From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric [ebook ed.] 3035107823, 9783035107821

Table of contents :
Contents: Attention and Cognitive Science - Attention and Semiotics - Attention and Linguistics - Attention and Rhetoric.

Citation preview

“Rhetorical theorists interested in understanding what rhetoric can accomplish by way of asking, what makes rhetoric possible, will find this a satisfying and compelling read.” David Kaufer Carnegie Mellon University

8

“Todd Oakley’s book is a most innovative, radical and deeply inspiring contribution to what must be considered a cutting edge in Cognitive Linguistics: the role of attention in language and discourse. It is the first encompassing proposal for a general theory of attention in relation to meaning construction in discourse and a claim for a ‘Cognitive Rhetoric’. As such the book is a must for anybody interested in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics.” Cornelia Müller European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

European Semiotics Sémiotiques Européennes

ISBN 978-3-03911-442-9

8 Todd Oakley

From Attention to Meaning

•

Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric

Peter Lang

Todd Oakley is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Co-Director of the Center for Cognition and Culture at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Todd Oakley

Of all the tasks you perform, perhaps none is more consequential for the performance of other tasks than paying attention. When you attend, you perceive. When you attend and perceive, you remember. When you attend, perceive, and remember, you learn. When you learn, you have the option of acting deliberately. Perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding, and acting require the constant adjustment of the attention system. The author proposes a model of the greater attention system as comprising three distinct but interdependent sub-systems: the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system, with eight elements distributed among them: altering, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The chapters in this book develop an “attentional” analysis of meaning under the unifying framework of mental spaces theory. In addition, each chapter explores the implications of an attention based approach to meaning for research in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric. Data for the investigation originate from the author’s own field work carried out in cultural institutions.

From Attention to Meaning

European Semiotics Sémiotiques Européennes

“Rhetorical theorists interested in understanding what rhetoric can accomplish by way of asking, what makes rhetoric possible, will find this a satisfying and compelling read.” David Kaufer Carnegie Mellon University

8

“Todd Oakley’s book is a most innovative, radical and deeply inspiring contribution to what must be considered a cutting edge in Cognitive Linguistics: the role of attention in language and discourse. It is the first encompassing proposal for a general theory of attention in relation to meaning construction in discourse and a claim for a ‘Cognitive Rhetoric’. As such the book is a must for anybody interested in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics.” Cornelia Müller European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

European Semiotics Sémiotiques Européennes

8 Todd Oakley

From Attention to Meaning

•

Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric

Peter Lang

Todd Oakley is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Co-Director of the Center for Cognition and Culture at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Todd Oakley

Of all the tasks you perform, perhaps none is more consequential for the performance of other tasks than paying attention. When you attend, you perceive. When you attend and perceive, you remember. When you attend, perceive, and remember, you learn. When you learn, you have the option of acting deliberately. Perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding, and acting require the constant adjustment of the attention system. The author proposes a model of the greater attention system as comprising three distinct but interdependent sub-systems: the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system, with eight elements distributed among them: altering, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The chapters in this book develop an “attentional” analysis of meaning under the unifying framework of mental spaces theory. In addition, each chapter explores the implications of an attention based approach to meaning for research in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric. Data for the investigation originate from the author’s own field work carried out in cultural institutions.

From Attention to Meaning

European Semiotics Sémiotiques Européennes

From Attention to Meaning

European Semiotics: Language, Cognition, and Culture Sémiotiques Européennes: langage, cognition et culture Edited by / Série rédigée par

Per Aage Brandt (Cleveland), Wolfgang Wildgen (Bremen/Brême), and/et Barend van Heusden (Groningen/Groningue)

Volume 8

PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Todd Oakley

From Attention to Meaning Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric

Translated by Franson Manjali Jawaharlal Nehru University. [email protected]

PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oakley, Todd, 1966From attention to meaning : explorations in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric / Todd Oakley. p. cm. -- (European semiotics, ISSN 1423-5587 ; . 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-03-911442-9 (alk. paper) 1. Attention. 2. Perception. 3. Meaning (Psychology) I. Title. BF321.O18 2009 153.1‘532--dc22 2009000511

ISSN 2235-6266 eBook ISBN 978-3-0351-0782-1 eBook

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2009 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9 [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Attention: A foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 A Collector’s Conceit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Prologue: Attention, Meaning, and Knowledge Representation . . . . . 19 Synopsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 1 The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences . . . . . . . . . 25 Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Greater Attention System: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Signal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Selection System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Interpersonal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cognitive Psychology and Neurophysiology of Attention . . . . . . A Cognitive Psychology of Attention: Protocols, Models, Theories, Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Neurophysiology of Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Related Topics in Cognitive Science: Consciousness, Memory, Categorization, Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Categorization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Affect: Values and Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relevant Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imagery and Schemas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mental Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 26 27 29 33 36 37 38 46 52 52 53 56 58 61 61 62 64

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From Attention to Meaning

Mental Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Culture and Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Chapter Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Chapter 2 Attention and Semiotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Semiotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What is Semiotics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Five Theoretical Perspectives: Overview and Assessment . . . . . . . . . The Greater Attention System as Semiotic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Dimensions of the Sign: Presentation, Representation, Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nine Functions of the Sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frick’s Conceit and the Attention Semiotic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Synopsis: Signs and the Greater Attention System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brief Case Studies in the Semiotics of Attention (with special emphasis on conceptual blending) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Debating Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kant and the Graduate Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melville’s Mincer: Presentation as Symbolization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Landing an MD-80 Aircraft: Distributed Attention . . . . . . . . . . . Extended Case Study: Auto-Ethnography of the Cleveland Zoo’s Rainforest Exhibit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Attention Structures of the Cleveland Rainforest Exhibit . . . . . . . . . Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Guided Tour of the Rainforest Exhibit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Architecture of Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infelicitous Apologies and Felicitous Human Scale Reasoning in the Rainforest Exhibit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 77 78 83 83 86 90 93 94 94 96 100 102 106 106 109 109 111 115 123

Chapter 3 Attention in Language and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Greater Attention System and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Signal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Selection System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

125 127 128 136

Contents

The Interpersonal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Studies in Language and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fictivity and Aesthetic Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Prosody of Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 151 156 159 160 178 187

Chapter 4 Attention and Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Three Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: Rhetorical Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . Burke: Dramatic Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Force and Counterforce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Construal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Force Dynamic Analysis of the Preface to Bush’s National Security Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetoric of Compliance: The Census 2000 Campaign . . . . . . . Chapter Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191 191 193 198 201 202 203 207 208 218 230

Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Appendix A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Preface to National Security Strategy of the United States of America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Appendix B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book took shape in 1999, when I was asked to give a set of lectures at the Center for Semiotic Research in the University of Aarhus, Denmark. But for the stimulating engagements of faculty and students at 28 Findlandsgade this project would, at the very least, have followed a very different course. I remain forever indebted to Line Brandt, Per Aage Brandt, Peer Bundgaard, Svend Østergaard, as well as Chris Sinha, and Anders Hougaard (who traveled up from the University of Southern Denmark on several occasions to attend these lectures) for providing a nurturing environment for gestating these ideas. Colleagues in the English and Cognitive Science departments at Case Western Reserve University were likewise instrumental in helping shape and mold this project. Of course, Mark Turner (now a colleague at Case) and Gilles Fauconnier continue to be a source of advice and of constructive critique, as has my frequent collaborator Seana Coulson. David Kaufer of Carnegie Mellon University has also been a source of inestimable help and inspiration in the refinement of my claims and counterclaims as well as a wonderful collaborator on the rhetorical dimensions of attention research. Per Aage Brandt (also now a colleague at Case and at the Center for Cognition and Culture), has proved an invaluable voice of encouragement and constructive critique in the final phases of this project. I thank him for his patient reading of and commentary on each chapter. Thanks also to Wolgang Wildgen and Barend van Heusden, editors of the European Semiotics Series, for their comments and support. Gratitude goes to Larimee Cortnik, Department Assistant for the Center for Cognition and Culture, for proofreading the entire manuscript. In addition to these known associates, I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers of the earliest complete version of this manuscript; their criticisms and advice helped shape the present argument. Some of the material published here has appeared or will appear elsewhere. Portions of chapter 2 appear in Cognitive Semiotics 1: Consciousness and Semiosis (2008): 25–45; the case study on The National Security Strategy Report of the United States of America, September 20002 appears as “Force Dynamic Dimensions of Rhetorical Effect” in Beate Hempe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, 443–474.

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From Attention to Meaning

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; the case study on Census 2000 campaign will appear as “Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning” in C. Meyer and F. Girke (eds.), The Interplay of Rhetoric and Culture. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. I also wish to thank Zoe Doll from the Rights and Reproduction Department, The Frick Collection, New York for granting permission to reprint images of Hans Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Cromwell. Finally, thank you to Cindy, Ben, and Simon, for without their unwavering encouragement and endless patience this project could not have materialized.

11

Attention: A foreword

A little philological observation for a starter. The German translation of attention is Aufmerksamkeit, whose Old Norse root /merk / also gives rise to verbs such as bemerken, to notice, and markieren, to mark out. The French has the same differentiation: remarquer (to notice) versus marquer (to mark out). English notice and note reflect the Latin nota, written sign, distinction, from the verb (g)nosco, to study, know, recognize, understand, hence: (cum + (g)nosco), cognitio, knowledge as process or result: cognition. Underlying this double semantics – whereby the word for attention also refers to demarcation, marking, apposing a mark on some object – there may be a general tendency is to associate a graphic act of distinguishing a thing and the event of becoming aware of this thing. The phenomenon of ‘paying attention’1 to some entity by a conscious effort thus appears to show affinity to the semiotic activity of writing, marking, signifying. A possible interpretation: Our attention is thought of as a mode of signifying by mental writing into perceptual space; the result, cognition, is conceptualized as some sort of ‘writing with the eyes’ by looking upon something. The attentive gaze is a pen. Attention is often ‘shared’; if a person ‘draws’ attention to something, or ‘attracts’ someone’s attention, such events or acts of sharing seem intelligible in this framework of a semiotic phenomenology.2 The exercise of attention affects dynamically some other ‘attentions’ present in a given space; it attracts them – to some marked-out object – and thereby creates experiences of mental contact, intersubjectivity. These experiences of joint or shared ‘attending’ to something will further give rise to feelings of sharing thoughts, or exchanging information, making possible the concept of communication, including the well-known models representing conduits, senders, receivers, and channels through which meaning appears to ‘flow’ while subjects attend to its referent. 1

2

This semantic area is rich in similar figurative data. In Danish, you can ‘ofre opmærksomhed [på noget]’, literally, sacrifice [your] attention on something… Paying, sacrificing, and in general: the symbolic act of giving, are instances of signifying, making sense in an intersubjective, socio-cultural space. A phenomenology of attentional ‘writing’ or ‘marking’ is semiotic, since such imaginary graphic marks would be symbolic signs of having been attended to – checkmarks.

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From Attention to Meaning

A special effect of this basic dynamics of attention is what we call intentionality, in the simple sense of: the quality of the intentional, as in: ‘an intentional act’, ‘he did it intentionally’, or simply: ‘the meaning intended was …’ When our individual attention to an item is ‘shared’, in that other persons are ‘paying’ attention to the same item, and this communal situation acquires certain stability in time, the meaning of the object of attention tends to stabilize. What we attend to then begins to ‘mean’ something, in itself and to us. If the doing of a person requires the attention of the doer and allows or attracts the attention of others, we will in the same way ascribe intentional meaning to it, to be assumed by the doer, who is thus its ‘intentional’ agent. The intentional meaning of an act is the meaning it has as object of stable, shared attention; we can even call this its objective meaning; it is this meaning that the (responsible) agent has to assume as the intentional meaning of his own act – even if, for some reason, the actual doer does not attribute such meaning to it. If something ‘makes sense’, we cognitively experience this sense to be ‘made’ intentionally, in so far as it is grounded in stable, shared attention. This cognitive principle is incompatible with many hermeneutic philosophies; but in social life, ethics and jurisdiction rely on it, as well as the structure of narratives cross-culturally presuppose it in the very set-up of a third-person perspective.3 In the world of art, this phenomenon of ‘sense-making’ by the ascription of objective meaning to artifacts, works of art, texts, pieces of music, etc. is particularly salient. Art critique is mainly an instance (or institution) of interpretation, namely of the possible objective meaning of each work. Here, the basic but intriguing fact is that the artist does not have to be the best interpreter, even of his own work. The artist or author of a given piece participates in the community of attending (inter-)subjects but enjoys no privileged interpretive authority. The meaning of the item is necessarily experienced as written into it through the artistic act (of ‘paying’, ‘offering’, ‘giving’ …) of signification, inherent in the presumedly intense primordial attention paid to it during its creation, again according to the basic marking phenomenon mentioned above. Once thus ‘written’, it no longer belongs to the initial ‘writer’. It now ‘means what it means’. We live in a human world of meanings, that is, in this sense, of objective meanings ascribed to experienceable phenomena, rather than in an astrophysical or micro-physical world. Our historical meanings refer to intention3

So, as narrators we can say: “Paul promised to marry Jane”, and under certain circumstances, this can be true even if Paul disagrees.

Attention: A foreword

13

ality in the radical acception considered here. In this framework, it may be easier to see how religion can be grounded in cognition: the sense that things make to us is intentional and can sometimes be ascribed to creative acts of primordial attention (even without authority over the resulting meaning!), so why not the entire physical world? If meaning is intentionally given, even without a human author, then why not interpolate a non-human author? Deus in cognitione? In fact, human cultures equipped with conscious attentional resources have across many millennia explored the epistemic richness of the basic semiotic tendency to interpret the universe by ascribing intentional meaning to it, before reaching the state where the involved objectivity became the objectivity we assign to knowledge in areas we now call history, philosophy, science. The basic principle, however, remains: the author, in cases where such an instance can be identified, is not the master of meaning, just one of its interpreters. To interpret natural regularities, and to let the concept of objective meaning include ‘laws of nature’ – to let the Grand Book of Nature be written, with or without writers, in the language of mathematics, as the classical rationalists suggested – is to continue what the cognitive phenomenology of the minds of our species has always done, as long as there have been inter-subjective sense-making and ‘communication’. All forms of knowledge are based on intentionality. The main difference between religious beliefs (‘faith’) and profane beliefs or assumptions may be that the interpretive communities establishing the stable contents of phenomena as meanings are closed and esoteric in the former case and open and exoteric in the latter. Closure then leads to dogma and dogmatism, that is, rigid and inconsistent beliefs, while openness of discourse leads to unbounded curiosity and negotiable theory. It could be said that religion is an attentional accident; but we will have to add that due to its structure, it is likely to stay ubiquitous or imminently present within human civilisation.4 The cognitive and semiotic study of attention, its forms and its ‘grammar’, and the relations of these aspects to the rather complex semantics of human experience, as developed theoretically, technically, and empirically in the present volume, represents an important new step in the exploration of human consciousness. By lifting the inquiry out of the philosophical discourse – where it was born and raised, thanks to classical rationalism and modern phenomenology – and installing it in the open discourse of systematic collaboration, this work accomplishes a remarkable feat. It explores 4

For example, most or all ethnic communities or ‘cultures’ that claim to possess an ‘identity’ also present a religious profile. Closure is structural in the case of ethnicity.

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From Attention to Meaning

a basic phenomenon and invites critical debate and further contributions from the wide field of cognitive consciousness studies spanning from aesthetics and linguistics to biology and neuroscience. This is, I think, the way in which a cognitive semiotics works. Attention is particularly relevant to linguistics, in so far as language is our main medium of ‘pointing’ to things among things, especially to absent things hidden among other absent things in the crowded archives of human reference. Let me mention one elementary dimension of attention-driven linguistic organization: the difference between lexical and syntactic reference (to same things). Any language offers a lexical stock, structured independently of its phrase and clause grammar; while a phrasal articulation of a scenario implies a vantage point, a scaling of objects, indications of experiential intensity, salience, epistemic value, etc., a lexical abstract of the same scenario, a word that summarizes it, will allow speaker and hearer to ‘attend away from it’, to lift off their attention from its episodic drama, and move the attentional ‘marking’ to related themes, concepts and problems, predicates and circumstances. Sentences, made of words, thus play a game of both attending and ‘dis-attending’, of thinking in the direction of or away from things and thoughts. In this sense, introducing or learning a term for a concept allows us to ‘freeze’ it, that is, to ‘keep it in mind’, to hold it without attending to it – a capacity that must have had an important role in human evolution of perception, signification, and thinking. Similarly, when we translate, a word in the source text’s language often becomes a phrase in the target language; this fortunately heightens the degree of translatability between the two languages, but to the price of changing the ‘economy’ of attention. Thus, ‘having a word for’ an entity in a cultural group does not indicate a structural revolution in its cognitive semantics but indeed a determination of its degree of attentional freedom, its resources for unbound thinking; with a poorer vocabulary, attention must work harder… Speaking a foreign language, using a limited vocabulary, can be stimulating for this very reason: it makes us attend differently, and thus, therefore, think differently. This effect corresponds to what has often been established through brain scanning of expert versus lay treatment of mental tasks; widespread cortical activity in the latter case, and more local and reduced activity in the former.5 The working of attention is of course both an immaterial operation and a material process. 5

The expert uses an expert terminology and – internally – an inventory of mental symbols or diagrams, either directly or indirectly linked to – external – terminological lexemes.

Attention: A foreword

15

One of the most prominent features of the expressive behavior we call art (incl. literature and music) is to produce and present compositions for which we do not have words ready; we therefore have to ‘pay’ so much more attention, and thus will perceive slowly, carefully, in one sensory modality at a time, while enjoying art.6 Beauty is the classical name for the emotional value of doing just that. Here, we are apparently facing the opposite of the attentional freedom mentioned above. In art, the esthetic goal seems to obtain anti-expert perception and processing of the object. That is why art can be ‘captivating’. With an expression coined by Danish musicologist and philosopher Carl-Erik Kühl, the particular, slow, and often erratic, hesitant style of perception we use in front of works of art is a genre of perception: not epistemic but instead epimonic perception (from the Greek epimone (from the verb epimeno, I continue) lingering, hesitation).7 Why do humans cultivate this genre of attention, epimonic attention? I think this question is relevant, because it leads us toward that of the origins of symbolization. Only when we experience an item epimonically do we separate it from the context of manifestation and instead place it in a foregrounded position that forces it to make sense – to symbolize. Symbols are famously ‘conventional’, but their users do not have to ‘convene’ in order to establish them; however, their attention has to experience mutual reinforcement, to generate the intentionality that transforms them – from marks to symbols. Human semiotics, the basic condition of human culture formation, is a cognitive process of sense-making built directly on the grammar of human attention. So the present treatise is an elaborate introduction to the aspect of human consciousness that constitutes our semiotic being. Per Aage Brandt

6

7

A figurative painting of course represents what a human eye would view in very few seconds: a landscape, an agglomeration of objects, a human face, etc. But in theframed and painted canvas window, we are offered a frozen view bound to stay showing forever what a human being may have glanced in an instant. A curious contrast occurs between fast and slow perception. The distinction goes back to Roman Jakobson’s view of our perceptive attitudes (Einstellungen), which in his terminology could be pragmatico-functional or aesthetic. C.-E. Kühl, “Epistemisk og epimonisk sansning” [epistemic and epimonic perception], manuscript, Aarhus 2007.

Introduction

A Collector’s Conceit Our subject begins with a curious experience that happened as I toured the famous Frick Gallery on East 70th Street, overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park in New York City. As I entered the Living Hall, an oak paneled room at the center of the gallery housing some of Henry Clay Frick’s most famous acquisitions, and oriented myself toward the fireplace, I took notice of three paintings: El Greco’s portrait of St. Jerome (circa 1590) hanging directly above the fireplace mantle flanked by a portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527) to my left and Thomas Cromwell (1532) to my right, both creations of Hans Holbein, the Younger. The portrait of More (famous for its trompe l’oeil effect) presents the subject in a three-quarter view facing to his left, while the portrait of Cromwell presents the subject in a more severe profile facing

Plate 1: Thomas More (1527) and Thomas Cromwell (1532) painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (Copyright: The Frick Collection, New York).

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From Attention to Meaning

to his right. Gazing out from the center of the room as I listen intently to the commentary about each portrait, I experience the odd feeling that Thomas Cromwell is staring at Thomas More, as if he were plotting against him, the imputation of such iniquitous intent no doubt prompted by the commentator’s disclosure that Cromwell was More’s arch political enemy and partly responsible for his execution in 1535. Although gazing in Cromwell’s general direction, More seems unaware of his arch enemy’s presence. It seems as if Cromwell has More right where he wanted him! This odd feeling was not mine alone, as my companion, standing next to me and listening to the same commentary, agreed that Cromwell was indeed staring at More. Overhearing our conversation, a third patron perforce let out a short laugh at the situation presenting itself to us. We all thought that Frick probably savored the irony of this hang.1 As strange as this feeling may seem, it is an absolutely normal occurrence based on the workaday cognitive operations, namely the ability to construct on the fly mental simulations of scenes and states of affairs displaced in time and space and involving disparate experiential domains (in this case from the domains of artistic portraiture, curatorial practices, and political infighting). Understanding why and how such effects happen is the subject of this book. This curious experience is richly instructive in several ways and data from it will be mined throughout these explorations. It puts in evidence a prime instance of human beings forging dramatic meanings from static images by blending things that do not normally go together; hence, it is a prime example of conceptual blending, the general model of human meaning construction the mechanics of which involve the construction, completion, and elaboration of mental spaces – dynamic scenes and scenarios created as human beings think, talk, and interact. But most fundamentally, this curious incident is important for what it says about human attention, in my view the sine qua non of human meaning construction. The term attention pops up repeatedly in discussions of meaning, but its presence has been casually mentioned more often than deliberately explored. In response, this book qualifies as a new approach to meaning insofar as it provides “thick descriptions” of meaningful events as a function of attention, imagined in these pages as consisting of an interdependent signal

1

The living hall is the only room left unchanged since Frick’s death.

