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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1427409
In Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1175-1202. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
CHAPTER 45
COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO LITERARY STUDIES:
STATE OF THE ART IN COGNITIVE POETICS
MARGARET H. FREEMAN
1. INTRODUCTION
In his statement, “Language is the child of the literary mind,” Turner (1991, 1996) reverses the traditional view that
literature is a special, exotic subcategory of language by arguing that human language capabilities arose from the
cognitive mapping projections of parable and story. Although Turner’s argument has not as yet received wide
acceptance in either field of linguistics or literature, the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics has encouraged the
development of new relations between the two disciplines (see Geeraerts 1999 for a comprehensive survey of the
historical development of linguistic semantics and literary theories). Just as literary texts may serve as legitimate
data for understanding the principles of language structure and use, linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on
literary production, interpretation, reception, and evaluation (Bizup and Kintgen 1993; Hart 1995; Jahn 1997; Crane
and Richardson 1999; Jackson 2000).
Historically, a certain amount of tension has existed between the disciplines of linguistics and literature. For
those of us engaged in bridging the two, the particular form this tension takes—namely, that literary criticism
contributes nothing to linguistic enquiry, and vice versa—has always seemed anomalous. However, this anomaly
may have roots deeper than being simply a matter of turf wars. Recently, Burrows (2003) has characterized the split
between scientific method and literary criticism as a comparison between Descartes’s retiring to his ‘stove’ to
contemplate the foundations of knowledge and Montaigne’s retiring to his tower to write his Essays:
Descartes’s stove and Montaigne’s library tower have given us two ways of living and thinking that are at
root divergent. Stove people think that you can strip everything away and rebuild reality from precepts; tower
people reckon that writing about and exploring or refining beliefs is the best you can do. For tower people,
the process of writing and arguing is what thinking is; it is not concluding. (Burrows 2003: 21)
Though the ways of the stove and the tower may appear fundamentally incompatible, this chapter surveys recent
work in applying cognitive linguistic approaches to literature that carry with them both the air of the tower and the
heat of the stove.
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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1427409
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Literary critics have long been familiar with such topics as perspective, point of view, flashbacks,
foreshadowing, etc. that cognitive linguists are just now exploring. One question that inevitably arises is what new
insights Cognitive Linguistics provides in literary studies that literary criticism has not already discovered. The
corollary, what literary criticism can contribute to cognitive linguistics, is almost always never asked (but see Brandt
and Brandt 2005a). In its focus on the processes of literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation, Cognitive
Linguistics contributes scientific explanations for the findings of literary critics and thus provides a means whereby
their knowledge and insights might be seen in the context of a unified theory of human cognition and language. To
this extent, the stove is not incompatible with the tower; to the contrary, neither functions completely without the
other.
Although ‘literature’ in its broadest sense refers to all written texts, this chapter restricts its scope to the more
narrowly focused term used to cover the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, written instances of humor,
multimedia forms such as film, and religious writings that display literary qualities, such as the Bible and mystic
poetry. All these writings are oriented toward the expressive, the emotive, and the aesthetic; it is here that the more
inclusive approach of Cognitive Poetics, particularly as practiced by Tsur (1992, 1998, 2003), may serve as a guide
for further developments in the interdisciplinary area of linguistics and literature. As Hamilton (2000: 3) notes,
“Cognitive poetics can provide a sensible epistemology for the event of interpretation.”
The past few years have seen an explosion in interest in cognitive approaches to literature.
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These approaches
include the development of methodologies for describing both the production and reception of literary texts. Since
the work presented in this chapter describes a symbiotic relationship between literary and linguistic objectives, I
have organized it according to challenges common to both. Each section highlights aspects important to literary and
linguistic study and describes work that suggests possible directions for future study.
2. PROTOTYPICALITY AND THE NOTION OF LITERATURE
Several researchers have turned their attention to illuminating the nature of literature and its various genres through
prototypicality theory as opposed to a classical, feature-based theory of categorization (Meyer 1997; De Geest and
Van Gorp 1999; G. Steen 1999b). From the perspective of literary criticism, the category ‘literature’ has been so
enlarged in the postmodern period as to include whatever a particular reader chooses to consider ‘text’, whether oral
or written or even the nonlinguistic ‘signifiers’ of culture. Under these circumstances, Steen wisely calls for an
empirical research program to develop a taxonomy of discourse, in which literature may be positioned within the
domain of discourse in general. He argues for a taxonomy in which “a prototypical approach emphasizes the
hierarchical order of fuzzy concepts in a domain, using the same attributes for every level of conceptualization”
(1999b:116). The seven attributes he identifies are content, form, type, function, medium, domain, and language.
What becomes clear from his discussion is that the more abstract the level, the more certain attributes are
unspecified. Thus, the basic level ‘novel’ may be characterized by values of all seven attributes, whereas the
superordinate term, ‘literature’, is characterized by domain (“artistic”), content (“fictional”), and function
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(“positively affective”), but not by the other four. The advantage of Steen’s taxonomy is that it quickly identifies
when theories of literature mix values belonging to different attributes, as Meyer (1997) does. In his analysis, the
addition of the attributes of medium, language, and form to the term ‘literature’ makes it less superordinate as a
category and closer to the level of genre. In Meyer’s prototypical definition of literature, works that contain more
features would be considered more literary or better examples of the category than those that contain less.
