30.4226, Review: Cognitive Science; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Speed, O'Meara, San Roque, Majid (2019)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4226. Thu Nov 07 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4226, Review: Cognitive Science; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Speed, O'Meara, San Roque, Majid (2019)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 14:02:02
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at english.su.se]
Subject: Perception Metaphors

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36523097


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1063.html

EDITOR: Laura J. Speed
EDITOR: Carolyn  O'Meara
EDITOR: Lila  San Roque
EDITOR: Asifa  Majid
TITLE: Perception Metaphors
SERIES TITLE: Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 19
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, Stockholm University, Sweden

INTRODUCTION

I carried the book Perception Metaphors with me while travelling in Central
Europe. Thus, I read about perceiving the taste of wine during a flight
between two wine countries, Italy and Germany. It seemed quite apt. The topic
of this book, edited by Laura J. Speed, Carolyn O’Meara, Lila San Roque and
Asifa Majid, is rather concrete; it is very close to our physical experience.
It is also an important topic for cognitive linguists and psycholinguists in
many ways. For example, a basic tenet of conceptual metaphor theory is that we
understand abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones. Kövecses (2002:
6) writes: “[C]onceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as
target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source.” 

SUMMARY

The editors themselves underline three issues in their introductory chapter to
the volume. They first discuss the relationship between metaphor and
perception and divide perception metaphors into three categories. The first
one consists of metaphors which employ perception as a source domain; the
second one comprises metaphors which have perception as a target domain, that
is, characterize perception itself; and the third one subsumes metaphors which
help us understand one kind of perception in terms of another kind (p. 3).
Secondly, the editors write about the directionality of perception metaphors.
A major aspect of this is the question whether it tends to be the case that
target domains tend to be more abstract, and source domains more physical.
However, it is also interesting to see in what ways we can use one kind of
perception to understand another kind, since metaphorical mappings do not
extend into all directions. Thirdly, the editors emphasize the diversity of
perception metaphors and the topics covered by their volume. Their aim has
been to cover “perception metaphor around the globe”, which is why they have
included “a diverse sample of languages, time periods, and genres” (p. 9). 

The book begins with the reprint of a chapter from a previous book, Constance
Classen’s (1993) Worlds of Sense. The reprinted chapter is titled “Words of
sense”, and it first discusses languages in general rather than focusing on a
particular language, and then turns to English vocabulary. Much of the
discussion centers on etymologies of words. The first half of the chapter
comprises a general discussion of words related to different senses, and the
second half consists of a list of words whose origins in perception are
explained briefly. The list includes such English words as ‘blatant’,
‘comprehend’, ‘dull’, ‘eager’, ‘intelligent’, ‘pungent’, ‘scent’, and ‘tone’. 

There are in fact several chapters in the volume that deal with perception
metaphors from a general or theoretical perspective. Chapter Three is written
by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, and it deals with the scope, motivation, and
lexicalization of perception metaphors. In other words, she asks which target
domains can be understood with the help of perception, which aspects of
perception motivate such metaphors, and what kind of lexical expressions ensue
in various languages. 

The title of Chapter Six makes the claim that “[s]ynaesthetic metaphors are
neither synaesthetic nor metaphorical”. Bodo Winter’s claim is based on two
ideas. One is that “sensory perception is neurophysiologically and
psychologically continuous” (p. 121); the other is that when we talk about
sweet music, for example, we are not metaphorically transferring sweetness of
taste to a quality of music but using the adjective in a more general,
categorical sense that is culturally determined to apply across various
domains of experience.

Zoltán Kövecses’s ambitious aim in Chapter Sixteen is to cover the case of
smell. He suggests that conceptual metaphor theory can help us uncover the
conceptual structure of smell which overlaps to some extent with the
conceptual structure of emotion but also differs from it in crucial respects.
He then moves on to consider smell as a source domain and   as a target
domain. The latter investigation leads him to discover three important aspects
of smell which metaphors tend to accentuate: its existence and intensity, and
its experiencers’ lack of control over it. 