Introduction

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system, selection system, and interpersonal system. This book presents this ‘greater’ attention system as a heuristic on which to build theories of meaning in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric but does not claim to present a grand unified theory of meaning. Instead this exploration offers a rough sketch of what the sciences of meaning might look like as a consequence of attending to attention.

Prologue: Attention, Meaning, and Knowledge Representation As prelude, I wish to situate the attention system and Mental Spaces and Blending Theory within the province of knowledge representation, a concern at the core of cognitive science. What do cognitive scientists mean by representation? Markman (1999: 5–10) defines representations as consisting of four components. The first component consists of a represented world, or content, that discloses to us what representations are about. This world consists of the range of “somethings” worth attending to, thinking about, or acting upon. This first component refers to a world purportedly external to the representation system itself.2 The second component consists of a representing world, or the domain of forms used to stand for entities in the represented world. This is the domain of signifiers. The third component consists of the mechanisms used to connect the representing and represented worlds. These two worlds can be linked isomorphically such that every piece of information in the first world has a corresponding form in the second world, but more often is the case that the two worlds are linked homomorphically such that multiple pieces in the first world share forms from the second world, with the result being a loss of information. The fourth component consists of the processes for using representations. The first three components, argues Markman, point to the potential for representations. But representations mean nothing unless processes unfold in using them. For instance, there is no representation of the feuding Cromwell and More until someone “reads off ” their relationship from the display.

2

Of course, the represented world can include reflexive content about the status of representations as representations; the represented world is also meta-representational.

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From Attention to Meaning

Markman’s model of knowledge representation presents a heuristic for locating the apparatuses of attention and mental spaces within the cognitive science landscape. The greater attention system and its corresponding elements – alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing – purport to capture regularities of the processes underling representations, while Mental Spaces and Blending Theory (itself a process model of integrating elements into representations) captures facets of the mechanisms for relating the representing and represented worlds. For instance, on the processing end, the attention system predicts that certain representations function specifically as attention “harmonizers” inveigling others to allocate cognitive resources to the same item in the surround, while other representations function specifically as attention controllers, inducing cognizers to switch attention between two distinct items or to oscillate attention between two features of the same item; likewise, a mental spaces approach predicts that meaning arises from selective projection of elements from a stock of existing representations to compose, complete, and elaborate new representations that create new meanings not apparent in the preexisting stock. Together these apparatuses predict that the representations themselves unfold in the present as dynamic scenes and scenarios that, more often than not, allocate attention to the there-andthen, broadly construed. Patrons can see More and Cromwell staged in the here-and-now but attend to them as political actors of the historical past. Patrons see the arrangement of portraits before them but can turn their attention to the person who so arranged them for our amusement. The broad sketch that human attention comprises the processes component and mental spaces comprise the mechanism component of knowledge representation is by no means an uncontroversial view of their relationship, if for no other reason than not all cognitive scientists, many of whom work within the mental spaces and blending framework, hold attention and consciousness in very high regard, and thus would envision a different relationship emerging. But the relationship sketched above is, at present, the one that makes the most sense to this researcher. Another matter needs our attention before these explorations can begin in earnest. Markman’s four-fold model is agnostic with respect to the precise nature of these representations. Do representations reside inside the head? Do they reside outside the head? Or, do they reside both inside and outside the head? While Markman’s sympathies lie more with the first option, my sympathies lie more with the third option. Since these are matters of deep philo-

Introduction

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sophical debate with no apparent consensus on the horizon, one is left simply to acknowledge initial biases. My own is to see cognitive science expand the unit of analysis beyond the individual mind to include facets of the environment, an environment teeming with other bodies and minds. Thus, representation and meaning is a function of body, brain, and environment in synchronized harmony with other bodies and brains. Take away any one of these features and meaning fails. The conjecture explored in the next four chapters is that the attention is the preeminent cognitive process that fills life with meaning.

Synopsis To prepare you for what comes next, I conclude this introduction with a brief outline of each chapter. The first chapter, “The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences,” presents the entire attention system as comprehending three subsystems – the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system – which unfold dynamically during acts of meaning by eight elemental capacities: alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The cognitive psychology and neurosphysiology of attention further suggests that the attention system fits within the broader research paradigm of Distributed Adjustable Capacity theories, in which attention is understood as a socially and culturally attuned “zoom lens” that widens and narrows as occasion demands. The Frick Gallery and its contents serve as the underlying occasion to “scale up” experimental evidence in the cognitive psychology and neurophysiology of attention and to see how “ideal observers” allocate attention in a uniquely human habitat. This chapter also provides the occasion to introduce other research interests in cognitive science, such as consciousness, categorization, memory, affect, and culture, of central importance to the ensuing explorations in the meaning sciences. Chapter two, “Attention and the Study of Signs,” presents an attention semiotic from the perspective of the attention system outlined in the previous chapter. I argue that sign production and comprehension are best understood as attending to one of three types of scenario at any given time – the “what is the case” scenario (hypostasis), the “what if X were the case” scenario (hypothesis) and the “as if X were the case” scenario (hypotyposic).

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From Attention to Meaning

Reusing the story recounted in the introduction as my principal illustrative case of minds entrained to oscillate between these three types of scenario, I show how the processes of attention employ mental spaces and blended spaces during meaning construction. I then supplement this exploration with two additional case studies. The first is a brief analysis of a philosophy discussion session, wherein a graduate student leads a group of undergraduate students through Kant’s notion of a transcendental argument by effectively enacting the persona of the great philosopher. The second and more extensive case study is designed to show the attention semiotic as working in another cultural institution – the tropical rainforest exhibit at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. While any of the three scenario types can dominate meaning making at any given time, hypotyposic scenes enjoy a special status insofar as they, more so than the other types, blend the present with the future and the past, often inducing a greater sense of vividness, empathy, or urgency to the matter identified with it. Chapter three, “Attention in Language and Discourse,” applies lessons learned in the previous chapters to the domain of language and discourse. In this chapter, I explore the possibility of theorizing language as both conditioned by attention and, once developed, conditioning and refining the capacity to detect, select, sustain, control, harmonize, and direct attention. This chapter explores this possibility of a linguistics of attention with the help of Cognitive Linguistics approaches, namely Cognitive Semantics, Cognitive Grammar, and, of course, Mental Space and Blending Theory. After correlating specific linguistic phenomena in English with attention phenomena predicted by the eight elements (with a special focus on the role semantic domains play as primary constituents of the selection system), I then shift the discussion to discourse, focusing on two extended case studies in written and spoken discourse. The first concerns the written genre of architecture writing and the use of hypotyposic scenario of a projected ego moving through a lived spaces. This case study focuses on the role a range of middle voice constructions play in directing the attention of readers to experience the space in a particular way. The second case study takes ups the case of the graduate student enacting Kant presented in the previous chapter, this time focusing on five prosodic features of the graduate student’s voice that appear, on close analysis, to be functionally significant in managing the flow of information and, hence, directing the attention of her interlocutors. Chapter four, “Attention and Rhetoric,” expands the purview of meaning construction to consider language and other signs as inducements to

Introduction

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social action in specific discursive situations. Rhetorical practices exploit current beliefs an audience holds to induce new beliefs in that audience. These new beliefs can subsequently induce physical actions based on the logic of persuasion that goes something like this: If you attend to X in this or that manner, you will come to believe Y. If you come to believe Y strongly enough – usually through sustained concentration and effort – you will likely do Z. This chapter begins with overview of three prominent rhetorical theorists, starting with Aristotle, jumping ahead two-millennia to the work of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Kenneth Burke. Each theorist contributes specific features important for the construction of a rhetoric of attention: Aristotle contributes a classification of artistic proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos); Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca contribute a context-sensitive theory of argumentation based on the notion of rhetorical presence; Kenneth Burke contributes the idea that meaning is inherently dramatic and that persuasion depends on the audience’s degree of identification with or division from the mini-drama as presented. This overview sets the stage for two extended case studies. The first case is a sentential analysis of the rhetorical semantics of force and counterforce in George W. Bush’s “Preface” to the National Security Strategy Report of the United States of America, issued in September of 2002, that when presented to nation and foreign policy community became the first authoritative document justifying the “Bush Doctrine” of preventive warfare. The second case is an extended mental spaces treatment of the Census2000 campaign to induce citizens and residents of the United States to complete and send in the census form. In both cases, rhetorical inducement was about creating a new set of beliefs and applying them to specific situations. The first sought to induce cooperation between the Administration and Congress by commanding the attention of its audience, while the second sought to induce compliance by inviting the attention of its audience. A rhetoric of attention has to come to terms with the extrinsic conditions of an attention economy – some discourses we attend to by virtue of institutional prerogative (namely via the “voice” of a sitting president who is also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces) and some discourses we attend to by virtue of repeated invitation (namely via an omnipresent message vying for our attention in the midst of the quotidian). This last chapter brings together the external forces of the semiotic and institutional environment with the internal forces conditioning one’s ability to make sense of it. These four chapters comprise distinct explorations into the study of meaning construction. Each exploration carries with it its own implications

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for future research and scholarship within their own fields of study. Thus, this book should not be construed as a seamless whole or as a single theory. It merely aims to advance the discussion and debate about the role attention plays in conscious mental life – a thoroughly social mental life.

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Chapter 1

The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences

Attention Of all the activities human beings undertake, perhaps none is more consequential for the performance of other activities than paying attention. When we attend, we perceive. When we attend and perceive, we remember. When we attend, perceive, and remember, we learn. When we learn, we can act deliberately and with forethought.3 When performing a task, we must, conversely, reduce the need for vigilant attention to some items and procedures, allowing them to be carried out automatically, yet the very act of pushing them into the background of conscious awareness occurs only because we must attend to something else. In short, perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding, and acting require human beings to economize attention. So, if attention is at the center of human cognition, what precisely is it? A search for a concise definition needs go no farther than this famous quotation from William James: attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously present objects or trains of thought” (1910: 403–404). Current thinking among many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists is that this “taking possession by the mind” is not a single entity or mechanism, but rather the name given to a distributed set of contiguous neural populations that interact mutually with other populations during the performance of perceptual, motor, and conceptual tasks. Attention is neurologically and phenomenologically systematic.4

3 4

Raja Parasuraman produces a similar stylistic formulation in his introduction to The Attentive Brain (1998: 3). By system, I mean a functionally and temporally related group of elements.

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From Attention to Meaning

The Greater Attention System: An Overview The greater attention system I am about to consists of three distinct but interdependent systems: the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system.5 These three systems can only be apperceived relative to eight elements of attention that comprise them. A gerundive listing of the eight elements is as follows: alerting and orienting comprise the signal system; detecting, sustaining, and controlling comprise the selection system; and sharing, harmonizing, and directing comprise the interpersonal system. Before explication of the greater attention system can begin, a first attempt to describe how the greater attention system works as a seamless whole is in order. Taken completely, the system operates on a continuum such that targets within the field of attention can occupy a place on a scale from inactive to active to salient, with inactive items remaining pre-conscious and active and salient items occupying explicit awareness (see Anderson 1982). Salient items readily play determining roles in thought and action, for they are immediately accessible with little or no effort; active items also play a conscious role in thought and action but require slightly more effort to bring them into focal awareness; and inactive items play a preconscious role in thought and action, constituting the background from which one can extract salient items. Bringing inactive items into full conscious attention requires greater effort or cognitive load, and greater shunting of information from long-term memory, and, concomitantly, greater effort in damping the flow of sensory stimulation. A stimulus can become salient and active by two routes: exogenously through the bottom-up capture of external prompts, or endogenously through top-down imposition of memory. If an item impinges directly on visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory systems, one then places it momentarily in focal attention for further processing. An item can become 5

Development of this system was inspired by many sources in phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, including textbooks by Anderson (1982), Gazzaniga et al. (1998), Johnson and Proctor (2004), Matlin (1987), Posner and Raichle (1994), and Styles (2005); monographs and edited collections by Baars (1988), Baddeley (1998), Broadbent (1958), Deacon (1997), Groeger (2000), Jeannerod (1997) Kahneman (1973), Kosslyn (1994), LaBerge (1995), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Parasuraman (1984, 1998), Pashler (1998), Reisberg (1997), and Tomasello (1999); and research reports and articles by Lavie et al. (2004), Masuda and Nisbett (2006), Triesman (1960), Wickens (1984), and Yantis and Johnson (1990).

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salient as a byproduct of direct capture should further processing effort connect the focal concept to a closely connected concept, through a process known as spreading activation. For instance, direct capture of the sound of a nearby gallery patron’s loud voice may activate the concept MUSEUM ETIQUETTE. The curious drama of the confrontational Holbein portraits and an ethnographically inspired analysis of the museum space offer an occasion for the explication of the Greater Attention System.

The Signal System Human beings are like any other organism. We sense signals embedded in noise. These signals constitute a change in the immediate environment. A perceived change in the organism’s environment serves as stimulus to produce a particular response. Many of our responses are reflexive, involuntary, and unintentional and reflect the objective properties of the human life-word. Many of them are culturally uniform. On the other hand, a signal can only become meaningful if it is a difference that makes a difference to us. The two elements of the signaling system (alerting and orienting) comprise at once the sensory and dispositive boundary conditions of human meaning making: they determine that which is significant without being significant in themselves. All human sensory-perception operates within specific bandwidths. For visual perception of the environment, light frequencies between 400nanometers – 700nanometers can become signals, sandwiching the visual spectrum between the ultraviolet (below 400nm) and infrared (above 700nm) spectra. In auditory perception, frequencies between 20 kHz – 20,000 kHz can become signals, sandwiching the sonic spectrum between two bands of ultrasonic frequencies. In brief, alerting refers to the processes of maintaining a general readiness to process novel items, while orienting refers to the factors that dispose one to select particular items over others. Two axioms characterize thinking about the signal system: not all information is equally important, and different organisms are alerted to different items. Human beings are highly attuned to human speech of any kind (i. e., phonetic recognition). In any given situation, the superior temporal gyrus on the sylvan fissure is primed to recognize incoming sensations of human voices (regardless of the language). When a human voice fills a silent space,

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From Attention to Meaning

we are automatically alerted to pay attention and process its message. The mere presence of voice “disturbs” present consciousness. Language is a powerful tool because the awake and alert brain will nearly always mind it; oral or written language is powerful, because it can alert us to something not present, operating as a virtual alerting system portable from situation to situation, moving addressees from the world of actuality to the world of potentiality. In a greater semantic and pragmatic context, this element names the class of prosodic devices, such as syllabic stress, intonation peaks, and intonation contours, eliciting attention through variable intensity of the signal. In a similar vein, alerting correlates with typographic phenomena in written communication, such as ALL CAPITAL spellings or bold face type. Orienting, on the other hand, refers to the disposition to select particular kinds of incoming information over others based on spatial, temporal, and cultural frames of reference. When I occupy a space filled with many voices, I am undoubtedly alerted to voice but now have to select one and filter out the others while remaining peripherally aware of those other voices. Phonemic recognition is largely a function of orienting insofar as I am more likely to be alerted to the sounds of English than any other language. In a room filled with unfamiliar sounds, I will be specifically attuned to the sounds of English. Linguistic constructions are primarily used to orient and direct others to events, actions, and states of affairs in particular ways from particular perspectives and vantage points (as will be discussed in chapter 3). Let us consider these elements of the signaling system within the Frick Gallery. Alerting refers to the process by which one maintains sensory readiness to process novel signals, while orienting refers to one’s disposition to select particular kinds of input over others. Alerting tells us precious little about the combative Holbeins other than to note that human beings must possess a capacity to function and that the specific patterns of alerting are typical of all human beings regardless of geography, history, and culture. When combined with orienting, however, one begins to see the genius of museums as sites designed to minimize the broad bandwidth of sensory signals that facilitate exogenous, bottom-up attention capture (especially when compared to the goings on outside) and maximize a narrower bandwidth of sensory signals that facilitate endogenous, top-down attention structures. With respect to the two Holbein portraits, the virtual drama elicited by Frick’s arrangement only came about by virtue of my spatial orientation toward to the fireplace. Had I been closer, the two portraits would not have fit in the field of attention. Spatial orientation within the Living Hall has a

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determining effect on what items occupy the same stage at the same time. More generally, this quiet setting facilitates a particular orientation, too. Patrons are encouraged (and indeed cannot do much of anything else) to examine individual works of art and to compare them from their own vantage points. They can walk up close to the works, take a few steps back, move from side to side, and otherwise “zoom in” or “zoom out” in order to alter their own dispositions to attend to the works on display. If, for instance, patrons like me were not permitted to stand about five meters from the fireplace, they would have a very difficult time seeing the two Holbein portraits as two protagonists in the same political drama.

The Selection System Human beings are unlike other organisms in the degree of conscious rehearsal of past, present, future, and imagined scenes and situations, in the degree to which multi-tasking (doing more than one thing at a time) comprises the quotidian, and in the degree to which one is aware of one’s own mental states. Human beings are better planners, projectors, controllers, and monitors of their own cognition than any other species. Greater governance of cognition and consciousness depends on the selection system, consisting of detecting, sustaining, and controlling. Detecting Detecting names the element of attention described in James’ oft-quoted definition and is perhaps the most widely researched. Detecting itself works on the economic principle of scarcity: distribution of attention depends on a transfer of resources from one area to another. The primate brain evolved mechanisms for data extraction based on selective attention for the purpose of coping with information processing, and information processing is really a matter of making readings of present, past, future, or imagined happenings in the world that are deemed valuable. Detecting directs attention toward items and away from other items. Such a process can be a response to a strong external stimulus (James’ “passive selection”) or imposed voluntarily (James’ “active selection”). This process can be viewed either as a process of filtering, in which case a stimulus is blocked and hence unidentified, or as a process of depriving, in which case an already identified stimulus is simply denied sufficient cognitive resources to remain in consciousness.

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From Attention to Meaning

Detecting is the process that initiates conscious execution of a task or set of tasks. Patrons of the Frick Gallery routinely detect portraiture as their main object of attention and in doing so are invited to ruminate on the meaning of these objects. A gallery effectively governs the range of detecting states. In this instance, detecting includes focusing on the two Holbein portraits at the expense of other proximate items, namely El Greco’s St. Jerome hanging directly above the fireplace. In summary, detecting facilitates mental processing of one task while inhibiting the completion of other tasks. It accounts for the fact that I must choose which painting to examine first. Without detecting attention, cognitively modern human beings would be ill-equipped to act coherently in the face of a distracting sensorium. Sustaining While detecting attention supports the choice of goal-directed tasks of all sorts, sustaining attention ensures a task’s completion by taking up the greatest share of cognitive resources. The need for focused attention defines a component of attention distinct from selection in that it involves concentration, which in turn, involves narrowing the field of attention. While detecting is subject to the contingencies of bottom-up perception, sustained attention depends on top-down framing of a situation or scene. It is largely endogenously driven and impervious to exogenous capture. Turning to pay attention to something, detecting, is different from concentrating on something. Once attention settles on the two Holbein portraits in dialogue, it gives way to absorbed attention to the details of their fictional encounter. Ruminating on the curious scene of Cromwell staring on More requires sustaining attention, effectively marshaling the greatest share of cognitive resources. Sustaining attention requires time and effort, thus museums and other exhibition sites create conditions for sustained attention – spaces dedicated to orienting attention toward the objects therein while mitigating distractions from without. Mentally simulating a mini-drama of Cromwell gazing with pernicious intent at More can be understood as a dynamic mental simulation anchored in the here-and-now of a museum visit but referencing the past events of Tudor England. While detecting and sustaining attention can function as mutually reinforcing processes, they can also oppose each other, most notably in rich sensory environments where the alerting and orienting mechanisms are prone to respond to any sensory cue from above and below, front and back, and

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left and right. In this respect, it is perhaps best to think of detecting and sustaining as antagonistic forces that ensure balance between exogenous and endogenous control. That is, a high rate of stimulus presentation induces iterations of detecting, thence decreasing sustained attention. A sudden sound of an explosion will force me to reckon a different attentional budget to deal with a possible threat. The stimulus and its aftermath may be so intense or consequential as to supplant my original plan. Cognitive psychologists have identified two mental activities associated with sustained attention: vigilance and search (see Matlin 1987 for an accessible overview of this research). Individuals engage in vigilance tasks when they detect signals presented to them only infrequently over a long time span in unpredictable intervals but in predictable locations.6 An apparent example of a vigilance task would be a museum security guard standing vigil in the Living Hall of the Frick Gallery, where he watches patrons look at the paintings. The exact numbers of patrons who actually misbehave are unpredictable but this potential misbehavior will surely occur in this location, otherwise it is not significant. Another unrelated example would be driving a car on an unfamiliar stretch of highway. You remain vigilant to the task of taking a certain exit. You know it is somewhere on this stretch of highway, but have little idea where, so you cannot calculate exactly when to turn off. Because you know that a situation will arise requiring you to turn off, you remain in a state of alertness, even as you must switch to other immediate tasks, such as breaking, shifting gears, passing slower drivers, talking to the passenger, and so on. Whereas uncertainty persists with respect to when and what kind of signals will be detected with vigilance tasks, uncertainty persists with respect to where a signal will be detected with respect to search tasks. Imagine a patron visiting the Frick Gallery for the first time. He knows in advance that Frick collected seventeenth century Dutch masters and had a few works by Johannes Vermeer, his favorite painter. Unfamiliar with the museum layout, he has no idea where to find the Vermeer paintings. So intent on seeing the Vermeers first, he rushes through the gallery examining the placards next to each painting while ignoring the paintings themselves. The aperture of attention actually narrows to a small portion of the placard – the name. In fact, it is quite possible that our impatient patron is not reading every name but only searching for either a capital “J” and small case “o” and “h” or a

6

Psychologists usually study vigilance tasks that last more than an hour.