In their focus on the basic level of literary genre, De Geest and Van Gorp (1999) reveal the complexities of
applying a prototype approach. They point out that identifying the ‘best’ or more typical example of a literary
category is not at all the same as an aesthetic evaluation: “the ‘best’ texts are almost by definition exceptional cases
which clearly are, at least in some aspects, atypical” (1999: 43). As the discussion of Steen’s taxonomy has noted,
the greater the superordination of the category, the harder it is to establish prototypical instances; consider, for
example, the difference between ‘poem’ and ‘sonnet’. However, even the lower-level category is more problematic
than it seems. Although the sonnet exists at a more subordinate level than the poem and thus might be more readily
defined in prototypical terms, De Geest and Van Gorp show that it is just as problematic; it would be strange, if not
absurd, to consider a Petrarchan sonnet more prototypical than a Spenserian one, or a Spenserian than a
Shakespearian. And then, what does one do with poems that literary critics identify as sonnets that violate even these
parameters, with respect to rhyme, meter, structure, or number of lines? Like Steen and Meyer, De Geest and Van
Gorp indicate that literary texts and genres must be considered along their evaluative and axiological components,
considering norms, values, and models, as well as the author’s intentions and the reader’s expectations. They
suggest that the concept of norm has to include not just what is proscribed but what is permitted. One possibility for
achieving a prototypical theory of literature would be to adopt their recognition that “the so-called ‘prototype’ need
not exist in reality, since it is generally assumed to be a kind of hypothetical cognitive construction, a theoretical
‘fiction’,” much like Lakoff’s Idealized Cognitive Model that structures a conceptual domain (1999: 41). The
‘prototype’ of a literary work would then include in its description an atypical example of its genre.
This rather radical proposal—that the category of literary works needs to accommodate atypicality as
prototypical—appears to undermine the very notion of prototypicality theory, so that literary critics might well
question the relevance of applying it to literature in the first place. This is one example of the conflict between the
stove and the tower. Understanding the nature of literature involves explaining its role in the workings of the
embodied human mind. It might be argued that this begs the question. Why should the methodology applied to
understanding literature (and the other arts) be necessarily a scientific one? Leonard Talmy’s (2000: 479-80)
discussion of the parameter of protoypicality in the context of evaluation provides one answer: it is only by judging
with respect to cultural norms that one can determine the relative status of a literary work as conforming to, or
challenging them. As Talmy notes, “Thus, it appears that certain long periods in Chinese art and literature
maintained themselves with great conservatism, while this century in the West has rewarded authorial
experimentation” (480). In this light, the expectation that a literary work be atypical may be seen as the prototypical
attitude to literature held by contemporary Western critics. Only by looking at literature using the same methodology
that is applied to looking at other activities of the human mind can we fully comprehend the nature of the
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distinctions between creative and conventional expressions and trace the changes in their prototypical status through
time.
All the research surveyed in this chapter may be understood as examples of this principle. A case in point is
Ravid and Hanauer’s (1998) study of how adult speakers of Hebrew show evidence of having a prototypical theory
of rhyme. Their scientific analysis and empirical research confirms literary intuitions about the way readers respond
to the kind of rhyme schemes that occur in a variety of poetic texts. One finding that ran counter to Ravid and
Hanauer’s predictions—that Hebrew speakers tolerated contrasting coda consonants but not contrasting vowels in
the post-stress syllable of modernistic rhymes—may possibly signify a dynamic shift of category boundary in
process as Hebrew speakers grow more familiar with the rhyming practices of modernist poets. Whether Hebrew
speakers in the future tolerate both post-stress consonants and vowels as members of the same rhyme category
would be a hypothesis for such dynamic change and subject to further empirical research.
A dynamic theory of prototypicality over time could explain how literary decisions as to what constitutes a
literary text are made. For example, though Wordsworth, in his second preface to the Lyrical Ballads, remarked that
readers might question whether the poems included could be considered poetry at all, literary critics today perceive
them to be classic examples of the genre of Romantic Poetry, a possible indication of category change over time.
Evidence for a dynamic as opposed to static construal of prototypes is provided by two studies of prototypicality that
involve literary texts. Głaz’s (2002) lexicological study of the concept domain of EARTH looks at the use of the term
in six novels by Kingsley Amis, alongside data collected from the 1995 editions of The Times and The Sunday
Times. Głaz combines Fuchs’s (1994) dynamic model of semantic space with Langacker’s (1987, 1991) network
model to show how the use of a term opens a window onto its entire lexical network, with meaning construed by
shifts in both intracategorial and extracategorial tensions set up by the context. Gibbs (2003: 38) recognizes that
“prototypes are not abstract, pre-existing conceptual structures, but are better understood as products of meaning
construal.” These include interpreting context-sensitive meaning in literary texts, the judgment of novelty by skilled
readers, and the fact that an “embodied view of meaning construal nicely captures at least some of what people see
as poetic during their reading experiences” (39). Applying a dynamic view of prototype theory might well serve as a
research agenda for understanding how prototypical judgments of literature change over time.
3. CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE IN HUMAN COGNITION AND NARRATIVE
The aims of the tower are different from those of the stove. Literary critics focus on the emotional and aesthetic
effects of literary works, cognitive linguists on accounting for the way language characterizes meaning. From a
cognitive perspective, literary critics are engaged in mapping the meanings of texts from various contextual
domains. They are interested in the results of these mappings, not the means by which they accomplish them.
Analyses of these means, however, can reveal the principles on which the mappings are made. Exploring general
cognitive constraints on mapping provides a framework for evaluating the effect of individual writers who violate
these constraints. Research into the cognitive systems and constraints on human language processing provides a
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mechanism for precise description of the motivations for both literary production and reception. Leonard Talmy’s
(2000: 479-80) work reveals the extent to which the approaches of the stove and the tower may be made compatible.
Talmy’s discussion in the final chapter of his two-volume work on Cognitive Semantics is the most
comprehensive account to date of the cognitive system that gives rise to literature. Although he uses the term
‘narrative structure’ to describe this system, he does not mean narrative in its narrow sense but in the sense of its
function “to connect and integrate certain components of conscious content over time into a coherent ideational
structure” (2000: 419). In this respect, his approach correlates closely with Turner’s cognitive reversal in exploring
the structures of ‘the literary mind’ that distinguish us as human beings.
