32.2266, Review: Cognitive Science; Syntax: Baicchi (2020)

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Subject: 32.2266, Review: Cognitive Science; Syntax: Baicchi (2020)

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Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2021 15:59:54
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36662977


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2967.html

EDITOR: Annalisa  Baicchi
TITLE: Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
SERIES TITLE: Figurative Thought and Language 9
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, University of Helsinki

SUMMARY

In the short foreword to her book, Annalisa Baicchi explains that her volume
“Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language” ”brings together a
selection of cutting-edge research studies that were delivered at the 2nd
International Symposium on Figurative Thought and Language (November 2015)”
(p. vii). The adjective “figurative” in this case refers to several tropes,
including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, and irony. In her
introductory chapter, Baicchi underlines that “[f]igurativeness is not merely
a device for the embellishment of communication --- but it is, first and
foremost, the pivot around which our thinking ability revolves” (p. 1). This
of course evokes Lakoff and Johnson’s claims about metaphor in their
groundbreaking book “Metaphors We Live By” (1980: 4), who write, among other
things: “we have found a way to begin to identify in detail just what the
metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.”
Baicchi refers to their book, among others, and discusses what she calls their
Embodiment Hypothesis, which states that the way our bodies are constructed
constitutes the way we think and speak (p. 2). She then briefly explains what
each of the chapters is about.

The book is divided into four parts: “Figurativeness and theory” (three
chapters), “Figurativeness and constructions” (four chapters),
“Figurativeness, pragmaticity and multimodality” (two chapters), and “Typology
of figures and cognitive models” (three chapters).  The first part is
subtitled “Addition, identification and structure”.

In the first chapter of the book, “Metaphor thoughtfully”, John Barnden
theorizes about what it means that we understand the world via metaphors and
that our thoughts are embodied. Among other things, he discusses the
hypothesis that people may have different metaphorical understandings of how
electricity works and that this may lead them into different conclusions about
how to solve problems with electricity. He suggests that a person might not
verbalize their metaphorical understandings of phenomena such as electricity;
instead, they might just use them in their internal reasoning. That the
metaphors which people use in reasoning are not necessarily always expressed
in speech or writing is one of the main ideas in this chapter.

In their chapter “Separating (non-)figurative weeds from wheat”, Mario Brdar,
Rita Brdar-Szabó, and Benedikt Perak discuss the identification of metaphor.
They suggest that instead of focusing on metaphors to begin with, we could
start from identifying non-metaphorical language in order to separate it from
metaphorical expressions in texts. They explain in detail how this could be
done in terms of understanding concepts and their structures, utilizing
WikiPedia as a source for concept structure and analyzing corpus data. They
also consider metonymy but come to the conclusion that this should be dealt
with in a different way. They recommend that more metonymical sense
developments be added to FrameNet.

Zoltan Kövecses’s chapter “A multi-level view of metaphor and some of its
advantages” also deals with the identification of metaphor, but the questions
are different--how to recognize the source and target domains and how to name
a metaphor. Kövecses’s main topic in this chapter is the different levels of
metaphor, which he captures by comparing image schemas, domains, frames, and
mental spaces, suggesting that these offer different degrees of specificity in
categorizing metaphors. He says that the level of specificity in the naming of
metaphor should be judged from case to case, depending on whether we want to
talk about general-level thought structures or specific instantiations of
metaphor.

The second part of the book begins with Angeliki Athanasiadou’s chapter
“Intensification via figurative language”, in which she focuses on irony and
sarcasm, expressed via metaphor and metonymy. The idea is that one can
intensify one’s message through the use of figurative language. This is
enhanced by familiar grammatical constructions such as A is B and the
like-comparison construction.

Christiano Broccias’s chapter “Falling to one’s death in multiple landscapes:
>From blending to typology” discusses in detail the expression “he fell to his
death”. His questions are: (1) whether the construction codes motion in
multiple landscapes, (2) whether it can be classified as a resultative phrase,
and (3) whether it can be analyzed as a metonymic phrase. This chapter
continues a discussion which Broccias has already started earlier, disagreeing
with Iwata (2014a, 2014b). Broccias’s answers to the above questions are,
roughly, (1) yes, (2) yes, and (3) no.

In the next chapter, Sabine de Knop discusses “Metaphorical adjective-noun
phrases in German journalese”. She explains specific instances of these in
great detail, showing how they can be variously motivated and interpreted. She
divides the possibilities into three: cases where the adjective is literal and
the noun is metaphorical, cases where the adjective is metaphorical and the
noun is literal, and cases where the combination of adjective and noun is
metaphorical. Furthermore, she discusses cases where pictures give more
conceptual information.   

