From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Cognitive linguistics [was Re: Prototypes]
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 00:19:45 GMT

In article <92Aug26.160549edt.48031@neat.cs.toronto.edu> mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede) writes:
>pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) 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.
>[...]
>
>>Secondly, the notion that we must take into account "what is generally
>>known about the mind and the brain, from other disciplines as well as
>>our own" presupposes a generality of opinion concerning the mind and the
>>brain which does not exist.  From some I hear that specialization of
>>function is a property of the brain, yet there are other results that
>>some people interpret as evidence for diffusion of certain functions
>>(Ojema).  Furthermore, there is a presupposition here that results
>>concerning, say, vision should immediately tell us something about
>>language.  But this is at best a research topic, not something to be
>>presupposed.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  You have to show it.
>
>Yes, I agree that the issues become much more problematic when we let
>psychological considerations enter the picture.  We leave the comfortable
>mathematical foundations, and enter a swamp.  Whether you want to do
>that or not depends on your view of the language phenomenon.  You can
>treat it as a mathematical object and nothing else (as stated for
>instance by Gazdar et al in the GPSG book), or as an aspect of human
>behavior, tightly connected to other aspects---which leads to the
>'cognitive commitment'.  

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.

-David Pesetsky

disclaimer: I don't know neuroscience, but I hear rumors.
Newsgroups: sci.lang