Talmy’s description of the framework of the narrative cognitive system includes three parts: domains, strata,
and parameters. Domains include “the spatiotemporal physical world with all its (so-conceived) characteristics and
properties; the culture or society with its presuppositions, conceptual and affective structuring, values, norms, and so
on; the producer or producers of a narrative; the experiencer or experiencers of a narrative; and the narrative itself”
(Talmy 2000: 422). Strata refer to the basic structuring systems (temporal, spatial, causal, and psychological) that
operate within and across domains. Parameters are the general organizing principles that apply across all the strata,
such as relating structures to each other, relative quantity (scope, granularity, density), degree of differentiation,
combinatory structure, and evaluation. Explorations of literary works tend to focus on one or more aspects within or
across these three areas. With its many examples drawn from literary works, Talmy’s system serves both as an
exemplary model for the taxonomy of discourse Steen calls for and as a way of integrating and uniting into a
coherent theory the various theoretical stances of literary criticism.
Although its theoretical framework ties together work on other literary approaches such as text and possible
world theories, reader response, psychoanalytic approaches, and so on, the fairly recent appearance of Talmy’s work
means that it has not yet had a direct effect on cognitive approaches to literature. However, several studies discussed
in this section fall under the framework of Talmy’s theory as it applies to perspective and construal by author or
reader and mental space projection and deixis.
3.1 Perspective and Construal
There is already copious research on narratology that focuses on the processes of scene construal and perspective
from the point of view of author and reader (for a useful overview, see Van Peer and Chatman 2001). For instance,
the concept of ‘implied’ author comes from literary criticism’s awareness of the dangers of assigning ‘intentionality’
to real writers of texts. New Criticism attacked intentionality, in its early phase, because it suggested that the author
of a text had a specific intention in mind, which could be accessed by a ‘true’ reading of the text. Poststructuralist
critics, in challenging the stability of the text itself, also sought to undermine the idea of intentionality in the writer.
However, following new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, literary critics are beginning to reappraise the
roles of writer, reader, and text. With the rise of Cognitive Linguistics came the idea that conceptual metaphorical
structure could provide insights into the human mind, so that a natural move is to explore what these structures
might reveal about the author’s conceptual attitudes and motivations (Holland 1988; Crane 2000).
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Kardela and Kardela (2002) discuss the conflicting metaphorical realities of the ‘implied author’ and those of
the ‘unreliable’ narrator by exploring the extended metaphor that structures the narrative of Ishiguro’s novel The
Remains of the Day. In objecting to one literary critic’s reading of the novel as having only one narrative
perspective, the authors show the need to invoke an implied author to establish the extended conflict metaphor,
thereby accounting in a principled way for the degree of unreliability evidenced by the narrator. In a similar manner,
Kedra-Kardela and Kardela (2000) extend the literary meaning of ‘subjectivity’ as representing a character’s
thoughts and feelings to embrace the notion of the focalizer/narrator’s viewpoint, which includes world knowledge,
beliefs, and values. By adopting Langacker’s methodology of subjective and objective grounding of perspective in
scene construal, they are able to show in three stories by Elizabeth Bowen how shifts in scene construal reveal the
extent of alienation and reconciliation the protagonists experience with respect to their homes, family, and society.
Reader response theories have focused on the way readers construct meaning from text. Cognitive
psychologists have begun to explore constraints on reader responses to literary texts, as indicated by Gibbs and
Bogdonovich’s (1999) empirical studies on the role of mental imagery in interpreting image metaphors in literature.
Their findings indicate that readers of Andre Breton’s poem “Free Union” more frequently respond to image
metaphors like My wife whose hair is brush fire by mapping concrete images than by mapping their more complex
knowledge about the source domain. They conclude: “People indeed must create concrete imagistic mappings to
understand novel image metaphors” (1999: 43). These findings are particularly suggestive when considering exactly
what interpretive strategies literary critics use. Interpretations often depend on the critic’s choice of image mappings
across metaphorical domains (M. Freeman 2000, 2002a). Gibbs and Bogdonovich’s study is important in showing
that “theories of metaphor must distinguish between different kinds of conceptual mappings in explaining the
aesthetic qualities of metaphorical statements” (1999: 43).
Compatible with this approach is extensive work by Miall (1989) and Miall and Kuiken (2001) on the way
readers comprehend and evaluate literary narratives through their subjective experience of emotions and feelings.
This ‘affect’, they argue, is: (i) self-referential, in enabling readers to identify with a story; (ii) cross-domain, in
being able to transfer schemata from one domain (such as setting) to another (such as relation between characters);
and (iii) anticipatory, in providing readers with the capability of comprehending the narrative’s progress.
3.2. Mental Space Projection and Deixis
Some literary studies have used mental space theory to explore creative aspects of literary technique. Harding (2001)
discusses Hemingway’s use in one short story of counterfactual spaces in the discourse of two protagonists to
reinforce the negative affect governing their situation. Irandoust (1999) cites passages from French literary works to
show that tense markers like the past perfect construction can create narrative perspective through concealed parallel
spaces or ‘reference frames’ that enrich linear narrative sequencing with subjective information. Mental space theory
and deictic projection can account for a poet’s idiosyncratic grammar (M. Freeman 1997). Epistolary letters provide
clear examples of deictic projection since the letter writer will often project into the imagined reality space of the
letter recipient. Readers of the epistolary sections of A. S. Byatt’s novel Persuasion, are drawn into these projections
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as their own cognitive abilities trace the deictic triggers that move them from one mental space to another (Herman
1999).
These approaches seem to be one area where further cognitive linguistic research can inform literary
criticism.
