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: 26 Aug 92 20:05:56 GMT

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

>In article <92Aug26.100040edt.47888@neat.cs.toronto.edu> mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede) writes:
[brief explanation of Lakoff's approach to CogLinguistics, leading to:]
>>He furthermore contrasts the cognitive commitment with those underlying
>>classical linguistics (which he himself used to adhere to some time ago):
>>
>>* Symbol manipulation: Language must be explained within the generative
>>symbol-manipulation paradigm.
>>* The Fregean commitment: Meaning must be explained in terms of truth and
>>reference.
>>
>>When one's thinking is grounded in principles like these, Lakoff says,
>>clashes with cognitive observations are inevitable, which lead him to 
>>abandon them and adopt the cognitive linguistics perspective.

>Yes, this is in accord with my reading/knowledge of Lakoff.  Two points
>then.  First, the "cognitive observations" important to Lakoff with
>which I am familiar shockingly underdetermine his conclusions.  For
>example, nothing empirical in his entire metaphor book with Johnson (nor
>anything I know about the later book) in any way contradicts, clashes or
>otherwise undermines symbol-manipulation linguistics or the "Fregean
>commitment", except insofar as Lakoff's notion of the "Fregean
>commitment" incorporates the dubious notion "must be explained" and some
>semi-private notion of how we should understand the term "meaning".  I
>can (and do) accept the observations about the function and
>systematicity of metaphor as important, yet see no reason to abandon
>those ideas that Lakoff feels we should abandon.

The 'Fregean commitment' (the notion that words refer to entities in
the world (or a model) and that sentence meaning comes down to truth
values) has been and is popular primarily among philosophers of language.
Some linguists, traditionally concerned with syntax in the first place,
adopted this scheme, since it meshes elegantly with category-based
syntactic rules (cf. Montague grammar, trying to give compositional
semantic rules that operate in parallel with syntactic rules).  This
co-operation works so well because formal linguistics is so deeply
grounded in the idea of *well-formedness*: the whole game is to identify 
those strings that accord with your formal grammar and assign them a 
truth-functional interpretation, and dismiss all the others.

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.

Linguistics with phrase structure rules and Fregean commitments has
its strengths in certain areas, and it has the nice property of being
based on rigidly defined terms, lending itself to computational 
complexity analyses and other useful things.  In other areas of
language, however, these things just don't serve to explain anything,
and it's only fair to look for other approaches. 

>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'.  

-manfred