Human Conceptual System Research Articles

Flexible Conceptual Representations

AbstractA view that has been gaining prevalence over the past decade is that the human conceptual system is malleable, dynamic, context‐dependent, and task‐dependent, that is, flexible. Within the flexible conceptual representation framework, conceptual representations are constructed ad hoc, forming a different, idiosyncratic instantiation upon each occurrence. In this review, we scrutinize the neurocognitive literature to better understand the nature of this flexibility. First, we identify some key characteristics of these representations. Next, we consider how these flexible representations are constructed by addressing some of the open questions in this framework: We review the age‐old question of how to reconcile flexibility with the apparent need for shareable stable definitions to anchor meaning and come to mutual understanding, as well as some newer questions we find critical, namely, the nature of relations among flexible representations, the role of feature saliency in activation, and the viability of all‐or‐none feature activations. We suggest replacing the debate about the existence of a definitional stable core that is obligatorily activated with a question of the degree and probability of activation of the information constituting a conceptual representation. We rely on published works to suggest that (1) prior featural salience matters, (2) feature activation may be graded, and (3) Bayesian updating of prior information according to current demands offers a viable account of how flexible representations are constructed. This proposal provides a theoretical mechanism for incorporating a changing momentary context into a constructed representation, while still preserving some of the concept's constituent meaning.

Comparative Study of the Structures of French and Yoruba Idiomatic Expressions

oruba and French languages are so rich in the use of idiomatic expressions which lend themselves easily in the hands of those who know the two languages, through limitless improvisation of idiomatic expressions. In friendly, family and societal conversations, idiomatic expressions occupy a unique place. Their importance cannot be over emphasized as they add beauty to the speeches that employ them and provide knowledge and wisdom for better and clear understanding of the messages being projected. This paper therefore, examines idiomatic expressions in both languages at different fora. The paper hinges on Cognitive Linguistics which claims that idiomatic expression, which is motivated by metaphor, is not merely a figure of speech, but a specific mental and neutral mapping that influences a good deal of how people think, reason and imagine in everyday life. It was complemented with Conceptual Metaphor Theory which postulates that human thought process are largely metaphorical, and human conceptual system is structured and defined in a metaphorical way. The examples of Yoruba idiomatic expressions used in the paper were taken from two authentic Yoruba text books; Yoruba idioms by M.A. Fabunmi and Asayan Akanlo Ede Yoruba by Ademola Olopade while French idiomatic expressions were taken from Dictionnaire Des Expressions Et Locutions, second edition by Allain Ray et Sophie Chantreau. Our findings reveal that, the idiomatic expressions in both languages have similar characteristics, similar functions and at times have mutual equivalence. Also idioms in both languages can have the same word patterns but different lexical items due to different cultures. Keywords: Yoruba, French, idiomatic expressions, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory.

Ranah Sumber Binatang dalam Panyandra: Menjadi Cantik ala Orang Jawa

Panyandra is a form of expression in Javanese which is used to praise someone's beauty or beauty. Panyandra in Javanese society is usually to praise the bride (nyandra manten). Panyandra is a form of metaphor because it has metaphorical components such as the target domain, the source realm and the mapping between the target realm and the source realm. An interesting thing to study is the use of the source domain in panyandra. If panyandra is used to praise the beauty, however, the source realm used as a comparison looks far from beauty. An example is the use of the beast's source realm. Panyandra as a form of metaphor in Javanese can be used as an expression of the human conceptual system in thinking. This is based on the understanding that metaphor can be a reflection of the cognition and culture of a speech community. Thus, this study aims to describe the use of the animal source domain in panyandra as a form of cognitive process to understand the concept of female beauty according to the Javanese view. This study used descriptive qualitative method. Data sources are limited to pannyandra. Data collection was carried out using the observing and noting method so that the panyandra was collected in the form of sentences. Next, the data is analyzed to classify panyandra as a metaphor based on the animal source domain and the mapping pattern of the beauty metaphor using the animal source domain. The theoretical framework used as the basis for thinking in this study is a conceptual metaphor; the relationship between language, culture and thought; and analysis of meaning components. The results obtained are that there are various types of animals that are used as source domains, namely insects, wild animals, birds, and reptiles. There is a pattern of mapping relationships between the target domain and the source domain, namely through the properties of both of them are defined socio-culturally, then the two domains are mapped.
 Keywords: panyandra; metaphor; the beauty; Javanese woman; animal lexicon

Do we need Queer Cognitive Linguistics?