4. METAPHOR AND BLENDING IN LITERARY TEXTS
Metaphor, metonymy, and the figurative tropes of classical rhetoric have always been identified as an integral part
of literary texts. The explosion of metaphor studies at the end of the last century has led to fresh ways of conceiving
the tropes and to the emergence of coherent views of metaphor and metonymy that are still very much under
development. This development is reflected in Kittay’s (1987) seminal work on metaphor which is situated in the
context of the traditionally understood divide between semantics and pragmatics while at the same time it develops a
theory of metaphor closely allied to modern cognitive science. Her theory of ‘semantic field’ spells out the way a
‘content domain’ (analogous to ‘conceptual domain’ or ‘Idealized Cognitive Model’) is linguistically articulated and
forms the basis of her understanding of metaphor structure, especially as it is represented in literary texts. She shows
that John Donne’s poem “The Bait” has a more complex metaphorical structure than Wordsworth’s poem “On the
Extinction of the Venetian Republic,” and that metaphor in Shelley’s poem “Song to the Men of England” is less
successful. Kittay’s application of semantic field theory to metaphor anticipates Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002)
theory of the structure of multiple domain mappings and also provides suggestive criteria both for determining the
distinctions between standard and novel metaphors and for evaluating the relative success of a particular literary
metaphor.
Kittay’s suggestion that metaphors may be evaluated according to the extent to which the vehicle field
restructures the topic field may provide a useful heuristic for the evaluation of literary texts. Recognizing the
existence of literary metaphor is a case in point. Cognitive metaphor analyses have revealed the absurdity of the
position of some critics that the works of Tolstoy and Jane Austen are nonmetaphorical by revealing just how
successful Tolstoy (Danaher 2003a, 2003b) and Austen (Peña Cervel 1997–1998; Wye 1998) are in tapping the
underlying metaphorical systems of all cognitive thought. Fernandes’ (2002) PhD dissertation focuses on metaphors
and cultural models which are central to the work of four contemporary Francophone women novelists Condé,
Djebar, Beyala, and Belghoul). Such work extends the concept of metaphor from its use in individual examples to
entire conceptual domains.
4.1. The Structure of Extended Metaphor and Its Literary Effects
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1998) identified the structural schemas and extended metaphors that underlie some of the
most basic ways we conceptualize our experiences of life. These extended metaphors, as Werth (1994: 80) has
noted, can consist of “an entire metaphorical ‘undercurrent’ running through a whole text, which may manifest itself
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in a large number and variety of ‘single’ metaphors.” This metaphorical undercurrent brings structural unity to a
literary text and contributes to the emergence of a text’s theme, as Popova (2002) shows in her study of the
metaphorical mappings of smell in Süskind’s novel Perfume. In his studies on conceptual metaphors in
Shakespeare’s plays, D. Freeman (1993, 1998, 1999) explores the extended metaphors that build the theme of each
play on the principle that a theory of metaphor depends upon a theory of mind. His cognitive analyses show how
figurative patterns generalize to other patterns, such as plot and scene, and provide interpretations detailed and
coherent enough to be compared against competing interpretations.
Studying such structuring metaphors provides a principled way to explain how writers are influenced by the
metaphors of their culture while at the same time they are selecting and refining those metaphors to shape their own
thinking and attitudes about the world around them. While literary metaphors often subvert conventional and
stereotypical cultural attitudes (see M. Freeman 1995), Kövecses (1994: 132) concludes that what Tocqueville saw
in his travels through America “must have been thoroughly influenced by the unoriginal, ready-made, and
subconscious ideas” that constitute the basis of the PERSON metaphors he uses to describe American democracy.
That writers adopt certain metaphors from a range of metaphor systems deeply embedded in their culture is explored
further in Csábi’s (2000, 2001) articles on Thomas Paine’s arguments for the separation of America from Britain
and the immigration experiences of American Puritans.
Like Kövecses and Csábi, Bertuol (2001: 21) is interested in the “influence that common knowledge and
beliefs shared by the members of a linguistic community exert on the poet’s choice of metaphors.” However,
Bertuol is not claiming that this influence determines a poet’s choices; if this were true, then it would be difficult if
not impossible to explain individual, creative, and revolutionary thinking. His study of the works of Margaret
Cavendish, a seventeenth-century poet writing on scientific matters, shows how mathematical knowledge at that
time influenced people’s views of reality. The cultural choice the poet makes of the seventeenth-century conceptual
metaphor UNIVERSE IS MATHEMATICS enables her to argue that “irrationalia, such as female nature and fancy,
cannot be penetrated and controlled” (Bertuol 2001: 37).
Exploring the relations of a writer’s metaphorical perspective to his or her culture also provides a means for
explaining the extent of a writer’s popularity. Kimmel (2001) analyzes the metaphor of CENTER AND ALTERITY in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to see whether it sheds light on “the scope of variation” and “prevailing cultural
dispositions” of Victorian England. He concludes that Conrad’s use of the metaphor reflects the Victorian
psychopolitical mindset of a self-model that Europeans have been subconsciously sharing for a long time and
explains why Conrad’s novel reverberated so strongly with its Victorian audience.
