neglected non-English theorists, the German philosopher Cassirer (1968, 1953) and French rhetorical analyst Matoré (1962) made similar arguments earlier. Underhill also appreciates that Lakoff and Johnson’s theories posit that language “organises” reality for us, that imagination is primary to thought, and that all language is “metaphoric,” although he sees loss in their blurring of rhetorical categories of figurative language (pp. 22-24). In Chapter 3, he summarizes seven points of Lakoff and Johnson’s work: metaphors “live,” “form systemic constructs,” “highlight and hide,” “often contradict one another,” “are grounded in experience,” “create similarity,” and are “the cardinal trope” (pp. 25-29).
Underhill demonstrates in chapter 4, “Other Developments in Metaphor Theory,” that metaphor theory is interdisciplinary, not the domain of cognitive linguistics exclusively. Philosophers, linguists, literary critics, and rhetorical scholars have all pondered metaphor and often with more narrow definitions than those used by cognitive linguists, particularly in the discipline of rhetoric. His list of philosophers theorizing metaphor runs from Aristotle and Plato to Wittgenstein and Derrida. Ricœur (1975) insisted upon the examination of metaphor within discourse, casting disregard on the assumption that one feature is simplistically transferred from a source to a target. The linguist Brook-Rose (1958) gave examples that showed that metaphorical language is often not as nominal as is frequently assumed. Often, it is adjectival, such as “the visiting moon” (p. 207, in Underhill 2011, p. 38), or verbal, such as “the ship ploughs the waves” (p. 206, in Underhill 2011, p. 37). Turner and Lakoff (1989) explained that literary metaphors, in Underhill’s words, “force us to see the world anew” (p. 39). The scholar of rhetoric Morier (1989) subcategorized metaphor, illustrating its extensiveness in all of language.
In Chapter 5, “Further Cognitive Contributions to Metaphor Theory,” Underhill covers works of other cognitive metaphor theorists. He appreciates that Eubanks’ method has been to study actual speech, showing that “not only do metaphors shape thought, thought in discourse carves anew the contours of our metaphors” (p. 45). It is not that we are immersed only unconsciously in conceptual metaphors, but as Eubanks (2000) showed in his Trade-Is-War examples, we consciously, in Underhill’s words, “invoke” and “harness” metaphors in what Eubanks calls a “discursive strategy.” In this chapter, Underhill also reviews Goatly’s explanation of the revising of conceptual metaphors to fit into a “history of ideas” (p. 50). He admires Turner and Fauconnier’s (2003) work for an explanation of “blending” of target and source domains, but critiques them and other cognitive linguists for seeking a universalistic approach in metaphor studies rather than “partial equivalence” (p. 62). Underhill fears that in seeking to show that some conceptual metaphors are common in all languages, cognitive linguists may be unwittingly forcing other languages into an English framework.
To illustrate partial equivalence, in chapter 6, “Diversity on the Periphery,” Underhill’s final chapter in part 1 of the book, he reviews studies comparing metaphor across languages. Key to the rest of the book is the work of Dirven (1985) on lexical extension by metaphor. Underhill explains that one of Dirven’s “motors” for lexical extension was “synaesthesia,” in which one sense activated another sense, as in the phrase “warm colors,” which Dirven recognized as associated with fire (Dirven 1985, p. 99, in Underhill 2011, p. 65). Dirven showed that metaphors could shape the lexicon through morphology. He provided examples of the diminutive suffix used in phrases about the heart: “hartje,” as indicating the “inmost part of a place” rather than the non-diminutive form “hart” (Underhill 2011, p. 66).
