Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
The various contributions: foundations, applications and future perspectives
The verbal and beyond: Vision and imagination
Verbal expression merely represents one means of conceptual self-expression. Similar means of expression include visual, pictorial, and/or rhythmic systems that can be interwoven with it, or operate in parallel or as complete alternatives. While verbal communication cannot do without its para-verbal and non-verbal support, signed language is equally composed of conceptual-content gestures and other accompanying met-gestures signaling how the message is to be interpreted. In his chapter entitled “Visual communication: Signed language and cognition”, Terry Janzen argues that a cognitively oriented approach to signed languages allows us to gain an insight into human conceptual structures, as the mapping between conceptual space and articulation space is often expressly iconic. Janzen first provides the reader with a survey of some of the current research and findings in the area of CL and signed languages and dedicates the rest of the topic to accounts of specific theoretical questions: what visual perception of language means for an articulation system, the relation between gesture and signs with focus on a discontinuous versus a continuous view of such domains, iconic representations (including a proposal for cognitive iconicity grounded in the theory of cognitive grammar), metaphor and metonymy, body partitioning, blended spaces and the embodied expression of point of view. Like other contributors, Janzen also addresses the issue of future directions for cognitive linguistic research on signed language.
In far more general terms and outside the domain of signed language, the visual mode, or rather multimodal systems, have now come to largely dominate Western and global communication systems, as Charles Forceville’s cognitive rhetoric studies have shown for the world of advertising. In “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research,” Forceville pursues the thesis that if conceptual metaphor theory is right in assuming that humans pervasively use verbal metaphor because they largely think metaphorically, then metaphorical thought should manifest itself not just in language, but also via all other modes of communication, such as pictures, music, sounds, and gestures. Forceville offers a review of work done in this area and focuses on a series of theoretical issues that require further research, including the distinction between monomodal and multimodal metaphor, the difference between structural and creative metaphor, the question of how verbalizations of non-verbal or conceptual metaphors may affect their possible interpretation, the intriguing problem how exactly similarity between target and source is created, and the importance of genre for the construal and interpretation of metaphor.
Due to its full exploitation of the visual and the imaginative potential in poetry, narrative and drama, literature by far transcends the monomodal constraints of verbal expression. It does not come as a surprise that CL has also given rise to a cognitive approach to literature, known as cognitive poetics (or cognitive stylistics), which employs cognitive tools to interpret the imaginative depths of literary text worlds. In her chapter entitled “The fall of the wall between literary studies and linguistics: Cognitive poetics”, Margaret H. Freeman first presents a brief overview of the cognitive poetics enterprise. To Freeman, cognitive poetics is essentially an exploration into poetic iconicity, and one which links the literary text to the cognitive processes of the human mind, providing a theoretical cognitive linguistic basis for literary intuition. Next, Freeman exemplifies the field by means of a case study, analyzing Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.” Here she applies the theoretical framework pertaining to blending theory, metaphor theory, deixis, and image schemas, among others, to show how cognitive poetics, by exploring the iconic functions that create literature as the semblance of felt life contributes to our understanding of the embodied mind. The effect of “poetic iconicity” is to create sensations, feelings, and images in language that enable the mind to encounter them as phenomenally real. The choice of “Mending Wall” as a case study undoubtedly contributes to rendering the “fall of the wall” an even more symbolic and entertaining process.