4.2 Creative and Conventional Metaphors
Turner’s reversal in claiming the literary mind generated language removes the problem of attempting to discover
how conventional language could give rise to creative language. In the case of metaphor, deeply entrenched or
conventionalized metaphors presumably began as novel or creative metaphor. However, old habits die hard, and the
language, if not the spirit, of much metaphorical work in Cognitive Linguistics tends to reflect a conventional to
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creative direction, as reflected in two of Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) frequently quoted passages: “Poetic thought
uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go
beyond the ordinary” (67); “Poetic language uses the same conceptual and linguistic apparatus as ordinary
language” (158). Though these statements might appear reductionist, all Lakoff and Turner are saying is that the
underlying apparatus or mechanisms of poetic and conventional language and thought are the same, not that the two
are conflated. Several studies have explored the extent to which creative metaphors arise from extension,
elaboration, and combination in such writers as Henry James (Čulić 2001), Eavan Boland and Adrienne Rich
(McGrath n.d.), and Hemingway (Strack 2000). In a detailed and thorough explanation of conceptual orientation
metaphors that combine to create such conventional expressions as down and out to mean ‘destitute and
unfortunate,’ Sweetser (2004) shows how the same co-orientations of metaphorical mappings occur in a pivotal
speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar. Although she does not specifically claim that such mappings
become literary when they form a single complex model, her notion that this in fact is what occurs in Shakespeare’s
passage suggests one possible way of distinguishing creative from conventional metaphor.
The prevailing assumption in these studies is that a continuum exists between creative and conventional use
of metaphor, and that devices such as elaboration, extension, and compression account for the distinction between
them. G. Steen (1994, 2001b) challenges this assumption as presumed rather than proven and calls for cognitive
psychologists, linguists, and literary critics to work toward a better understanding of how we identify and process
metaphor. To this end, G. Steen (1999a, 2001a) has developed and tested for reliability a five-step procedure for
metaphor identification that is based on conceptual metaphor theory and blending. Several issues for cognitive
research emerge from G. Steen’s studies, including how to account for the distinction between conceptual and
linguistic metaphor and how to identify metaphorical projections when the target domain is not identified. G.
Steen’s reliability studies indicate that the technical ability to identify metaphor, especially in literary text, is
something that has to be learned, a finding that has implications for both pedagogy and metaphor theory.
4.3 Blending as a Metaphorical Structure
So far as I know, no researcher to date has considered exploring metaphor as a category, though many different
types of metaphor are discussed, such as ‘conventional’,‘creative’, ‘banal’, ‘extended’, and so on. Many of the
arguments over the structure of metaphor may in fact rest in the failure to recognize that there may be many
different metaphorical types and structures. As noted in section 4, Kittay’s work explores some of the possible
structures metaphor might have. Although Fauconnier and Turner’s work on conceptual integration networks or
‘blending’ does not specifically refer to metaphor, all metaphors at some stage in their creation involve blending, so
that the analysis of single-, double-, or multiple-scope blending might very well be productively applied to metaphor
structure. As in all cognitive linguistic applications to literature, work in this area has only just begun, but
increasingly, more researchers are applying blending analysis to literary texts.
Blending provides an elegant explanation for creativity in its theory of an ‘emergent structure’ created by the
blend. It explains, for example, the rhetorical effects in haiku texts of juxtaposing phrases by kireji (cutting letters)
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and kakekotoba (multiple puns); and it provides a better reading of the frequent use in haiku of personification and
allegory through indirect mapping across spaces and recruitment from common cultural knowledge (Hiraga 1999a,
1999b). Blending reveals the structure of prototypical and borderline allegories, from Dante to Pynchon (Sinding
2001). Blending enables F. Steen (2002) to show how an Aphra Behn novel, by mapping the rhetoric of power onto
the rhetoric for love, may have functioned as both literature and political propaganda. Oakley’s (1998) article on
conceptual blending, narrative discourse, and rhetoric provides an exemplary account of blending and how it
operates in Art Spiegelman’s Maus to link the larger story of the Holocaust with the more immediate story of
Richelieu’s relationship to his ‘ghost brother’. Matthew’s (2003) dissertation explores temporal compression blends
in literature. Coulson (2003) explores conceptual blending in political and religious rhetoric.
Conceptual schemas and blending also address questions of literary structure and style, such as reconfiguring
literary allusion, constructing a lyric subject, establishing the roots of African American poetry, and comparing
literary styles (L. Ramey 1996, 2002). Poetic styles can be identified, described, and compared according to which
image schemas are chosen as a structuring principle for a writer’s poetics (M. Freeman 2002b). Further explorations
of literary examples promise to provide specific details as to how mappings and blending create coherence and
cohesion in literary texts and to perhaps identify further principles of creative language use.
5. EMBODIMENT, ICONICITY, AND NEUROLOGY IN LITERARY FORM AND AFFECT
Literary critics in stylistics, especially those influenced by New Criticism, structuralism, and the work of the Russian
formalists, have long recognized the importance of formal, emotional, and aesthetic effects in literary works. As a
natural extension from the principle of the embodied mind and in line with literary critical work in this area
(McGann 1991), some cognitive linguists are beginning to explore literary ‘meaning’ that arises from formal
textural qualities or ‘pastiosity’ (to borrow a term from graphology), where physical, sensory modalities fuse with
linguistic and metalinguistic forms (M. Freeman 2000). As a corollary to reader response theory in literary criticism,
several cognitive studies have begun to use empirical research to determine such literary affects. These include
sensory modalities beyond sight and sound, the way language in poetic texts iconically reflects its meaning, and how
these might be governed by cognitive constraints in the brain.
5.1 Sensory Modalities of Embodiment: Empirical Research
Certain general cognitive constraints have been shown to govern figurative use. In a series of psychological
experiments, Todd and Clarke (2001) were able to show in a principled way the cognitive similarities and
differences between simile and metaphor, with simile being harder to process. In simile, synaesthesia, and zeugma,
Shen (1997) found that Hebrew poets across different schools and periods prefer mapping from the more accessible
term. They provide psychological evidence from empirical experiments to support this constraint. Whenever the two
terms in simile differ in their relative concrete and abstract levels or degree of salience, the preferred direction of
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mapping is from more to less. In zeugma (Shen 1997) and synaesthesia (Shen and Cohen 1998), poets were found to
prefer naming the more prototypical term first and to prefer mappings that went from senses more closely related to
the body, such as touch and taste, to those less closely related, such as sound and sight; readers found these easier to
understand. Gibbs and Kearney’s (1994) work on poetic oxymoron produced similar results. Shen (1997: 67)
concludes that studies such as these show “not only that poetic uses of figuration constrain our cognitive system, but
that poetic figures are themselves constrained by general cognitive constraints.”