This article proposes a more inclusive approach to the concept of gender, identity, and non-normativity. Gender is often used in research as a binary category, leading researchers to misrepresent the more complex reality. Taking a more inclusive perspective on how people differ in terms of their body and body perceptions and accepting gender as a fuzzy category make research in linguistics more inclusive in terms of the communities we study and the methodologies we use. Queer Cognitive Linguistics (QCL) proposes a non-reductive approach to language and cognition, recognising the complexity of the human conceptual system. QCL treats universality in human cognition with caution and posits, after Embodied Sociolinguistics, the two-way embodiment, where the interactions between body and language are both bidirectional and intertwined.

THE COGNITIVE ESSENCE OF THE METAPHOR

THE COGNITIVE ESSENCE OF THE METAPHOR

현직 유아교사의 ‘유아 원격교육에서의 유아교사’에 대한 이미지

Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine how incumbent early childhood teachers who have undergone changes due to COVID-19 image early childhood teachers in remote education. Methods In this study, metaphor analysis was conducted to find out the human conceptual system and thoughts from the perspective of experientialism. The subject of the study is 172 early childhood teachers with remote education experience. The researcher distributed the research subject a sentence-completed metaphor analysis questionnaire, “In remote education, the early childhood teacher is ( ). Because it is ( ).” After organizing the collected data in Excel, it was analyzed using the conceptual metaphor method(Gok & Erdogan, 2010) that revealed the metaphor tendency and metaphor type. While the researchers repeatedly read the data, the final results were derived through classification, categorization, and recategory. Results As a result of the study, early childhood teachers perceived early childhood teachers implementing remote education as robots, guides, entertainers, researches, capable of doing anything, leaders, a person who teaches others, and people who would disappear. Conclusions Through the results of this study, it was revealed that early childhood teachers perceived difficulties and limitations in their roles in early childhood remote education, and various implications were also provided for the new role of early childhood teachers for childhood remote education in the post-COVID-19 era

“More than conquerors”: A qualitative analysis of war metaphors for patients with cancer.

e24134 Background: Limited research suggests that war metaphors may be harmful for patients with cancer. For instance, it has been claimed that the use of war metaphors is associated with increased anxiety and depression, as well as poor coping for patients with cancer. However, little is known about how patients use and perceive these metaphors. Metaphors, which are intrinsic to the human conceptual system, help articulate patients’ experiences and needs. In this study, we explored patient narratives of illness metaphors in cancer, focusing particularly on war metaphors. Methods: Fifteen patients diagnosed with various stages of lung, colorectal or breast cancer completed semi-structured qualitative interviews about their use of metaphors after their cancer diagnoses. Interviews explored war metaphors in the context of treatment decisions, aggressiveness of care, and quality of life. Patients were also provided with a curated list of metaphors and asked about their use and experience thereof. Transcribed interviews were organized and analyzed by descriptive content analysis using NVivo software. Results: The most used metaphor categories were: 1) nature (e.g., journey, season); 2) militaristic (e.g., battle, victory, fight); and 3) uncertainty (e.g., mystery, puzzle). War metaphors were frequently referenced in patients’ support communities rather than in hospital or clinician encounters. Next, all patients with non-metastatic disease (n = 7) used war metaphors to describe their illness experience. Among all patients who used metaphorical language to describe their experience (n = 14), the only ones who did not use war metaphors (n = 2) had metastatic disease; these patients found war metaphors to be unhelpful due to their sense of having no control over the outcome. Lastly, participants reported that war metaphors served the following purposes in their illness experience with cancer: 1) promoted perseverance in the face of adversity, 2) expressed optimism, and 3) allowed them to relate cancer to previous life challenges. Conclusions: The hypothesis that war metaphors are invariably counterproductive for patients appears to be misguided. Metaphors of fighting, victory and battle worked both to empower and harm patients in this study, depending on the individual patient and their prognosis. While more prospective studies with robust sample sizes are needed to elucidate the role of metaphors in the lived experience of patients with cancer, our patients suggest the need to individualize, acknowledge and explore these metaphors for cancer populations.

