31.1296, Review: Cognitive Science; Psycholinguistics: Bolognesi, Steen (2019)

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Subject: 31.1296, Review: Cognitive Science; Psycholinguistics: Bolognesi, Steen (2019)

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Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2020 22:16:34
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at english.su.se]
Subject: Perspectives on Abstract Concepts

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2854.html

EDITOR: Marianna  Bolognesi
EDITOR: Gerard J.  Steen
TITLE: Perspectives on Abstract Concepts
SUBTITLE: Cognition, language and communication
SERIES TITLE: Human Cognitive Processing 65
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, Stockholm University, Sweden

INTRODUCTION

I have always found it problematic that linguists often talk about concrete
and abstract concepts as if we knew what the distinction between them is.
Fortunately, there is now discussion between linguists, cognitive scientists,
psychologists and psycholinguists about this. The book under review,
“Perspectives on Abstract Concepts”, is indeed divided into three sections
according to its authors’ branches of expertise, as suggested by its subtitle,
“Cognition, language and communication”. Its first part contains studies on
the “Conceptual processing and cognitive grounding of abstract concepts” under
the main heading “Abstract concepts in the mind”. The second part is called
“Abstract concepts in language: Insights from psycholinguistics and lexical
semantics”, and the third part is “Abstract concepts in communication: Corpus
analyses and spontaneous production of words referring to abstract concepts”.
The two first parts include five chapters, and the last one three. The book
has its origins in the symposium “Abstract Concepts: Debating structure,
processing, and modeling of abstract concepts” that was held in Amsterdam on
18 November 2016. 

In their introduction to the book, the editors Marianna Bolognesi and Gerard
J. Steen first address abstract concepts from the point of view of empirical
evidence from cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience. They then turn
to studies in linguistics. They point out that “words designating abstract
concepts tend to be used in a wider array of contexts than words designating
concrete concepts” (p. 2). They refer to an “extremely lively” debate between
people as to what meaning and semantic representations are. They are of the
opinion that when we discuss such matters or indeed the question of what an
abstract word or concept is, “it is necessary to break through classic binary
oppositions” (p. 4) such as the idea that meaning is either embodied or
symbolic. They suggest that the studies presented in this volume agree with
this view in that they address pertinent questions. They then summarize the
contributions, which is also what I am going to do next. 

SUMMARY: ABSTRACT CONCEPTS IN THE MIND

I will here approach the chapters from the point of view of the question: how
can we distinguish between concrete and abstract concepts when we study
language? The first chapter by Dreyer and Pulvermüller, titled “The relevance
of specific semantic categories in investigating the neural bases of abstract
and concrete semantics”, provides an array of answers rather than one, because
it surveys many studies discussing several aspects of abstract words. The
focus is nevertheless on sensorimotor areas. This may not be easy to see on
first glance because the topics range from neurostimulation to brain lesions
to emotions. However, the point is that the sensorimotor system plays a role
in our understanding even of many abstract concepts. For example, abstract
concepts can be involved in our understanding of mathematical terms for such
reasons as people having learned to count using their fingers. Consequently,
damage to a brain area primarily related to, say, hand movements, can affect
the processing of abstract words. The answer to my question, then, is that
even abstract words can be rather embodied.

The second chapter, “Abstract concepts and the activation of mouth-hand
effectors”, continues in a similar vein. In it, Mazzuca and Borghi investigate
the possibility that our processing of abstract words could have a direct
relationship to movements of the mouth because we learn them through speech.
For this purpose, they designed an experiment where participants responded to
tasks not only by pressing a button with their hands but also using their
mouths and feet. They found out that “abstract, concrete and emotional words
were differently modulated by the hand and mouth effectors, but that there was
a marked influence of the task” (p. 53). They concluded that mouth activation
had to do with a “deep level of processing” that could imply either actual or
inner speech (p. 54). The answer to my question that they provide is that the
deep processing of abstract words relates to our speech organ. However, this
chapter also suggests that emotional words are a category of their own,
separate from both concrete and abstract words (pp. 52–53). This has been
suggested by other scholars as well (e.g. Pavlenko 2008).  

Chapter Three takes us from speech to vision. In it, Calzavarini discusses
“Inferential processing with concrete vs. abstract words and visual cortex”.
In contrast to the kind of ideas presented in the two previous chapters, he
claims that the “inferential processing of abstract concepts does not seem to
involve [the] visual cortex” (p. 59). He thus argues against the idea that the
processing of word meaning would always involve some kind of simulation of
experienced events, grounding his view on neuroimaging and patient studies. He
points out, for example, that patients’ ability to name abstract concepts can
be retained in a situation where it is difficult for them to name concrete
objects or discuss concrete operations. His answer to my question thus leans
towards the symbolic view, that is, the idea that abstract meaning is
represented in our brains without direct reference to physical experience.

