34.1566, Review: Cognitive Science, General Linguistics: Harris (2022)

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Subject: 34.1566, Review: Cognitive Science, General Linguistics: Harris (2022)

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Date: 13-Apr-2023
From: randy harris [raha at uwaterloo.ca]
Subject: Cognitive Science, General Linguistics: Harris (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3309

AUTHOR: randy allen harris
TITLE: Figuring out Figuration
SUBTITLE: A cognitive linguistic account
SERIES TITLE: Figurative Thought and Language   14
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: randy harris

SUMMARY
This book attempts a comprehensive cognitive and pragmatic account of
“traditional figures of speech” by combining linguistic argumentation
with extensive but myopic literature reviews, offering new definitions
for each of their core set of tropes, outlining dependency relations
among them, focussing on their collocations, and charting their
communicative consequences, all very firmly embedded in the Cognitive
Linguistics framework. It is a valuable contribution to the immense
body of scholarship on the figurative dimensions of language, but it
does not come anywhere near to providing the “unified theory of
figurative language” (259) to which it aspires. While they slightly
expand the purview of figuration common in contemporary linguistics,
María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez’s
efforts still leave that purview scandalously narrow in light of the
ways that rhetorical figures structure human communication, and while
it is broader in its research base than most linguistic forays into
figuration, dipping modestly into the literary and rhetorical
traditions, this book continues to neglect or diminish major
contributions to understanding figurative phenomena.
STRUCTURE
Chapter 1, as you would expect, is the “Introduction,” providing an
efficient overview of the book’s aims and methods: to build a
comprehensive, unified theory of figuration within the Cognitive
Linguistics programme and demonstrate its productivity with respect to
metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, irony, and related “secondary figures”
(3).
Chapter 2, “Figurative thought and language: An overview of
approaches,” purports to offer a comprehensive survey of figurative
literature but is largely confined to linguistic work of the last few
decades; that is, post Lakoff and Johnson (1980), a period they call
“The metaphor revolution” (though see Nerlich & Clarke 2001 and Booth
1978 for accounts of other metaphor revolutions). Other fields and
periods are either omitted entirely or absurdly truncated and
misrepresented. Within the literature they do consider, focussing
largely on metaphor, they discuss the so-called literal / figural
divide and survey semantic, referentialist, descriptivist, relational,
pragmatic, neuroscientific, and cognitive perspectives on metaphor,
frequently noting both the value and the limitations of each
perspective. Relevance Theory and Blending Theory get particular
attention and some psycholinguistic research (on processing cost) is
reviewed. The culmination of the chapter is their classificatory
scheme for “figures of speech,” partially motivated by what they see
(rightly!) as the undue exclusion in linguistics of figures other than
metaphor and metonymy. But their scheme is woefully insufficient for
their ambitions. They directly invoke a little over twenty figures,
sometimes appending a phrase like “and related figures,” with the
entire book mentioning well under fifty figures, some of them rather
questionable. The rhetorical tradition has a vastly larger inventory.
Burton (2016), for instance, defines over 400 figures. The chapter is
also insufficient in terms of the cognitive factors they consider.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza's scheme does serve a useful purpose,
however, in plotting out several cognitive and pragmatic factors that
contribute to the processing of their main figures: (i) the nature of
interdomain relationships (e.g., metaphor implicates a cross-domain,
source-target relationship; metonymy implicates a within-domain,
source-target relationship); (ii) the presence of shared features
among figures (determining, for instance, that meiosis and litotes are
both types of understatement); and (iii) the role of denotational
(semantic) and attitudinal (pragmatic) orientations (e.g. metaphor and
metonymy are oriented denotationally, because semantic incongruity is
important in their construal, while context is secondary; hyperbole
and irony are attitudinal figures because referential and intentional
context are central to their construal).
This classificatory scheme is the blueprint for the blended
cognitive-pragmatic approach Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza follow
for the rest of the book.
Chapter 3, “Foundations of cognitive modeling,“ outlines central
cognitive behaviours involved in producing and understanding language,
including a taxonomy of cognitive models. These models are only the
beginning of the categorizations in this chapter. Conceptualizations
sponsored by these models, for instance, come in different levels
(primary, low, and high) connected to issues of abstraction and
genericity. Situational models might result in descriptive,
attitudinal, or regulatory scenarios. And so on. In aggregate, the
many factors Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza introduce, distinguish,
and combine can seem excessive, and in the final analysis, their
framework is far from tidy. But these factors provide resources for
very nuanced accounts of how figurative phenomena function.
