16.1943, Disc: Modified Re: 16.1856, Review of Haser (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1943. Thu Jun 23 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1943, Disc: Modified Re: 16.1856, Review of Haser (2005)

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1)
Date: 23-Jun-2005
From: Fiona MacArthur < fionamac at unex.es >
Subject: Re:16.1810, Review: Philosophy of Lang/Semantics: Haser (2005) 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:02:51
From: Fiona MacArthur < fionamac at unex.es >
Subject: Re:16.1810, Review: Philosophy of Lang/Semantics: Haser (2005) 
 

[Editor's note: A part of this message was omitted when it was 
originally posted in LINGUIST 16.1856.  The corrected text is below.  
We apologize for the error.]

I am not the author of the work reviewed in the Linguist List posting
16.1810, but would nevertheless like to open a discussion of the
review and the work discussed. The following are my comments: 

The review offered on LinguistList of Haser's Metaphor, Metonymy, 
and Experientialist Philosophy does less than justice to this book. If it 
is to be expected that among the purposes of such reviews are an 
assessment of the contribution of a work to a particular field of enquiry 
and an identification of its interest to a potential audience, then the 
reviewer has misrepresented the work on both counts. Rather than 
offering a critical evaluation of Haser's contribution to cognitive 
semantics (as the subtitle indicates, her aim is to "challenge" prevalent 
views), the reviewer appears to suggest that Haser simply repeats 
and accepts current views on metaphor and metonymy and their 
relationship with human understanding. This is reflected in the fact 
that only on one occasion in the whole review (in the Evaluation 
section) does the reviewer cite the author whose work she is 
discussing, while she makes direct and indirect reference at least 
fourteen times to authors such as Lakoff and Johnson, Radden and 
Kövecses or Grady. This might suggest that Haser's book would be a 
good work to offer undergraduates as an introduction to the field of 
cognitive semantics -"a useful presentation of modern authors", as the 
author says at the end of the review. This misrepresents the 
contribution of Haser's book, ignoring the fact that some very 
important points are raised in her discussion of the relationship 
between experiential semantics and traditional Western philosophy, 
among other issues. For example, no mention is made in the review of 
Haser's alternative accounts of the distinction between metaphor and 
metonymy or the reasons why we find thematically related clusters of 
metaphorical expressions. Far from echoing the views of Lakoff and 
Johnson (1980), as the reviewer implies, Haser offers an explanation 
that has little if anything to do with conceptual metaphor theory.

Given that the springboard for many of Haser's arguments is the close 
attention she has paid to the founding texts of cognitive semantics 
(particularly the contradictions and misrepresentations she uncovers 
in these works), it is ironic that this author's own work should have 
been read with so little of the close attention it undoubtedly deserves. 
It is not necessary to agree or disagree with the author's views on 
metaphor and metonymy to recognise that her work provides a 
stimulating contribution to debate in this particular field of inquiry. 
However, the reviewer in question appears to be unaware of what this 
comprises (and indeed of developments in the field generally) and 
hence fails to adequately inform potential readers of what it is that the 
book offers and why linguists may or may not want to read it. 


Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Semantics





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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1943