The title of the next chapter suggests a very similar topic: “Are abstract
concepts grounded in bodily mimesis?” It is nevertheless a rather different
chapter from the previous three, focusing on interviews concerning abstract
words with a single Polish girl, first aged seven and then aged ten. An
additional aspect of this study is that the girl in question is congenitally
blind. Jelec suggests that the answers that the girl provides to the computer
when she is seven are evidence of her understanding abstract words through
bodily mimesis such as gesture. However, in the course of time it is replaced
by a more detached understanding where the child no longer actively simulates
situations with her body and speech. For example, when she is seven, she
addresses the computer as if it was a human being, while at the age of ten she
no longer does so. This brings an additional angle to the question of the
nature of abstract words and concepts in our minds, that it might change as we
grow up. 

Lastly in this section on the mind, Scerrati et al. discuss hearing. Their
title asks the question: “Is the acoustic modality relevant for abstract
concepts?” The subtitle specifies that it is “A study with the Extrinsic Simon
task”. Here the book continues with the question whether our understanding of
abstract concepts has to do with simulation, the focus now being oral
simulation. On the basis of how people responded to nouns in a test involving
a visual and an auditory key, the authors suggest that the acquisition of
abstract words is likely to “require the re-enactment of the linguistic
information underlying their acquisition”, that is, a re-enactment of what the
person heard. This they see to be in line with the Words As Social Tools (WAT)
theory (Borghi & Binkofski 2014). Their answer to my question is that our
understanding of abstract words is based on our having heard them being used
in social situations. 

 SUMMARY: ABSTRACT CONCEPTS IN LANGUAGE

The section on abstract concepts in language begins with a study titled
“Determinants of abstractness and concreteness and their persuasive effects”
by Hustinx and Spooren. It is a methodologically rigorous study, but its main
part concerns a rather practical, everyday topic, how to tell important facts
to teenagers so that they actually become interested in them. Hustinx and
Spooren manipulated a website text about debts that was addressed to teenagers
to see if making the text less or more concrete would change their attitudes
towards it. Their study subjects included students from both intermediate
vocational training programs and general higher secondary education. The
chapter contains plenty of numerical information both about what makes a word
abstract, the focus of their preliminary study, and how the two groups of
students responded to different versions of the same text. However, an
important aspect of the website text that does not directly relate to the
research question also turned out to be relevant: the students could have been
more interested in reading about the topic in general. In other words, their
lack of interest in debts also influenced the results. This sets the question
about the concreteness and abstractness of words in a broader context: how we
respond to them also depends on further factors such as our level of interest.

Murphy’s chapter on “Acceptability properties of abstract senses in
coprediction” is also a systematic account with plenty of detail. He is
interested in how people understand abstract words when they are presented
together with other words and whether the order of presentation influences the
ease or difficulty of their processing. This is very relevant since we seldom
hear or read a single word, but tend to interpret words in a discourse
context. The same applies to production: it is uncommon for us to restrict it
to a single word. Among other things, this chapter includes a figure listing
many nouns which could be understood in a couple of different senses, a
concrete and an abstract one (Figure 1, p. 157). It is based on a
fill-in-the-blank norming study that suggests that at least a third of these
nouns tend to be understood in one sense mainly. For example, nobody
associated the words “translation” and “exam” with a piece of paper; all
respondents associated them with their informative contents. The answer that
this study gives to my question is not only that the abstractness versus
concreteness of words depends on how they are used in written and spoken
textual contexts but also that there are many nuances to it. For example, the
noun “university” could be understood both to refer to an institution (57.1%
of the answers) or to a physical entity (building or set of buildings, 42.9%;
Figure 1). Murphy also considers adjectives and different combinations and
sequences of adjectives and nouns in sentences. 

Franzon and Zanini’s chapter “Different degrees of abstraction from visual
cues in processing concrete nouns” somewhat relates to Jelec’s study on the
blind girl because they are also interested in how children develop an
understanding of words. They focus on countable and uncountable nouns,
claiming that the previous are easier for children to understand due to their
easily discernible visual boundaries. In their own experiment, six-year-old
Italian children were asked to react to grammatically correct and incorrect
contexts containing countable and mass nouns. They report that “children
widely accepted mass nouns in a count context, but not vice versa, showing a
predilection for count reference that cannot be explained in terms of
frequency effects” (p. 176). Although this chapter does not directly address
abstract concepts, the idea behind the study is that mass nouns are more like
abstract nouns. Consequently, the answer to my question is that there is a
cline from count nouns to mass nouns to abstract nouns.