The Effectiveness of Xi Jinping’s Metaphorical Discourse in Cross-Cultural Communication

Metaphor is not only a linguistic and rhetorical phenomenon, but also an important cognitive and thinking mode, which plays an important role in the formation of human conceptual system. Conceptual metaphor theory holds that metaphor is the foundation of human conceptual system and the essence of metaphor is the mental mapping from source domain to target domain on the basis of similarities. In recent years, more and more metaphorical expressions can be found in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speeches, which have attracted wide attention of the researchers. This paper aims at exploring the effectiveness of Xi Jinping’s metaphorical discourse from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The study shows that the use of metaphor in political discourse helps to bring about novelty, break cultural barriers, enhance cultural identity, so as to enhance cross-cultural understanding and promote the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. Conceptual metaphor provides an effective perspective for the study of political discourse, and also provides a new perspective for constructing China’s communication discourse system to the foreign countries in the world.

Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production.

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11-dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow-up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/.

МЕТАФОРИЧЕСКОЕ ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЕ КРИЗИСА ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В НЕМЕЦКОМ ОБЩЕСТВЕННОМ ДИСКУРСЕ, ПОСВЯЩЕННОМ ПОСТСОВЕТСКИМ МИГРАНТАМ В ГЕРМАНИИ

The article concerns the ways of metaphoric representation of the identity crisis in German social discourse on post-Soviet migrants in Germany. In the contemporary West European society, the growth of migration processes and socio-cultural transformations makes the notion of migrants’ identity crisis highly relevant. The problem has acquired particular topicality in Germany during the recent years in terms of the prospects and challenges to successful integration of representatives of different migration streams. This article analyzes cognitive metaphors of the identity crisis among post-Soviet migrants. It studies in detail the historical and legislative preconditions that have led to the formation of this migrant community, as well as the specific features characterizing the development of this crises and how it is experienced within the community. The conclusion is made that the language follow-through and reflection on the migration processes are inevitably accompanied by the emergence and actualization of spatial metaphoric models connected with spatial boundaries and the location and movement of migration subjects within those boundaries. A metaphor is viewed in the framework of cognitive metaphor theory as a universal cognitive mechanism and an integral part of human conceptual and verbal systems involved in the perception and categorization activity. In the process of their unfolding, basic spatial metaphors acquire a well-developed network of corresponding secondary metaphoric nominations. The functioning of participial constructions has a special meaning in the composition of basic spatial metaphors: they emphasize the processual character of migration, the dynamics of migrants’ relocation and the manifestations of the identity crisis in the context of heterogeneous migration society.

Cognitive Semantic Study of the Preposition ‘Min’ in the Quran

The preposition ‘min’ is semantically more complex than what the traditional lexicaAl-syntactic approaches held it to be adverb or adverbial of place and time. This paper attempts to investigate the semantic complexity of the preposition ‘min’ from cognitive linguistic perspective to find out its semantic classification and linguistic symmetric patterns. Data has been taken from the Quran to investigate the claim of conceptual metaphor theory that sensorimotor neural structures generates the preposition ‘min’ on the image schema of source-path-goal. The findings reveal that the source-pathgoal image schema is not only at work in the use of preposition ‘min’ in spatio-geometric sense, but also to map the abstract concepts, emotional states and relationship with supernatural entities in spatial terms in the Quran. However, the data also show idiosyncratic behaviour of preposition, attaining different semantic arguments in different linguistic contexts, which strengthen the argument that language use cannot be abridged to static mapping in the human conceptual system. This paper recommends future research on the same preposition or other prepositions to investigate further the source-path-goal image schema in the Quran and Arabic language.

The discursive construction of categories. Categorisation as a dynamic and co-operative process

In this paper, I provide an account of categorisation intended as an action that participants carry out in conversation. As opposed to cognitive theories, which are mainly interested in how language structure can be explained with reference to the human conceptual system, discourse-based theories are interested in studying how linguistic resources are used to create categories on a locally relevant basis. Based on recent contributions within the latter framework, I provide in this article a preliminary overview of a corpus study on spoken Italian (Goria and Mauri, 2018) and I illustrate different types of structurally unrelated constructions that are recruited by the participants to perform categorisation in spontaneously occurring interactions.

