首页 towards a critical cognitive linguistics

towards a critical cognitive linguistics

举报
开通vip

towards a critical cognitive linguistics 1 Towards a Critical Cognitive Linguistics? Peter Stockwell: School of English Studies, Nottingham University, UK peter.stockwell@nottingham.ac.uk 1. The Landscape of Modern Linguistics At the turn of the millennium, the two most rapidly developing fields ...

towards a critical cognitive linguistics
1 Towards a Critical Cognitive Linguistics? Peter Stockwell: School of English Studies, Nottingham University, UK peter.stockwell@nottingham.ac.uk 1. The Landscape of Modern Linguistics At the turn of the millennium, the two most rapidly developing fields of modern linguistics are Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Both fields are relatively new and innovative. Both claim to offer a radical new direction for the study of language and communication, and both effect this by widening the traditional conception of language as an area of study in itself. Both have arisen out of interdisciplinary studies with linguistics at the core, and both are characterised by the missionary zeal of their proponents and their sense of the inadequacies of other approaches to language. This paper asks whether the two disciplines share any common ground, and whether any synthesis or at least accommodation is possible between them. The reason for this inquiry is partly to use the comparative method to highlight whether there are any proper or peculiar domains to which each discipline belongs, and partly to use the occasion of the comparison to investigate some of the claims made within each discipline. CL is best exemplified in the work of Fauconnier (1994, 1997), Geeraerts (with Grondelaers and Bakema 1994), Gibbs (1994), Johnson (1987), Lakoff (and Johnson 1980, 1999, Lakoff 1987), Langacker (1987, 1991), Sweetser (1990, Fauconnier and Sweetser 1996), and Turner (1987, 1991, Lakoff and Turner 1989), among many others. Ungerer and Schmid (1996) is a good introduction, and though in this paper I assume some knowledge of the discipline, the key ideas are as follows. CL represents an experientialist and thus anti-objectivist position, in describing the relationship between the world on one hand and language and thought on the other. This has far-reaching consequences for reference, anaphora, deixis, pragmatic force, categorisation, lexicalisation and lexical semantics, many of which are in the process of being developed at the moment. The fundamental re-evaluation of CL involves a rejection of Cartesian dualism, reuniting mind and body to see language and thought - and conceptualisation itself - as embodied. Embodied experience finds expression functionally in metaphorical structures (idealised cognitive models, or ICMs) which in turn are manifest in both conventional and novel metaphors and expressions. Conventional communication involves shared (perhaps universal) ICMs and image-schemas, through which we structure our understanding of the world and through which we even structure new concepts. That is, knowledge of the world is constituted through and by these conceptual metaphors, to the extent that even newly-encountered or abstract concepts are isomorphically understood in terms of them. 2 The process of categorisation itself consists of basic-level schemas and is arranged in a way that manifests prototype effects. Items within such radial categories can be judged as being central or peripheral, and rated on the basis of ‘goodness-of-example’. CL has formulated constraints on metaphorical mappings so that the framework matches intuitive senses of linguistic usage. Among the many interdisciplinary applications of CL is the sub-branch of cognitive poetics, which investigates the consequences for literary analysis of ideas from CL. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is exemplified in the work of Birch (1989), Caldas- Coulthard and Coulthard (1996), Fairclough (1989, 1995a, 1995b), Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew (1979, Fowler 1981, 1986, 1991, Kress and Hodge 1979, Hodge and Kress 1988) and Toolan (1996), among many others. The key points in CDA are as follows. The approach mainly uses Hallidayan (1985) systemic-functional linguistics to examine the rhetoric and ideology of institutions, such as the media, government, politicians, regulatory bodies and popular influential texts from fictional romances to billboard advertising. CDA developed from the linguistic criticism of the late 1970s and ‘80s, and has since broadened into social semiotics and a variety of critical linguistic approaches to a whole range of discourses. Fairclough’s (1995a) analysis is explicitly Marxian and emphasises the responsibility of academic practice in unearthing the latent ideologies of controlling hegemonic institutions. This is based on a tripartite analytical framework: - spoken and written text analysis - the analysis of the discourse practice of production and interpretation - and a politically situated analysis of social practice (Fairclough 1995a: 133). CDA is allied closely (especially in Toolan’s (1996) work) with integrationalism (after Harris 1981, 1987). This means that the