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From Attention to Meaning

capital “V “and small case “e” in his task as a quick search strategy. He finally hits pay dirt in the West Gallery. Here he comes across the letter combination “Jo” and suspends his search long enough to read the full name and title of the painting: Mistress and Maid. He then moves his head slightly to the left to find the painting on the wall, recalibrating and narrowing the field of attention to the elements within the painting. Controlling Sustaining attention over time in the face of many competing distractions is one means of maintaining goal-directed behavior. The activity may need to be stopped (in order to respond to some other contingency) and then be resumed; there may be other concurrent activities and their future fulfillment must be coordinated with meeting the primary task. The punctuated nature of goal-directed behavior coupled with the ability to coordinate several strands of information simultaneously, keeping them in their proper order, is known as control of attention. More precisely, the selection system specifies two types of control: switching and oscillating. Absorbed ruminations about the fate of Sir Thomas More at the hands of his archenemy are very difficult to sustain for long periods, as too many external contingencies compete for limited attention, even in sites dedicated to the art of rumination. A truck horn blasting from 5th Avenue, a call from my companion to look at Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert on the opposite wall, or an announcement that the gallery is closing, interrupt my reverie about More and Cromwell. The ability to engage in one cognitively laborious task, suspend that task to attend to something else only to return to it later on, seems a uniquely human ability. Switching attention is vital for functioning in heterogeneous, social, and technological environments. I can ruminate, but I have to cross the street safely if I want to live to ruminate later. Switching is particularly critical in theories of working memory and planning. Oscillating attention differs from switching in that it operates within a single, homogenous domain and thus constitutes a kind of controlled sustain.7 Here is an example. Ruminations about More, Cromwell, and political intrigue in the court of Henry VIII are syncopated with close examination of features within the paintings themselves. I notice, for instance, that 7

Lanham (2006: 84–86; passim) identifies oscillatio as a predominant mode of attention when reading texts.

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More appears unshaven and that Cromwell’s eyes are puffy. A few seconds later, I pick up the political drama, this time More’s scruffy demeanor and Cromwell’s puffy-eyed scowl come to signify great stress and toil, as though each were disregarding sleep and hygiene in the service of some cause. Notice that such fanciful interpretations depend on oscillation between attention to the painting as a pictorial object and attention to the greater political drama for which the paintings are props. I look at the paintings then through them, then at them, then through them, with each oscillation contributing something to the meaning of this engagement with Holbein’s work. In short, oscillating refers to phenomenon of switching between two bistable properties of the same object. I can attend to the representations of Holbein’s portraits – in effect, looking through the painting to the historical figures and their times; or, I can attend to Holbein’s every brush stroke, examining light, color, and shadow – in effect, looking at the paintings. Oscillating attention captures experiences of “looking at” and “looking through” something. Oscillation is a pre-eminently semiotic phenomenon to be discussed in chapter 2.

The Interpersonal System Although primate species are social animals and thus possess some form of intersubjective engagement, no other known species than human beings has social interaction and cultural niche construction as its defining behavior.8 Most of what we do and how we do it involves other bodies and other minds. A phenomenology of attention and its relation to meaning cannot be fully explained without understanding the ontogenesis of the interpersonal attention system, which consists of sharing, harmonizing, and directing. Sharing Complex human behaviors and abilities never occur in a vacuum; in fact, they will not even get off the ground without shared attention. One fundamental condition of the human infant seems to be that she comes into the world expertly prepared to appropriate the entirety of her caretakers’ atten8

Which, of course, is not to deny that other species – from bower birds to bonobos – engage in cultural practices. They are quantitatively (if not qualitatively) different from Homo sapiens.

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tion. She spends nearly all of her precious mental resources attending to the caretaker as the caretaker in turn attends to her. Together, they engage in shared attention. Trevarthen (1980) has conducted pioneering research in the development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants. He argues that infants engage in “proto-conversations” with caregivers. Caregivers and infants gaze at each other, sharing looks, vocalizations, and touch behaviors associated with the expression of basic emotions. What is more, Trevarthen suggests these proto-conversations acquire a turn-taking structure, the caregiver makes a facial expression and the infant, in turn, tries to make a similar expression. Sharing attention names the ontogenetically basic condition of constant perceptual accessibility of others as a permanent constituent of the attentional field. However, sharing of attention is itself insufficient to bring about the shared understanding, as the infant does not yet understand that the other being is a subject of experience. In other words, sharing refers to the condition of being sensitive to the presence of other beings as self-propelled, “mechanical” agents without attending to them as intentional agents. In the adult world, sharing attention can be described as the peripheral awareness of another. For instance, a patron absorbed into the fictive world of More and Cromwell might make momentary eye contact with another patron then quickly look away. In that instance, the patron may share attention with the other patron but does not necessarily become aware of the patron as another patron. She is simply another person in the commons. Harmonizing If sharing attention is the sine qua non of human symbolic development, then, without it, human beings cannot take their place as individuals in successive cultural environments. The next step in that process is joint attention. Tomasello (1999: 56–93) argues that children do not develop language and symbolization without being able to 1) know that others are subjects of experience, 2) maintain an interest in them as subjects, and 3) track the attention that others pay to objects or subjects in the environment. Human attention requires the harmonization of other minds onto a focal item in attention. Harmonizing attention is the metaphoric name used to identify the element of focal attention that is nearly unique to human beings. Adult meaning making is an individual act dependent upon the individual’s singular attitude, temperament, and knowledge, while simultaneously and

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paradoxically a richly social act dependent upon a community of shared signs, values, and needs. I adopt the position that meaning does not arise without the presence of the other (either real or imagined). Human learning is predicated on joint attention. I attend to the same objects in space as my companion, for this odd feeling about the two portraits was shared. Standing next to me listening to the same commentary, she remarked: “He’s staring at him.” Another patron, overhearing her remark, nodded in agreement. All three of us came to focus on the More-Cromwell portraits as props for creating a three-part harmony. We produced a set of simultaneous melodies on a common theme: the dramatic tension between Cromwell and More. I use the term harmony to suggest two crucial points: we were paying attention to the same objects and running similar mental simulations at the same time that we were doing so from subtly different perspectives – slight variations in spatial orientations, autobiographical memory, and, potentially, variations in cultural alignments (as the third patron may assign different significance to these objects based on distinct patterns of identification). The result is a rich harmony of meaningful experiences with each tone at different intervals. Harmonizing serves an important social pragmatic function of promoting human conviviality, as it is easier to place a “spotlight” on a third object than keeping it trained on each other. Two variants of harmonic attention also exist. One variant of this harmonization activity is a phenomenon known as refracting attention. It refers to the activity or state of attending to another agent as she attends to something else. It often occurs as an initial step in harmonization, wherein the first step is detecting the other person with the subsequent step being the detection of the object of that person’s attention, hence creating a ‘prismatic’ gaze as refracted through the first person. There is also a reflecting (or voyeuristic) version of harmonizing, whereby the first person becomes the object of attention as she attends to something else; what is being reflected is not the final object of the other person’s gaze but the person’s attentional posture itself. If this other person could see what you are seeing, she would see herself looking at something else, as if in a mirror. Directing Harmonizing attention focuses on the affective side of human meaning making. The three patrons happen to be focusing attention on the MoreCromwell portraits, but the corollary to this event is that the gallery has

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been arranged in this way. We all thought that Frick probably savored the irony of this hang. In attending to the arrangement of the portraits, we subsequently focus on the intentions of the collector, for we feel that our attention was being intentionally manipulated to regard them in this manner. Frick, we reasoned, must have wanted us to see Cromwell gazing at More and More oblivious to Cromwell’s malice; this was his attempt to direct our attention to the historical subjects of Holbein’s painting. Directing attention is the term I use to speak about the intentional manipulation of another’s attention. Whether this was in fact Frick’s intention is beside the point. It may be that Frick was simply following the convention that portraits should face the center of the room, and thus the effect of Cromwell engaging More is an emergent property he himself never really appreciated. But the point is that these patrons ascribe an intentional agent or agency directing their attention.

Summary This general account of attention is intended to provide grounding for modeling human meaning making. Therefore, the eight elements of alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing attention distributed among the signal, selection, and interpersonal systems of attention count as the basic phenomenological scaffolding for a theory of meaning. Table 1.1 provides an at-a-glance overview of the greater attention system.

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The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences Signal System Elements Alerting

Selection System

Sensitivity to the intensity of stimuli

Orienting

Detecting

Spatial, temporal, and cultural Conscious recognition of disposition to attend; based something as relevant to on cultural frames of reference the performance of a task; identification of a task

Interpersonal System Sharing Sensitivity to the presence of other beings as self-propelled, “mechanical” agents without attending to them as intentional agents Harmonizing Sensitivity to the intentional states of other agents toward a common object of interest (i. e., joint attention); the feeling that the other is attending to the same thing as you; refracting attention occurs when one person establishes attention to something else by following another person’s gaze; reflecting attention occurs when one agent directs this other person’s gaze toward the object of attention, a kind of surveillance

Sustaining Concentration of mental resources on something; the feeling of narrowing the aperture on the “zoom lens” of attention Controlling Switching attention between two heterogeneous tasks; oscillating between two aspects of a single object or task

Directing The ability to manipulate the attention of other agents; the feeling of being manipulated by some other agent or agency

Table 1.1: The Greater Attention System.

The Cognitive Psychology and Neurophysiology of Attention Selective attention after Jamesian psychology has narrowed from its phenomenological and pragmatic roots, such that cognitive psychology and neuroscience focus narrowly on the capacity and limits of individuals to detect and process sensory stimuli from the immediate environment, predominantly in controlled experiments in vision. It is apropos at this mo-

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ment to sample some of the ways attention has been empirically investigated and modeled in cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, taking care to relate their findings to the greater attention system just outlined. One caveat: attention tasks in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology (not represented here) reveal more about the psychology of perception under controlled conditions than they do about human meaning construction in situ. The attempt here to fit cognitive psychology and neurophysiology of attention within the wider phenomenological and cultural matrix of a museum visit is a speculative exercise in service of a philosophical and programmatic objective rather than a narrowly scientific one. As such, it may meet resistance from these communities, given their aversion to introspection and speculation. Such resistance should be tempered by the recognition that these experiments need explicit attempts to connect them to real world happenings. If the ultimate goal of attention research is to explain how human beings attend to their world, then scaling up laboratory findings to ecologically embedded modes of engagement is a necessary step in understanding how human beings adapt to situations.

A Cognitive Psychology of Attention: Protocols, Models, Theories, Paradigms Experimental protocols in cognitive psychology typically focus on four kinds of tasks. In the visual search task, participants are presented with visual information containing a target stimulus amidst irrelevant stimuli, termed “distracters” in the literature. Such experiments are designed to measure selective attention. In the visual matching task, participants are to determine if two or more visual targets are the same or different, with the targets usually being some combination of letters or numbers appearing on computer screens, whereby participants have to determine whether two targets are physically identical (e. g., X X), categorically identical (e. g., x X), or categorically different (e. g., X T). This type of task is used to measure levels of alertness, selective properties of the targets, and limitations on attention capacity. This kind of protocol measures human responses to the range of signals presented and thus may reveal something about the nature of the signal system. In the divided attention task, participants are asked to split their attention among two or more targets, with one detection task designated as primary and other secondary. This type of task seeks to determine the limits of

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cognitive load that participants parcel out to the two different tasks. The results may yield insights into the nature of the selection system, with special focus on detecting and controlling phenomena. In the dichotic listening task, participants fitted with headphones broadcasting different auditory input in each channel are instructed to attend to the message being proffered in either the right or left ear and to ignore the other channel. Occasionally, participants are asked to “shadow” (i. e., repeat) the message from the attended channel. This type of task seeks to determine if and when filtering of messages occurs. The results obtained in this type of task may be most revealing about orienting and sustaining of attention, for it examines our capacity to widen or narrow the field of attention (orienting) for purposes of vigilance and search (sustaining). In the return task, participants concentrate on a visually presented scene. As they concentrate thereon, investigators distract them for a moment while substituting the original image with an altered one (with changes to either focal or peripheral objects) and then determine if and when participants notice the change upon reengaging attention. This task paradigm has revealed a strong effect known as “change blindness”9 in which detection of the change takes several seconds, even several minutes in some cases (see Resnick, O’Reagan, and Clarke 1997 for details). Such is a representative sample of experimental protocols in visual and auditory attention, each of which has at least a partial analog to the ways we attend in the real world. The scenario of our hypothetical patron searching the gallery for the Vermeer paintings correlates with the visual search task insofar as he is presented with potential targets resembling the actual target but which have to be disregarded. Suppose the patron knows in advance that the Living Hall contains no Dutch paintings but has to pass through it on his way to the West Gallery, which he thinks may contain paintings by Dutch Masters. He disregards the perceptually and semantically dense information presented to him in the Living Hall, for the room merely serves as a passageway to the next room. Likewise, the scenario of our patron searching the placards for the letters “Joh” or “Ver” maps onto the visual matching task insofar as he tries to determine in each case if the letters presented before him are physically identical to the target letter (i. e., capital letters signify the first letter in a name), categorically different from the target letter (i. e., the letter scanned 9

Vitevitch (2003) found the analogous effect of “change deafness” in several auditory return tasks.

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is categorically different from the letters “J” or “V”) and categorically the same (i. e., the letter is categorically the same but not capitalized, as is the case with “van Rijn”). The interpersonal scenario, in which the patron holds the ArtPhone to his right ear and listens to the commentary on Vermeer’s Mistress and Maiden while his companion, standing to his immediate left, asks him if he wants to go to Chinatown for lunch, may be a fairly exact real world analog to the dichotic listening task. In this case, the patron is aware that his companion is asking him a question but remains unable to process its precise semantic content. He subsequently stops the ArtPhone commentary, turns and faces her, asking her to repeat herself. Imagine, in fancy, a scenario in which he is looking at the image of Vermeer’s Mistress and Maiden on a flat screen monitor located in the museum shop, a monitor that shuffles images from the collection at twenty second intervals. Momentarily distracted by a loud noise coming from Central Park, our hypothetical patron turns his head and disengages attention from the monitor for about five seconds. Between distraction and reengagement, the image on the screen changes to Hendrik van der Burgh’s Drinkers Before the Fireplace. Despite differences in both compositional arrangement (three characters rather than two) and setting (a fireplace rather than desk), he does not realize the change for several seconds, at least it takes him that long to reorient to the images before detecting that he is now gazing at a different object altogether. Recent history of experimental psychology can be divided among three models of attention: barriers and filters, spotlights, and zoom lenses. Barrier models include the Early-Selection model of Broadbent (1958), LateSelection model of Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) and Norman (1968), and the Attenuation model of Triesman (1960). All three models are predicated on the presence or absence of a barrier (usually referred to as information “bottlenecks”) that blocks input from processing. Early-selection models predict that blockades occur upstream and early in the flow of sensory input, effectively blocking the flow of sensory input to downstream processing areas, leaving a narrow signal stream. Our hypothetical Early-selection patron does not semantically process any letter combinations other than “Joh” and “Ver,” such as “Rem” or “Hen.” Late-selection models predict that blockades occur further downstream, blocking flow only after most of the sensory information has been semantically “interpreted.” Our Late-selection patron, in contrast, semantically processes other letter combinations, such as above, and if pressed, could provide educated guesses where paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn and Hendrik van der Burgh might be located

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several minutes after scanning their placards, despite not attending to them. In the one model, the signal system allows only a trickle of information into the selection system, while in the other, the signal system lets a heavy stream of information flow into the selection system at all times. The attenuation model predicts that signal flow from unattended channels can be processed in parallel with other information but only under specific conditions and usually only after much of the information has been filtered out, but the idea of “attenuated” information is very hard to test empirically. It is therefore unlikely that strong versions of these barrier / filter models – characterized by a more or less fixed rate of flow from signal to selection – are correct. If there is a barrier mechanism, it is most likely a flexible system, as Yantis and Johnson (1990) and Pashler (1998) argue.10 Selection takes place early when the task demands that one attend to one form of target at the expense of all others. Selection takes place later when the tasks require divided attention as one performs two tasks at once. In Yantis and Johnson’s account, selection is a function of timing and this timing is not an automatic and invariable state but a controllable and variable performance. If the patron were also switching between the tasks of finding the letter combination “Ver” while talking with his companion as they both navigate the museum, then it is likely he will remember the Rembrandts and Burghs as contextually relevant landmarks along the way. If he is not talking with his companion and he pays no mind to objects other than the placards, then it is likely he will have no recollection of these Rembrandts and Burghs. Proponents of Early-selection (Broadbent 1982) have also given us the spotlight model of attention. This model stipulates that a spotlight shines only on a small portion of the visual field at one time, leaving the rest shrouded in darkness. The strong version of attention spotlights poses a fixed 1–4 degree field around a target point (Lambert, Beard, and Thompson 1988). Proponents of a variable spotlight have proposed, in contrast to a fixed spotlight of attention, an adjustable “zoom lens.” This model stipulates that individuals narrow or widen the attention aperture depending on the nature of the environment and the task therein (see Eriksen and St. James 1986; LaBerge 1983). The zoom lens model predicts that widened lens apertures will increase response time, as the field becomes more perceptually dense, but the wide lens nevertheless enables multitasking, whereas a narrow lens does not. The empirical evidence favors the zoom lens model 10 Pashler (1998: 223–226) does not use the imagery of barriers in his description, choosing instead the connectionist inspired moniker “Controlled Parallel Processing.”