5.2 Iconicity of Form and Meaning
Embodiment takes on a special form with respect to structural and visual iconicity. Recent research on signed
languages has given cognitive linguists crucial new insights into the relationship between form and meaning: it is
almost impossible to ignore the pervasive iconicity present in signed language structure. Taub (2001) makes the first
major advance since Charles Sanders Peirce in building a modern cognitive theory of the nature of iconicity,
applicable equally to linguistic and semiotic systems in any language. Applying her theory to American Sign
Language (ASL) poetry as well as to the structure of ASL grammar, Taub’s chapter on Ella Mae Lenz’s work
provides new insights for both literary and linguistic theorists. Wilcox (2001) centers on the issues of productivity
and creativity in the use of metaphor in ASL and analyzes the unique role of visual iconicity in the poetics of a
visual-gestural language.
Hiraga’s (1998, 2002, 2005) discussion of the metaphor-icon link in poetic texts provides a cognitive account
of how iconicity and metaphor can be fused in grammar and language. Hiraga shows how two poems by George
Herbert and Percy Bysshe Shelley differ in degree and types of iconicity. Herbert’s poem exhibits imagic iconicity
overtly, while Shelley’s poem exhibits diagrammatic iconicity covertly. Hiraga’s thesis is important because it
suggests one definition of poetic language: foregrounding metaphor-icon links makes language poetic because form
and meaning are closer together in literary than in nonliterary language in the sense of sharing and sometimes fusing
sensory features. In this sense, Berntsen’s (1999) discussion of the ‘embodied’ nature of modernist poetry may be
extended to all forms of poetic language, regardless of school or period.
5.3 Neurological Constraints and Affordances
A more general view of human cognition is taken in Danaher’s (1998) study of metonymy in Gogol, where Danaher
draws attention to the need for cognitive linguists to step beyond their conventional boundaries of showing how
cognitive systems motivate and constrain linguistic structure to explore the fundamental principles which underlie
human cognition itself. Benzon (2000) explains the ability of the neural self to animate imaginary characters in
literary fictions. Zunshine (2003) provides insight into Virginia Woolf’s style by exploring findings on autism and
cognitive experiments on our ability to imagine representations of mental states. Richardson (2001) re-examines
from a cognitive neuroscience perspective the extent to which literary Romanticism was historically deeply
implicated with research and speculation on the brain.
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Some cognitive psychologists have begun to explore aspects of literary form and affect from a conceptual
perspective. In addition to Miall’s and Kuiken’s work mentioned in section 3.1, Getz and Lubart (2000) explain
creative metaphor in terms of emotional information processing. Their Emotional Resonance Model of creative
associative thought reveals how “feeling tones” or “emotional traces, acquired through self-involving experiences,
play a key role in the production and interpretation of creative metaphors” (2000: 285). They show that whereas the
conventional metaphor X is a burdock meaning ‘X is a prickly person’ has little creative potential, Tolstoy’s feelings
about seeing a burdock one day created an emotional trace in his mind that became linked with his memories of the
Chechen leader and thus provided the potential for creative metaphor in his story Hadji Murat. Such analyses
complement literary stylistics work, such as that of Brearton and Simpson (2001) on language, form, and memory in
Michael Longley’s poetry.
6. FURTHER APPLICATIONS
This chapter has focused primarily on studies of literary texts inspired by the work of cognitive linguists as defined
in this handbook. Following is a brief survey of related research.
6.1 Multimedia Art Forms
Several researchers have begun to explore these cognitive processes in other art forms. Zbikowski (1999, 2002)
applies blending to the analysis of early nineteenth-century art songs. A text-music blend creates a much richer
structure than is provided by text or music alone. His blending analysis of different musical settings of Wilhelm
Müller’s “Trockne Blumen” shows how the music constrains our interpretation of the text to produce somewhat
different descriptions of the miller’s character and motivations. Forceville (1999) considers conceptual structural
metaphor across verbal and pictorial domains in the novel, screenplay, and film versions of Ian McEwan’s The
Comfort of Strangers. He shows how both Pinter in his screenplay and Schrader in his film employ pictorial
metaphors to support the underlying metaphor COLIN IS A CHILD, which describes the novel’s adult protagonist. An
even more integrative approach to multimedia dimensions is Narayan’s (2001) research on comic books, which
describes multiple embeddings in blended spaces where such narrative elements as focus and viewpoint are
sometimes created jointly by images and ‘voice-overs’.
Rohrer (2005) defines mimetic blending as a blend that self-referentially embeds itself into subsequent blends
and shows how this iterative chaining serves as a literary device in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter, and its film version Tune in Tomorrow, to provide metafictional commentary on issues such as the
ability of art to create fictive emotion. The use of grammatical voice in a dynamic discourse situation in a Tagalog
video melodrama reveals the underlying scenarios that affect whether or not the agency of the participants will be
profiled (Palmer 1998). Palmer’s study suggests that cognitive analysis may reveal how emotional discourse in
literature is governed by the social and power relationships that give rise to dramatic conflict and resolution.
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6.2 Religious Texts
Tsur’s (2003) latest contribution to his theory of Cognitive Poetics studies “how religious ideas are turned into
verbal imitations of religious experience by poetic structure” (7). Ranging widely over metaphysical, baroque, and
romantic poetry, Tsur explores all the many different aspects of human cognitive processes in a comprehensive and
detailed manner to show how poets attempt to represent the ineffable.