dimensions of communicative experience - such as context, power relations and background knowledge - are not sidelined as in traditional linguistic rule- systems, but become part of a holistic integrated study. The respective ancestries of CL and CDA seem to be significant. CL includes practitioners who grew up as generativists studying transformational-generative grammar and language universals in the 1970s. Though many of the current writers refute their earlier selves, the search for universal or totalizing linguistic and conceptual structures is still a tendency in CL. There is less oedipal angst in the development of CDA; its roots lie in left-wing politics and systemic-functional linguistics and this is still largely the agenda for writers. It has always had a concern to expose conservative or anti-democratic ideologies in persuasive, regulatory, institutional, media and popular influential texts, though later CDA problematises the truth/falsity issue of studying textual ‘distortions’ of a preferred reality, in response to criticism often from within the movement (such as Pateman 1981, Richardson 1987). 3 In general, CL mainly has a continental European and US bias, while CDA is generally to be found amongst academics working in Britain and Australia. In spite of these geographical and historical differences, there are points of contact even at the theoretical level. 2. A Comparison of Theoretical Issues Both CL and CDA are interested in suggesting deep structures that are made manifest in linguistic expressions. CDA is focused on how individual utterances and sentences are expressions of ideological discursive practices (such as analyses of women’s magazine articles, tabloid newspaper reports, university regulations, and so on). CL is focused on how individual utterances and sentences are expressions of conceptual metaphors (such as ‘he blew his top’ as an example of ANGER IS A CONTAINER OF HOT LIQUID, or ‘she rejected his advances’ as LOVE IS WAR, and so on). Both traditions emphasise that linguistic conventions are not just examples of social practice, but that linguistic usage is also ‘constitutive’ (Fairclough 1995a: 131) of social practice. CDA focuses on how hegemonic institutions attempt to structure conventional thinking, and CL focuses on making explicit the conceptual metaphors of everyday usage. Although CDA claims to be interventionist (it wants to make explicit an awareness of control in order to resist it critically) and CL aims to be descriptive (it wants to be simply a methodological tool which can be used in a variety of ideological ways), there is no reason why the linguistic procedures of CL cannot be used in the service of CDA. I will return to this point later. Both CL (centrally, Lakoff 1987) and CDA (latterly, Fairclough 1995a) are anti-objectivist in their view of the conceptually constitutive power of language. Both place re-emphasis on ‘experientialism’. However, there are differences in definition and how thoroughly the assimilation of the term is embraced. In CL, experientialism serves to situate conceptualisation in the body (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Lakoff 1987, Turner 1987, 1991), and it emphasises the ‘embodiment’ of experience in idealised cognitive models (ICMs). Thus the abstract concept TIME is figured as the human-scale and tangible SPACE, and emotions are metaphorically directional in prepositions of being ‘up’ or ‘down,’ ‘high’ or ‘low’ in relation to the conditions of being corporeally human. Where categories and concepts are shared in the language system, the individual has learnt the convention experientially: though there is an element of a social theory here, the focus is on the individual and their mental space being imprinted with the culturally correct convention. The CDA understanding of experience is more dynamic and interactive than this. Toolan (1996) (after pointing out the problems CL has in dealing with creative and novel metaphors – see also Stockwell 1999 on this) argues that the CL rejection of objectivism is not thorough enough: ... it is clear that his [Lakoff’s] rejection of abstract objectivism is in no way a rejection of collective categorization itself but rather as [an?] emphasis on different roots of categorization (experience, in the body) and a different kind of 4 categorization (prototypical etc. rather than absolute). As a shared mental framework, categorization is crucial to the revision ... In fact, Lakoff presents ‘basicness in human categorization’ very much as if it is analogous, for things in the world, to what Chomsky’s universal grammar is claimed to be for natural language syntactic structures ... Lakoff’s [1987] book reports revisions as to what counts as ‘membership of a category’ (i.e., what the criteria are); it does not take the radical step of confronting the possibility that ‘membershipping’ (categorization) is contingent, varying from case to case according to criteria that may differ from case to case. (Toolan 1996: 87-8) There is a divergence in what ‘experientialism’ means and how thoroughly it can be assimilated into an investigative methodology. Nevertheless, Toolan’s book is primarily about integrationalism