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with an initially wide aperture. Eriksen and Murphy (1987) found that in experiments where no pre-cue was provided to orient participants, the participants’ attention was distributed widely over the field ready to detect information in parallel. More recently, experiments by Levie, Fockert, and Viding (2004) supports the case for a zoom lens model. In a series of five experiments, they found that situations of high perceptual load (i. e., a densely populated field of perception) reduce likelihood of distraction from an irrelevant stimulus, whereas situations of high working memory load increase likelihood of distraction from an irrelevant stimulus. Detailed description of these experiments is beyond the scope of this present discussion, but the implications of their findings for sustaining and controlling attention deserve comment. In order for human beings to sift through items efficiently to determine their relevance, they depend on two mechanisms: the bottom-up mechanism of perceptual capture that blocks stimuli from interfering with the primary task, and a top-down mechanism that aligns behavior with the present goal hierarchies. Both mechanisms work in concert to minimize intrusions of irrelevant distractors. In conditions of high perceptual load but relatively low cognitive load, participants are able to cope with the wider array of exogenous stimuli efficiently and without distraction. In conditions of high cognitive load (i. e., having to remember several non-present items at one time) and relatively low perceptual load (i. e., infrequent distractive stimuli introduced into foveal vision) participants were more likely to be distracted by an intermittent stimulus than in the other condition. What this means is that conditions requiring considerable cognitive control require a narrow lens as disruption will increase in proportion to the amount of scarce resources shunted to working memory and other modes of endogenous cognitive effort. Conversely, conditions of low cognitive load call for a wider aperture in order to survey the immediate landscape. The zoom lens functions as an orienting attention mechanism: narrow aperture facilitates the endogenous sustaining and controlling of attention; wide aperture facilitates exogenous detection of new targets. Returning to the drama of the two Holbein portraits can illustrate the relevance of the zoom lens model of attention. Ruminations of the conflict between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell occupy the center stage of my conscious awareness upon detecting that the one painting was “doing something” to the other painting. My lens narrows (lights are dimmed) and these characters “pop out” onto center stage. Simulations of these characters’ business come to the fore. If, by chance, a distracting event rushes out

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of the darkness onto the intense spotlight at center stage, it demands attention with greater intensity than otherwise might be the case had the house lights been on, effectively widening the stage to include all the members of the audience. On the other hand, surveillance of the entire crowd means that fewer members of the “backstage” case (i. e., historical characters) take center stage. A zoom lens model of attention emphasizes its adjustable nature. It suggests a paradigm of attention research based on Capacity and Multiple Resources theories. Kahneman (1973) serves as the fountainhead of the capacity theory. Attention is thus understood as the process of building up segments of information that lead to conscious perception. Kahneman’s capacity theory emphasizes cognitive effort and allocation of resources. It therefore broadens attention beyond the narrow scope of psychology of perception to focus on the allocation of resources needed in mental labor, such as imagining the subjects of two Holbein paintings as the dramatis personae in an unfolding political drama set in Tudor England. Thus, human beings allocate effort depending on the level of arousal and task complexity. For Kahneman, arousal has a determining effect on performance. Extreme states of arousal can degrade performance, as it permits too many distractions. It is suggestive of the capacity theory that human beings work optimally when they obey Aristotle’s “golden mean”: too little arousal retards one’s ability to adjust the lens aperture; too much arousal does essentially the same thing (which may be appropriate for meditation but not for guided action). We also allocate effort and resources contingent upon the complexity of the task. When a task is relatively simple and routine, attention can be distributed to more than one channel. When a task is complicated, attention narrows so that cognitive resources from other processes can be allocated to it. Capacity theory emphasizes the commitment of limited resources at key moments. We attend by spending the resources necessary to prime the relevant cognitive operations, as just discussed. Kahneman’s theory squares with the general rule that we must economize attention: the zoom lens model follows from this basic insight as well, while the Barrier and Spotlight models do not. The economics of attentional budgeting dictate that human beings can do multiple tasks in tandem only if the requisite cognitive resources are available and within their budget. Performance will suffer (or break down entirely) if cognitive load exceeds its budget. This explains why our hypothetical patron does not simultaneously listen and fully understand the ArtPhone commentary and his companion’s question. It also explains why

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one can use attended items to remember unattended items if the resources needed to attend to them are contextually relevant and do not unduly interfere with the resources applied to the primary task. For instance, as I caught sight of Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More on returning to the Living Hall, I noticed the chair to its right was now slightly closer to the fireplace. Attention to the painting produced memory of unattended but contextually relevant items. Attention is fundamentally about the allocation of scarce resources, which begs the question of how to model cognitive systems for handling these resources. One question dogging cognitive psychologists is whether resources are the same for all tasks or whether different types of resources key to different types of activities. If the former be true then performance of a secondary task will degrade with increased complexity of the primary task. If the latter be true, the performance of a secondary task will degrade markedly as the complexity of the primary task increases only if the two tasks draw from the same pool of resources. There is some empirical evidence for the latter view. If two tasks draw from different pools of resources, then, according to Wicken’s Multiple Resources theory, we will see time-sharing efficiency in the performance of both actions, meaning that no degradation in performance occurs. Wicken’s model predicts that two tasks involving distinct sensory modalities (visual or auditory), distinct codes (spatial or verbal), and distinct response routines (manual or vocal) will not interfere with each other when all three draw from different resource pools. Interference will occur when the sources overlap along any of these three dimensions, but especially along the response dimension. Empirical support for the Multiple Resources model comes from behavioral experiments with musicians. Allport, Antonis, and Reynolds (1972) found that professional musicians have no problem simultaneously sight-reading a piece of music while repeating sentences in a passage presented to them through the auditory channel. Conversing with my companion while examining features of Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell draw from different resources; what is more, I can hold a conversation with her while writing notes on a piece of paper, as the mode of response in each (verbal versus manual) do not interfere with each other (provided, of course, that the notes do not require concentrated effort). The attention system presented in this chapter takes its cue from the capacity and resources models. These two models in turn control the zoom lens of attention. The cognitive psychology of the signal and selection system fits within an Adjustable Capacity paradigm.

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One diagnostic feature of adjustable capacity is that we use it to cognize the world together. Much of attentional activity is interpersonal, yet the majority of attention studies in cognitive psychology seem to overlook this fundamental point. With the recent interest in social cognition among cognitive scientists, this gap in research may finally be closing. Richardson’s “Eye Chat” project is one case worth extended commentary. In one “Eye Chat experiment” (Richardson and Dale 2005), a speaker was recorded talking about a television sitcom (either Friends or The Simpsons) while fitted with an eye-tracker that recorded her gazes at images of cast members. The sound recordings were then played back to a listener fitted with the same eye-tracker that recorded his fixations at the same set of cast member images. Richardson and his team then performed cross recurrence analysis of each participant’s eye saccades, time-locking them to the speaker’s utterances. They hypothesize a causal link between eye movements and language comprehension. A tight coupling of listener and speaker saccades seems to facilitate language comprehension, for the population of listeners whose saccades mirrored the speaker’s did significantly better on language comprehension tasks than did listeners with “wandering eyes.” A second “Eye Chat” experiment replicated the same speaker playback condition but varied the listener’s viewing condition. In the simultaneous playback condition, an image of a cast member would light up when the speaker fixated on it. In the shuffled playback condition, a cast member image would light up randomly during playback. Listeners in the simultaneous condition produced very tight saccadic couplings; listeners in the random condition did not. What is more, listeners in the simultaneous condition answered post experiment comprehension questions 40% faster than did listener in the shuffled condition. A third experiment replicated real world conversation, with both participants interrupting and disagreeing with each other as they engaged in spontaneous conversation about television sitcoms, politics, or paintings. In each case, the participants were fitted with eye-trackers and asked to gaze at relevant images during the conversation. In this situation, the recurrence of eye gazes was not tightly coupled but instantaneously coordinated when the participants shared common knowledge. This means that there was virtually no detectable temporal gap (0 milliseconds) between speaker and listener gaze alignments. For instance, if prior to the conversation both speakers heard the same encyclopedia entry about a painter (e. g., Salvador Dali), their overall saccadic alignments increased by 33% as compared to interlocutors primed with different encyclopedic entries.

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All three experiments attest to the central role of harmonized and directed attention in human meaning making. The second set of experiments show that asynchronous discourse with alerting and orienting cue (lighted images) has a significant effect on mutual understanding. The third experiment maps closely onto the harmonized art gallery experience between my companion, another patron, and me. We were all in the same location, looking at the same paintings and listening to the same commentary. All things being equal, had our saccades been tracked and recurrence analysis been performed, a similar if not identical set of findings would likely have been produced. I also cannot help but believe that the harmonized agreement we shared secured this experience’s place in my long-term episodic memory. Such findings point to a Distributed Adjustable Capacity paradigm, in which the capacity to attend is understood as being determined by the conjunctions of the bottom-up perceptual density of the environment, the topdown priorities of the agent, and the interpersonal coordination of both. Table 1.2 presents an at-a-glance review of the different attention models and their dominant characteristics (fixed or adjustable). Model and Theory Early-Selection (Barrier) Late-Selection (Barrier) Attenuation (Filter) Spotlights Zoom Lenses Capacity Multiple Resources

Dominant Characteristic: fixed Dominant Characteristic: adjustable X X X X X X X

Table 1.2: Models of attention.

A Neurophysiology of Attention A consensus is building among neuroscientists that the parietal lobes are the general anatomical site for detecting and switching attention, as these activities correlate with head and eye movement (Gazzaniga, et al. 1998: 244). There is also a growing consensus that as the difficulty or novelty of the task increases, so does activity in the prefrontal cortex. Attention narrows as cognitive load increases (Deacon 1997: 256). A review of the current state of knowledge about the neurophysiology of attention may also be helpful in placing the proposed attention system on sturdier empirical foot-

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ing. The review consists of studies of blood flow in specific regions of the cerebral cortex using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) protocols, studies involving Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of brainwave activities using time-sensitive Electro Encephalography (EEG) protocols. Let us now “zoom in” for a more parochial view of the anatomy and physiology of visual attention. The present perspective relies heavily on Posner and Raichle’s (1994: 153–179) “Networks of Attention”. According to the authors, the neurophysiology of attention comprises three distinct networks: the Visual Orienting Network; the Executive Attention Network; and the Vigilance Network. I will discuss each in turn. It has long been known that we pay covert attention to things, meaning that we can in fact attend to a peripheral cue in the visual field without moving our eyes to foveate to it, in effect allowing persons to examine several areas in the visual array quickly and without additional effort. Both overt and covert visual orienting rely on the same automatic process of DISENGAGE – MOVE – ENHANCE. Posner and Raichle argue that the neural circuitry of visual orientation comprises three sites: the superior colliculus (midbrain), the posterior parietal lobe, and the pulvinar (thalamus). The parietal lobe’s primary function is to disengage or “release” the lens of attention from one’s current object, thereby signaling the superior colliculus to move the lens to a new location. Once the lens settles on a location, the pulvinar “focuses” the lens on the content in that location, enhancing the perceptual salience of the target for processing by the other systems. As may be apparent, the neurophysiology of DISENGAGE – MOVE – ENHANCE maps fairly directly onto the signal system described above, particularly as it relates to spatial and temporal dispositions of beings who continuously adjust signal-to-noise ratios as they sense, perceive, and move in a three dimensional world. The role of the posterior parietal cortex deserves special mention here. Posner and Raichle (1994: 162) suggest that it not only disengages attention, it also adjusts the lens aperture depending on which hemisphere is active. Tasks involving wider vistas correlate with greater activity in the right hemisphere of the parietal cortex, whereas narrower vistas correlate with greater activity in the left hemisphere of the same cortex. This contra-lateral correlation suggests that zoom lenses originate in the parietal lobes. The Executive Network is responsible for conscious recognition of objects, events, or actions. Even more, this network is responsible for identifying an object, event, or action as meaningful for satisfying a goal. This

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network identifies the neural circuitry for the conscious execution of a task. In this respect it has much in common with Baars (1988) idea of Global Workspace (more below), the settling on a task or set directly experienced by an agent. Posner and Raichle (1994: 169) identify the anterior cingulate gyrus as the neural active in tasks of generating responses to novel or unique targets, especially in situations involving motor responses, emotional responses, and in pain perception. The anterior cingulate works in conjunction with the frontal lobes in determining the overall coherence of a newly attended object, hence the ability to pay attention to something as relevant to some primary task. We can speculate that our patron’s primary goal of finding paintings by Johannes Vermeer, despite all the other paintings in the gallery “haling” him to come their way, requires considerable activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus and frontal lobe circuit. Another way to say this is that extended detection depends on the continued activation of these cortical structures so as to absorb attention, a kind of “clamping” of attention if you will. Once chosen, it becomes harder for information in other channels and unmatched information from the same channel to interfere or break through. The medial frontal lobe, in particular, plays an active role in sustaining attention, as it helps narrow the lens, thereby decreasing the likelihood of distraction. Returning to the two Holbein portraits as an illustration, concentrated rumination over Frick’s clever conceit is cognitively taxing to sustain for several seconds, and thus, I may be deaf to a question posed to me by my companion. It would seem that activation of the executive network as the left posterior parietal lobe closes the zoom lens aperture. The executive attention network kicks in under conditions of heavy working memory load. Dees and Frith (1999: 84) offer additional evidence for the adjustable capacity paradigm from neurophysiology. They observed that unattended items could still be perceived but only under conditions of low-cognitive load. Thus, fMRI results show significant blood flow to auditory cortices even as the subject is attending to an item in the visual field under conditions of high perceptual but low working memory load. The researchers concluded that the peripheral item was perceptually available but unattended. Under conditions of high cognitive load, however, blood flow to cortices associated with the unattended or distracting item (i.e., auditory stimulus) was practically undetectable. Under these conditions, subjects do not even perceive the sound. Their data support Levie and her colleagues’ contention that high cognitive load narrows the attentional aperture.

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Posner and Raichle (1994: 174–176) propose the existence of a Vigilance Network: neural circuitry specialized in sustained alertness. In such situations, the zoom lens closes in on a particular type of target, appearing in the same location. Sustained vigilance involves training working memory on these infrequent signals at the expense of other possibilities. The authors identify two anatomical sites – cells in the midbrain region known as the locus coeruleus and the right frontal lobe – implicated in maintaining vigilance. Importantly, they also note that as the right frontal lobe activates the anterior cingulated goes quiet, and somatically, breathing and heart rates decrease. This is so because the locus coeruleus secretes norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that “boosts” the signal to noise ratio in sensory channels in which it is released. Posner and Raichle think that this network orients the signal system to the demands of working memory in setting a disposition to identify a type of object, action, or event in the attended visual pathway. Imagine again the job of a security guard stationed in the Living Hall of the Frick Gallery. His primary (indeed his only) purpose is in the invigilate monitoring of patron behavior. He monitors how close patrons stand to the paintings, the means and manner in which they move about; he monitors how loud they talk to one another, and assesses their behavior as appropriate or inappropriate. Monitored behavior judged inappropriate will be corrected by issuance of explicit instructions not to do something or instructions to stop doing something. (I have never witnessed what happens next should the security guard’s speech acts go unheeded.) A neurological description of a security guard’s social role is thus: alert security guards secrete norepinephrine to the early visual cortices and increase blood flow to the left frontal lobe along with concomitant decreasing of blood flow to the anterior cingulate. (One can imagine the same neurological situation holds true for line judges on the professional tennis tour.) To summarize, three attention networks have been identified, each with a functional profile corresponding roughly to the signal and selection systems, and each with distinct neural instantiations. Table 1.3 presents an ata-glance treatment of the three networks of visual attention. Orienting Network Posterior Superior Parietal Colliculus (Midbrain) cortex

Pulvinar (Thalamus)

Executive Network Anterior Frontal cortex Cingulate Gyrus

Table 1.3: The neuroanatomy of visual attention.

Vigilance Network locus coeruleus (norepinephrine)

Left Frontal cortex

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The account just offered presents a plausible yet impressionistic sketch of the neural circuitry underlying aspects of the signal and selection systems. As with the cognitive psychology of attention, we are left to ponder the plausible neural circuitry of the interpersonal system, for if it is phenomenologically the case that when I attend to my companion in the Frick Gallery, I feel as though I am attending not to an object but to another intentional agent, and furthermore that I feel as though we are attending to something or someone else simultaneously, then it should also be the case that the neurophysiology underpinning these interpersonal engagements differ from object perception (though there may be considerable neuroanatomical overlap between perceptual motor interact with objects as with people). Studies pioneered by a group of neuroscientists based in Parma, Italy in the late 1990s on the “mirror system” in macaque monkeys has led to some recent proposals for the neural instantiation of social cognition. Led by neuroscientists Gallese and Rizzolatti, the scientific merit of their teams’ discoveries is well established among larger community of neuroscientists, but it is worth cautioning that their proposed role in primate and human social cognition, including attention, is highly controversial, but in my estimate, the mirror system is currently the best neural hypothesis available. So, what exactly are mirror neurons? According to Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti (2004), “mirror neurons” designate a population of cells in the ventral premotor cortex (also known as area F5) of macaque monkeys that “fire” when they perform transitive actions, such as picking up a block. Interestingly, the same neuronal population fires when the monkey witnesses another primate (human or nonhuman) perform the same transitive action. Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese (2001) found that human beings activate the motor cortices of the inferior parietal lobe and inferior frontal gyrus and the adjacent part of the premotor cortex when concomitantly they perform a motor action; when they witness another individual performing a motor action; and, quite surprisingly, when they imagine themselves or someone else performing a motor action. According to Gallese et al. (2004: 396), the human mirror system “resonates” in response to a significantly greater range of witnessed actions (i. e., while macaque systems respond only to observed transitive actions, the human system responds to intransitive, directionless hand and arm gestures). What is more, the human mirror system seems to code both the goal of the action (convergent with macaque data) but also the manner in which the action is performed (divergent with macaque data). In addition, the mirror system, argues Gallese et al. (2004: 397–400), is implicated in the

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understanding of emotions keyed to facial expressions, such as disgust. The upshot of their proposal is that human beings simulate both first-person and third-person experiences directly, such that we come to read and understand the actions and, they claim, intentions of others easily, because we enact their actions as we witness them. The story gets even more intriguing with the report by Iacobini (1999) that Broca’s area (the cortical structure involved in speech production that sits in analogous position to area F5 in macaques) activates when persons imitate the actions of others, suggesting a strong link between language, imitation, and expressive hand movements. Eerily, the primate brain is structured such that to see an action is literally to simulate that action offline but with the same basic neurological machinery used to perform it in real life. These enactments also have a direct pathway to the amygdala and insular cortices, separating the temporal and parietal lobes: the so-called emotion centers of the brain. The three elements of the interpersonal attention system offer functional interpretations of the mirror system. Sharing attention involves the sensitivity to others beings as self-propelled, mechanical agents. It seems plausible that premotor cortices are implicated in the observance of motor actions and are necessary for the understanding of animate action and motion. Another take-away lesson from this research is that it suggests a coevolving ontogenetic relationship between the sharing and orienting elements of attention. If it is true that infants imitate facial expressions, gestures, and vocalizations as a prelude to meaning making, then one supposes the mirror system is the principal neural circuitry for orienting and sharing attention, which in turn teaches infants about signifying behaviors most worthy of understanding and imitation. The final two elements of the interpersonal system – harmonizing and directing – can be seen as developmental outcomes of this basic sharing process unique to a brain that has attained greater executive control in the anterior cortices over motor perception characteristic of the posterior cortices. Attending to the same scene and getting others to attend to the same scene and form similar emotional and rational attitudes toward it suggest a neurophysiology in which the mirror system functions in a time-locked manner with the prefrontal and frontal cortices (with the help of the basil ganglia), as they play their executive role in managing the control of information to and from other sensory and association cortices. The mirror system then is a critical piece of the interpersonal puzzle if we assume that first person and third person actions are part of the same neurophysiological system. If each of us shares sufficiently similar mirror systems, then, we

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share minds. The interpersonal attention system identifies the phenomenology of calibrating minds; the primate mirror system may be the neurophsyiological point of departure for human sociality. Table 1.4 presents at a glance the proposed neurophysiology of the greater attention system with vision as the dominant mode of sense-perception. Orienting Network Posterior Superior Parietal Colliculus (Midbrain) cortex

Pulvinar (Thalamus)

Executive Network Anterior Frontal Cingulate cortex Gyrus

Vigilance Network Left locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) Frontal cortex

Mirror System Premotor Broca’s cortex area

Table 1.4: The neurophysiology of the Greater Attention System.

Related Topics in Cognitive Science: Consciousness, Memory, Categorization, Affect The greater attention system has a determining effect on how human beings perceive, remember, learn, and act, such that without this system conscious mental life all but ceases. Consequently, the exploration of attention and meaning leads inevitably to other cognitive and cultural phenomena. My point may be better made through metaphor: the gravitational pull of the greater attention system brings into its orbit satellites of consciousness, memory, categorization, and affect (values and emotions). Let us consider each of these satellites and their relation to the solar nexus of attention.

Consciousness Detecting, sustaining, controlling, harmonizing, and directing are all conscious activities, or many facets thereof imply conscious awareness. At any moment during my visit to the Frick Gallery it would have been possible for me to provide a fairly accurate report of “what I am doing now.” If my companion’s and my attention be harmonized, we will produce convergent accounts of “what we are doing now.” Attention and consciousness are not identical systems, however: even though consciousness entails attention. Attention, on the other hand, does not entail consciousness, as ample evidence suggests that we attended to targets without being conscious of

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them. I was not, for example, conscious of the chair to the right of the Thomas More portrait when first detecting it, but the fact that I noticed its change in position upon reviewing the piece suggests that the signal system captured it as a contextually relevant stimulus during the orienting of attention. The greater attention system encompasses consciousness but its ultimate function is to determine what and how human beings construct conscious states. Much more can be said about consciousness than time and space provide. As a general point of orientation, I refer readers to Baars’ (1988: 43) Global Workspace Theory of consciousness for a cognitive science model of consciousness nearest my own.

Memory My companion and I had a converging sense of what we were doing together when we were doing it. It would not be surprising, however, to see our senses diverge when asked to remember facets of this experience. While she remembers the two Holbein paintings, she does not fully remember our conversations about it, as it was not the highlight of her visit. Memory refers to the representation of scenes and scenarios in their absence as well as to the acts of controlling those representations as we think, talk, and act. In the greater attention system, memory is directly implicated in detecting, sustaining, and controlling attention. Working memory is critical for managing representations and their elements during acts of meaning making, as it holds information from sensory memory (i.e., iconic and echoic memory) relevant to current goals and activities.11 According to Baddeley, working memory is “an alliance of temporary memory systems that play a crucial role in many cognitive tasks as reasoning, learning, and understanding” (1998: 6). Detecting and sustaining attention may be the mental states whose functional purpose is to facilitate working memory, and working memory’s functional role is to coordinate exogenous capture of information in service of endogenous goals. Working memory can be distinguished from long-term memory in that long-term memory is a stable collection of recorded experiences that include facts and knowledge. For the two Holbein portraits to prompt a political drama in which Cromwell ministers the execution of More will 11 Iconic and Echoic memory stays active for about 500–800ms, after which it disappears (see Johnson and Proctor 2004: 193–198).

