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The notions of construction and formula are, respectively, the main
currencies of cognitive grammar and the theory of oral-formulaic composition in
performance. Even though they originated independently, both formulas and
constructions are defined as form-meaning-function patterns, and, as such, represent
the central theoretical constructs in their respective fields. In this chapter
we propose a connection between these two research traditions, in the hope this
will open up new vistas for scholars in oral poetics, cognitive linguistics, and
cognitive science.
To examine how connecting these two approaches may provide new insights,
we first compare the frameworks of construction grammar and the Parry-Lord
theory of oral composition in performance, paying particular attention to the
(often problematic) definitions of the concepts of oral formula and grammatical
construction, showing that the two are based on very similar foundations. We
then go on to suggest how both approaches can complement one another, outlining
the connections between some of their major interests and recent developments.
Finally, we illustrate our ideas with an analysis of a formula highlighted
by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales, using the methodological apparatus of
construction grammar.
Our conclusion is that this combination of the two approaches can help us
reach a better understanding of both formulas and constructions, as well as build
the foundations for an interdisciplinary field of cognitive oral poetics. This new
field, we hope, will have the potential to provide important insights into not only
verbal art, but also into language and cognition in general, especially in the
domains of generalization in language, language acquisition, and the relation
between verbal form and conceptual structure.
As cognitive structures that capture patterns of sensorimotor experience, image schemas and their metaphorical interpretations not only deliver meaning in Latin’s semantic system but also organize other forms of Roman symbolic representation. This paper builds on Maurizio Bettini’s analysis of Latin’s metaphorical expression of time in terms of linear spatial relations by tracing the structuring effects of these metaphors on other aspects of Roman social practice, including its artistic practice. As I argue, apart from their linguistic manifestations, these metaphors motivate the “axial” configurations of certain socially instituted genealogical representations as well as provide principles of organization for the construction and decoration of material objects.
This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We develop these connections into an integrated whole, opening up the way for a research program in the new field of “cognitive oral poetics”, and relating it to a number of very topical questions in present-day cognitive science (creativity, language acquisition, multimodality). The conclusion vouches for a closer collaboration of literary theorists, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the establishment of cognitive oral poetics.
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
El presente trabajo es un estudio de los verbos de movimiento empleados en las «construcciones de movimiento virtual» en griego antiguo. Los autores proponen que estas construcciones implican una proyección metafórica y estudian la incidencia de la metáfora en la construcción sintáctica y el empleo de las voces. Por otra parte, las referencias genérica y de estado asociadas a los verbos de movimiento virtual se explican a partir de su carácter descriptivo y el tipo textual descriptivo en que tienden a aparecer.
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is "ahead" and the past is "behind." Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals' minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people's minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.
Whereas communication is today conceived as the “transmission” of “signals” along a “conduit”, Latin speakers’ understanding of this concept was delivered by a system of metaphors recruiting images of cooking, serving, eating, and digesting food. More than providing simply colorful ways of speaking about thought and speech, however, these alimentary metaphors functioned together to deliver a coherent overall model of how mental representations come to be verbally shared between individuals. While it is not the only metaphorical model available to Latin speakers in conceptualizing communication, the alimentary model also represents a privileged model that informs scholarly and philosophical theorizing.
A comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has been written in response to the growing interest among scholars and students from a variety of disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, music and psychology. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture and artistic expression. There are five main themes of the book: the roots of metaphor, metaphor understanding, metaphor in language and culture, metaphor in reasoning and feeling, and metaphor in non-verbal expression. Contributors come from a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, literature, education, music, and law.
Homer's Iliad is an epic poem full of war and battles, but scholars have noted that ‘[t]he Homeric poems are interested in death far more than they are in fighting’. Even though long passages of the poem, particularly the so-called ‘battle books’ ( Il. Books 5–8, 11–17, 20–2), consist of little other than fighting, individual battles are often very short with hardly ever a longer exchange of blows. Usually, one strike is all it takes for the superior warrior to dispatch his opponent, and death occurs swiftly. The prominence of death in Homeric battle scenes raises the question of how and in which terms dying in battle is being depicted in the Iliad : for while fighting can be described in a straightforward fashion, death is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to grasp. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have ascertained that, when coping with difficult and abstract concepts, such as emotions, the human mind is likely to resort to figurative language and particularly to metaphors.