The ninth chapter of the book is called “Cognitive and linguistic aspects of
composition in German particle verbs”, and it is written by three German
scholars. Springorum et al. approach the composition of particle verbs in
minute logical steps, stopping to consider various ways to interpret their
meaning. Their sense of humour and their experiment where people produced
sentences using imaginary verbs add lightness and fun to the chapter. This is
how they explain the communication sense of the verb “anpissen”: “When
anpissen is used in this second way, the contribution made by the base verb
pissen is obviously a non-literal one: no actual piss makes its way from
speaker to audience” (p. 187; in the original, the verb is italicized). This
chapter is of special interest to metaphor scholars because it discusses many
metaphors. However, its focus is not on metaphor but on the composition of the
verbs, as the chapter title suggests. The authors’ main contribution to the
study of verb composition is a list of hypotheses concerning conditions that
make a particle verb either concrete or abstract (p. 197). The answer to my
question then is that whether a word is abstract can be discussed in terms of
its morphology and that different combinations of word parts produce different
results in different contexts. 

To continue with metaphor, the tenth chapter by Panunzi and Vernillo directly
addresses it. Their study is called “Metaphor in action: Action verbs and
abstract meaning”. It is nested in a project called IMAGACT which they
describe as a “multilingual and multimedia linguistic ontology of action
concepts” (p. 217; <http://www.imagact.it>). According to them, the multimedia
contains animations and videos. In this chapter, the reader can see four
images illustrating the variation in the use of the Italian verb “alzare” (p.
218). This leads the authors to discuss five Italian verbs that have to do
with the vertical axis and whose meaning can also be abstracted. The verbs are
“abbassare”, “alzare”, “salire”, “scendere”, and “sollevare”.  Panunzi and
Vernillo explain in a clear way why some verbs produce different metaphors
than others. The answer to my question is: the metaphorical, that is, abstract
senses of the verbs retain such parts of the structure of the concrete actions
that are highlighted by particular verbs, and differ accordingly. 

SUMMARY: ABSTRACT CONCEPTS IN COMMUNICATION

The chapter which begins the third and last part of the book brings us back to
child language acquisition. Rosenberg has given her study the title “Abstract
concepts in development: Spontaneous production of complex words in Swedish
child language”. Like Jelec, she focuses on one child only. However, in this
case, it is her own daughter, “between the ages of 1;9 and 3;6” (p. 247). She
is interested in conceptual combinations and the child’s ability to understand
words that either combine two concepts without either concept being reduced in
meaning or combine two concepts so that one becomes reduced. Many of the words
that the child produces begin with “jätte”, originally a noun denoting
‘giant’, which in present-day Swedish is used almost like a prefix. Rosenberg
calls it an “intensifying item” and categorizes the child’s “jätte” words into
two main groups: sensorimotor versus affective or introspective. Both begin to
appear at the same time, at 1;9 months, when the child produces “jättevarmt”
(‘very-hot’) and “jättefin” (‘very-fine’). (P. 248.) A major observation in
the study is that the child does not behave exactly as predicted by previous
research. In other words, she does not as clearly move from more concrete to
more abstract words. Of course, she does not always know how to produce
adult-like language, but may need a word of her own to express an idea.
Rosenberg concludes that “the earliest complex words created by the child rely
on perceptual anchoring to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 257). The answer to
my question then becomes somewhat indirect, that a child does not necessarily
first learn concrete and then abstract concepts. Rather, the acquisition of
one overlaps with acquisition of the  other.

The next study takes us to the classroom where Zacharias has observed physics
teaching. Her chapter is called “The development of the abstract scientific
concept of heat energy in a naturalistic classroom setting” (in the original,
“heat energy” is in italics). The main message is that the secondary school
pupils who participated in the study understood heat energy better when they
not only wrote about it but also explained their own texts with the help of a
picture that they themselves drew. There were nuances in the theory presented
by the teacher doing an experiment that escaped the pupils’ attention because
they focused on what they saw, that is, what the experiment looked like,
rather than the theory that the teacher was talking about. They had to
consider those nuances when they drew a picture to explain their own texts to
the researcher. My take from this chapter is this idea of drawing mental
images: the pupils understand the abstract concept of heat energy with the
help of the picture which is not a direct representation of what they saw but
a coupling of it with the theory. However, it has to be taken into account
that they talked with the experimenter while drawing, which also influenced
the outcome. It was in fact the interaction between auditory and visual clues
coupled with their own work that led to their final understanding of an
abstract theoretical concept. It should probably be added that Zacharias’s
study relies on the Text World Theory (Gavins 2013). 