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depend on recognition of historical facts presented in the ArtPhone commentary – an efficient external memory system in its own right12 – but also endogenous long-term memories: declarative knowledge of political systems, intimate experiences of human dispositions such as jealousy and secrecy and their attendant behaviors, feelings of being the object of someone else’s intentions, all of which are resources that may engender benignant sympathy with More and malignant antipathy toward Cromwell. Appreciation of Frick’s conceit depends on other memory structures, such as metarepresentation structures of my own attempts to produce an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of objects, memories of how other collections have been arranged, or knowledge about the standard practices of display. As a process, memory is the capacity to reconstruct important scenes, and the reason one wants to reconstruct complex scenes is, at base, “to repeat a performance” (Edelman 1992: 102). This study assumes the capacity to construct and repeat a performance, understood as a complex cognitive routine in which certain elements are afforded a great deal of attention in working memory. Together, these capacities make possible the construction of elaborate scenes, scenes that draw from resources in procedural, semantic, and episodic memory, with procedural memory (almost always unconscious) handling the execution of task sequences, semantic memory handling knowledge unmoored from personal experiences, and episodic memory handling qualitative, autobiographical knowledge of past experiences (see Tulving 1985 for further description of the three memory systems). The repeating of a performance is equivalent to the online construction of analog models or scene involving states, events, and actions drawing from the stores in procedural, semantic, and episodic memory. Glenberg (1997) offers an analog model of memory compatible with the attention system outlined in these pages.13 For Glenberg, memory in essence results from action, and thus memory depends on attention to bodily movements and responses to its environment, thereby preparing us to operate in the world. Memories retain the perceptual characteristics of their acquisition and in this respect functionally mirror Barsalou’s Perceptual Symbol System theory of concepts (1999). According to Glenberg, the purpose of memory is “[…] to mesh the embodied conceptualization of 12 See Donald (1991) for extended discussion of the importance of External Memory Systems for human cognitive evolution. 13 Glenberg’s analog model contrasts with the standard symbolic paradigms that regard storage and retrieval as a function of meaningless symbolic addresses.

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projectable properties [sensations & perceptions] of the environment (e. g., a path or a cup) with embodied experiences that provide nonprojectable properties [conceptualizations & abstractions]” (1997: 4). The projectable property of paint on canvas becomes non-projectable property of Holbein’s painting. This meshing of projectable and non-projectable properties is the basis on which we construct meaning. This view of memory means that we match past instances of interaction, social or individual, with present or future interactions as similar or different for the purposes of adjusting anticipations, expectations, and behavior. The memory of a place or situation guides behavior because memory is mental simulation of places and situations and our experiences in them. Our memory of something is entrenched to the extent that simulation holds; our memories change to the extent that new projectable properties of the environment require us to alter these scenes and scenarios. As with consciousness, attention and memory coexist along several dimensions. An exhaustive treatment of their relation is beyond the scope of these chapters; nevertheless an preliminary sketch can be offered. In order some a signal to be significant, it must be recognized, and recognition comes about through the orienting of attention to a target and its match in memory. A likeness of Thomas More depends on the ability to orient to faces (a process that may be more of a problem for persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorder). In similar fashion, the phonological loop in working memory performs important orienting, detecting, controlling, harmonizing, and directing functions, for it holds in memory verbal information that subsequently makes it available for manipulation. Finally, much of the interpersonal system would cease to operate without episodic memory – the feeling of having experienced something. It may be that sharing attention is the fountainhead of episodic memory, as our experiences of being self-propelled agents may stem from primordial imitation of animate actions in others, as recently hypothesized by Hobson (2004) and Tomasello (1999) and not so recently by Vygotsky (1962). Harmonizing and directing attention may be the developmental results of calibrating our own bodily movements into interpersonally shared modes of expression, which in turn shapes episodic memory.

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Categorization Human beings are no different from any other organism. They live by their categories. Interpreting the world involves putting objects, events, beings, and ideas into categories, taking them out of other categories, and transferring emotions and attitudes onto them as a result of either placing them in or taking them out of a preregistered category. We deal with contingencies by deriving ad hoc categories that guide local thought and action, as when weekend travelers come up with “interesting places to visit in Manhattan in December.” Attention, memory, and categorization are co-evolving processes. In fact, perceptual categorization is a form of recognition memory that creates a disposition to act and thus intersects with alerting, orienting and detecting procedures. Categories are not to be considered a priori, fixed, or context-free. They are, instead, the result of dynamic, changing, and context-dependent cognitive routines. One of the great achievements of cognitive psychology, supported by work in anthropology, is a near complete revision of what it means to construct categories (Rosch 1978). People do not categorize based on necessary and sufficient conditions; instead, human categories reflect what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” (1958: 32): category members can be related to one another even if its members share none of the properties that would define them classically. Categories also have degrees of membership, or what is usually known in the literature as prototype effects, some being easier to recall in context neutral situations (see Lakoff 1987: 58–68). Thus, most westerners would easily consider the two Holbein portraits as good examples of the category PAINTING, whereas a Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup I (Tomato) would be a less good example, but an example nevertheless. In specific contexts, a urinal turned over on its side can be categorized functionally as ART WORK by virtue of its being displayed in a gallery. In fact, a speaker can even felicitously refer to it as “the masterpiece by R. Mutt.” These ad hoc categories are not an exotic extra process separate from other categorizing processes, but are likely the core process itself, thus studying instances of ad hoc categorization may be the key to understanding the nature of human categorization generally. In addition to family resemblances and prototype effects, category members can be organized around a basic level, a level at which individuals can determine membership faster, can remember the actions associated with the category at greater frequency, and, generally, can name them most easily. For instance, PAINTING is a basic level category, whereas

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ART and LANDSCAPE PAINTING are superordinate and subordinate categories, respectively. According to Lakoff, the basic level categories typically represent the level at which “people function most efficiently and successfully at dealing with discontinuities in the environment” (1987: 269). With lower level categories (subordinate) people usually find it harder to distinguish between category members (subordinate) and they also find it harder to generate imagery associated with superordinate level categories; disambiguation and mental imagery are easily detected with basic cues, whereas these tasks require sustained attention with higher level and lower level categories. With respect to linguistic structure, basic level categories tend to be morphologically simple. With respect to language acquisition, basic level categories tend to be among the first items learned by children (Lakoff 1987: 46). Linguistically, the basic level is represented by names for basic colors, qualities, plants, animals, substances, objects and actions, tall, short, hard soft, rose, lily, tree, dog, cat, horse, running, walking, jumping, and eating. Basic level categories, however, are not confined to the real world or physical experience (although interpreting the immediate physical environment is a fundamental use of categorization that makes all other uses possible), since cultural and fantasy categories like mother, father, brother, sister, ghost, unicorn, priest, gang, and so forth are basic as well. They seem to be indispensable for negotiating an immediate, culturally defined environment. Prototype theories of categories and categorization (see Lakoff 1987) do not replace completely classical categorization. Nevertheless, their robust influence on cognition in general does indicate that how we typically construct, maintain, and alter categories does not follow the classical model of necessary and sufficient constraints. Classical categorization is a real mental phenomenon, but it is also an artificial and normative one, in great need of elaborate systems of knowledge to sustain it (e. g., law, disciplines, taxonomy). Categorization is crucial to conscious mental life because it links our present environment with past experiences; categories are tools for constructing mental maps for dealing with contingencies in the world. The visit to the Frick Museum is categorized as a kind of social event; once that category is detected, it controls the kinds of representations shunted into working memory, providing a culturally specific frame of reference that lets me know what to expect and how to behave. The more the Frick Museum fits the prototype category for ART GALLERY, the more likely I am to apply a predetermined set of anticipations, expectations and actions to it.

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In contrast, a particular wall of art in my house may be categorized as an ART GALLERY as well, but almost certainly not a prototypical instance. Since the wall itself and the pieces thereon do not fit the prototype of a gallery open to the public, “patrons” would be far less likely to apply the same set of anticipations, expectations, and behaviors to the activities therein, at least not without explicit coaching from the proprietor.

Affect: Values and Emotions In order for human beings to attend to something, they must value it, and to confer value onto someone or something means that we feel a certain way about it. Paying attention costs us. Accordingly, whatever occupies an individual’s attention must be worthwhile. Survival depends on paying attention to the right things. Thriving in an environment and culture usually means complying with certain value hierarchies, it is better to be rich than poor, or it is better to be literate than illiterate. Valuation is a fundamental component of human existence. We are constantly engaging in value claims and acting accordingly. If attention is, as Reisberg (1997: 122) suggests, an achievement in which we decide to detect certain targets and ignore others, then these achievements are acts of valuation, of deciding moment-by-moment what is important. The question of what we value individually and collectively varies depending on cultural and sub-cultural constraints (more on this point later). What a whole culture values is reflected most clearly in the basic categories comprising its language. As Barsalou (1993: 271–272) reminds us, English-speaking cultures have elaborate color terms, such as red, blue, and green, while many languages of non-Western cultures, such as Dugum Dani, have an “impoverished” color terminology (only encoding terms for black and white). Conversely, languages of plant gathering cultures have extensive terminologies for flora, whereas industrialized peoples do not. If lexical categories develop to serve everyday thought, then these two cultures develop categories that reflect what is most important to them. In industrialized cultures, Barsalou tells us, it is more important to extract colors from objects so they can isolate colors in paints and dyes, or match and coordinate colors. In plant gathering cultures, it is more important to recognize immediately different species of plant so they can avoid, eat, or cultivate them. Westerners and non-Westerners orient to different targets – they possess contrasting (if not altogether incommensurate) dispositions to attend to the world.

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This is not to say that individuals in these two cultures perceive color and plant life differently (each are capable of acquiring or even creating subordinate categories for colors and plants). This is to say that by virtue of acquiring a language, an individual acquires certain valuations reflected in the structural and functional history of the language. Basic-level categories for color in industrial countries would count as an extensive subordinate set of categories in Dugum Dani. The basic-level categories for plants in plant gathering cultures would count as an extensive subordinate set of botanical categories in English and other Indo-European languages. Until recently, questions of how human beings reason about values held little interest among cognitive scientists. Human valuation has, however, been treated extensively by rhetorical theorists. Two Belgian rhetoricians, whose theory of argumentation I will describe in chapter four, stress the importance of valuation with respect to inducing agreement. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca write that “agreement with regard to value means an admission that the object, a being or an ideal, must have a specific influence on action and a disposition toward action …” (1969: 74), a remark that captures an important component of meaning construction: the capacity and predilection for the attention system to facilitate judgments about the relative importance of an object, event, or idea. This capacity to judge is reflected in our experience of basic emotions, moods, and temperament. Evolutionary psychologists (e. g., Ekman, Oatley, and Tooby & Cosmides) argue that basic emotions, such as fear, anger, pity, anxiety, disgust, sadness, and happiness, are adaptive responses to recurrent and species universal situations, like fighting, escaping predators and capturing prey, and falling in love. Universal among humans and primates, basic emotions are observable in others by facial expressions (the preponderance of evidence suggests expressions for basic emotions are cross culturally invariant). Emotions are distinct from other psychological phenomena in that their quick onset and limited duration offer very fast appraisals of current events, a fact that has led evolutionary psychologists such as Ekman (1994), Oatley (1992), and Tooby & Cosmides (1990) to argue that basic emotions are innate capacities reflecting our ancestral past.14 Perhaps be14 Much work in evolutionary psychology assumes that virtually all human traits and behaviors are evolved instincts with little contribution from culture. Culture is merely a “thin veneer” atop a set of innate modules for paying attention, detecting cheats, socializing, learning a language, and so on. There may be empirical universals cutting across cultures, but that fact neither entails the existence of innate modules nor does it reveal culture as a mere epiphenomenon of human cognitive evolution.

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cause of their evolutionary status, basic emotions are valuable to online meaning construction, because they offer quick appraisals of situations, leading one to act as if certain things are true of an unfolding event on the basis of what was true about a past event. The strength of being able to read the emotional tenor of a situation is that it offers a quick evaluation in a world where quick interpretation and response can mean the difference between life and death, success or failure. The weakness of being able to do so is it can be wrong, because such responses tend to be automatic (occurring before conscious attention can catch up) and incapable of being sensitive to fine-grained variations among similar situations. The costs and benefits of rapid emotion detection match that of vigilance tasks, in which cost of remaining in an aroused and ready state to detect a particular kind of infrequently appearing target leads to many “false positives.” Vigilant attention to emotion plays a role in the human predilection for “jumping to conclusions.” Although deeply entrenched and automatic, emotions are intimately connected to higher order concepts. All events and situations elicit emotions; they have to in order to properly alert and orient the individual. But not all events acquire the same emotional register or exhibit the same degree of intensity, nor does the same event necessarily produce the same emotional tenor or coloring every time. A visit to the museum can take on the emotional intensity of a much anticipated special event, conferring memorable and pleasurable association; conversely, a visit to the same museum can become just another aspect of quotidian reality to a Parisian. Another dimension of human values is mood. Human affect is greatly influence by mood, definable as “enduring emotions” (which according to Ekman are really a series of briefer emotional episodes). While emotions are accompanied by distinctive facial expressions, moods are not. But the real difference between emotion and mood, as proposed by Davidson (1994), is that emotions relate to situations where quick reaction is necessary, thus modulating or biasing action. Mood, on the other hand, functions in situations that call for considerably more deliberation, and, therefore, function to modulate or bias thought. As such, mood will bias the kinds of interpretations we construct and, concomitantly, what ways we represent situations to others. For instance, if I were in a sad mood, I would have increased access to sad memories and decreased accessibility to happy memories, a phenomenon known as “mood-congruent memory” (Bower 1981). This suggests that mood affects spreading activation, or what conceptualizations become salient at any particular time. In addition, Davidson (1994) reports

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that positive moods facilitate cognitive flexibility, whereas negative moods inhibit cognitive flexibility. Mood directly influences the signal system, influencing both alerting and orienting dispositions, as being in a depressed mood may engender involution, decreasing alertness. Everyone is capable of feeling intense emotions, and everyone has socalled mood swings. But everyone differs in the distribution and duration of emotions and moods. Davidson uses the term “affective style” for describing variations among individuals in how they react to events. Known colloquially as temperament, affective style, argues Davidson (1994: 54), appears early in development and has a determining effect on learning and memory. Individuals who grow up in stressful environments are more likely to develop pathological affective styles, such as borderline personality disorder. A tentative conclusion to be drawn from the cognitive science of emotions is that emotions, moods, and temperament be determining factors in the orienting of attention.

Relevant Concepts As preparation for exploring the semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric of attention, I offer extended remarks on a selection of concepts and modes of analysis that will appear throughout the study. The discussion begins with a few words about the meaning of meaning before taking up concepts, such as imagery and schemas, and mental models. This chapter ends with an extended demonstration of the mental spaces and blending theory – the primary mode of analysis employed in these explorations – before concluding with some thoughts on culture and cognition.

Meaning As the title suggests, this study attempts to go from attention to meaning. But what counts as meaning, a term that has at least sixteen separate definitions, according to Ogden and Richards ([1923] 1989: 186–187). I do not use the term as philosophers of language have traditionally used it: either to describe referential properties of words, or the truth value of sentences, or

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the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s intention. Meaning is paradoxically all and none of these things: it is all of these insofar as the term can be felicitously used to stipulate the senses and referents of words, of asserting truth or falsity, and of displaying a speaker’s intentional stance; it is none of these insofar as it emphasizes the fact that meaning is the ephemeral product of an activity not an enduring state or thing, that senses of words are continually being constructed and reconstructed and not fixed “in” the signs themselves, that truth or falsity of sentences are rarely an overriding concern in human communication, that a speaker’s intentions are not hers alone and perhaps most important, that meaning does not fall under the proprietary control of language proper, but rather is an outcome of attention to information. Therefore, the base elements of meaning are not words and sentences, per se, but interpersonally experienced selections of signs. The attention to informational nature of meaning can be further defined as a piecemeal process with results that are obtained only within particular semiotics events. In their study of written communication, Kaufer and Carley (1993) offer a relevant definition of meaning. For them, meaning is the resultant product of local recognition and interpretation, deriving “from the relationships between […] discrete pieces of information, built on pieces that are known and how they are interlinked” (1993: 106–107). This piecemeal view of meaning suggests further that any given datum can have multiple meanings. What is more, the same person may assign a different meaning to the same datum in later moments, depending on the precise interpretive task required of her and on the set of presuppositions available to her. The two Holbein portraits take on entirely different meanings when examined dialectically than when examined discretely. The range of possible meanings transpires from the interactions between the signal, selection, and interpersonal attention systems.

Imagery and Schemas Imagery. Much of cognition is forming mental images, and the term imagery emphasizes the perceptual origins of concepts; that is, concepts (even abstract concepts) develop from representations of sensory-motor experience – a conglomeration of visual, auditory, haptic, motoric, olfactory, and gustatory sensations. Palmer’s (1996) definition of imagery is particularly clear and worth quoting in full:

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Images are mental representations that begin as conceptual analogs of immediate, perceptual experience from the peripheral sensory organs. Because they are analogs of peripheral experience, they are also, therefore, indirect conceptual analogs of the environment, broadly construed to include society, natural phenomena, our own bodies and their organic (mental) processes, and the rest of what is called “reality” or “the world out there” (47).

Once registered in the mind, the immediate perceptual experiences thus defined can be abstracted and replicated so that we can make sense of our environment, reason about contingencies therein, and act thereupon. While immediate perceptions form the basis of mental imagery, the images themselves are abstractions, providing a structure for filling in the details. They become schemas, or templates for framing new experiences. Image Schemas. Living and dwelling in this world depends on acquiring patterns for arranging information, called schemas. The number of schemas needed to engage in purposeful behavior is staggering. Every piece of information must be placed in a schema or schemas to be interpreted. Without a schema, a phenomenon cannot be categorized and interpreted. A class of schemas that has proven indispensable for understanding human thought and reason is the image schema. Initially developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and elaborated into the areas of philosophy by Johnson (1987), into human categorization by Lakoff (1987), into poetic metaphor by Lakoff and Turner (1989), into literary criticism by Turner (1987, 1991), and into formal linguistics by Langacker (1987, 1991) and Talmy (2000a, 2000b), image schemas are thought to make possible the mind’s ability to map spatial structure onto conceptual structure. An image-schema is a condensed redescription of perceptual experience. When fully developed in a conceptual system, an image schema operates as “a dynamic pattern that functions somewhat like the abstract structure of an image, and thereby connects up a vast range of different experiences that manifest the same recurring structure” (Lakoff 1987: 113–114). Johnson (1987: 126) describes many of these schemas and their transformations that provide the ground for cognition. Some common image-schemas employed in everyday thought include: CONTAINMENT, PART-WHOLE, CENTER-PERIPHERY, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, LINK, CYCLE, FRONT-BACK, SUPPORT, FORCE-COUNTERFORCE, BARRIER, and UP-DOWN. These schemas often combine to give basic structure to both concrete and abstract concepts. The schemas we employ as we think involve relations among these image schemas; these relations are known as image-schema

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transformations (Gibbs & Colston 1995: 347–378; Johnson 1987: 25–27; Lakoff 1987: 440–444; Palmer 1995: 68–74; Turner 1991: 177). Thus, simulating the act of walking from Central Park to the Frick Museum involves a path-focus to end-point-focus transformation where an agent follows a moving object along a path and then shifts focus to the point of rest (Johnson 1987: 26). Simulating the abstract concept of going into debt entails the metaphoric transformation of an abstraction into a concrete location, again via the path-focus to end-point focus transformation, and where the end-point itself gets transformed by a CONTAINMENT schema. Simulating the act of detecting one painting from a wall of paintings operates by a mass to multiplex transformation. In this case, the wall appears at a distance as a homogenous mass but as the patron approaches the mass turns into a cluster of individual items. Image-schemas are conceptual primitives because they are topological. Along with Talmy (2000a: 25–31) and D’Andrade (1995: 133), I use the term topology as it is used in mathematics as “spaces” sectioned into areas without specifying actual magnitude, shape, or material. For example, the semantics of over involves a image schematic transformation of PATH and UP relative to a landmark but does not specify the magnitude of spatial gap between object, or trajector, and contextual ground, or landmark; the trajector can be construed as making contact with the path, as in walking over to the museum, such that the magnitude of the gap is perceptually negligible, or the trajector can be construed as above the landmark, as in the balloon flew over the museum, such that the magnitude of the gap is perceptually salient. To summarize, image schemas represent the regularity experiences, and although they are both meaningful and structured, they are not richly meaningful, which makes them highly useful as an apparatus capable of describing a wide array of human experience. Image-schemas may lie at the core of our understanding of objects, events, and ideas.