This paper argues that every Homeric narrative moment involving “[harmful] delusion” (ἄτη) includes a precipitating human cause, from arrogance and lust, to a great number of other human weaknesses and character flaws. These human faults were experienced by characters and recognized by the audience.
The vividness of Homeric poetry has been admired since antiquity, but has been difficult to pin down with precision. It is usually thought to come about because readers are prompted to visualize the storyworld in the form of mental images seen with the mind's eye. But this cannot be right, both because there are serious scientific problems with the concept of ‘pictures in the head’ and because Homer does not offer many detailed descriptions, which are a prerequisite for eliciting detailed mental images. This article presents a different, and cognitively more realistic, take on the imageability of Homeric epic, which is based on recent reader-response studies inspired by the enactivist theory of cognition. These studies make a compelling case for readerly visualization as an embodied response, which does not depend on bright or detailed mental images. An analysis of the chariot race in Iliad 23 identifies specific features of what may be called an ‘enactive style’, notably the description of simple bodily actions. The final part of the article demonstrates that an enactivist take on Homer's vividness is not incompatible with the ancient concept of enargeia , the chief rhetorical term with which Homer's vividness is characterized in ancient criticism.
This article surveys several early Chinese and Greek representations of the self, with particular interest in relations between body and mind. I begin with Edward Slingerland’s application of recent research in conceptual metaphor analysis to early Chinese texts, his arguments on early Chinese root metaphors for self and an important study of mind-body dualism in early China. Next I introduce metaphors of mind and body in texts from technical expertise traditions that Slingerland’s survey does not cover. The last section introduces three apparently comparable sets of early Chinese and Greek metaphors: (1) analogies between mind and body and ruler and subordinates; (2) metaphors of the body as a container in which the mind is somehow contained; and (3) the notion that a person is a set of balances between constituent elements.
The verb βυσσο-δομεύω ( Sc . 30 = Hes. Frg. 195.37 M.–W.), separated by Glenn Most in his translation as ‘planning in the depth’, appears to be composed of a noun βυσσός (‘depth’) and a verbal root *δέμ- (‘[to] construct’), thus literally meaning ‘(to) build in the deep’. There is no instance in our extant texts where this compound verb is employed literally in reference to an act of construction, and to the best of our knowledge it is exclusively used metaphorically in early epic diction to describe a mental process (see also Hom. Od . 4.676; 8.273; 9.316; 17.66, 465, 491; 20.184).
Where are the borders of mind and where does the rest of the world begin? There are two standard answers possible: Some philosophers argue that these borders are defined by our scull and skin. Everything outside the body is also outside the mind. The others argue that the meanings of our words "simply are not in our heads" and insist that this meaning externalism applies also to the mind. The authors are suggesting a third position, i.e. quite another form of externalism. Their so called active externalism implies an active involvement of the background in controlling the cognitive processes.
I begin this exploration of characteristically Iliadic and Odyssean attitudes toward the traditional language in which these poems are composed by treading again a well-rutted path in the field of mid-20th century Homeric studies. In formulating his radical revision of the aesthetics of Homeric poetry, Milman Parry took as one of his guiding principles Heinrich Düntzer's notion of a contradiction between the compositional utility of the fixed epithet and its semantic value: if an epithet could be shown to have been selected on the basis of its utility in versification—and Parry's detailed examinations of extensive and economical systems of noun-epithet formulae were aimed in part at demonstrating this point—then it would be proven by that very fact that the epithet's meaning was irrelevant to its selection. Moreover, Parry asserted that the success of poetry composed in such a manner would depend on a corresponding indifference on the part of the audience, an indifference that must be, by his reasoning, categorical and absolute.
ἕρϰος Ἀχαιῶν: ἔμψυχον τεῖχος τῶν Ἑλλήνων.
Bulwark of the Achaeans: living wall of the Greeks.
Schol. D.
Il.