Kövecses’s discussion appears to be entirely based on the English language.
The same applies to Chapter Nine where Nina Julich considers the metaphorical
basis of musical motion. She begins by looking at musical notation and
considering musical theory as well as conceptual metaphor theory, but moves on
to analyze texts representing music criticism. She suggests that musical
motion could be understood in terms of fictive motion.       

In contrast, Ulrike Zeshan and Nick Palfreyman cover several sign languages in
Chapter Fourteen on sensory perception metaphors in sign languages. They begin
to coin a language for discussing matters that relate specifically to sign
languages. An important difference between spoken and sign languages is that
the latter potentially involves iconicity, that is, the signs that refer both
to literal and metaphorical perception often involve sensory organs such as
the ears or the eyes. They call such metaphors “double-stage metaphors” (p.
181).

Because the book has as many as seventeen chapters, I will continue
summarizing it with the help of the editors’ suggestion that the book covers a
“diverse sample of languages” (p. 9). Apart from the above mentioned chapters,
data in English is analyzed by Wendy Anderson (“Perception metaphor in
English: A bird’s-eye view”), Rosario Caballero (“Sensory experiences, meaning
and metaphor: The case of wine”), and Kobin H. Kendrick (“Evidential
vindication in next turn: Using the retrospective ‘see?’”). However, several
other languages also play a role. Francesca Strik Lievers and Irene Da Felice
are interested in the history of the Italian language (“Metaphors and
perception in the lexicon: A diachronic perspective”); Elisabeth
Steinbach-Eicke writes about “[t]aste metaphors in hieroglyphic Egyptian”;
Mariann Proos analyzes the “[p]olysemy of the Estonian perception verb nägema
‘to see’”; Yufuko Takashima tells us about “[m]etaphors of perception in
Japanese sign language”; and Lila San Roque and Bambi B. Schieffelin look at
perception verbs in Kaluli (Bosawi) child-caregiver interaction in Papua New
Guinea. In addition, there are chapters dealing with English and other
languages. Daria Ryzhova, Ekaterina Rakhilina and Lilya Kholkina are generally
interested in perceptual qualities and write about “the case of heavy”,
considering it from a typological perspective. Marcin Trojszczak, in his turn,
writes about mental metaphors that are grounded in touch, comparing English
and Polish. 

As can  be seen even from the names of the chapters, the book also covers
diverse time periods. When Anderson uses the expression “bird’s-eye view”, she
refers to the entire history of the English language, as represented in the
Historical Thesaurus of English. Her chapter includes both an overview of
perception categories, and separate sections on touch, smell and taste. Strik
Lievers and De Felice consider both Classical Latin and Contemporary Italian
and find out, among other things, that their data confirms the hypothesis that
“[i]f a new meaning arises over time, it is always in a ‘higher’ sensory
modality” (p. 100). For example, the adjective asper ‘sharp, stinging’
receives the meaning ‘sour’. 

Steinbach-Eicke takes us even further back in time, into ancient Egypt. In the
beginning of her chapter, she considers the way hieroglyphs work, before
discussing the sensory modality of taste in texts as old as “the Pyramid Texts
of the Old Kingdom (28th – 23rd century BCE)” (p. 151), and especially the
development of the Egyptian perception verb tp ‘to taste’. 

As regards the editors’ claim that the volume includes analyses of different
genres, we may compare the Egyptian texts with, for example, the “audio and
video recordings of informal conversation” in Present-day English that
Kendrick uses as his data (p. 255). He focuses on explaining the exclamation
“See!” in terms of Conversation Analysis but also discusses reasons why it is
based on the sensory modality of sight. San Roque and Schieffelin also analyze
spoken data when they investigate what kind of expressions caregivers and
little children use. They discuss sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. 

Corpora contain various genres by definition. Trojszczak uses the British
National Corpus and the National Corpus of Polish to apply Szwedek’s theory of
objectification to metaphors for mind and thought. He covers the source
domains of size, shape, containment, and liquidity to discuss the mind. The
list of source domains for thought is longer and includes, in addition,
density, weight, temperature, and manipulativity. Proos on the other hand,
resorts to the Balanced Corpus of Estonian to understand various senses of the
verb nägema ‘to see’. However, she also uses a sorting task to create a
dendrogram illustrating the senses of the verb. She realizes that the two
methods give her different results. Caballero bases her description of wine
metaphors on a corpus of wine tasting notes and concludes that they can be
understood as “result[ing] from a process of synaesthetic metonymisation” (p.
139). In other words, a soft taste feels like soft things but its
conceptualization does not necessitate mental recourse to any particular
object.  