Mental Models The chain of cognitive events from attending to meaning connect as one seamless whole because along the way we continuously model the events, actions, objects and relations encountered in the physical, mental, and social domains. The chain of cognitive events is held together by cognitive models, small-scale representations of reality as it discloses itself to us. As

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Craik pointed out before anyone else, models allows us to “try out various alternatives, conclude what is the best of them, react to future situations, try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and future …” (1943: 13). Models are representations of the past, present, future, hypothetical, counterfactual, and otherwise imagined states of affairs that simulate perception, emulate actions, and support attention, memory, categorization, and social pragmatic knowledge. These explorations in meaning construction assume at the outset that human beings routinely build imagistic mental models in order to think, talk, listen, and act. Recent examples of mental model theories of cognition include Glenberg’s (1997) analog model of memory, Barsalou’s (1999) theory of perceptual symbols, and Grush’s (2004) emulation theory of representation, all of which take the view that human conceptual systems possess the following characteristics: 1) the architecture is non-modular, 2) the representational format is modality specific (i. e., mental simulation involves actual activation of sensory motor pathways rather than transducing them into a amodal symbolic registers) bearing the same perceptual structure of the phenomena they represent, 3) concepts are situated and context sensitive (as opposed to context insensitive), 4) conceptualizations are dynamic and variable rather than fixed (but with some concepts more stable than others), and 5) the organization is actionoriented rather than taxonomic.15 Governed by the attention and memory systems, mental models require continuous updating from procedural, semantic, and episodic memories and are structured by image schematic transformations and emotional valences. Under this view, a cognitive model of the Frick Gallery is not a set of propositions about the space, but rather a series of simulations of what it is like to be an actor in that space, and thus would include first and third person perspectives of bodies moving through space, navigating specific trajectories through rooms populated with objects and people, along with images of passageways relating one room to the next. With that, the mental model includes knowledge of relevant aesthetic and historical categories used in arranging the items on display. The mental model includes social pragmatic knowledge of the kinds of activities that can and cannot take 15 Barsalou (2003) provides a detailed comparison of simulation based models and autonomous semantic network models of conceptual system.

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place, including knowledge about specific kinds of agents, such as docents and curators, sales staff, security guards and their perspectives, not to mention knowledge about the primary (but absent) agent, Henry Clay Frick himself. Also included are idiosyncratic episodic memories of how I felt when visiting it – indeed an elaborate mental model of this exhibit space probably would not have taken hold without considerable emotional investment. Finally, this mental model meshes with other mental simulations of museums, such that certain schematic extractions of the model lead inductively to generalizations about museum visits as a cultural practice.

Mental Spaces A mental model approach to cognition find a close companion in the Mental Spaces and Conceptual Blending Theory developed in the past two decades by Fauconnier (1994, 1997) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002). As a general approach to the study of meaning construction, it has become a defining framework in cognitive semiotics (P.Aa. Brandt 2004), linguistic analysis (Fauconnier and Turner 1998; 2002), discourse analysis (Oakley and Hougaard 2008), and rhetorical criticism (Oakley 1998), and will be a used extensively in these explorations. Meaning construction involves a set of operations for combining dynamic cognitive models called mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994), or ad hoc and dynamic simulations of relevant scenes and situations that control what we pay attention to, remember, think about and communicate to one another. Fauconnier & Turner (2002) argue that mental spaces operate in the creative construction of meaning in analogy, metaphor, counterfactuals, concept combination, grammatical constructions, perhaps the entire spectrum of signifying behaviors. Meaning rarely involves the activation of single mental spaces. Rather, meaning typically arises from networks of mental spaces working together. Many of the products of human signification depend on the processes of integration of elements and inferences across networks of mental spaces, producing what has become known as blended spaces – mental models built on selective projection of elements, roles, and relations from multiple “input” spaces for purposes of local reasoning and action. It is often the case that these blended spaces “contain” facets that are distinct in meaning from the other space, and in many case exhibit fantastically odd and unreal characteristics that nevertheless are functionally useful in reasoning and plan-

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ning, as they promote novel conceptualizations and inferences, emotional reactions, and can focus attention in unique ways.16 The experience of the confrontational Holbein portraits lends itself easily to mental spaces and blending analysis. The method of analysis adopted in these explorations has its provenance in refinements made initially by Brandt and Brandt (2005). It captures the underlying format for the general mental setup that carries us from attention to meaning. One salient aspect of human meaning is the fictive act of using representational resources commonly associated with attention in the here-andnow (linguistically encoded in forms of proximal deixis, present tense, and imperfective aspect) to characterize a scene, situation, or facet of a scene or situation from the there-and-then. Meaning is essentially theatrical; we create meaning, make sense, by staging and playing. Mental spaces then are dynamic mini-dramas, which rely on schematic resources of interactivity. The mental spaces format describes the ways in which one scene is integrated with a mental space for another scene to form a third, blended or virtual scene with unique ontological characteristics, in this case two portraits “coming alive” before our eye, a phenomenon classified as hypotyposis by classical rhetoricians and Fictivity by Cognitive Linguists. The specific mental format for training out attention diagrammed in figure 1.1 needs extended explication, an analysis also available in Oakley and Brandt (in press). The presentational scene is used to frame the terms by which the referential scene is dramatized. It is the dramaturgical framing of the reference space made manifest in the virtual scene that is experienced as vividly arresting. Much depends of course on the type of presentation involved. One type of presentational scene that human beings rely on pervasively is the scene of interaction – in three versions: symmetrical and synchronous face-to-face conversation between two people; formal and asymmetrical presentations between a speaker and an audience; and asynchronous interactions between readers and writers. In a similar vein, we have interactive scenarios of mindreading, which include a symmetrical scene of two or more minds harmonizing attention and intentions about the same topic as well as asymmetrical scenes of two or more inscrutable minds, not confident of knowing what the 16 Fauconnier and Turner (2002) present several examples of novel blends that have generated much discussion and analysis in the blending community, most notably the “Debate with Kant” (discussed here), “the Riddle of the Buddhist Monk,” the blend for “Complex Number,” and the “Toblerone Chocolate Pyramids,” to name a few.

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other is thinking, and asymmetrical scenes of two minds, each confident of knowing that what the other wants, believes, and desires, conflicts with his own wants, beliefs, and desires. And famously, there is the asymmetrical and synchronous scene in which one thinker knows something the other does not, and what the other does not know can hurt him, that characterizes the mental drama unfolding before our eyes. Grounding

Presentation space

Participants museum patrons security guards

Situation

Hans Holbein, the Younger Portrait of Thomas More (1527) Enface position Portrait of Thomas Cromwell (1532) Profile position Henry C. Frick =Protagonist

Reference space

Thomas More (protagonist) Thomas Cromwell (antagonist) Political rivals in the Tudor Court of Henry VIII

Setting

The Living Hall at the Frick mansion on 5th Avenue in NYC; depictions of St. Jerome and St. Paul, among others.

Virtual space 1: 1st person singular experience of a fictive 3rd person viewpoint

Patrons walk th through h th the gallery ll looking at the collection and listening to commentary

Situational relevance Illocutionary Force: Look at this!

Pragmatic g implication: p Frick was a clever collector

Virtual space 2: 1st person plural experience of a fictive 3rd person viewpoint

Virtual space 3: fictive 3rd person omnipotent perspective

Figure 1.1: The mental space network for “confrontational” Holbein portraits.

The Grounding space is ontologically given, meaning that it models and tracks the here-and-now phenomenology of meaning construction, namely the interpersonal, social, and pragmatic relationships that alert and orient attention. To put the matter slightly different: it is the point of contact between the pragmatic here-and-now – the spectrum of signals and interpersonal attunements – and the semantic there-and-then – the spectrum of available selections. It orients attention to the network of mental spaces. The meaningful content of the network issues from it and circulates back

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into it in a dynamic loop whereby the resulting meaning is ‘landed’ in the space of communication, the space occupied by my companion, the other patron, and I. The initial state of this space feeds forward schemas, frames, and patterns that define the pragmatically relevant characteristics of ongoing signification, and the results of these relevant activities in mental spaces feedback to the grounding space in the form of illocutionary forces, pragmatic implications, and perlocutionary effects. The diagramming protocol is as follows. The Grounding space contains – in three concentric circles – the actual interpersonal specifications, the situational setting, including subjective and intersubjective patterns of attention, and the phenomenological conditions17 of the ongoing communication analyzed. The concentric circles are just graphic conveniences for modeling this ontological grounding of acts of meaning. This example has active participant roles and values: in this case, museum patron role (for which the co-author and his companion are values), museum staffers and security guards, both of whom the patrons pay little mind to. Conversely, of course, the guards pay all their attention to the patrons. You may not be minding them but they are minding you. We only point this out to emphasize that this asymmetrical form of interaction is built into the field of attention in this situation and therefore is open to becoming pragmatically relevant and semantically salient. In some respect, the pervasive presence of security guard surveillance is part of the social background radiation of the entire activity. Such “Foucauldian”18 power and control schemes are primed and thus accessible to conscious experience, reflecting a common cultural disposition to orient to others who have made you the object of their attention. The grounding leads us to the specific Presentation space. Such mental spaces are made up of ontologically grounded and ungrounded elements and relations. In this case, the grounded elements include the two Holbein portraits of More and Cromwell, iconic representations of historical figures. One of the grounded elements making up this mental scene is the image of Thomas More looking contemplatively in the distance; the object of his gaze is not perceptually available, as he appears to be heavy in con-

17 The phenomenological-cognitive conditions are the conditions that shape human experience of a scene of communication in general, excluding aspects of reality that the communicative agents cannot experience directly, such as quantum gravity. 18 See Michel Foucault (1972).

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templation not about anything in the here-and-now. Perhaps he is thinking about Utopia. The image of Thomas Cromwell, in contrast, bespeaks a person looking intently in the direction of Thomas More. It is hard not to see that, at certain remove, he is looking at Thomas More, eyes narrowed. It is likewise hard not to read a certain attitude and posture from this gaze, unpleasant, even dystopic. This arrangement – More looking off in the distance to “his” left and Cromwell looking severely to “his” right – comprises the material scaffolding of the ensuing drama. The ungrounded element in this mental space is Henry Clay Frick himself, for he is the one who arranged these props in this way. He is the implied author of this historical drama between unwitting protagonist and witting antagonist, an inference that comes to pass as the network develops over time. The other ungrounded element is the schema for fictive interaction (graphically represented as two shaded humanoid figures facing each other). In this case, a schema for a kind of theory-of-mind situation that is itself a representation; so the representation of one mind scrutinizing another, confident in its belief that the one knows something the other does not. The viewer experiences this state of affairs as fictive surveillance. We can further assert that this very representation is a schematic representation underlying acts of conversation in general as a consequence of the no-telepathy rule: the theory-of-mind elements of this drama – from picture to picture: Cromwell in one picture seen as thinking about More in another picture, and More seen as thinking about something abstract while Cromwell (fictively) watches him – come from the same representational resource that structures the very activity of human conversation and interaction itself. Dynamic schemas of human interaction both structure representation and show up in the representations themselves. The attention system is highly attuned to representations of intersubjectivity and cleavages in intersubjectivity. Space delegation from grounding further leads the patrons’ minds to the Reference space. In this space, the iconic representations of More and Cromwell function as cynosures for an infinitely deep historical drama involving political rivalry in the Court of Henry VIII. The dramatic content of this space centers on Cromwell and More as political antagonists, culminating in the physical elimination of More. As patrons linger on in the depths of this space, they learn that Cromwell himself met the same fate as More a few years later, once again involving the Court and yet another of Henry’s wives. Once constructed, patrons can oscillate attention between presentation and reference spaces, adding content relevant to each space as occasion demands.

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Contents from the presentation space and the reference space blend into a blended or Virtual space. This space has again ungrounded and grounded elements. The ungrounded elements are historical Thomas More and historical Thomas Cromwell blended with their aesthetic manifestations (through Holbein’s work) in a scene that brings before the eyes the moment when the historical Cromwell knows that More is in trouble. “You’re toast!,” he mutters sotto voce. The grounded element in this space is the reporting museum patron (graphically represented by blank humanoid figures jointly attending to an object). Cromwell is thinking this and saying this right here, right now, in Henry Frick’s House on Fifth Avenue and East 70th street in New York City, while poor unsuspecting More, unaware of his enemy’s plot, nobly ruminates on a political society different from that of Tudor England. A relevance schema applies specifically to the content of the Virtual space: a person sees a second-degree object ‘behind’ the immediately given, first-degree object, attends to this supplement of meaning; another person follows the first person’s line of attention, and potentially an unlimited group of persons do the same, thereby forming a group of mutually reinforcing subjects harmonizing attending to a supplementary meaning, relying on an interpretation; thus stabilized by a collective and reciprocal attention, the meaning ‘hidden behind’ the immediate presentation will increasingly be experienced as intended by some subject – here, of course, the character of Frick is available. Harmonization to phenomena that call for interpretation, and especially fictive constructions, create the intentional experience of “objective significance,” of something being meaningful in the sense of being meant by some mind responsible for the observable setup; we feel this agent is directing our attention to this meaning. The cognitive emergence of intentionality, or first person plural experience of virtual third person viewpoint as intentional agent anchors the meaning of an interpretable object. In the same way an audience in a cinema will feel each other’s attention to the film and enjoy the shared idea that what is shown means something general, that the film objectively means this something as, in principle, meant by its creator. The mental spaces mode of analysis leads me to conclude that meaning in this strong sense is the result of sustained harmony of attention to the indirect ‘message’ of an object that triggers an intentional reading. By virtue of directing attention, the second and third elaborations of the Virtual space 2 and 3, cast Frick as a ‘ghost’ hovering over the composition of the portraits and inviting the patrons to ‘follow’ his thoughts as

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expressed by this composition. This gestalt becomes a sort of Olympic narrator of what patrons are to see in what they see. The general cultural impact of such a cognitive mechanism is understandably immense. Collective memory in general is grounded on this ‘intentional objectivity’ of the meaning of signs of the past brought before our eyes.

Culture and Cognition Acts of meaning are first and foremost cultural activities. They occur, as in the case of the dramatic confrontation between Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell and his Thomas More, in interpersonally constructed spaces. These spaces scaffold the thoughts and words of persons who belong to a culture, begging the question: what is culture? One point of departure is to quote Goodenough’s famous definition of culture as “whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (quoted in D’Andrade 1995: xiii). Although not very precise, this definition suggests, perhaps paradoxically, that culture is simultaneously a product of personal cognitive development and a product of the collective set of constraints imposed from without. On the developmental side, a cognitive science view has it that discernable patterns exist because the evolved conceptual system of individuals permits them to exist. Talmy (2000b: 372–415) proposes that individuals have a “cognitive culture system” designed to evaluate the patterns of behavior and affect observed in others, and budgets attentional resources for the purpose of being instructed in such patterns, making them a part of one’s moral identity. Talmy’s main point is that enculturation is a highly structured process that begins at birth and continues unabated throughout the course of one’s life, with perhaps ages nine through fifteen as the critical period for the cultural imprinting of identity. According to Talmy, a cognitive cultural system is designed to ensure individuals perform the following tasks: determine groups most relevant to the self in the acquisition of culture; assess the affective behavioral patterns of others; attend to the structure of these patterns and internalize them; interpret foreign patterns of behavior in terms of these familiar patterns (2000b: 374). A dominant cultural patterning can be observed by the behavior of museum patrons, such as standing at a certain distance from the objects, walking slowly and quietly, talking slowly and quietly, affecting postures

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suggesting concentration (e. g., hands clasped behind one’s back, a posture suggesting openness to objects before one’s eyes). The degree of internalization of these ritual behaviors can be gauged by the degree to which other patrons and staff need to instruct a patron in how to behave. In adopting the policy of not admitting children under twelve, The Frick Museum had decided that fluency in “patron-culture” does not begin until then, and that they are not in the business of imparting this cultural practice. On the collective side, conceptual schemas and models should be regarded as issuing from a culture or subculture; and what defines a subculture is its differences in the degree to which individuals comprising it internalize the patterns identified with it. For instance, as a member of the museum-going public within a greater American-European culture, I have internalized the museum schema to such a degree that it provides a defining cultural representation of what I take to be true, correct, and right. That is, I believe in the importance of museums and art galleries, especially in the importance of publically funded museums. On the other hand, I have not internalized cultural representations of Jesus as the Messiah. As a member of a larger American culture that is, by most measures, religious, I repeatedly observe cultural patterns gathering around the figure of Jesus and am familiar with their theological meaning, but I have not internalized any of these beliefs and behaviors as true, correct, and right. Being a museum patron shapes my identity; being a Christian does not. As consequence, I regard the existence and support of public libraries as true, correct, and right. In fact, I am likely to vehemently and emotionally defend the funding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities against egregious budget cuts. Contrastingly, I do not regard the existence of Jesus, son of God as true, correct, and right; hence, I would vehemently oppose measures that would coerce worship. Thinking of culture in the ways just suggested has consequences for how we think about cognition and attention itself. Although individuals do think and reason, what we often call cognition is not just a property of individuals. In many circumstances, cognition can refer to the mental work that goes on among individuals in specific settings from specific cultural alignments. In some respects, it is desirable to speak of cognition as distributed within cultural niches, as suggested by Hutchins (1994, 1995). The emergence of distributed cognition as a method of extending the unit of analysis beyond the individual will be discussed in the next chapter. But focus for the moment will be on extending the reach of cultural attunement into the realm of personal cognition.

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Recall the phenomenon of change blindness, where participants fail to detect changes to a visually presented scene. While change blindness is a universal phenomenon, based in part on the species specific limits on iconic memory retention (about 500–800 milliseconds), the nature and quality of change blindness may be culture specific. Masuda and Nisbett (2006) conducted a series of experiments on American and East Asian populations, thirty Americans and thirty-six East Asians. Since westerners seem to view the world analytically and East Asians view the world holistically, they expected to find different degrees of sensitivity to changes in focal objects in a visual display than to changes to the periphery of the same display. Using the flicker procedure, a set of images appeared on a computer screen in original image / modified image pairings. Each image was presented for 560 milliseconds sandwiched between by an 80 millisecond presentation of a blank field. Participants pressed a button when they recognized a change. They later reported the changes orally.19 As predicted, the American populations detected changes to central objects (e. g., the color of a car) faster than changes to the periphery (e. g., accumulation of clouds in the sky). East Asian populations detected changes in context as rapidly and as reliably as changes to focal objects. This means that East Asian populations may have a different figure/ground alignment, such that their signal system is oriented to oscillate more quickly between figure and ground than the signal systems for westerners. Masuda and Nisbett (2006: 392–394) offer two candidate explanations for these findings. First, Japanese infants and toddlers are socialized to attend to physical and socioeconomic contexts, where the emphasis in motherchild interactions among Japanese and Chinese populations tend to be oriented toward relationship between humans and objects as compared to more object-centered orientations among American populations. Second, they suggest that the Asian built environments are denser and more complex than most Western built environments (especially in the United States), thus the complexity of the environment may demand an orienting structure that is more sensitive to landmarks and relationships among them. Preliminary though the evidence may be, it nevertheless merits revision of the traditional view of this attention as being governed by invariant perceptual processes. Paying attention is culturally variable, suggesting that the 19 During the oral reports, researchers asked each participant to identify the focal object(s) in each image, finding no significant differences in the identification of central objects among the populations.

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proper unit of analysis in cognitive science is not the individual brain and body alone, but a distributed network of brain and body, interpersonal engagements, and material culture. Cultural patterns run deep.

Chapter Summary This chapter provided an overview of the Greater Attention System as comprehending three subsystems – the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system – which unfold dynamically during acts of meaning by eight elemental capacities: alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The cognitive psychology of attention further suggests that the attention system fits within the broader research paradigm of Distributed Adjustable Capacity theories, in which attention is understood as a socially and culturally attuned “zoom lens” that widens and narrows as occasion demands. In addition, this paradigm gets along quite well with analog theories of memory and concepts based on mental models that preserve direct perceptual motor experience as the representational format, and prototype theories of categorization that allow for variable degrees of category membership based on the local demands of the situation. In addition to these topics, affect is understood to play a critical role in what and how we attend. Finally, this chapter introduces important analytic concepts and methods, in particular mental spaces and blending theory, of central importance in the explorations and analyses presented in the remaining chapters.

Chapter 2

Attention and Semiotics

Semiotics What is Semiotics? Semiotics is the study of signs produced intentionally by human beings and taken by other human beings as expressions of their producers’ conscious mental states and communicative intentions.20 Most generally, semiotics is the term given in the European context for the study of meaning as it relates to any and all cultural phenomena. There is a basic notion that meaning is the product of signification, and that signification operates across multiple sign systems. Therefore, capturing the structure and logic of those systems as manifest in the products of meaning (i. e., literary texts, cinema, paintings, cartoons, music, etc.) is the domain of semiotics. The general logic of signs pursued in this study is that they present us with a mental resonance of the “remembered present” that helps us attend to the here-and-now as suggesting to us what is the case. Signs disclose to us hypostatic scenarios. They likewise give us the means of elaborating on presentations through imaginative variations that reference the there-and-then, allowing past and future variable aspects of this presentation, aspects that could change, and suggesting to us what would happen if such-and-such were the case. Signs disclose to us hypothetical scenarios. Signs also provide us with the means of enacting hypostatic and hypothetical scenarios as-if they were unfolding in the present moment – the experience of the interacting Holbein portraits being a juicy example. Signs disclose to us hypotyposic (or fictive) scenarios. Such is the general logic of signification pursued in this and the remaining chapters. As preparation for the next chapter’s focus on language and discourse, this chapter presents a series of case studies in the greater attention system 20 Other semioticians locate the study of meaning much lower down the scala naturae – from zoology to biochemistry – Hoffmeyer (1999) Sebeok (1972) being two prominent representatives of this pansemiotic tradition. I will not descend from the anthropological rung of the semiotic ladder in this study.