COGNITIVE DYNAMICS OF STANCETAKING IN RISK DISCOURSE SITUATION

This article studies the cognitive dynamics of stancetaking in the discourse situations associated with risky behaviour and perilous decisions. The objective of this work is to find out what linguistic and cognitive mechanisms are used by speech participants to conceptualise a discourse situation as a situation of risk, and analyse the ways the stances on the discussed problem (here, the risk of addicting to FACEBOOK, as well as other social networks) are taken by discourse partners under different circumstances and varying communicative conditions. The overall theoretical framework for the study synthesises socio-constructionist and socio-cognitive approaches to discourse analysis of risk and stance. In the post-modernist model, speakers use discourse to construct versions of the world which are variable, functional and consequential. Gilles Fauconnier’s mental spaces theory (1994, 1997) served a methodological tool for re-assembling the ways stances on risks are taken in discourse interaction. Risk-taking has always been an integral part of human behaviour. We are constantly forced to make decisions that lead us towards unknown or uncertain consequences that can be potentially hazardous or even life-threatening. The study shows that the field of risk-taking in everyday life is extremely wide, embracing a diverse range of spheres such as household activities, gambling, sports, finance, medicine, technology or politics. Because risk pervades such a substantial part of our lives, it can be claimed as one of the fundamental concepts of the human conceptual system, thus, cognitive mechanisms of risk conceptualisation, as well as the linguistic ways of discursive stancetaking on risk have been determined, analysed and described in the present research.

An analysis of metaphorical idioms in South African Indian English

This study looks at a selected number of expressions used in the variety of English known as “South African Indian English” (SAIE). Mesthrie (1992, 2010a) compiled a dictionary of expressions used within this language variety, which is the primary source of data for this study. Mesthrie has also published numerous scholarly works documenting various aspects of SAIE (cf. Mesthrie 1991, 1992a). A selection of five metaphorical idioms have been chosen for analysis, and the meanings as put forth by Mesthrie (1992, 2010a) have been cross-checked with 10 native speakers of SAIE, as well as the author’s native-speaker intuitions. The informants were all middle-class, professional, educated persons of Indian origin, who speak English as a first language; they were all between 30 and 60 years of age, and reside either in Johannesburg as internal economic migrants from Durban, or currently reside in Durban. As this analysis is undertaken through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the various metaphorical idioms are analysed as expressions of underlying conceptual metaphors, which confirms the idea that many entrenched idiomatic expressions are surface manifestations of underlying conceptual metaphors, and therefore part and parcel of the same human conceptual system. The analysis follows an adapted format used by Kovecses (2010), whereby the metaphorical idiom is stated, followed by the meaning, then the underlying conceptual metaphor. A table illustrating how the idiom is typically mapped in context, followed by a brief discussion of the import, is also in line with Kovecses (2010). One of the key findings is that this is indeed a viable approach to the study of idioms in general, and a more comprehensive study should be made of more expressions like these to see whether or not all entrenched expressions can be viewed as emanating from underlying conceptual metaphors.

Motiviranost značenja turskih i bosanskih somatskih frazema koji se povezuju s čovjekovim osobinama / Motivation of the meaning of Turkish and Bosnian somatic phrasemes connected to human characteristics

There is a claim in cognitive linguistics stating that the meaning of phrasemes is motivated by human conceptual system and the primary objective of this paper is to analyze the motivation of meaning of Turkish and Bosnian somatic phrasemes connected to human characteristics. An analysis like this should contribute not only to deepening the knowledge in the field of Turkish and Bosnian phraseology but better understanding and interpretation of grammatic and semantic structures of both languages as well. It is a well-known fact that the speakers of Bosnian and Turkish language inherit similar culture, customs and beliefs. Therefore, the study compares Bosnian and Turkish somatic phrasemes connected to human characteristics trying to establish whether the speakers of these two languages, which are genetically and typologically different languages, are similar in their conceptualization of certain activities and experiences in the domain of body parts. The starting language of the analysis is Turkish which means that the somatic phrasemes are compared to the semantically close phrasemes in Bosnian language.

The multifaceted abstract brain.

concepts play a central role in human behaviour and constitute a critical component of the human conceptual system. Here, we investigate the neural basis of four types of abstract concepts, examining their similarities and differences through neuroimaging meta-analyses. We examine numerical and emotional concepts, and two higher-order abstract processes, morality judgements and theory of mind. Three main findings emerge. First, representation of abstract concepts is more widespread than is often assumed. Second, representations of different types of abstract concepts differ in important respects. Each of the domains examined here was associated with some unique areas. Third, some areas were commonly activated across domains and included inferior parietal, posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex. We interpret these regions in terms of their role in episodic recall, event representation and social-emotional processing. We suggest that different types of abstract concepts can be represented and grounded through differing contributions from event-based, interoceptive, introspective and sensory-motor representations. The results underscore the richness and diversity of abstract concepts, argue against single-mechanism accounts for representation of all types of abstract concepts and suggest mechanisms for their direct and indirect grounding.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

