Rhetorical, Conceptual, and Grammatical Entrenchment with Expressions of Change

THE WAY WE THINK, Fauconnier, G., Turner, M., eds., New York: Basic Books, 2002

Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, 9th Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL9)

FOR HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN, IT'S BEEN A CLASS STRUGGLE, Hirshman, L., ed., Washington Post, March 2, 2008

Posted: 21 Nov 2008

See all articles by Vera Tobin

Vera Tobin

Case Western Reserve University - Department of Cognitive Science

Date Written: October 18, 2008

Abstract

Fauconnier and Turner (2002) claim that our understanding of the world is structured in terms of several "vital relations," and that compressions over these relations are crucial to higher-order cognition. The current study evaluates evidence for, and rhetorical and grammatical consequences of, the entrenchment of conceptual structures of this kind.

I will discuss a cluster of phenomena in which variability across a group is compressed into, or conceptualized as, change in an individual. For example, the "role" interpretation of the change predicates in (1) can be analyzed as the product of a conceptual blend in which analogies between many specific individuals are compressed into an identity relation, producing a unique individual in the resulting blend. Disanalogies across those individuals are then understood in terms of changes to the unique individual.

(1) Every year my cell phone gets smaller and my bill gets bigger.

I examine two features of this class of compressions and their linguistic expression. First, there is a subset of cases which license grammatical structures that are not normally available (Sweetser 1997) for expressing this relationship. The usual constraint makes a role reading much less readily available in (2b) than in (2a).

(2) a. My office gets bigger every year. b. My office expands every year.

By contrast, I argue that (3) does invite a role interpretation, and that this receptivity reflects entrenchment of the underlying compression to uniqueness.

(3) Moore's poem expands in each new edition.

Second, I catalog a common extension of the compression structure illustrated in (1). Here, variability across a group is figured as change in each individual in a newly conceptualized version of the group:

(4) Chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women's vote [is] fragmented... Women are fickle. Turns out it's true. (Hirshman 2008)

In both the unusually receptive constructions exemplified by (3) and the extensions exemplified by (4), underlying compressions are relatively opaque: Most hearers of (2a) will not believe that the speaker's office is "really" growing, but it is less obvious that (3) does not refer to a poem that has "really" changed. These less-transparent mappings are also specially amenable to use with adjectives that denote a significant change to an entity's physical or essential form, such as mutilated or transformed, and those that denote changeability, as with fickle. I conclude with a cognitive-rhetorical analysis of these expressions and their projection of evaluative structure back to the source domain.

This analysis sheds new light on the linked roles that entrenchment plays in rhetorical, conceptual and grammatical structure, and provides new evidence for the descriptive utility of vital relations and their compression.

Suggested Citation

Tobin, Vera, Rhetorical, Conceptual, and Grammatical Entrenchment with Expressions of Change (October 18, 2008). THE WAY WE THINK, Fauconnier, G., Turner, M., eds., New York: Basic Books, 2002, Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, 9th Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL9), FOR HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN, IT'S BEEN A CLASS STRUGGLE, Hirshman, L., ed., Washington Post, March 2, 2008, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1304730

Vera Tobin (Contact Author)

Case Western Reserve University - Department of Cognitive Science ( email )

10900 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44106-7068
United States

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