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as general semiotic (or theory of signs). But before beginning this investigation, it is necessary to orient the systematic perspective developed here to other known systematic perspectives in semiotics.

Five Theoretical Perspectives: Overview and Assessment 21 The epistemological perspective. Signs may be regarded as making knowledge and reasoning possible, because it is through signs that we are able to refer to “things” in a world, be they real or imagined, past, present or future, possible or impossible. Signs allow us to make generalizations and abstractions about the world and about each other. We think in signs. This epistemic and logical perspective is most identified with Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). The cultural linguistic perspective. Signs may be studied as manifestations of culture and its conventions. Signs are codes conveying messages among members of a community; we use signs to share experiences. Language is the prototypical sign system and thus provides the basis for studying most if not all other sign systems, such as those comprising architecture, film, music, and painting, to name a few prominent examples. The cultural linguistic perspective is most identified with Ferdinand de Saussure (1972 [1913]), but more specifically with the structural semiotics of Louis Hjelmslev (1961 [1943]). Other prominent cultural linguistic semioticians include Algirdas Julien Greimas (1966) and the work of Roman Jakobson from his Prague School years: 1920–1939 (1971 [1932]). An offshoot of the cultural linguistic perspective is the radical postmodern perspective. This perspective founds itself on the axiom, “All signs are in fact ‘empty’ of meaning.” Meaning is no longer possible, if it ever was. Radical postmodernists reject the very notion that there is any relationship between the signifier and signified (Saussure’s terms for the sign vehicle and its meaning); reality is a welter of signifiers that “simulate” the real or the true.22 The work of Jean Baudrillard (1983; 1990) is the apotheosis of the carnival of signs as self-generating signifiers. 21 Van Heusden (2004: 3–6) offers a similar classification of perspectives and has been instrumental in refining my own thoughts about the different approaches to the study of signs. The first drafts of my classification scheme was influenced by Bouissac (1998) and Nöth (1995). 22 “Simulate” in the sense of producing simulacra, not simulate and simulation in the sense discussed in the previous chapter.

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The behaviorist perspective. Signs may be theorized in terms of the reflex arcs of stimulus and response. Signs are at base ways of directing and conditioning behavior. A sign appears and we respond to it in a predictable way, leading to new signs and sign relations. In this respect signs are “preparatory-stimuli” influencing the reactions to other stimuli in other situations, and thus processes of signification can be empirically observed and classified to “behavior-families.” The behaviorist perspective is most identified with Charles Morris (1946), a follower of Peirce and George Herbert Mead. The bio-anthropological perspective. Signs may be studies as adaptations, behavioral routines that emerge from the interaction of organism and their environmental niches. The basic function of organisms is to represent reality. In the human context, representations are constitutive of all experience, especially communication. Biologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists can be placed within this tradition of inquiry (even those who would abjure the title, “semiotician”), as they define sign relations as comprising an organism’s umwelt, or subjectworld. The bio-anthropological perspective is most identified with the ethological theory of Jakob von Uexküll (1956 [1937]), and with the philosophical anthropology of Ernst Cassirer (1944), for whom symbolic forms are to understood as collective coping devices. The phenomenological perspective. Signs may be studies as the constituents of conscious experience, particularly from the first-person perspective. Under this view, signs are the entities enabling the appearance of things, our intuitions of their meanings as they bear on perception, thought, memory, imagination, desire, and volition. In addition, the phenomenological perspective accords special attention to bodily awareness and action as the basis of social and linguistic action. The philosophical progenitors of this perspective include Edmund Husserl (2001 [1901]) and Maurice MerleauPonty (1996 [1945]). A general theory of semiotics based on attention fits within a cognitive perspective in which signs are to be understood as the basis for “higher-order” human cognition responsible for abstract reasoning, architecture, language, institutions, laws, music, visual arts – cultural practices writ large. My colleague Per Aage Brandt (2004) is a principal advocate of this theoretical perspective.

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The general theory of an attention semiotic intersects with the other five perspectives in specific ways. An attention semiotic intersects with the Epistemological perspective in three ways. First, it sees all reasoning as fundamentally semiotic, and thus semiotics should be seen not as a discipline but as a field housing many simplified models. It is foundational in the sense that all other modes of philosophical inquiry depend on it. Second, it takes from this perspective the basic tenet that signs function along three dimensions (described below). Third, it treats, iconicity (i. e., similarity with the thing it represents) as the most fundamental sign relation in the human context. Icons (discussed below) engender what Peirce terms “diagrammatic representations,” which for him underlie all abstract forms of reasoning. Thinking issues from diagrams, for it is through these skeletal representations that human beings can “experiment” and in so doing deduce and later induce evidence (CP 1931: 4.§351–367).23 In its broadest formulation, the Epistemic perspective aligns itself with the tripartite attention system outlined in the last chapter insofar as human signification operates across a material domain of signals, a mental domain of the selection, sustain, and control of thought, and the interpersonal domain of calibrating and communicating thoughts among agents. An attention semiotic intersects with the Behavioral perspective only to the extent that it gives due attention to the signal system as amenable to empirical observation. Patterns of alerting and orienting are indeed capable of being empirically studied by experimental and observational methods (some of which have already been catalogued in the previous chapter). Behaviorism as a doctrine, however, does not fit easily into a cognitive semiotic approach, given the large role introspection plays in the latter. For partisans of the former perspective, introspection is the enemy of good science, whereas for partisans of the present perspective, introspection is a necessary and desirable, if fallible, mode of investigation. An attention semiotic intersects with the Cultural Linguistic perspective in the prominent place it affords conventions – sign relations based on common interpersonal agreement, language being a preeminent example. Culture is not, as some evolutionary psychologists seem to imply, a thin veneer atop innate processes and dispositions. As argued in the previous chapter, culture and cognition are deeply intertwined. What is more, cul-

23 See also Stjernfelt (2000; 2007).

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tural patterns form more or less stable structures permitting meaning to arise. The attention semiotic takes from this tradition Hjelmslev’s (1943) interpretation of the sign as consisting along two axes of expression-form and content-form and expression-substance and content-substance. These distinctions will be discussed in the next chapter, but the principal contribution of these Hjelmslevian distinctions permit semioticians to extract interpersonally meaningful and communicative structure from its more accidental properties. In short, a semiotics of attention has to account for the differences that make a difference. In other words, these distinctions are necessary if human beings are to make categorical intuitions. The study of signs as structured systems of cultural conventions has been pioneering in this respect, so much so that much contemporary linguistic theory is founded upon it. My initial instinct is dismiss out of hand the radical postmodernist perspective, for the simple reason that it is not really a theory or method at all. The postmodernist critique of the “economy of signs” is a normative rather than descriptive enterprise.24 As such it is a form of critique that produces ever more hyperbolic claims and counterclaims. Still, the radical postmodernist do offer a global insight (dare I say “truth”) pertinent to any contemporary semiotic theory. Much of the world is awash in signs. We westerners in particular dwell in iconically, indexically, and symbolically saturated landscapes, so saturated that it would probably be incomprehensible to the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine or Erasmus and vertiginous to the likes of Locke, Hobbes, or even Peirce and Saussure. The radical postmodernists point this out more forcefully than do partisans of the other perspectives. The lesson I take from this fact is the polar opposite of theirs, however. The need is not for critique (understood as resistance) – however acutely I and others may feel the need to distance my being from the things signs are doing to me – but for better theories of how we attend, perceive, remember, learn, and act in these semiotically dense environments. An attention semiotic intersects with the Bio-Anthropological perspective in one important respect. As van Heusden rightly points out, the bio24 The very notion of a descriptive enterprise has come under attack, particularly in some pockets of cultural anthropology and discourse studies. Many arguments can be mounted for and against descriptive methods, an issue well beyond the scope of these explorations. Most generally, there is a chasm between positing or implying an a priori view of what signs should be doing in a perfect world and critiquing what they appear to be doing here and now, and an a posteriori judgment of what signs appear to be doing in this or that circumstance, modeling how this might be happening, and then perhaps evaluating the results against an explicit normative standard.

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anthropological perspective is “the only perspective that takes the emergence of signs […] into account” (2004: 4). In other words, the other perspectives take for granted the existence of signs and sign processes, hence begging the question, “How did signification arise in the first place?” Van Heusden himself identifies memory as the origin of human signification, for memory provides two elements that are the building blocks of all sign relations: 1) a recognized pattern and 2) an object that is recognized in terms of that pattern at the same time that it is taken to be different from it. These two elements interact as a memory, and it is through memory that we relate them (2004: 9). I am generally sympathetic to this line of reasoning but would add, of course, the idea that memory works within the larger context of attention; hence, the present general theory has manifold implications for theories of the origin of human signification. Though questions concerning the phylogeny and ontongeny of signs and symbols is of immense importance and will be indirectly broached in these explorations, for the goal of this study is narrower: to refine semiotic, linguistic, and rhetorical analysis by bringing those analyses into alignment with an model of human attention. Perhaps the perspective most tightly aligned with an attention semiotic one given to us through Phenomenology (cf. introduction). How and why we attend and the consequences of how and why we attend and become conscious of some things rather than others is the project of phenomenology, particularly that of Merleau-Ponty, who regards language and other expressive signs systems as emerging from and circulating back into the body-as-subject (1945: 175), such that the five senses that acquaints us with our own and other bodies, and we use our embodiment as a means of expression because we know directly that these bodily dispositions mean something to us and, though interpersonal engagement, to others like us. The signs human bodies produce form the building blocks of conscious experience, and it is through conscious experience that meanings become meaningful to us. In this respect, the phenomenological perspective is woven through the greater attention system: our bodies are sensitive to specific kinds of signals, which in turn define the spectrum of detecting, sustaining, and controlling attention. And perhaps most importantly of all, the phenomenology of perception helps us build third-person perspectives that lead to expressive routines for sharing and harmonizing attention with others and for directing the attention of others. An attention semiotic sits comfortably with epistemology, phenomenology, and cultural linguistics as a theory and method of semiotic analysis. It

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shares much with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology insofar as it regards questions of the origin and development of sign relations as paramount research problems and would seek to influence research in some directions (attention and memory research) over others (positing yet more innate mental modules). It does not sit comfortably with the behaviorists (but neither do many contemporary semiotic theories for that matter) for narrow methodological reasons, and it is a real party-pooper among the radical postmodernists. It is one thing to place the present theory within the larger field of semiotics and quite another to describe how it operates as a theory, our next topic.

The Greater Attention System as Semiotic Three Dimensions of the Sign: Presentation, Representation, Interpretation A sign is anything that stands for something to someone. The process of signification (or “semiosis” in the literature) then comprehends a tripartite relationship in which, as Peirce characterizes it, a Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object (CP 1931: 1.§92). This definition stands in contrast to Saussure’s dyadic doctrine of signified and signifier, whereby a barking sound (signifier) elicits the idea of a dog (signified) in one’s mind. For Peirce the critical point is that the sound does elicit the category DOG but also the object to which the sign refers – signs are always grounded: something that functions as a sign is always manifest in something that is not in itself a sign. Peirce’s semiotics, pace Saussure’s, emphasizes the embodied and grounded nature of signification and that the sign vehicle (or “representamen” as he calls it) can be manifest in a great variety of substances, really anything detectable by human sense-perception. It likewise emphasizes the communal nature of signification, as all thinking involves signs, and what renders signs adaptive is their “testimonial” quality; we can learn that something is the case by displaced signification, obviating the need to experience it firsthand (EP 1992: 19–20).

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The theory of signs inspired by Peirce and outlined here starts from the idea that signification operates along three dimensions: the presentation dimension of the sign vehicle, the representation dimension of the sign object, and the interpretation dimension of sign affect. Together these three dimensions of the sign comprise the semiotic substrate for building hypostatic, hypothetic, and hypotyposic scenarios. There is a logical alignment among the triadic dimensions of the sign and the three systems of attention. Sign vehicles are materially grounded in signals of various stripes, the only necessary qualification is for the signal be detectable. That a certain arrangement of line and color on a two-dimension plane come to signify something to someone from a particular vantage point is a reliable means of alerting and orienting attention. Sign objects are selected for conscious awareness and can remain in conscious awareness through continued signification, sustainable exogenously and endogenously. For instance, detecting the two Holbein portraits can lead to sustaining attention, such that all modes of signals subsequently detected are interpreted in relation to a nexus of related sign objects, such as the portraits themselves, the persons represented therein, and the manner in which each historical portrait is displayed. Controlling attention fits within the Peirce’s doctrine as well, for it is possible for human beings to divide attention between unrelated objects and to oscillate among the dimensions of the same or related objects. In the former instance, the museum patron’s attention switches between the Holbein portraits and his companion’s dining suggestions. In the latter instance, his attention can oscillate between the historical objects of Holbein’s artistry and his artistry itself and between the historical objects of that artistry and Frick’s imputed intentions in displaying that artistry. The interpretant of a sign refers to its influence on interpreters.25 All signs are signs for somebody in some context; hence, the interpersonal nature of signification aligns with the interpersonal system of attention, such that signs emerge from sharing, harmonizing, and directing attention. Awareness of the presence of others, of a shared existence, is a necessary condition of meaning making, for obvious reasons. If I can use something to stand for something else, then that same vehicle-object relation can be replicated by someone else. What makes semiotics a foundational discipline, according 25 Interpretants are not to be identified with interpreters. Interpretants entail the existence of interpreters, but the effects they produce are stable among the community of sign users. Their influences are socially real and distributed among agents.

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to Peirce, is that it makes culture possible. In this context, cultures are conglomerations of communally shared vehicle-object relations. They are a form of “currency” in an inter-mental exchange, with meaning as the harmonized object of that exchange. The three museum patrons remain harmonized to the two Holbein portraits as representing real historical beings oriented to one another in a dramatically meaningful way. This means that the three patrons understand that portraits are meaningful, i. e., bear specific sign relations, because they each “gaze at” their viewers – a manner of address, if you will. Thomas More appears to be looking off into the distance completely unaware of his viewers; whereas Thomas Cromwell appears to be looking somewhere else entirely, equally unaware of his viewers. There are also layers of agency significant here. Holbein is the artistic agent who brings into existence of the two portraits. It is his actions with paint that bring about a Thomas More oriented toward the viewer’s right and a Thomas Cromwell oriented toward the viewer’s left. In this sense, the interpretant of the vehicle-object relations are of persons looking in one direction or the other. We feel that Holbein intended viewers to regard each thusly; he is directing our attention to particular kinds of interpretant. At a subsequent layer of signification, the interpretant of these two vehicle-object relations are not only persons looking in one direction then another, but of two persons looking in different directions at the same time, signifying different objects of attention. This mode of signification is not to be regarded as a function of Holbein’s agency but as a function of Frick’s agency. It is he who is directing our attention to a particular kind of interpretant: one person gazing at the other person, the latter being unaware of the former’s gaze. The logical alignment of the signal, selection, and interpersonal attention systems with the presentation, representation, and interpretation dimensions of the sign is thus my proposal for founding a theory of signs in human cognition, and it is a natural alignment if one considers attention the sine qua non of higher order cognition with sign action defined in terms of alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, and above all, sharing, harmonizing, and directing attention for specific expressive purposes. Before exploring further, I wish to insist on two characterizations of the attention system as semiotic. First, it is non-linear; second, it is recursive. There is a dynamic-looping relationship between the signal system and the other attention systems. While there may be many facets of signals invariant across cultures, the role a specific signal plays and the manner in which persons orient attention to them varies greatly. The way human beings organize inter-

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personal existence has tremendous bearing on what counts as a sign vehicle. As noted in the previous chapter, East Asians urbanites live in a denser environment than do their West European and American counterparts, that has a significant effect on how each of them orient objects and relations in the environment. A similar feedback loop emerges from the different kinds of interpersonal engagements and patterns that have developed among these people, further influencing what counts as a meaningful signal. Investigating in full the cultural effects of attention to vehicle-object relations is well beyond the scope of the present study; I simply wish to note the semiotics of attention discussed here assumes non-linear influences among the three systems. The systems non-linear influence means that it is also recursive: vehicle-object relations build on each other in such a way that the circumambient vehicle-object relation comprehends a more basic vehicle-object relation. A representation becomes a presentation of another representation at a more comprehensive layer of interpretation. For instance, the vehicleobject relation between globs of paint and a human figure can betoken a specific person (e. g., Thomas Cromwell). The object of the first vehicle then becomes the vehicle for another object, for instance a type of office holder (e. g., Chancellor of the Exchequer of English 1533–1534) when comprehended at the level of historical discourse. It is therefore possible to look at Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell and remark: “The Ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer looks tired and angry.”

Nine Functions of the Sign Three sets of three sign functions limn the three dimensions of signification and correspond to Peirce’s own taxonomy.26 A sign can function in three modes of presentation: quality, existence, and convention. First, something becomes a sign of something else because it possesses sensory qualities that make it a good indicator of that something else. Specific colors and their saturations are sign vehicles because they match the qualities of the intended object: methods of combining red, yellow, and blue, tinted with white or shaded with black produce skin tone colors, each of which chosen for its qualitative 26 I preserve only four of Pierce’s original nomenclature in the chapter proper but present the rest here for readers unfamiliar with Peircean semiotics. They are: qualisign, sinsign, legisign from the first trichotomy (CP 1931: 2.§243–245); rheme and dicent from the third trichotomy (CP 1931: 2.§309–310). For accessible overviews of Peirce’s classification of signs, see De Waal (2001), Liszka (1996) and Nöth (1995: 39– 47).

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match with the intended object. Second, something becomes a sign of something else because it appears existentially with that something else. An obvious example is smoke. A less obvious example might be a grimace, since the grimace is taken as coextensive with a particular emotion or feeling, such as pain. Third, something becomes a sign of something else because it possesses a conventional or law-like signifying relation. The principal reason a letter combination signifies a concept is through an agreed upon or legislated convention. Some of these conventional relationships are motivated by qualitative or existential considerations while others are purely arbitrary. A sign functions in three modes of representation: icon, index, and symbol.27 First, a sign directs attention to something else because it bears some (however slight) resemblance that something else. Holbein’s portraits are obvious examples of iconic signs that form “likenesses.” The stick figures on traffic signs are likewise icons of persons crossing streets, for instance. In both cases, their iconicity signifies the possibility of existence or appearing. The traffic sign depicting a human figure crossing the street means, “It is possible that pedestrians may be crossing the street,” this without committing to any actual occurrence at any given moment. The Holbein portraits mean, “There is a person who looks like this, even though he is not here in the flesh.” Icons are the basic type of representation, for human beings are especially apt at relating one thing to another based on similarity. Second, a sign directs attention to something else because it bears some causal or contiguous relation to that something else. In this manner, the two Holbein portraits point to the existence of real people. They mean, “This person is Thomas More, the author of the political treatise Utopia.” More fancifully, Cromwell’s pose indexes More if one views his gaze as “pointing” at the portrait of More across the room. Third, a sign directs attention to something else because it bears some conventional or agreed-upon relation to something else. The name Hans Holbein bears an identity relation to a person because the conventional relationship between specific combinations of letters and sound has evolved into an agreed upon method of detecting conspecifics among Homo sapiens sapiens. A less obvious but no less pertinent example is the convention of exhibiting portraits. Proper museal convention holds that portraits are to face toward the center of the room. If for no other reason, Frick placed the Cromwell portrait to the left and More to the right of the fireplace in order to ensure the viewer’s line of sight complied with this conventional rule. 27 Cf. Peirce, CP (1931: 2.§275; 2.§298; 2.§449; 8.§335).

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A sign functions in three modes of interpretation: association, designation, argumentation. First, a sign comes to mean something because it initiates a chain of associations based on sparse or vague presentations. The mere mention of the name “Frick” can elicit associations of the industrial revolution, the Robber Barons, privilege, philanthropy, and patronage in the minds of those familiar with American history. Second, a sign comes to mean something because it designates something else, as in “This portrait left of the fireplace.” Third, a sign comes to mean something because it predicates something to something else. The clause, “Henry Clay Frick is a clever art collector,” functions as an argumentative sign. Argumentation builds on designation and association. Table 2.1 presents an at-a-glance breakdown of the nine functions of the sign. Signal System Presentation

Selection System Representation

Interpersonal System Interpretation

(Object) Icon Detecting based on the resemblance, between presentation to representation

(Interpretant) Association Understanding a representation based on a chain of associations elicited by qualities of presentations

Existence Sensitivity to the appearance of something as indicating the existence of something else

Index Detecting based on a contiguous or causal relation between presentation and representation

Designation Understanding a representation based on the appearance/existence of something as a singularity: this thing, here-and-now

Convention Sensitivity to the presence of something as a conventional placeholder for something else; a law-like signifying relation

Symbol Detecting based on an instituted relation between presentation and representation

Argumentation Understanding a representation based on generalizations predicated on it: this thing, here-an-now is that kind of thing

(Vehicle) Quality Function Sensitivity to the perceptual qualities of something as indicative of something else

Table 2.1: The nine functions of the sign.