In part 2 of the book, Underhill dedicates each chapter to a case study of metaphors, first in the language of Czechoslovakian communists, then the language of Nazism, and finally language praising one’s own language -- examples from French and English -- and language calling for maintenance of language diversity. In each of these chapters, he presents primarily the works of native-speaker scholars. In Chapter 7, “The Language of Czechoslovak Communist Power,” he describes essayist Petr Fidelius’s study of the Party newspaper Rudé Právo, in which he concluded that the Party’s language did indeed have a logic. Underhill describes four concepts that were clustered: history, people, Party, and State. Czechoslavakian communists promoted history as a “trajectory” and a “machine” -- a progressive metaphor. The people join this trajectory in bringing about progress, making anyone who stood in the way of such progress an enemy. The Party as the “nucleus” of the people not only told them what life was but was responsible for “activating” them as if they were without life or were asleep before -- a metaphorical twist of objectification that Underhill names “personified reification” (pp.105-106). The “State” was called an organ, but it was not clearly distinct from the Party. The spatial metaphor of the Party as a “movement” would lead to its decline because of the challenge of the Party remaining a movement when its destination of a socialist nation appears to have been reached. Underhill presents a list of political terms, meant to challenge English-speaking readers to recognize that supposedly equivalent terms in Czech could mean something somewhat different because of the differing conceptual linguistic framework, e.g., “politics” defined as “social activity to defend class interests” (p.119). He concludes the chapter by explaining that one cannot understand one of the four concepts without understanding the others. This “cultural mindset,” he reminds us, harnessed concepts already within the Czech language within a particular time period.
Chapter 8, “Hitlerdeutsch: Klemperer and the Language of the Third Reich,” contains an analysis of excerpts of Nazi discourse that may be little known. Underhill claims that Nazi rhetoric with its goal of “perversion” cannot be seen as similar to the Czech communist language with its goal of “reason” and “enlightening.” He hails the German-Jewish philologist Klemperer (2006) as a hero who secretly documented his observations of the language of the Third Reich, “Hitlerdeutsch.” Nazism reduced the concept of people to mere sentiment, personified “race,” and relied on clichés to act as common sense. Underhill argues that by promoting “purity,” it could demonize Jews as the opposite with a binary definition, essentializing and excluding them. Confusion was a strategy of Nazi rhetoric so that reason would be withheld -- thus, anything that challenged Nazism, even socialism, was blamed on the Jews. Underhill illustrates this by comparing Goebbels’ propaganda with his private diary, showing that his embrace of only sentiment and his dismissal of reason produced a rhetoric of racism. Underhill concludes the chapter delineating an ideology’s transformation of language, its re-networking of concepts : “the ideology adapts to the language, and the language…in turn adapts to the ideology” (p.168).
In Underhill’s final case study, “Language in Metaphors,” in chapter 9, he begins by reviewing historical commentary praising the aesthetics of French with much reference to a sardonic work of Henri Meschonnic (1997) on this topic. The majority of the chapter, however, is a critique of the ecological metaphor of languages used by both Académie française member Hagège (2000) and British linguist Crystal (2000) in their arguments for language diversity. Underhill claims that without entering the study of language as philologists, without really seeing the networking of meaning, such talk makes Hagège and Crystal into “museum curators” (p. 227). Both Hagège and Crystal want it both ways, Underhill argues: diversity and yet a privileged language, French (Hagège) or English (Crystal). Crystal’s insistence that outsiders must save languages whether the speakers are interested in doing so or not -- to be “stewards” of the garden of languages -- has the metaphorical underpinnings of Protestantism, coming in to save the teeming, unenlightened masses -- a kind of “colonial rhetoric” (p. 230). The answer to a concern for language diversity is Humboldt’s “Sprachsinn,” which can only come of individual speech and of language’s relationship to imagination. Underhill applies “Sprachsinn” synonymously with a “sense of language,” describing it as what “stimulates a language’s capacity to welcome us into its world, enabling us to express that world and thereby act within it and upon it” (perhaps defined as the creative potential of language to perceive and conceive worldviews) (p. 235). Not realizing this connection reveals linguists’ disinterest in “perception” and a focus on “conception,” the tendency of most worldview discussions. It is only individual speakers who can save their own language: only they know how the world is enlivened through their spoken expressions.
Underhill’s “Final Word” reminds the reader of some of his themes: certainly individuals cannot “escape” languages and worldviews, and yet it is individuals who critique and re-shape them, as literary study has shown us. In the end, he lauds “Sprachsinn.”
EVALUATION
Certainly, Underhill follows through on what he sees as lacking in metaphor studies: he shares insights from non-English-speaking scholars, he examines individual speech, he translates from other languages, he notes the history of concepts, and he demonstrates individuals not being entirely subsumed by the discourse of a prevailing ideology. For all these characteristics, this book is an invaluable contribution to the field of metaphor studies.