Ryzhova, Rakhilina and Kholkina combine corpus data with data collected from
dictionaries and with the help of questionnaires. They consider three types of
situations where something is described as heavy. In the first situation, a
person lifts an object; in the second, a person
“displaces a part of an object in relation to its other parts”, for example,
pedals; and in the third type, a “person estimates the weight of an object”
(p. 190). According to them, languages can employ different strategies to
lexically mark these situations, in other words, to distinguish or not to
distinguish between them.

Lastly, Takashima has collected data from dictionaries and interviewed two
signers. His chapter on Japanese sign language has three parts that focus on
“vision verbs and signs articulated around the eyes”; on “audition and signs
around the ears”; and on “smelling and signs on the nose showing negative
evaluation”. Every time, she begins from basic signs, and then moves on to
more specific issues. Her chapter contains, for example, a figure comparing
“[m]eaning extensions of the vision verb miru ‘see’ in spoken Japanese” and
“[m]eanings of signs articulated around the eyes in JSL” (p. 315). It shows
both similarities and differences between spoken Japanese and Japanese sign
language.     

EVALUATION     

It can be said that the editors of the book Perception Metaphors have
succeeded in including various languages, time periods and genres in it. At
the same time, many of the chapters deal with English, and most of them deal
with contemporary languages. However, there is plenty of diversity in terms of
methods and approaches. In addition, it should be said that a number of the
chapters reach towards a general understanding of the language of perception.
Some of those chapters focus on theory-formation rather than issues of
empirical research, and others combine the two.

The theoretical understanding that can be gained by reading this book includes
matters relating to directionality, as suggested by the introductory chapter.
Several of the authors are interested in how sensory modalities act as source
domains for each other or for further concepts. However, many other
theoretical issues also receive their share of attention. 

For example, readers of this volume learn not only about written and spoken
but also sign languages. Furthermore, they learn some things about scripts
that differ from the type in which the book is set and which may include
pictorial elements. With pictorial elements I refer to hieroglyphic writing as
discussed by Steinbach-Eicke. The next step from here would obviously be to
address pictorial and multimodal metaphors, following Forceville (2016). It
would be especially intriguing to read if elements comparable to such signs of
anger in comics as arm/hand position and spirals also occur in writing systems
when it comes to perception metaphors (Forceville 2003).

To give another example, although the authors do not always use the term
metonymy, many issues that they discuss are relevant to it. Both Strik Lievers
and De Felice’s diachronic perspective on the Italian sensory lexicon and
Proos’s chapter on polysemy touch upon issues which cognitive linguists have
discussed in terms of metonymy. A potential next step would be to study the
role of cultural changes in changing the meaning of polysemous sensory words,
as suggested, for example, by Zhang, Geeraerts and Speelman’s (2015) findings
concerning Chinese words for ‘woman’. These two chapters in the book could
also be considered in the light of research on radial networks beginning from
Brugman and Lakoff’s work (2006 [1988]). 

In this book, metonymy goes together with synaesthesia. Winter and Caballero
combine them to explain perception metaphors. This potentially represents a
budding new consensus among cognitive linguists about the nature of
synaesthesia. It nevertheless needs to be taken into account that the view
that these two authors represent is not entirely new. To illustrate, Winter
refers to Rakova’s (2003) explanation of why food can be hot. His arguments
very much resemble those of hers. She talks about physiology and the nervous
system to explain how our bodies contribute to our understanding of what is
hot (Rakova 2003: 34-47).   

As I have studied English historical linguistics myself and used the
Historical Thesaurus of English, I was happy to see Anderson’s chapter in this
book. I appreciate her idea that the thesaurus gives us a bird’s-eye view of
the English vocabulary and of perception metaphors in English. In my view, the
most valuable information in this chapter is that perception categories appear
more often as sources than targets of metaphors, as expected. However, it
would have been good to read even more about the lexicon of perception in the
thesaurus and about how the Mapping Metaphor project members divided
metaphorical connections as strong or weak. I would thus have liked to know
more about this interesting topic.