6.5 (on Ajax)
Now, still breathing, he is simply matter…
Simone Weil, ‘The
Iliad
or the Poem of Force’
The two quotations at the start of this paper, one from the D scholion on the
Iliad
and the other from Simone Weil's famous essay on force, both make of the Homeric warrior a kind of ‘breathing material’. Two references, then, to the liveliness of objects, but each meaning very different things. For the scholiast places man on the same side as materiality, as if humans and things can equally be infused with life and can exist in a sort of continuum, but Weil argues that a human who is reduced to mere matter, even if he is a still a thing that breathes, is as good as nothing. Unlike the scholiast, Weil's interpretation is predicated on a strong belief in the duality of body and soul in the structure of human life, and since objects do not have souls they are, for her, essentially dead. Throughout her essay, Weil visits again and again the materiality of Homeric man and his propensity to turn, under the crushing power of force, into what she calls alternately a ‘thing’, ‘inert matter’, ‘stone’, and even ‘nothingness’. But for the D scholiast, the comparison of Ajax to stone does not subjugate him or turn him into a ‘mere’ or ‘inert’ object. On the contrary, the gloss ἔμψυχον τεῖχος speaks instead to the lively and permeable boundary between human and nonhuman in early Greek epic, one that suggests that objects can have their own life form, their own energy, vitality, and even creativity.
Due to the general acceptance of oral poetry theory, Homeric metaphors have generally been regarded as formulaic set pieces with little or no contextual meaning and have correspondingly received little attention. This paper aims to demonstrate that metaphors in Homer can nevertheless fulfil cognitive functions in their respective contexts by the analysis, as an exemplary case, of a unique metaphor of death: in Il. 11.234-247 it is narrated that the Trojan Iphidamas is killed by Agamemnon and "sleeps the brazen slumber" (Il. 11.241). The metaphorical representation of death as a kind of falling asleep is an instantiation of the well-known conceptual metaphor DEATH IS SLEEP, while the description of the sleep of death as "brazen" permits several interpretations which all highlight the pathos of the killing and make the death of Iphidamas appear premature and regrettable. A comparison with two passages in Vergil's Aeneid which adapt the phrasing "iron sleep" (Aen. 10.745-746; 12.309-310) indicates that the Homeric metaphor is particularly well suited to its context and contributes to the effect of the passage.
1. The scope of this paper This paper deals with the notions of ψυχή and θυμός both in Homer and in Plato (especially the Republic), and in particular with the importance of metaphor (especially personification) in both the Homeric and Platonic versions of these concepts. We shall start with ψυχή and then move on to θυμός, just as we start with Homer and move on to Plato, but the metaphoricity of both concepts in both authors will be central throughout. Homeric representations of ψυχή will be...
What does it mean for metaphors to be “embodied”? Here we describe an influential theory of embodied cognition according to which thoughts are implemented in perceptuo-motor simulations, in the brain’s modality-specific systems. This theory is invoked in nearly every paper on “embodied metaphor,” across linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. There appears to be overwhelming support for the conclusion that representations of metaphorical “source domains” are embodied in perceptuo-motor simulations. Here we show, however, that when the data are evaluated appropriately there is very little evidence that metaphors are embodied in this sense. The kind of data that offer compelling support for the embodiment of concrete, literal ideas like “grasping the ball” are nearly absent for abstract, metaphorical ideas like “grasping the explanation.” There is now abundant evidence that metaphors structure our thoughts, feelings, and choices in a variety of conceptual domains. But evidence for metaphorical mental representation is not necessarily evidence for embodiment. If any metaphorical source domains are embodied in modality-specific simulations, they may be the exception rather than the rule.
There is a mistaken perception that ‘metaphor theory’ and ‘conceptual blending’ are competing views, and that there is some argument between us over this. The real situation is this: We have been good friends and colleagues for over forty years, and we remain so. We fully respect, and make use of, each other’s work. We are both scientists, who do both empirical research and theorizing. We see the research programs developed for metaphor and blending as mutually reinforcing and often deeply intertwined, rather than at odds with each other. So why do some see discord where we find remarkable convergence? The short answer is that over the years, we focused on what we were most interested in, with corresponding differences of emphasis and interpretation. To explain how all this unfolded, and dispel the view that pits metaphor against blending, we need to go over the basic developments over time in the study of conceptual metaphor and blends, and then do a comparison.
Individual speech is a minimal system of language use and variation and yet, despite its theoretical interest, has been neglected; syntax (as against phonology) has been egregiously ignored. This article, stimulated by the work of Adam Parry and of Sapir, partly solves a thorny problem over two millennia old. Using total samples of Achilles and his interlocutors, the authors establish nine categories of discriminatory variables in rhetoric, discourse, and syntax; 'expressive rhetoric', asyndeton, and particles are particularly revealing. The speech of Achilles is related to the personality which it symbolizes. Our conclusions concern three major open questions in the study of individual variation.