rather than CDA directly, and in fact there are correspondences in the notions of prototypes and categorisations between CL and CDA. An ICM is an experientially-accumulated knowledge structure that is always open to new information, is connected with other domains of knowledge in a network, and is omnipresent in cognitive activity (Ungerer and Schmid 1996: 48-9). The notion is a new (Lakoff 1987) version of the notions of frames and schemas of knowledge developed in the AI research of the 1970s. Fairclough links CDA to these ideas: It may be useful to think of ideologies in terms of content-like entities which are manifested in various formal features, and perhaps frame, schema, script and related concepts are of value in this respect (Schank and Abelson (1977)). (Fairclough 1995a: 75) In his earlier work, Fairclough (1989) developed the notion of members’ resources (MR). These are accumulated knowledge structures ‘which people have in their heads and draw upon when they produce or interpret texts – including their knowledge of language, representations of the natural and social worlds they inhabit, values, beliefs, assumptions, and so on’ (Fairclough 1989: 24). Fairclough’s MRs are clearly experientialist ICMs. Earlier (Fairclough 1989: 10) he refers to them as a set of ‘prototypes’, within a section entitled ‘Cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence’. He links these mental structures to the cognitive dimension: The MR which people draw upon to produce and interpret texts are cognitive in the sense that they are in people’s heads, but they are social in the sense that they have social origins. (Fairclough 1989: 24) It is the social aspect that is of primary interest for Fairclough, and he uses this concern to argue against the emphasis within CL: 5 Not surprisingly, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have given little attention to the social origins or significance of MR. I shall argue later that attention to the processes of production and comprehension is essential to an understanding of the interrelations of language, power and ideology, and that this is so because MR are socially determined and ideologically shaped, though their ‘common sense’ and automatic character typically disguises that fact. Routine and unselfconscious resort to MR in the ordinary business of discourse is, I shall suggest, a powerful mechanism for sustaining the relations of power which ultimately underlie them. (Fairclough 1989: 11) Fairclough’s first criticism here seems to have been met by CL in the 1990s. Furthermore, in the same way as Fairclough (1989: 91) sees ‘common sense’ as the ‘naturalization’ of an ideological set of assumptions so that they are not perceived as ideological any more, CL regards cultural models as shared conceptual metaphors which operate as folk-theories and structure our relationship with society (Holland and Quinn 1987). Though Fairclough argues directly against early CL emphases here, it seems to me that the difference is based on a different focus and is additional or complementary rather than being an antithesis. It seems that Fairclough might prefer a framework which shifted the focus of idealised cognitive models to being ideological cognitive models. Fairclough points out that ‘frames, scripts, and schemata’ are all ‘a part of MR constituting interpretative procedures ... and share the property of mental representations in general of being ideologically variable’ (Fairclough 1989: 158). It is the awareness of ideology and the status of linguistic analysis as scientific method or critical engagement that is at the heart of the CL/CDA comparison. Though some work within the sub-branch of ‘cognitive poetics’ (Turner 1987, 1991, Lakoff and Turner 1989, D. Freeman 1993a, M.H. Freeman 1997) has focused on the stylistic expression of linguistic metaphors, in general CL is concerned mainly with the conceptual mappings which underlie metaphorical expressions. Fairclough recognises the ubiquity of metaphor, and though he is interested in underlying ideological functions, his systemic linguistic framework makes him sensitive to the ideological nuances of different stylistic choices: Metaphor is a means of representing one aspect of experience in terms of another, and is by no means restricted to the sort of discourse it tends to be stereotypically associated with – poetry and literary discourse. But any aspect of experience can be represented in terms of any number of metaphors, and it is the relationship between alternative metaphors that is of particular interest here, for different metaphors have different ideological attachments. (Fairclough 1989: 119) This seems to me to be a difference in the current practices of the two disciplines, but it is not one that is necessary to their distinctiveness as disciplines. As the cognitive poetics work shows, CL can be used successfully to discuss stylistic variation in a way that would correspond quite happily with CDA. 6 A more problematic divergence is in the question of what sort of disciplines CL and CDA think they are, respectively. CL explicitly and unapologetically regards itself as a science with the job of investigating a natural