The thirteenth and last chapter in the volume by Bondarenko is titled “Time
domain matrix modelling in cognitive linguistic research”. She has conducted
corpus-linguistic research into a number of texts representing the history of
the English language from Old English to Late Modern English. She covers both
scientific and non-scientific texts from medieval religious teaching to
Bertrand Russell. This is quite a task, and the chapter comprises not only
many ideas about time presented in these texts but also four figures where she
shows which different abstract and concrete meanings the noun “time” may
receive, in theory (Figure 1, p. 294), and indeed receives in Old English,
Early Modern English and Late Modern English. The author herself says that she
contributes criteria to evaluate abstractness and concreteness of different
senses of the noun “time”, the major criteria being whether it is understood
in a scientific or non-scientific manner. 

EVALUATION

The main value of this volume may not lie in the novelty of the findings
presented in its chapters but rather in the bringing together of so many
various kinds of approaches in the same book. My evaluation is above all based
on what I know about abstract concepts as a metaphor scholar. I learned many
new things while reading this book, but I did not learn so much from the
chapters that addressed metaphors. This should not be misunderstood: I did not
consider it a waste of time to read them. To be more specific, I had not been
aware of the IMAGACT multilingual and multimedia linguistic ontology of action
concepts (<http://www.imagact.it>), and I found the discussion of the Italian
action verbs interesting. However, the theoretical idea that it confirmed was
not new. It is called the “invariance principle”, and Lakoff presented it in
1990. As to Bondarenko’s topic of time, it may never have been approached from
the point of view of covering the entire history of English, but it has been
discussed time and again by cognitive linguists (e.g. Evans 2013). 

The same evaluation can also be arrived at from an angle other than that of a
metaphor scholar. The first chapter by Dreyer and Pulvermüller is an overview
of previous research rather than a completely new piece of research. This is
again not a bad thing because the chapter is written by two famous researchers
and because overviews are valuable per se. Similarly, Calzavarini bases his
point on the processing of concrete versus abstract words in the visual cortex
on previously published studies.

It must be admitted, though, that the volume also gives an idea of ongoing
research into abstract words and concepts. I found Mazzuca and Borghi’s idea
of studying mouth responses particularly interesting. I also appreciated the
small-scale studies into child language acquisition (Jelec, Franzon & Zanini,
Rosenberg), because they brought the abstract topic of the book to an everyday
level that most of us can understand. Lastly, I would like to mention here
that the book attests to really meticulous ongoing work into abstract
language; its detail must be respected in itself (Murphy, Springorum et al.). 

Above all, the book confirms that the study of abstract words and concepts is
very relevant. The editors indeed recommend in the introduction that they be
studied more. They see “new compelling challenges” such as covering even more
languages and being more specific about “what types of cognitive operations
motivate the emergence of specific types of abstract concepts from concrete
categories” (p. 10). I would like to see people connect different threads such
as the study of spoken language with the neurolinguistic understanding that
the mouth plays a role in our understanding of abstract words. Also, we could
discuss the difference between words and concepts. 

To conclude, I will return to my original question how to distinguish between
concrete and abstract concepts. After reading this book, I would be more
likely than previously to suspect that even abstract concepts have a
sensorimotor grounding. However, this comes with a caveat if I take the
editors seriously. To believe that all concepts ultimately derive from
embodied action would be to return the kind of binary opposition that they
profess to oppose. 

REFERENCES

Borghi, Anna M. & Ferdinand Binkofski. 2014. Words as Social Tools: An
Embodied View on Abstract Concepts. New York: Springer. 

Evans, Vyvyan. 2013. Language and Time: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Gavins, Joanna. 2013. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press. 

Lakoff, George. 1990. The Invariance Hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on
image schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1(1). 39–74.

Pavlenko, Aneta. 2008. Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual
lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11 (2). 147–164.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari submitted this review in November 2019 when she was working
as a lecturer of English linguistics at Stockholm University. She has
published many articles on words and metaphors for emotions in English,
discussing both their history and current uses. In addition, she has worked on
other topics in cognitive and corpus linguistics as well as lexical semantics.





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