Figuration is barely mentioned in Chapter 3. I’m not sure if the
motivation for this largely non-figurative chapter is to make the
following point, or if this is just a side effect of their approach,
but it does serve to reinforce an absolutely fundamental axiom in
figural studies: that figuration is the product of basic cognitive
orientations and social processes, not something that requires
specialized abilities or talents.
Chapters 4 – 6 are dedicated to specific figure complexes: 4 to
metaphor, metonymy, and related analogical or correlational figures; 5
to hyperbole and related scalar figures; 6 to irony and related
oppositional intentionality figures.
Chapter 4, “Metaphor and metonymy revisited,” continues the trend of
being jam-packed with concepts and categorizations. Again, they are
largely worth the attention of anyone investigating the sociocognitive
aspects of figurative phenomena, but I will note only on the four most
central, by which they define and distinguish metaphor and metonymy.
The basic claim in the chapter (and throughout) is that cross-domain
correlation and resemblance are the cognitive operations responsible
for metaphor, while metonymy manifests within-domain expansion and
reduction. Admirably, they draw several other “figures” into the
discussion. Those scare quotes are necessary because not all of the
phenomena to which they give that label are in fact figures, properly
understood. Nor do Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza invest much rigor
in how they treat those phenomena.
Chapter 5, “Hyperbole,” marks one of the book's central achievements.
It focusses on figurative phenomena sponsored by our neurocognitive
affinity for perceiving, categorizing, and reasoning along scalar
clines. Hyperbole pushes any given scale out of the bounds of basic
accuracy. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” one might say, or “That
Tom Ford blazer is to die for;” or one might type something like
“a;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs” on a keyboard, which I have recently learned means
‘I’m so excited/angry/speechless by this thing that all I can do is
slam my hands/head/body against the keyboard.’ As these examples show,
hyperbole is a mode of figuration, not a specific figure. “Eat a
horse” is chiefly metonymical, leveraging a large edible thing, too
large for any individual to eat at one sitting. “To die for” is
chiefly metaphorical, leveraging a scenario that likens the speaker to
a patriotic soldier willing to sacrifice themselves for the protection
of their kith and kin. “A;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs” is a kind of metaplasm, a
suite of figures of phonological or orthographic derangement, but it
functions more like a riddle or noema. The meanings conveyed by the
first two work primarily by semantic incongruity, but the third
depends much more fully on context.
Chapter 5 is also valuable for bringing in constructions, a highly
neglected area in the linguistics of figuration. Many, many
constructions are highly figured. Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza
highlight the X is not Y but Z construction, exemplified by
expressions like
She is not a woman, but an angel! (202)
A celibate of such spotless chastity is not a human being, but God
indeed. (202)
The discussion is helpful but also very underdetermined as an argument
for the inter-penetration of figures and construction. It's helpful
because all of their data exemplify hyperbole and leverage our
cognitive affinity for scalar conceptualizing and because the analysis
is rich and nuanced. It is less than ideal, however, because the
construction is not itself hyperbolic, or even inherently scalar—in
the way that, say, the ‘let alone’ construction  is essentially scalar
(Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor 1988), in which the second item is
necessarily higher up some conceptual cline. The X is not Y but Z
construction is just a corrective, as easily neutral as scalar:
She is not a pediatrician, but a podiatrist!
Felix is not German but Swiss.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza miss the opportunity to engage with
constructions that more intimately incorporate figuration. Most
conspicuous in its absence is Turner's (1987) fundamentally metaphoric
XYZ construction, illustrated by familiar colligations (5) and
literary expressions (6):
Money is the root of all evil.
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
Chapter 6, “Irony,” charts a group of ''figures'' associated with
irony. Irony has received considerable attention from pragmatics
scholars, rightly so. Similar to hyperbole, irony is a pragmatic
communicative mode. It has two distinctive characteristics. Just like
hyperbole, the denotation of irony is out of alignment with the
beliefs of the speaker, so that the hearer needs a theory of mind
which (1) recognizes that the speaker's intentions do not correspond
with the entrenched code the speaker deploys, and (2) recognizes that
there is a dimension of play to this misalignment, that the speaker
does not seek to mislead the hearer, just to participate in some
degree of feigning an attitude or belief.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza follow their established pattern here,
working through the literature, including various theories of
pretense, mock deception, and echoing, a range of ‘historical uses’ of
''irony'' (Socratic, rhetorical, satirical, dramatic, and
metafictional), and so on, to endorse, but never actually articulate,
a ‘synthetic’ account of irony, one that bridges superficially
competing pragmatic accounts.