phenomenon (language) and producing the best possible current account of the workings of that system in the mind. Freeman (1993b) has argued that in itself CL is a method rather than a methodology, a tool with no inherent ideological assumptions, and which could be used in the service of a whole range of other ideological approaches. CL explains the detail of a range of interpretations, and excludes some readings which are demonstrably without cognitive basis, but it cannot itself choose between different interpretations of, for example, how a conceptual metaphor is applied. In relation to literary interpretation, Freeman asserts: Of course there is no one God’s-eye interpretation of a literary work, whether the evidence for such a claim arises from cognitive metaphor or anything else. But there is a range of plausible interpretations and a scale of valid ones. (Freeman 1993a: 17) Freeman’s challenge is to ask which part of CL is inherently ideological. Of course, considered as a ‘pure’ theory, this cannot be answered, except in the very general sense that there is an implicit ideological motivation in choosing the framework in the first place. However, claiming that CL is exempt from ideological assumptions does not seem tenable to me. There is a fundamental consensualism in the notion of cultural models, conventional mapping of ICMs, shared prototypes, and so on, and the common method of discussion of CL is to examine individual sentences asocially. Even if CL does not exclude a social dimension, it tends to focus elsewhere and this is an applied ideological choice. It would be true to say that it is the application that is ideological rather than the theoretical framework, but since the only way of discussing CL is to apply it, this seems a bit mischievous. As Gross (1997) points out, new disciplines always tend to overstate their radicalism, innovativeness and novelty, and perhaps CL in this respect is a victim of its own hype. Freeman (1993a) takes a more robust but charitable view: I am often taxed ... with being ‘totalizing’ or ‘essentialist’. Guilty as charged. I take these terms to mean ‘general, ignoring particulars that do not fit the theory’. Noam Chomsky’s early work in linguistic theory is often held up to me as an example of this ‘fault’ ... None of ... [the modern linguistic] developments would have been possible, in my view, had not Chomsky been an unrepentant ‘totalizer’ from the start. Any theory of anything worth anything begins as totalizing, essentialist, and universalist, and progressively qualifies its claims as research proceeds. (Freeman 1993: 18) The process is certainly the institutional practice in sciences (where scientists compete for funding by good self-marketing), but it could be argued that this ‘scientific’ method makes for 7 bad science. Certainly the history of science has involved the progression from one explanatory framework to another, regarded as an improvement, but there is an inescapable ideological background and motivation to science as to every other human activity. This is what makes the following document from within CL all the more astonishing. This is the (anonymous) referee’s comment on a proposed paper to be given by a colleague at a CL conference: Comments on: ‘Cognitive Linguistics and the Marxist approach to ideology’ This paper appears to have been submitted to the wrong conference. It is a critique of Cognitive Linguistics from a Marxist perspective, which would be entirely appropriate at a conference of Marxists giving Marxist critiques of things. The paper ignores a fundamental difference between CL and Marxism: CL is a scientific endeavor, part of cognitive science. It is not an apriori theory, as Marxism is. At a conference on CL, an appropriate paper might be a cognitive analysis of Marxist thought. Indeed, the abstract itself would make in interesting subject for analysis. One thing is clear from the abstract (actually, it's been clear for many years): The consequences of empirical research on the mind in cognitive science in general and CL in particular are inconsistent with Marxist ideology. That is not particularly strange, since Lakoff and Johnson argue in their new book, Philosophy in the Flesh, that most of Western philosophy is inconsistent with results coming from cognitive science. Marx fits right in with Kant and Aristotle and Descartes. Of course, from within Marxist ideology, CL would be an example of ‘false consciousness’, as would anything disagreeing with Marxism, whether it had scientific support or not. I recommend rejecting this abstract. It should be given at conference of Marxists, or perhaps paired on neutral turf with a paper analyzing the folk theories and metaphors in the paper itself. [Thi
本文档为【towards a critical cognitive linguistics】,请使用软件OFFICE或WPS软件打开。作品中的文字与图均可以修改和编辑, 图片更改请在作品中右键图片并更换,文字修改请直接点击文字进行修改,也可以新增和删除文档中的内容。
该文档来自用户分享,如有侵权行为请发邮件ishare@vip.sina.com联系网站客服,我们会及时删除。
[版权声明] 本站所有资料为用户分享产生,若发现您的权利被侵害,请联系客服邮件isharekefu@iask.cn,我们尽快处理。
本作品所展示的图片、画像、字体、音乐的版权可能需版权方额外授权,请谨慎使用。
网站提供的党政主题相关内容(国旗、国徽、党徽..)目的在于配合国家政策宣传,仅限个人学习分享使用,禁止用于任何广告和商用目的。
下载需要: 免费 已有0 人下载
最新资料
资料动态
专题动态
is_665509
暂无简介~
格式:pdf
大小:52KB
软件:PDF阅读器
页数:0
分类:
上传时间:2013-05-30
浏览量:17