The prehistoric development of weaving ranks among humanity's greatest technological accomplishments. The subsequent production of elaborately patterned textiles, as opposed to nonpatterned forms of woven cloth, requires a great degree of technical expertise and is highly labor intensive. Fabrication processes implicit in a complex woven pattern requires the commitment to memory of a substantial amount of numerical and color-related information. Modern observation of traditional weavers in India and Central Asia suggests that this numerical information may have first emerged in the form of memorized, rhythmic chants that allowed weavers to both remember patterns and reproduce them as frequently as required. Moreover, the linguistic and poetic associations between weaving and singing preserved in several Indo-European languages also suggest that these chants were, at some point, sources of rhythmic or possibly metrical narration in their own right.
The aim of this paper is to establish the existence of a significant difference, in a number of respects, between the style of the narrated portions of Homer and that of the speeches which are recorded in the two epics; and to offer some explanations for this fact. It will require the presentation of some statistics: I suspect that not all of the figures are absolutely accurate, but I feel confident that such inaccuracies as they may contain will not affect the validity of the inferences drawn from them. The mere fact of differences in vocabulary, while not without interest, is not extremely interesting or surprising. The hope of this paper is that patterns will appear, and that the ‘reticence’ or ‘objectivity’ of Homer, more often praised than investigated, will be illuminated by them; that particular passages in the poems will be shown to be stylistically interesting or unusual; and that some general considerations will emerge which suggest that the difficulties confronting the oral theory of Homer are rather more complex than is often supposed.
This article examines social interaction in Homer in the light of modern conversation analysis, especially Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Some notoriously problematic utterances are explained in terms of their ‘off-record’ significance. One particular off-record conversation strategy is characterized by Homer as kertomia, and this is discussed in detail. The article focusses on social problems at the end of Achilles' meeting with Priam in Iliad 24, and in particular on the much-discussed word ἐπικερτομέων (24.649).
Tragic Time - de RomillyJacqueline: Time in Greek Tragedy. (Messenger Lectures, 1967.) Pp. viii + 180. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (London: Oxford University Press), 1968. Cloth, 57s. net. - Volume 20 Issue 3 - Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Since being brought to light in 1853 by Adalbert Kuhn, the fact that the Homeric expression κλέος ἄφθιτον has an exact parallel in the Veda has played an extremely important role in formulating the hypothesis that Greek epic poetry is of Indo-European origin. Yet only with Milman Parry's analysis of the formulaic character of Homeric composition did it become possible to test the antiquity of κλέος ἄφθιτον on the internal grounds of Homeric diction.
It is generally agreed that the conservative character of oral composition entails a high degree of correlation between the antiquity of a Homeric expression and its formulaic character. In other words, although not all Homeric formulae are necessarily of ancient origin, it is nevertheless in the formulaic stock of the epic diction that archaic and backward-looking expressions should be sought. Consequently, demonstration that κλέος ἄφθιτον (as well as other Homeric expressions with Vedic cognates) is a Homeric formula would constitute valuable evidence for its origin in Indo-European heroic poetry. Strangely enough, however, as Parry's analysis won the recognition of scholars, κλέος ἄφθιτον was identified as a Homeric formula simply because of its agreement with the Vedic śráva(s) ákṣitam . Yet examination of κλέος ἄφθιτον from the internal standpoint of the Greek epic casts serious doubts on the formulaic and traditional character of this Homeric expression.
The late Colin Macleod's commentary on Iliad 24 (Cambridge, 1982) has rightly received praise for its sensitivity to the nuances of Homeric language and its appreciation of the entire poem as a carefully constructed work of art. Although reluctant to accept the more radical solutions proposed by the ‘oral’ school, Macleod showed himself fully aware of the contribution made by the oral theory towards elucidating the history of the epic. Nevertheless, his commentary is concerned principally with the Iliad as we have it: a poem which is at one level a masterly re-telling of saga but at another a sublime tragedy, commiserating the sorrows inseparable from human existence and holding up for our admiration the heroes who nobly confront pain and death. I believe that much, and probably most, of the Iliad can and should be viewed in this light. The last book of all, as Macleod himself has shown, offers especially rich rewards to an interpreter who keeps in the front of his mind the overriding aims of the great poet. Yet Macleod's method, like any other single method, will never yield a fully satisfactory answer on all occasions. However the ‘definitive’ or ‘monumental’ composition of the Iliad was brought about, it formed only one stage (though from our point of view incomparably the most important stage) in the development of the Greek epic. Our Iliad cannot have been the first or the only treatment, on a large scale, of the matter of Troy.