His challenge to linguists that translators and philologists have the upper hand in understanding the relationship of worldviews to metaphors is robust (and therefore worth reading) but occasionally tiresome. Even the structure of the book seems a subtle affront to linguists. There is the apparent disjunction of two chapters critiquing regimes’ discourses followed by one critiquing discourse about language by Western European scholars. Underhill is intent on showing that it takes someone remarkable, such as Fidelius and Klemperer, to resist and “to make a difference” (p. 238) within dominant discourses, even those which are not political. It cannot be accidental that he juxtaposes the work of Meschonnic (likely somewhat of a tribute to a late friend), a brilliant translator who sarcastically described those who glorify French, with the works of linguists, Crystal’s praise of English and Hagège’s devotion to French. For Underhill, Meschonnic is one who has “made a difference” in studies of language, and he refers to him again in his second to last paragraph of the book before ending on Humboldt.
In its description of the relation of ideology to language, this book will be helpful for a wide range of readers, particularly a reader pondering the ethics of an ideology’s language production. We “invoke” or “harness” conceptual metaphors that are often conflicting. In part, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have written, the contradictory nature of multiple metaphors may help us to see multiple perspectives. Also, as Underhill demonstrates with Crystal’s views on language, contradiction to some extent is unavoidable since even thinkers and writers cannot entirely escape a cultural mindset despite their resistance to the clichés that ideologies are dependent on. For a prevailing ideology, contradiction may be unintended, spread by propaganda, perhaps even produced by disparate institutions and individuals, such as journalists from democratic, western nations. With his study of Nazi rhetoric, Underhill describes a situation when conflicting metaphors became an intended “perversion,” leading to atrocities such as genocide. Yet he also characterizes the demanding time period of Germany post-World War I and the availability of metaphors to be invoked from both science and the church.
Besides cognitive linguists, this book will also be invaluable for critical discourse analysts wishing to incorporate the study of metaphor into their work and for ethnographers who examine the history of the community of their research, as well as for scholars of rhetoric and of worldview. Readers might, as I did, have to review frequently Underhill’s various subcategories of worldview in the glossary (a definite plus, given the brevity of the index). It may be that I am biased toward “world-conceiving” as he suggests, since I often had to re-think the shade of difference with the term “world-perceiving.” Likewise, readers may be intrigued by the notion of “Sprachsinn” but may be left wondering if it is not described just as idealistically and romantically as Hagège’s and Crystal’s promotions of an ecological metaphor of language.
REFERENCES
Brook-Rose, Christine. 1965 (1958). A grammar of metaphor. London: D. R. Hilman and Sons.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1968 (1925). The philosophy of symbolic forms, volume one: Language. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1953 (1946). Language and myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. New York: Dover.
Crystal, David. 2000. Language death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dirven, René. 1985. Metaphor as a basic means of extending the lexicon. In Wolf Paprotté & René Dirven (eds.), The ubiquity of metaphor: Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, 84-119. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Eubanks, Phillips. 2000. A war of words in the discourse of trade: The rhetorical construction of metaphor. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2003 (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Goatly, Andrew. 2007. Washing the brain: Metaphor and hidden ideology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Hagège, Claude. 2000. Halte à las mort des langues. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Klemperer, Victor. 2006 (2000). The language of the Third Reich: LTI Lingua Tertii Imperii. Trans. Martin Brady. London & New York, NY: Continuum.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George & Mark Turner. 1989. More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Matoré, Georges. 1962. L’Espace humain. Paris: La Colombe.
Meschonnic, Henri. 1997. De la langue française: Essai sur une claret obscure. Paris: Hachette
Morier, Henri. 1981 (1961). Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, 4th edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Ricœur, Paul. 1975. La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil.
Underhill, James W. 2009. Humboldt, worldview and language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Heather Walker Peterson studies the relationship of language, religion, and
identity. Her research has been linguistic ethnography, combining the
overlapping theories of the New Literacy Studies, ethnicity studies, and
discursive approaches to identity by applied linguists. She is currently
working on articles about the language and collective non-identity of a
Slavic migrant congregation.