Chapter 7, ''Conclusion,'' is an efficient, summative account of the
book.
EVALUATION
The book’s virtues are substantial. It is a solid compendium of
Cognitive Linguistics instruments in the context of figuration,
including Frames, Idealized Cognitive Models, Image Schemata, and
Blending Theory, with notable supporting insights brought in from
Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatic subfields
(especially Relevance Theory), and, albeit with a major drop off at
this point, also Rhetorical and Literary Studies. It very thoroughly
reviews the cognitive and pragmatic literature for a few prominent
tropes, sifting through that scholarship for methods, findings, and
opportunities to integrate superficially competing positions or
theories into a coherent framework. It places a high premium on
cognitive operations and situational inferencing, and it is especially
important for its emphasis on collocations of figurative phenomena and
also for the efforts it makes to integrate figurative phenomena with
grammatical constructions. While it can move dizzyingly back and forth
among claims and observations in a way that might be unnecessarily
complex for beginners and does not always land on clear positions, it
is impossible even for experts to read Figuring out Figuration without
gaining a better understanding of figurative phenomena. Sometimes,
however, that understanding runs at cross-purposes to the authors’
claims.
The book’s liabilities are equally substantial but cannot be hung
entirely around the necks of the authors, who are positively radical
in their receptivity to other research traditions and admirably
ambitious in their attempts to expand the linguistics of figuration.
Rather, those liabilities are endemic to Cognitive Linguistics, which
has its roots in Lakoff and Johnson’s justly but lamentably
influential Metaphors We Live By (1980). It is justly influential
because of the systematic way in which the authors bring linguistic
rigor to figurative phenomena. It is lamentably influential because of
the way they misrepresent the millennia-long rhetorical, literary, and
grammatical traditions that first identified and investigated
figurative phenomena. Their palpable disdain for those traditions
strongly but wrongly implies not only that previous research can be
ignored, but also that any value of figurative phenomena for
linguistics is confined to a tiny handful of tropes, foreclosing major
research opportunities. They also unfortunately misapply the labels
for those tropes, leading to decades of distorted and insular research
in the very rich domain of figuration. Coming out of that programme,
Figuring out Figuration is therefore full of false claims and
confusions about earlier research and is riddled with omissions. For
instance, a hugely important trope for language and thought is
ignored, antithesis, and one unquestionably cognitive, extensively
investigated class of figures, which rhetoricians call ''schemes,'' is
wholly overlooked. Again, this perspective characterizes the larger
framework in which Figuring out Figuration is situated, rather than
the book alone, which tries rather earnestly to buck these trends. But
since the LINGUIST community is full of scholars developing that
framework, this review is a good place to voice these complaints. I
can address the importance both of antithesis and of schemes by way of
Construction Grammar, as a brief illustration of how impoverished
linguists' current notions of figuration are.
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza introduce a figure they call
''merism,'' without definition or citation, which they exemplify with
the phrases ''rich and poor,'' ''young and old,'' ''kind and cruel,''
''near and far,'' and so on; that is, an X and Y syntactic frame where
the variables represent antonyms of each other. The name largely, and
the form vaguely, aligns with the figure known as ''merismus,'' a
figure of thought in which information from one phrase is unpacked and
distributed into others, as in ''He alienated both his brothers, one
by his uncouth behavior, the other by his meanness'' (Erasmus, in
Christiansen 2013, 273). The communicative function of merism is,
Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza claim, to invoke extremes in a domain
such that they ''stand … for the whole of it'' (173). In fact, that
function is served by the Coordinated Antonymy suite of
constructions—including constructions like ‘both X and Y’ and ‘X and Y
alike’, along with plain old vanilla ‘X and Y’—which signal
''exhaustiveness of the scale involved'' (Jones et al. 2012, 106).