Francisco Gonzálvez-Garcia closes this part of the book with his chapter
“Metonymy meets coercion: The case of the intensification of nouns in
attributive and predicative constructions in Spanish”. There, he discusses
constructions where a noun is preceded by such adjectives as “muy”, indicating
a quality. Consider, for example, the following (p. 159): 

(1) Y la cuestión es que Gaga es muy/bastante/completamente/totalmente Madonna
‘And the thing is that Gaga is very/quite/completely/totally Madonna’

He provides the reader with an entire taxonomy of metonymies that occur in the
“X es muy N (=A) construction in Spanish” (Table 2, pp. 165-166) and discusses
these in great detail.

The third part of the book consists of two chapters. The first one is written
by Herbert L. Colston and Ann Carreno and titled “Sources of pragmatic effects
in irony and hyperbole”. This is a psycholinguistic study where the authors
measure whether a person using a hyperbole in an answer to an accusation makes
others think that the person is guilty or not guilty. They consider three
different kinds of situations in order to explore pragmatic effects. 

Marcin Kuzak’s title “Metaphorical interplay of words and gestures in the
Catholic liturgy”  expresses his topic rather well. He recognizes such
metaphors as GOD IS UP and DOING RIGHT IS BEING AWAKE, among others. Although
his chapter is relatively short, the data seem rather rich, and he concludes
by saying that there would be several options for developing the study. 

The last part of the book, “Typology of figures and cognitive models”, begins
with Bogusław Bierwiaczonek’s suggestion to add two terms to the current list
of figures of speech. Bierwiaczonek’s “Figures of speech revisited:
Introducing syntonymy and syntaphor”distinguishes two kinds of syntonymy. In
category syntonymy “a lower term denotes a category which stands for the whole
category C to which it belongs”, whereas in paragon-based syntonymy “a lower
term --- stands for an axiologically marked subcategory of C to which it
belongs” (p. 230). He gives the examples “cow” for bovine quadruped and
“Mozart” for musician, respectively. Under the term “syntaphor”, Bierwiaczonek
discusses “analogy between closely related concepts” (p. 235). As an example
of this, he provides the reader with a table presenting various meanings of
the lexeme “pin” (table 1, pp. 236-238).

In their chapter “Cutting and breaking metaphors of the self and the
Motivation & Sedimentation Model”, Simon Devylder and Jordan Zlatev discuss
the two concepts of cutting and breaking metaphors of the self, on the one
hand, and the Motivation & Sedimentation Model, on the other. More
specifically, they illustrate the latter through the former, questioning
“Lakoffian” types of analyses and the certainty with which many people label
and categorize metaphors. Their idea is to let the metaphorical categories
“arise” from the data. They use different annotators to analyze the data to
check agreement and provide a plot suggesting which metaphors occur more often
than they would be expected to occur. 

The last chapter of the book, by Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibãnez and
Alicia Galera Masegosa, is titled “The metonymic exploitation of descriptive,
attitudinal, and regulatory scenarios in meaning making”. . As suggested by
its title, the chapter explains how metonymy can be used to understand
pragmatic constructions, for example, the construction “What’s X Doing Y?”. 

EVALUATION 

The title of this volume, “Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and
Language” is very well-chosen, since each of the words in it is relevant. The
book is about tropes (“figures”); it is about meaning; it is about
constructions; and it is both about thought and language. However, it was
difficult for me to see any coherence throughout the book. It seemed rather
that the different chapters were taking part in different discussions. A good
example of this is Broccias’s chapter, in which he continues a previous
discussion with Iwata (2014a, 2014b). 

At the same time, it was evident that several of the chapters represented the
outcome of discussions among the various authors and even people outside this
circle. For example, Bierwiaczonek refers to a discussion between himself and
Günter Radden in his footnotes (pp. 235-236). Also, the authors refer to one
another’s work in their chapters. For example, Gonzálvez-Garcia often refers
to de Mendoza Ibãnez and his co-authors’ analyses (e.g. p. 158). It thus seems
that the volume is the result of fruitful interaction between specialists. 

The experience of reading this book very much resembles sitting at a (small)
cognitive linguistic conference and listening to various kinds of papers.
Clearly, it is a conference with very enthusiastic participants. However, to
achieve more coherence, the editor could have restricted the topics somewhat
and/or invited more authors to discuss topics similar to the ones published
here. For example, since Radden seems to disagree with Bierwiaczonek’s
terminological suggestions, it would have been interesting to read his chapter
on why the terms syntonymy and syntaphor might not be needed. 