One of these ways is of course through metaphor, and the articles in Boeve and Feyaerts’s (2003) edition of
Metaphor and God-talk provide a cognitive linguistic perspective on religious discourse. Other book-length studies
include discussion of an extended metaphor describing the deity in the context of Hebrew cultural beliefs and
practices (Sienstra 1993), and a study of the bible through metaphor and translation (Feyaerts 2003). From another
perspective, M. Ramey (1997) reviews the religious preconceptions of biblical exegesists that govern their
interpretations of St. Paul’s views on the body and the resurrection, and suggests that a blending analysis of
particular Pauline passages in the New Testament comes closer to Paul’s eschatological and ethical stances. Van
Hecke (2001) explores polysemy or homonymy from a cognitive perspective in a Biblical Hebrew verb and root to
provide new insights into the way Hebrew functions. In 2002, a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
colloquium brought together scholars in Hebrew semantics, biblical studies, and Cognitive Linguistics to discuss
“The Book of Job: Suffering and Cognition in Context,” which resulted in the publication of several cognitive
articles (van Wolde 2003). Noteworthy in that volume is Geeraerts’ (2003) analysis because it not only argues for an
ironic reading of the controversial speeches of God in the Book of Job, but suggests ways humor in a text can be
characterized and described.
6.3 Humor
Humor in general has caught the attention of cognitive linguists as evidenced by the large number of proposals
submitted to the Eight International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Veale, Feyaerts, and Brône 2004). The
cognitive structure of jokes and their reception are explored in several cognitive studies (Coulson 2000; Coulson and
Kutas 2001; Goel and Dolan 2001). Kurt Feyaerts (1997) shows how metonymic extension patterns provide a
constant renewal of the humorous expressive meanings in the conceptual domain of the German terms for stupidity.
Conceptual metaphor approaches reveal how writers create literary humor through manipulation of
conventional metaphorical schemas (Sun 1994) or by juxtaposing literal and metaphorical meaning (Jurado 1994).
Jurado, for example, shows how the Roman poet Horace exploits the orientation metaphors GOOD IS UP and BAD IS
DOWN to argue that ‘up’ is ‘good’ as long as it does not literally go too far. Donald Barthelme’s short stories are a
good example of how the interplay between the literal and the metaphorical structures humor. In “Some of Us Had
Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” Barthelme plays with what would happen if we actually responded literally to
the notions of common metaphorical expressions like going too far and I’ll kill you for that. This interplay between
the metaphorical and the literal to create humor is further explored by Jurado and Gregoris (1995) in several
examples from the Roman dramatist Plautus.
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6.4 Dreams
Another aspect of written texts is the prolific and extensive work on dream research. With the development of new
methodologies in neuroscientific studies of the brain, several researchers have begun to explore cognitive linguistic
approaches to dream content analysis. Notable in this area is Domhoff’s (2003) study that presents a new
neurocognitive model of dreams using empirical research and including an extensive bibliography of related
research.
6.5 Literary Translation
The task of translating one language into another poses a great challenge for translators of literary texts. Here,
Cognitive Linguistics provides a special contribution. Tabakowska’s (1993) study applies Cognitive Grammar
principles to literary translation. Defining translation equivalence in terms of units larger than a single sentence,
Tabakowska notes that these units overlap with Langacker’s notions of image and scene construal. In a series of case
studies, Tabakowska shows how Cognitive Linguistics contributes to the art and practice of translation by: (i)
providing systematic explanations for the ease or difficulty of translation; (ii) describing the techniques of style
through “pairing individual dimensions of imagery with particular linguistic means” (1993: 130); and (iii)
identifying the reasons in some cases for the impossibility of translation. She concedes that “it takes a poet to
translate poetry” (133), but argues that Cognitive Linguistics can help provide better understanding of the images
and techniques in poetic text.
Wójcik-Leese (2000) also employs Langacker’s theory of scene construal to analyze the strategies of free
verse composition and to provide principled reasons for preferring one translation over another. Focusing on free
verse as a visual, rather than phonic, form, Wójcik-Leese (2000b) applies Figure/Ground orientation to the structure
of a Polish poem by Adam Zagajewski to show the importance of the formal elements of ordering and placement of
words and phrases, along with delimiting punctuation. Translators, she suggests, ignore the significance of such
formal patterning at their peril.
Understanding conceptual metaphoric networks might also help translators achieve greater equivalence in
their translations, as Holm (2001) shows in analyzing two translations into Danish of the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca.
Holm claims that Cognitive Linguistics provides a better possibility for assessing not just whether a given
translation of a metaphor can be said to provide the ‘equivalent effect’ in the target language or not, but what the
“effect” consists in and by which criteria ‘equivalence’ can be achieved.
Typological differences in languages affect narrative style with implications for literary translation. Slobin
(1996) compared the verb-framed language of Spanish with the satellite-framed language of English in verbs of
motion in ten novels. He discovered significant differences between the two languages with respect to rhetorical
style, descriptions of movement, and relative allocation of attention to movement and setting. He notes that “Spanish
speakers and writers have apparently developed a ‘rhetorical set’ that favors separate clauses for each segment of a
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complex motion event” (1996: 217). When he compared translations of the novels, he found that Spanish translators
faced greater problems than their English counterparts did. In a subsequent paper, Slobin (1997) enlarged his study
to include other satellite-framed (Germanic and Slavic) languages as opposed to verb-framed (Romance, Semitic,
Turkic, and Japanese) languages, with similar results. He is careful to note, however, that cultural factors can modify
the sharp distinctions of linguistic typology that he found in his studies. These studies serve as a model for Cognitive
Linguistics approaches to literary translations.