Perceiving Law

The more we examine what is behind our most difficult legal questions, the more puzzling it can seem that we continue both to disagree strongly and, yet, to cooperate. If law is a reasoned enterprise, how is it that we are neither torn apart nor homogenized by our long social practice of it? I resolve this puzzle, and arrive at a richer understanding of law, using the idea of modeling familiar from the natural sciences and mathematics. I show (a) that theorists can model legal systems as abstract systems of institutions, information flows, and institutional processing or reasoning and (b) that the participants in a legal system themselves maintain and evaluate models of this sort. Understanding law this way clarifies numerous problems ranging from pluralism to legal interpretation. This work emphasizes four major points of the theory: (1) It identifies law as the conceptual side of cooperation and, thus, the means of coordinating decisionmaking. (2) It derives from human cooperation a picture of legal systems as a network of institutions exchanging information and maintaining their own rules of recognition and decision. (3) It advances the thesis that cooperation and its associated legal system arise when individuals create institution-information models, identify the models used by others, and accept the use of those models. (4) Finally, it provides a standard representation of institutions, their communications, and their reasoning. This analysis reveals that institutional agreement and disagreement occur at discrete levels. Together, these elements yield a theory of legal systems that grounds jurisprudence in the study of the human conceptual system. It sheds new light on the problem of theoretical disagreement, otherwise puzzling problems of pluralism, and the connection between law and morality. [Note: This is a 2.0, and I hope much improved, version of Perceiving Law.]

A Limit to Our Thinking and Some Unanticipated Moral Consequences: A Science of Conceptual Systems Perspective with Some Potential Solutions

One paradox of modern society is the widespread use of highly complex mechanisms of economic and social self-regulation which produce a large number of unintended and often undesirable side-effects. Human conceptual systems (theories, policies, and mental models which support our thinking) are good enough to keep the self-regulatory mechanisms in operation; yet they are not good enough to prevent and control the undesirable contingencies. Systems thinking, and complexity science are growing in their usefulness for understanding our social systems as well as our conceptual systems. The present paper examines and explains this paradox by combining the ideas from the burgeoning science of conceptual systems and Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. Drawing on Luhmann’s argument that social systems build up their internal complexity by disregarding the complexity of the environment, we propose to differentiate between those conceptual systems that reflect the intra-systemic complexity of simpler systems and those that reflect the intra-systemic complexity of sub-systems in combination with systems of systems to include the environmental complexity. Thus it comes about that the former conceptual systems, exemplified by physics, are much more effective and successful than the latter ones, often corresponding to social sciences. The chasm between the qualities of these systems can be overcome by using the tools of Integrative Propositional Analysis.

Lexically-Based Language Teaching: Metaphor In English For Specific Purposes

Metaphor can be a semi-technical vocabulary in ESP. In fact, it is abundant in all branches of science. Being a significant part of human conceptual system, it plays a basic role in the imaginative cognitive mechanism, which is common not only in daily activities but also in scientific inquiry. Although most ESP materials have been developed based on careful research and needs analysis on lexicon, metaphor has been ignored in the teaching of ESP. Lexically-based language teaching, however, underlines the importance of metaphor in ESP.

Revisiting Text World Theory and extended metaphor: Embedding and foregrounding extended metaphors in the text-worlds of the 2008 financial crash

It has long been recognised that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also has important cognitive dimensions. To find evidence that metaphor is an important feature of the human conceptual system, cognitive linguists have often searched for clusters of metaphor in discourse that manifest a single conceptual metaphor. As Werth points out, however, in addition to clustering, metaphors can be sustained throughout a discourse. The subtle conceptual effects of these extended metaphors are of particular interest to researchers working in the field of stylistics. In this article, I build on Werth’s account of extended metaphor to explore in more detail these sustained conceptual effects. Like Werth, I draw on Text World Theory to outline a text-world approach to extended metaphor, proposing the idea of a ‘source-world’ to account for how individual, clause-level metaphors combine across a discourse to create a discourse-level conceptual structure. I argue that the source-worlds of extended metaphor are anchored in the text-world structures discourse participants create as they engage with a text and that this embedding of extended metaphor in the discourse gives rise to some of the subtle conceptual effects to which Werth alludes. Building on work by Gavins, Steen, Stockwell and Sullivan, I also argue that source-worlds can be more or less foregrounded or pushed into the background of discourse participants’ mental representations of the text and I propose a linguistic framework to account for the phenomenon of extended metaphor foregrounding. I illustrate extended metaphor embedding and foregrounding by analysing a newspaper opinion piece by Matthew D’Ancona entitled ‘Gordon Brown with siren suit and cigar’.