Let us then consider the titles of the four sections of the book. The first
one, “Figurativeness and theory”, in fact applies to more chapters than the
three subsumed under it. Several of the authors consider theoretical aspects
of metaphor. For example, in their chapter Devylder and Zlatev challenge the
conceptual metaphor theory and develop their own Motivation & Sedimentation
Model. The subtitle “Addition, identification and structure”, however, covers
the three first chapters. “Addition” refers to Barnden’s idea that in the
understanding of metaphor, “information might also be transferred from target
to source” --- resulting in ‘addition of metaphor’” (p. 3). If one takes the
subtitle at face value, it is easier to understand the words “identification”
and “structure”, since the second chapter indeed is about identification of
metaphor, and the third one about metaphor structure.

In the second part of the book, “Figurativeness and constructions”, it is
rather clear that the constructions at hand include “falling to one’s death”,
adjective-noun phrases, and “nouns in attributive and predicative
constructions in Spanish”, but it is not so easy to see how they relate to
Athanasiadou’s chapter “Intensification via figurative language”. Baicchi
explains this by underlining the cooperation of figurative processes which
“contribute[s] to creativity and novelty” and also “foregrounds emphatic and
intensified constructions” (p. 5). 

In my view, Athanasiadou’s chapter could also have been subsumed under the
title of the third part of the book, “Figurativeness, pragmaticity and
multimodality”. However, this section actually comprises the psycholinguistic
study and the multimodal metaphors of Catholic liturgy.

Last comes the section “Typology of figures and cognitive models”, in which
Bierwiaczonek suggests the new terms syntonymy and syntaphor, Devylder and
Zlatev consider cutting and breaking metaphors, and Ruiz de Mendoza Ibãnez and
Alicia Galera Masegosa explain metonymic chains. All of these chapters fit
under the section’s rubric, but it would also have been possible to group
together chapters that discuss metaphor or chapters that discuss metonymy.
That the chapters have overlapping themes of course creates harmony in the
book, despite my statement that I would have liked the volume to be more
coherent. To say this differently, there is coherence in the book, but the
specific groupings of the chapters did not seem intuitive to me. To give a
further example, Broccias’s title contains the word “typology”, but it is not
categorized under “Typology of figures”. 

The book could have been improved with additional editing. It was relatively
easy to find typos in this book. For example, there are several extra hyphens
in Barnden’s list of references, which suggests that the typesetting had
changed from one stage to another, without these being removed. Barack Obama’s
name is misspelled on page 187 as Barak Obama, and one author misspells the
name of another, so that Brdar-Szábo becomes Brdar-Shábo (pp. 241, 249).  

Had I been the editor of this book, I would probably have asked one of the
authors to rewrite a page where he constantly refers to de Mendoza Ibãnez and
his colleagues’ works, so that it almost becomes a list of where he agrees
with them, with plenty of the information coming within brackets (p. 158). I
also noticed a mix of German and English: the word “mausig” (‘mousy’) was
translated as “mausy” on page 143. 

Since this book is ripe with ideas that experts like to discuss, I would
recommend it to anyone interested in studying figurative language and
especially to anyone interested in metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, synecdoche,
or irony. Who knows, it may be exactly this book whose contributions will give
rise to important new insights in the future. At the same time, I would
probably not recommend this book as a course book.

Lastly, I was left wondering if anyone has previously presented the idea that
our thoughts are not only metaphorical àla Lakoff and Johnson but that
metonymy, hyperbole, synecdoche, and irony are also part of the “pivot around
which our thinking ability revolves”, as suggested by Baicchi (p. 1). It would
be interesting to read a chapter or even a book which would combine these
aspects in a single theoretical vein of thought. The title of such a volume
could be “Tropes We Live By”. Perhaps that could even have been the title of
this book. 

REFERENCES

Iwata, Seizi. 2014a. “Tight links” make convenient metaphors but loose
explanations: Replying to a reply. Language Sciences 42. 15-29. 

Iwata, Seizi. 2014b. Going further and further astray: Why a loose explanation
never becomes tight. Language Sciences 45. 135-151. 

Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari from the University of Helsinki is especially interested in
metaphors. She has published many articles on words and expressions for
emotions in the history of the English language. Her work is mainly corpus
linguistic. She has also collaborated with Ulla Vanhatalo in introducing the
Finnish version of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to Finnish scholars. This
work has led to her coauthoring a couple of recent articles on Finnish words
for emotions. In the future, she would like to focus more on the development
of concepts in language and also write a couple of articles on words and
metaphors for virtues.





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