7. THE POETIC CHALLENGE
Like cognitive linguistic approaches, Cognitive Poetics attempts to describe how poetic language and form is
constrained and shaped by human cognitive processes. Tsur’s theory of Cognitive Poetics is more inclusive of the
cognitive sciences in general than studies in Cognitive Poetics that draw from linguistics and stylistics (Stockwell
2002; Gavins and Steen 2003) and therefore provides one way of evaluating the directions such studies should take.
Cureton, (1992, 1997, 2000, 2001) and Tsur (1992, 1998) both challenge Cognitive Linguistics’ failure to
attend to the formal aspects of literary works, such as the temporal dimension of meter and rhythm. Although
differing in their theories of rhythm, both believe that rhythm is a general cognitive process and make significant
claims about the formal and prosodic features of poetry that need to be explored in order to fully account for the role
of rhythm in human cognition and language.
Conspicuous by its absence in this chapter is the role of phonology and phonetics in poetic discourse. In its
infancy, Cognitive Phonology has not yet reached the stage of providing theoretical and methodological applications
to literature. However, since literary iconicity often depends on sound patterning, as Alexander Pope showed more
than two hundred years ago in his Essay on Criticism, cognitive studies of phonetic iconicity in poetic texts could
contribute much to a cognitive theory of phonology.
Brain studies of connections between the emotive qualities of the senses and their aesthetic effects indicate
additional potential areas for exploration of the affective dimension of poetic language. In his appraisal of what it
would take to have a “cognitive science of poetics,” Hogan (2003b) takes us back to a Sanskrit theory of poetry
based on aesthetic response being the result of experiencing rasa (usually translated, according to Hogan, as
‘sentiment’ but akin to emotion, with no precise English language equivalent): “These rasas are evoked in a reader
by words, sentences, topics, and so on, presented in a literary work. This is, of course, in part the result of literal
meanings. But it is also, and crucially, a function of the clouds of nondenumerable, nonsubstitutable,
nonpropositional suggestions that surround these texts” (2003b: 51).
The poetic challenge we face is to also consider these formal and affective aspects—Langer’s (1953, 1967)
“form” and “feeling”—into an adequate, productive, and plausible theory of aesthetic creation and response. Until
we do, we will not be able to claim we have fully accounted for human cognition in language.
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8. CONCLUSION
Can stove and tower people communicate productively with each other, or are their approaches, as Burrows (2003),
suggests, “at root divergent”? A symposium held at the Getty Museum in Spring 2002 brought together cognitive
scientists and art historians to discuss “Frames of Viewing: The Brain, Cognition, and Art.” Stimulating and
insightful as these discussions were, proceedings were marred by the contempt shown by some art historians for
what they saw as the crude naivety of the cognitive scientists in their approach to the arts. Certainly, the expertise in
sophisticated analyses evidenced by art historians, musicologists, and literary critics should not be ignored. As the
research discussed in this chapter reveals, researchers have been quick to see the advantages of applying cognitive
linguistic research to the literary arts; unfortunately, there is no indication that the reverse is true. So far as I have
been able to determine, with the exception of discussions of cognitive poetics and stylistics (Semino and Culpeper
2002), there have been no critical exchanges with existing literary theory, nor any indication that the Cognitive
Linguistics approach is recognized within the field. This may change with results from the conference at the
University of Helsinki in 2004 on “Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice.” It remains to be seen whether
the special issue being prepared for the Publications of the Modern Language Association on new directions in
Poetics will include any mention of Cognitive Poetics.
Despite this disheartening comment, the work reviewed in this chapter strikes a more positive note.
Researchers are already showing that Cognitive Linguistics can contribute to literary theory by providing insight
into such matters as the changing status of literary appreciation through time, the evaluation of quality in both
literary texts and criticism, and the empirical testing of literary choices and judgments. More broadly, the emerging
field of Cognitive Poetics, which includes these approaches, has already shown that the literary mind is indeed
fundamental to the processes of human cognition.
NOTES
I am grateful to all those who sent me information about their cognitive work in literary studies, without which I
would not have been able to write this chapter. I also thank Eve Sweetser for her contributions, especially regarding
ASL work, the editors of this volume, and Beth and Don Freeman for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Needless
to say, all errors of commission and omission are mine.
1. A growing body of literature reflects the current interest of cognitive linguists and literary scholars in the
ways Cognitive Linguistics can illumine literary texts and the challenges and opportunities literary texts raise for
Cognitive Linguistics. Special issues of the Journal of Pragmatics (1995) and Poetics Today (1999) have focused on
cognitive approaches to metaphor in literary texts; other special issues on cognitive approaches include Journal of
English Linguistics (2002), Style (2002), Poetics Today (2003) and Language and Literature (2005, 2006); articles
now regularly appear in such journals as Language and Literature, Literary Semantics, Metaphor and Symbol,
Mosaic, Style, and the Journal of English Linguistics. In addition to the citations mentioned in this chapter, there are
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books by Turner (1987), Spolsky (1993), Bex (2000), Semino and Culpeper (2002). Hogan (2003a), Popova,
Freeman, and Freeman (forthcoming), Brône and Vandaele (forthcoming); and three textbooks: Stockwell (2002),
Gavins and Steen (2003), and Kövecses (2002). Associations that have sponsored special sessions and disciplinary
areas featuring cognitive approaches to literary texts include the Poetics and Linguistic Association (PALA), the
Modern Language Association (MLA), the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA), the European
Society for the Study of English (ESSE), the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS), the
International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA), the Western Humanities Alliance (WHA), and the
University of North Texas annual Languaging conference. Several websites include information on cognitive
approaches to literary texts, such as the home page of the coglit discussion group http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~,
blending at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html, metaphor at http://www.let.vu.nl/pragglejaz,
and literature, cognition, and the brain at http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/Culture/WoF/eventsrtc.html, iconicity at
http://home.hum.uva.nl/iconicity/, and the Cognitive Poetics Project at http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/index.html.
Further links are available at these websites for additional related research.
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