The same applies to some other chapters in the volume — I would have liked to
know more —, but I would not say exactly the same about the book on the whole.
It kept me mesmerized at airports and on planes, so the topic was certainly
interesting. I would also like to read more about perception metaphors. Albeit
some chapters were easier and some more cumbersome to read, the book is rather
balanced, so that I did not miss anything that was not there. It represents
various approaches and views and probably does not tell us everything there is
to know about perception metaphors, but reading it resulted in satisfaction.
It would certainly be different to read a monograph about perception metaphors
to gain an overview, but in this way, I could as if enjoy one delicious snack
at a time rather than experience the contour of a dinner.   

Since perception metaphors are a hot topic, we nevertheless need to be aware
of the fact that the book under review does not present us with all the
authors currently working on it, or with all their topics. Amitash Ojha and
Bipin Indurkhya have also recently published an article “[o]n the role of
perceptual features in metaphor comprehension” (2016) and another article
together with Minho Lee where they ask if language is necessary to interpret
visual metaphors (2017). Admittedly, the focus of this work shifts slightly
from perception metaphors to metaphor and perception, but it is all quite
relevant to our understanding of how these two intertwine. Thus a divide
between the two topics is rather artificial. Irene Ronga’s recent article on
taste synaesthesias (2016) comes even closer to the topics discussed in the
book Perception Metaphors because it is a further take on synaesthesia. She
does not emphasize the role of metonymy in synaesthesia, but like Winter and
Caballero and even Rakova (2003), she pays attention to the experiential
grounding of synaesthetic metaphors. To put it differently, she also claims
that they are more than mappings across domains — that they make deeper sense.

If anything, we can at least be quite sure that Perception Metaphors is a
timely publication. It deals with something that interests many linguists
right now. If you are not yet familiar with this topic, this edited volume is
a good place to start.   

REFERENCES

Brugman, Claudia & George Lakoff. 2006 (1988). Radial network: Cognitive
topology and lexical networks. In: Dirk Geeraerts (ed.), Cognitive
Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 109-139.

Classen, Constance. 1993. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and
Across Cultures. London: Routledge. 

Forceville, Charles. 2003. Visual representations of the idealized cognitive
model of anger in the Asterix album La Zizanie. Journal of Pragmatics 37,
69-88. 

Forceville, Charles. 2016. Pictorial and multimodal metaphor. In:  Nina-Maria
Klug & Hartmut Stöckl (eds.), Handbuch Sprache im multimodalen Kontext [The
Handbook of Language in Multimodal Contexts].  Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
241-260.  

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 
Ojha, Amitash & Bipin Indurkhya. 2016. On the role of perceptual features in
metaphor comprehension. In: Elisabetta Gola & Francesca Ervas (eds.), Metaphor
and Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 147-169. 

Ojha, Amitash, Bipin Indurkhya & Minho Lee. 2017. Is language necessary to
interpret visual metaphors? In: Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola & Maria
Grazia Rossi (eds.), Metaphor in Communication, Science and Education. Berlin:
Mouton De Gruyter. 61-76. 

Rakova, Marina. 2003. The Extent of the Literal: Metaphor, Polysemy and
Theories of Concepts. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Ronga, Irene. 2016. Taste synaesthesias: Linguistic features and
neurophysiological bases. In: Elisabetta Gola & Francesca Ervas (eds.),
Metaphor and Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 47-60. 

Zhang, Weiwei, Dirk Geeraerts & Dirk Speelman. 2015. Visualizing
onomasiological change: Diachronic variation in metonymic patterns for woman
in Chinese. Cognitive Linguistics 26(2), 289-330.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari currently works as a lecturer of English linguistics at
Stockholm University. She has recently taught courses dealing with metaphors
of emotion and metaphor and communication. She has been interested in
metaphors since writing her PhD where she discussed conceptual metaphors of
love in Early Modern and Present-day English. Her newest publication on
metaphors is the chapter “Corpus-linguistic approaches to metaphor analysis”
in The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language, edited by Elena Semino and
Zsófia Demjen in 2017.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4226	
----------------------------------------------------------