Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.cognitive
From: mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede)
Subject: Re: Cognitive linguistics [was Re: Prototypes]
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 27 Aug 92 18:27:23 GMT

pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:

>In article <92Aug26.160549edt.48031@neat.cs.toronto.edu> mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede) writes:
>>Now the conventional metaphors (and other phenomena that Lakoff is 
>>interested in) just do not succumb to such analyses in terms of phrase
>>structure rules and truth conditions.  For instance, if I want to explain 
>>how certain metaphors work by carrying over whole concept ranges from
>>one domain to another (e.g. from Lakoff&Johnson: LOVE is WAR: He is known
>>for his many conquests. She fought for him. He is slowly gaining ground
>>with her. Etc, etc), then a truth-conditional semantics is out of place,
>>it's simply the wrong paradigm.

>This is what I do not understand at all.  Of course there are things to
>explain here, and things we might not understand, but what bearing any
>of the metaphor material has on semantics as a whole is completely
>unclear.  Surely "conquests" and "fought" in your examples are assigned
>special, contextually determined meanings, where this sort of special
>assignment is governed by some overarching correspondence scheme, e.g.
>LOVE is WAR.  But once this assignment is made, every problem there ever
>was in semantic remains exactly as it was before.  Or if this isn't so,
>then explain why not.

That might very well be so.  But you should acknowledge that some people
might not want to start doing semantics "once this assignment has been 
made" but earlier than that: WHY is that assignment being made, and why not 
a different one, and how is it made?

[parts deleted..]

>You say that you "agree", but not with me, surely.  I don't think there
>is necessarily any swamp, just a lot we don't know, and I would never
>espouse a Gazdar et al. position on the goals of linguistics.  My
>"cognitive commitment" is pretty strong, as is generally the case in
>linguisticsl.  All I said is that neuroscience does not supply us with
>any agreed-upon view of how the mind/brain as a whole works.  Indeed, if
>modularists are right, there may be no such concept. Therefore I do not
>see how anything in neuroscience leads us to "Cognitive" linguistics as
>opposed to other linguistics.  And there is no either/or of the sort you
>posit-- either you study language as a mathematical object or else you
>study "behavior, tightly connected to other aspects".  There's a whole
>world of cognitive (small c) linguistics that takes a third path, quite
>different from big-C Cognitive linguistics.  I'm still looking for
>arguments in favor of the fundamentals of Cognitive linguistics.

I didn't propagate *neuroscience* as the salvation for linguistics. I said
that cognitive linguistics emphasizes taking results from other cognitive
sciences into account.  In the first place, there's psychology, which
operates on a level much closer to linguistics than neuroscience. 
I do think, at any rate, that the either/or question does exist for very
many linguists.  If you don't share Gazdar's view, that's your choice, but 
others do and see their profession as primarily guided by operating in their
favorite formalism.  Those linguists who do care about cognition, tend
to be psycholinguists, and the very existence of that sub-field indicates
the difference in approaches towards language among linguists, does it not? 

-manfred

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Manfred Stede                                 mstede@cs.toronto.edu				
Dept. of Computer Science                      o              
University of Toronto                         <\ 
Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada                       />   
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6894 alt.usage.english:7062