Tag Archives: cognitive linguistics

Neighbours, highlighting and hiding

Consider this conversation:

Tom: This is my neighbour, David.
David: Hi. I’m his neighbour. Call me Dave.
Harry: Harry. Nice to meet you, Dave.

David is Tom’s neighbour from Tom’s perspective. So the focus of the conversation is with Tom. But in reality we tend to forget (or in Lakoff and Johnson’s term hide) the fact that Tom is also David’s neighbour.

Any piece of dialogue must assume a perspective. If it didn’t they would be difficult to understand. It must highlight some facts and hide others. Sometimes this highlighting and hiding is deliberate. Sometimes it is unavoidable.

The importance of evolutionary embodiment – clues from the fingertips

2uipial8Western philosophy has a tough time in dealing with the relationship between the body and the mind. In particular, identity has been all too often separated from the physical, all characteristic of ‘being’ invested in the soul. So it is no surprise that we have ignored the function of the fingerprint as part of our evolutionary makeup.

Fingerprints have served, so far, as an identity marker only in terms of criminality. But in reality the grip factor of fingertips are a trait for nothing greater than survival and advantage.

What is interesting in this article about a recent paper is that orientation of the friction plays a role in real terms for natural materials in nature, not for the artificial materials tested in labs and in human habitats.

Every trait, in short, has an evolutionary purpose. We are not above all other species or special in anyway. But we are unique, though, in our ability to delude ourselves and ignore important indicators such as this.

Teaching function words: the cognitive and corpus perspectives

I will be giving a presentation on function words, what we can learn from corpora about them, how we understnad them in light of conceptual metaphor theory and what this all means for second language teaching.

The venue and date: PanSIG @ Hiroshima University, 16 June 2012.

The alphabet as object

In a novel study of baboons it has been found it is possible for the animals to recognise ‘words’ (real word letter sequences) as opposed to jumbled letter sequences. This may indicate we may need to rethink our understanding of symbols as abstractions to a simpler concrete interpretation as if they are plain objects.

I do think our belief that we, human beings, are something ‘better’ than animals is complacent. Afterall we still live in a physical world just like any other animal. The ability for abstraction has its limits still confined by the physical.

That’s one point for the theory of embodiment.

Language and emotions are separate

Do we really need language to have emotions?

Given some thought it should be apparent that emotions – any sort of feeling – should not depend on language. Babies do not need to know the words ‘It hurts,’ to cry in pain. And we do not need the word ‘disgust’ to be disgusted.

The role of language is therefore first and foremost communication, not thinking. However, we do utilise words for thought. The probable reason for this is because language as an abstract tool is convenient for organizing our thoughts. Labelling things make them easier to manipulate. It could be as simple as that.

I have never been a fan of any innate language faculty that some linguists believe is responsible for our language ability. More likely is that language – a bunch sounds and symbols – is really just an abstraction we as humans are really really good at.