That suite leverages antithesis, and the very ubiquity of antonymy in
language reflects the intimate relation of antithesis to cognition,
every bit as close as the celebrated one shared by metaphor and
cognition. Antithesis is a trope. Schemes—figures of material
salience, like rhyme and alliteration—are every bit as cognitively
underpinned and every bit as pervasive as tropes in all varieties,
genres, registers, and forms of language. On rhyme and alliteration,
for instance, see Benczes (2019), and for other phonological figures
Rubin (2009). But consider sentences like these:
You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the
trailer park out of the girl. (Hilderbrand 2011, np)
Elon proves you can take the boy out of apartheid but you can’t take
apartheid out of the boy (Wise 2022)
These examples, utterly swarming with figures, represent the
A-out-of-B, not B-out-of-A construction (Harris 2022). Most obviously
for trope-centric Cognitive Linguists perhaps are the two analogical
phenomena in the second clauses: ''the trailer park'' and
''apartheid'' are reified into objects that can be manipulated (i.e.,
are 'ontological metaphors'), while ''the girl'' and ''the boy'' are
figured as containers (i.e., manifest the people are containers
'conceptual metaphor') from which those objects can in principle be
removed but which the construction says cannot be done. But for most
everyone else, the reverse repetitions (the figure is antimetabole),
the clause-initial repetitions of ''you can / can't take''
(epanaphora), and medial repetitions of ''out of'' (mesodiplosis) may
be somewhat more obvious. It is also crucial that the syntactic
structure of both clauses is the same (parison). What is especially
important to notice here is that the meaning of this construction
(roughly, that the relevant institutional or geographical ethos is
incorrigible for the relevant class of individuals) is inescapably
figurative. Critically, the reverse repetition (antimetabole) within
parallel syntactic structures (parison) swaps the semantic roles (the
relevant terms have opposite trajector and landmark assignments in the
two clauses), while the medial repetition (mesodiplosis) maintains the
semantics of the trajector/landmark relation and the negation
(antithesis) precludes the second trajector/landmark relation.
In short, I recommend reading María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Francisco
José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez’s Figuring out Figuration carefully, but
not as the definitive and comprehensive treatment of linguistic
figuration they believe it to be; rather, as a valiant but flawed
expansionist programme that needs desperately to be filtered through
rhetorical and literary works, like Christiansen (2013).
REFERENCES
Benczes, R. 2019. Rhyme Over Reason: Phonological Motivation in
English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Booth, W. C. 1978. Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation.
Critical Inquiry, 5(1), 49–72.
Burton, G. 2016. Sylva Rhetoricae. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.
Christiansen, N. 2013. Figuring Style: The Legacy of Renaissance
Rhetoric. Columbus: University of South Carolina Press.
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. 1988. Regularity and
Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone.
Language, 64(3), 501–538.
Jones, S., Murphy, M. L., Paradis, C., and Willners, C. 2012. Antonyms
in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Harris, R.A. 2022. Grammatical Constructions and Rhetorical Figures:
The Case of Chiasmus. 2022. LACUS Forum 46(1), 35-61.
Hilderbrand, E.  2011. Silver Girl: A Novel. Ebook. New York: Little,
Brown.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D. 2001. Mind, Meaning and Metaphor: The
Philosophy and Psychology of Metaphor in 19th-century Germany. History
of the Human Sciences, 14(2), 39–61.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09526950122120952.
Rubin, D. C. 2009. Oral Traditions as Collective Memories:
Implications for a General Theory of Individual and Collective Memory.
In P. Boyer & J. V. Wertsch Eds., Memory in Mind and Culture pp.
273–287. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511626999.017.
Turner, M. 1987. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor,
Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wise, T. [@timjacobwise]. 2022. Elon Proves You Can Take the Boy Out
Of Apartheid but You Can’t Take Apartheid Out Of the Boy…Welcome to
Twatter. Twitter. (October 28, 7:22 PM)
https://twitter.com/timjacobwise/status/1586136411455033344.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Randy Allen Harris, University of Waterloo, has advanced degrees in
literature, experimental psycholinguistics, technical communication,
and rhetoric (the doctorate); his research integrates all of those
fields. His books include Routledge Handbook on Language and
Persuasion (Routledge), co-edited with Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetoric and
Incommensurability (Parlor), Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the
New Conversational Interfaces (Elsevier), and The Linguistics War:
Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Debate over Deep Structure (Oxford).



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