To complete an exploration of the nine functions of the sign, let us consider briefly a humorous headline from the April 21st, 1999 edition of the satirical newspaper, The Onion. It reads: (1) Neighbors confront alcoholic child abuser about his lawn. The headline epitomizes a story of misplaced attention, selecting as its satirical object the suburbanite’s concern for aesthetics over ethics. The humor arises from attention to an inverted value hierarchy: it is better to be concerned with appearances than with conduct. A semiotic beginning is, of

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course, to acknowledge that the headline itself is a set of conventional and symbolic functions that are typically set very early on by the reader’s interpersonal tunings of the signal system. It is perhaps too obvious to be pointed out that such a conceit can be articulated with similar effect in French, (1a) Les voisins critiquent un alcoholique maltraiteur d’enfant au sujet de sa pelouse; or in Danish, (1b) Naboer kritiserer en alkoholisk børnemishandlers misligholdelse af sin græsplæne. The signal system captures the phonological and orthographical substantiation of these symbols, which in turn are forms aligned with semantic content analyzable into words and phrases. A phrasal analysis of the English headline will capture attentional structures of these sign functions. The selection system captures regularities of the iconic and indexical functions of these conventional signs, while the interpersonal system captures regularities of their association, designation, and argumentation functions to provide a semiotized analysis of its meaning. Take the subject, “neighbors.” The semantics of neighbors selects for a range of potential meanings. The meaning potential of this form can be something like “persons living in close proximity to other persons,” and “persons caring about the welfare of others living close by,” or “persons caring about the condition of their immediate environment.” As such, the sign indexes a type of person and, as such, elicits attention to a field of associations. That would be all if the subject remained a subject. In isolation, the expression merely detects a category of being, allowing the mind to associate freely, enriching imagery through sustained effort or disengaging attention in favor of something else. But the conventional nature of the sign vehicles allows for systematic constraining of signification. Lexical and grammatical forms channel meaning through predication, a linearization of form and content (the subject of syntax, a topic explored in the next chapter). The verb “confront” indexes a type of transitive action of a semantic agent directly at or on a semantic counter agent (literally in the accusative case). The next noun is the direct object specifying the counter agent, such that attention goes directly to a designation – a particular value of the category NEIGHBOR. This designation, however, indexes another designation, for the same value is simultaneously a NEIGHBOR, an ALCOHOLIC, and a

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CHILD ABUSER, and these categorical predications are taken as necessarily true. At this point, it is pertinent aide to point out that some linguists (viz., Haiman 1985) see the syntax of subject-verb-direct object as iconic, whereby the conventional linearization captures the temporal qualities of the representation itself – the flow of grammar matches the flow of the event. The act of confronting is likewise semantically unconstrained without a designation. The final designation is the category LANDSCAPE. The logic of confrontation is that there is a point of conflict between the semiotic agents about some object. The argumentation is the implication that the semiotic counter agent is a bad neighbor, based on the generalization that “a resident who neglects his lawn violates the norms of neighborliness.” (In fact, the literal meaning of the Danish participle misligholdelse is “to violate or fail to uphold a contract,” thereby directly lexicalizing the ethical associations only implicit in the English version.) The embedded argument, that the welfare of the person’s children is of no real concern to the neighborhood, remains conspicuous. It is these two scenarios presented for consideration that leads to a satirical meaning, a kind of attention in which the neighbors witness the parent breaking the law but only in order to identify him as the owner of their real topics of concern: lawns and their property values.

Frick’s Conceit and the Attention Semiotic Frick’s conceit, as I fancy calling it, can be understood as a lamination of three semiotic layers. The first layer corresponds to the vehicle of paint in which emerges an iconic resemblance to its object, in this case the living person, Sir Thomas More in 1527. At this layer, Hans Holbein is the existent sign for the appearance of oil paint on canvas, the specific colors of which were chosen as sign vehicles based on their qualities – one color mimics the quality of Caucasian skin, another the sumptuous textures of his garments. These colors and textures conspire to form a densely iconic representation of this historical figure. Add to this the convention of a threequarter pose that signals a familiar and agreed-upon means of representing someone’s likeness. Of course, the painting can only stand in iconic relation to Sir Thomas More in relation to the designating function of the interpretant. Unmoored from this designation, the portrait merely represents, in the words of my teenage son, “some old dude.” The second layer produces a similar set of qualitative, existent, and conventional modes of presentation for realizing iconic and indexical represen-

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tations of its object – in this case, of the living human being, Thomas Cromwell in 1539. (Sir Thomas More is now dead.) Similarly unmoored, this portrait represents the icon of “some really old guy.” Both these semiotic layers present to us what is the case. It is the third semiotic layer that elicits the much discussed and strange incident of the staring portrait. The sign vehicle is now the distribution of the two Holbein portraits within a spatial context. The qualitative functions of their poses meet each other in space, as though they were in some manner engaged. The existential nature of their placement in space brings about a new vehicle-object complex, that of human interaction. The iconic figures present themselves as indexes of absent, long dead historical persons, and a wealth of associations their existences may elicit. Below, I offer for your reconsideration in figure 2.1 a “semiotized” adaptation of the mental space delegations for the Frick Gallery hang.28 Grounding (semiosis)

Participants museum patrons security guards

Situation

Vehicle (dynamic object)

Hans Holbein, the Younger Portrait of Thomas More (1527) Enface position Portrait of Thomas Cromwell (1532) Profile position Henry C. Frick =Protagonist

Object (immediate object)

Thomas More (protagonist) Thomas Cromwell (antagonist) Political rivals in the Tudor Court of Henry VIII

Setting

The Living Hall at the Frick mansion on 5th Avenue in NYC; depictions of St. Jerome and St. Paul, among others.

Patrons walk th through h th the gallery ll looking at the collection and listening to commentary

Immediate Interpretant Illocutionary Force: Look at this!

Dynamic & Final Interpretant Pragmatic g implication: p Frick was a clever collector;; Thomas Cromwell was a ruthless politcian! Dynamic & Final Interpretant

Figure 2.1: From attention to intention, a cognitive semiotic account. 28 See in addition Brandt and Brandt’s (2005) semiotized treatment of mental space networks in their extended analysis of the “This surgeon is a butcher” metaphor.

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In this diagrammatic dispensation, the grounding space represents the space of signification. The situational relevance established in the grounding space gives us what Peirce calls the “immediate interpretant”. That is to say, the semiotic processes described above are purported to describe how patrons go from sign vehicles to interpersonally shared meaning at the moments following the encounters with Holbein’s portraits in Frick’s former living room. The immediate interpretant corresponds to the shared attentional field of an art gallery; thus everything presented to the patron is understood to take on a particular kind of contextual relevance. The presentation space encompasses meanings associated with the arrangement of sign vehicles. The relationship between paint and figure is iconic, an iconicity of strong resemblance; the relationship between figure of the portrait to the left and figure of the portrait to the right is similarly iconic, but this time an iconicity based on remembered patterns of human interaction, such that we attributed an attentional disposition to the figure to our left as directed at something beyond us, and we attribute an attentional disposition to the figure on our right as directed at the figure to our left. In Peirce’s terminology, the contents of this mental space function as a “dynamic object” – an efficient cause of the representation. The reference space, in contrast, encompasses meanings associated with Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More as historical and political figures in Tudor England.29 The relationships between the paint on canvas, the names on the placards, and the subjects of the curator’s commentary are all broadly indexical. In this mental space, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell coexisted for a time as influential members of the Court of Henry VIII; they had both enjoyed positions of political and economic power; and they both had a particular kind of relationship. Each figure from the presentation space maps onto a type of person in the reference space: “political rival.” The interpretant that emerges in this encounter is the argument: “These two figures hated each other.” In Peirce’s terminology, the contents of this mental space operate as “the immediate object” – the object represented by the sign vehicle. The Virtual space is the space in which iconic representations indexing the past impose their presence on the museum patron, such that the existent fact of the two portraits being displayed in the same room elicits the hypotyposic meaning predicated in the previous chapter. This space is sta29 Reminder: I am using “reference” to mean a designation in a mental space and mental space network and not to imply any allegiance to a correspondence theory of truth.

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bilized by an “immediate interpretant” – Peirce’s term for the immediately grasped intuition that the one figure in the portrait was (impossibly but nonetheless compellingly) staring at the other figure in the portrait: diegesis emerging from stasis. The subsequent development of the Virtual space may be glossed as interpersonally shared manifestations of Peirce’s dynamic and final interpretants.30 The three patrons can focus on the arrangement itself as a clever means of directing their attention and can oscillate between Frick’s imputed “dramaturgical” prowess in arranging it thus and the dramatis personae in this story of internecine political struggles during the reign of King Henry VIII (among other possibilities). In so doing, they oscillate between the dynamic interpretant – in this instance, admiring the way the collector is affecting our minds – and the final interpretant – in this instance, the meaning of this encounter – Frick’s clever trick of bringing the story of political rivalry vividly to life – after “sufficient development of thought” (EP1992: 2.482).

Synopsis: Signs and the Greater Attention System The presentation, representation, and interpretation dimensions of the sign provide a useful way of understanding the role of attention in meaningful communication: alerting and orienting correspond to moments when we make ourselves prone to experience the presentation of a kind of signal or sign vehicle. Detecting corresponds to the moment when a presentation acquires its object via an interpretant. Sustaining corresponds to the moment when signification acquires other significations at different layers of analysis, as when globs of paint conspire to represent a person which, in turn, comes to represent an historical figure from Tudor England. Controlling corresponds to the moments when the interpreter disengages from one vehicle-object relation or complex of relations to attend to another vehicleobject relation. Sharing, harmonizing, and directing correspond to the interpretation dimension insofar as any vehicle-object relation is a representation for someone for some purpose in some social-pragmatic context.

30 Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 48–49) refer to the processes of developing blends as completion and elaboration. I will use the same terms later in this study, and will avoid using Peirce’s argot whenever possible.

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The attentional varieties of the three dimensions of the sign permit three types of meaning: hypostatic generalizations (predications of what is the case); hypothetical inferences (experiments of what would happen if such and such were the case); and hypotyposic experiences (dramatization of what-is and what-if scenarios as if they were unfolding in the here-andnow).

Brief Case Studies in the Semiotics of Attention (with special emphasis on conceptual blending) The remainder of this chapter presents a series of four different cases of meaningful encounters: three brief cases and one extended qualitative analysis. The analyses will be broadly semiotic and will treat only tangentially linguistic issues. (We will reconsider some of these same cases in the next chapter from a programmatically linguistic point of view.) The first case is a reconsideration of a well-known example in the conceptual blending and mental spaces literature followed by a similar case found in the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English, then followed by two cases revealing what happens when material features of the immediate environment play an determined role in thought and action – in the first case, I take up the symbolization of material in a curious chapter from the novel Moby Dick; in the second case, I take up the case of semiotic integration by re-analyzing Hutchins’s (1995; 2005) theory of material anchors for the high-stakes activity of landing a commercial aircraft. Finally, the chapter ends by considering how zoo patrons are encouraged to attend in an exhibition space filled with exotica from the rainforests of Asia, Africa, and South America.

Debating Kant Debate is a default verbal routine in philosophy classes: the instructor can go into a late eighteenth-century author’s ‘universe’ and challenge him; inversely, the old master can appear in the classroom, ‘ventriloquized’ by the instructor, and challenge the students; what happens is that the person of the author and the person of the instructor find each other and interact in a theatrically staged virtual space, where the epiphany will endure for some extended

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moments, enough to score a couple of debate points. Here is an example of such an exchange as it appears in Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 59–60): I claim that reason is a self-developing capacity. Kant disagrees with me on this point. He says it’s innate, but I answer that that’s begging the question, to which he counters, in Critique of Pure Reason, that only innate ideas have power. But I say to that, What about neuronal group selection? And he gives no answer.

In the following diagram, figure 2.2, you will see a Grounding space for the classroom with two space ‘delegations,’ one toward a Presentation space for debate (a stage in the class with the instructor onstage) and a theme or Reference space (the content of the class is philosophy of mind and brain with Kant as the principal topic), so the German philosopher Immanuel Kant will be a plausible character to impersonate in the Virtual space (the ‘blend’ of debate space and theme space: instructor and Kant as dramatis personae).

Figure 2.2: Debating Kant into silent submission.

The advantage of this process of mental space blending by which Kant emerges, understands what the instructor says in English, and answers in this

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language, underscoring the instructor’s points as if they were made to the historical German philosopher and he had found nothing in his philosophy to refute his modern neuroscientific challenger. The attending students’ selves go into the blend right away, and these minds may identify with the person who wins the fictive debate. This last point is represented diagrammatically in terms of a second Virtual space, a dynamic unfolding of the initial space set up by the instructor. Virtual space 1 possesses an attentional structure of harmonic attention, whereby a first person attends to a second person and they both attend to an object or theme: philosophy of mind. This virtual tête-à-tête is by design witnessed by a third party: a classroom full of students, each of whom is to be witness to Kant’s error and the truth of the professor’s view – a form of reflecting attention (cf. chapter 1). The implication of this encounter is to dramatize a contemporary significance of the debate with Kant on a central question in the cognitive science, the innateness of ideas. A suite of conventional signifying moves serve pragmatic ends, and those pragmatic ends whose unfolding begins with an “involuted” debate scenario in the mind of the instructor and ends with a “released” debate scenario in the minds of the students. A notable example that leaves us imagining how this scenario was really dramatized, perhaps with the instructor gesturing at an empty chair in the classroom coinciding with “he says” and “to which he counters” directing attention to the spot where the person of Kant is to be found, all the while gesturing egocentrically when taking his turn.

Kant and the Graduate Student This is a fine example of the kinds of as-if scenarios human beings are especially good at constructing in order to direct the attention of other minds to a dramatic scene for explicit rhetorical purposes. But it would be even better to examine more naturalistic evidence of these hypotyposic scenarios being distributed among the minds of attested participants. I will then take up the question of hypotyposic interaction with dead philosophers once again, this time by considering data obtained on the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English.31 The discourse context is a graduate 31 This sample has been similarly analyzed elsewhere, in Oakley and P.Aa. Brandt (forthcoming) and L. Brandt (2008). The analysis is broadly similar to each but with slightly

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student (S1) leading a review session on Kant and the topic of discussion is his transcendental arguments, namely such arguments for unified consciousness. The discussion section has 10 participants and 10 non-participants, with S1 as the primary speaker. A senior undergraduate student (S3) provocatively rejoins her animation of Kant. As this excerpt reveals (more completely presented in the next chapter), discourse participants engage in a virtual dialogue with Kant at very brief intervals. This analysis will reveal that the as-if scenario is only punctually activated in short conversational spurts, and thus only bears faint resemblance to the elaborately staged as-if scenario exhibited by the Fauconnier & Turner datum. This analysis reveals something not captured in Fauconnier and Turner’s example: the constant dialectic interplay between these as-if scenarios its what-is and what-if counterparts. Discourse moves fluently and rapidly from one to the other. An excerpt from the transcript suggests that, for S1 at least, the classroom theatrically enacts a similar as-if scenario described by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) but without being staged explicitly as a debate. The graduate student becomes Kant for the purpose of explaining his Transcendental Arguments to her students: S1: [1] [2] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95] [96]

… um … so how many people would want to talk about Kant today? alright that’s what we’ll do. […]32 Kant says, look … it’s an obvious fact that we have a unified consciousness, by which he means, it’s obvious that Maureen’s thought states and beliefs and desires and mental states all kind of hang together, in a unified way inside of her in the same way that Matt’s kind of hang together, inside of him, and Matt’s perception of the board and my perception of the board are sort of in two separate unified consciousnesses, […] and Kant says, look i’m gonna offer you a new explanation, one, which involves the categories of the understanding and it’s, the best explanation, that we have for a unified consciousness […]

different foci, L. Brandt’s analysis especially, since she attends to different utterances from the sample. I found this transcript in March, 2005. 32 The bracketed ellipses were added to signal the redaction of utterances from the original transcript. We also added numbers to each line.

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S3: [310] wouldn’t it be simpler just to say that the numina already has that? [311] I mean wouldn’t Occam’s Razor say, [312] the simplest explanation is the best one, [313] so you could just say that, [314] the simplest explanation is not that we add something to it that it already has it S1: [314a] mhm [315] I see where you’re going and I think it’s a really good point to press him on [316] um S3: [317] too bad he’s dead S1: [318] pardon? S3: [319] too bad he’s dead S1: [320] too bad he’s dead. [321] it is actually cuz i think a lot of people would have a lot of questions for this man. [322] Um S3: [322a] (mail bomb)

Our analysis will focus primarily on lines 61–66, 91, from S1’s monologue, and the exchange between S1 and S3 in lines 317–322. Figure 2.3 depicts the network of mental spaces for sense making in this conversation. By line 61, a full mental space network for interacting with Kant has been constructed by S1. The mental spaces that limn out this experience are as follows. The Grounding space includes twenty participants in a classroom. The situational relevance of this real-world interaction is the commonplace practice of reading and writing about the thoughts of people no longer present. Students try to understand what Kant was trying to say in his philosophical treatises. What is more, they are trying to do so in English. In this case, the Presentation space should be understood as an “avatar” of the semiotic base space, meaning that a selection of individuals present actually become the dramatis personae in these spoken discourses (principally S1 & S3, but also “Matt” and Maureen”) while other participants remain offstage (but are very much present in the semiotic base). In the Reference space exists Immanuel Kant – the 18th century German philosopher and author of the 1781 treatise, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The Kant of the Kritik is famous for setting out to prove (among other things) the existence of the categories of understanding that, in turn, purport to explain how human beings achieve unified consciousness.

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Figure 2.3: Bringing Emmanuel Kant into the classroom.

The Virtual space, a fictive address, arises particularly in lines 60 and 91, when the free indirect discourse of S1 actually builds a scenario where she acts as if she were Kant himself talking to these students. Her language becomes his language; her gestures his gestures, her chalk his chalk. I wish to emphasize, however, that this as-if scenario (this “living in the blend” as Fauconnier and Turner call it) happens only in very short spurts, for as quickly as S1 becomes Kant speaking in the imperative mode in lines 60 and 91 by using a verb (“look”) whose discourse function is to demand the attention of his interlocutors, she shifts back to the third person perspective at the end of line 61 (“he means”). Now that the as-if scenario is up and running, it becomes a useful attention structure for bringing Kant’s philosophical arguments into the classroom. Lines 62–66 are important to focus on, because S1 shifts back to “Kant mode” and, as Kant, identifies two participants by name (Maureen and Matt), as if he were referencing them directly, index finger extended. The virtual space 1 allows Kant to interact and speak to the students directly and in English.

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Virtual space 2, fictive interaction, arises when it becomes possible for the other students to interact with Kant, to “press him” on specific issues – a verb phrase whose interpretant is for us to imagine a counterfactual existential and indexical sign relation. It is apparent that S1 has created this hypotyposic scenario, and it is also apparent to us that S3 becomes conscious of the fact that this scenario is, strictly speaking, impossible, and that there is a limit to its usefulness. His retort in lines 317, “too bad he’s dead,” its reiteration in line 319, and its echo by S1 in 320, suggests that the conceit is now fully onstage with at least two of the participants orienting to it. Despite its consciously fictive status at this moment, it remains in operation. The meaning of S1’s final utterance in line 322, “a lot of people would have a lot of questions for this man,” only makes complete sense in relation to this fictive interactive scenario. Speaker S1 is no longer “animating” Kant but talking about him as if he were present or at least nearby, while her use of the modal verb (“would”) signals that she is no longer taking Kant’s viewpoint. She is now in the same position as the students. The very final sotto voce utterance by S3, “mail bomb,” deserves comment. A slang compound for spamming an electronic mailbox, “mail bomb” gives evidence that S3 is also willing to contribute to this hypotyposic scenario. We then end with the highly counterfactual and humorous scene of Immanuel Kant going online and being inundated with email messages about his transcendental argument. Poor Professor Kant has to spend all his time answering thousands of inbox messages addressed to [email protected].

Melville’s Mincer: Presentation as Symbolization Artifacts present in the immediate environment have a significant effect on thought and action. Presentations are always operative in representations and interpretations, but the general tendency is for the act of signifying to step into the background in order to apprehend a meaning efficiently and without regard to the nature of the signal itself. But at times we detect the sign token itself as directly meaningful in itself. The fact that it is easy to oscillate from object to vehicle, from what is signified to how it is being signified, suggests the presentation dimensions of signs, the specific mode of expression, is never far away from being directly symbolic. Apprehension of the profane is more about expression than content, and it can work to humorous effect in certain contexts, as it does in the case of Melville’s Mincer.

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A curious scene from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1967 [1851]) appears a little more than half way into the novel in the chapter titled “The Cassock.” In this chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, continues his documentary on the process of “post-mortemizing” a sperm whale. Readers now reach the point where the Mincer, a sailor charged with cutting up whale blubber into fine strips for rendering, takes a severed black penis of a sperm whale, removes the foreskin, a “pelt” about six-feet long and one-foot in diameter at its base, turns it inside out, cuts two arm-holes on each side near the top and stretches the diameter, hangs it to dry, and, after a time, slips it over his head lengthwise, using it as an apron to protect him during the rendering process. Once dressed in this makeshift apron, the Mincer, Ishmael tells us, “stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him” (1967: 351). Figure 2.4 presents the mental space delegation for Ishmael’s profane conceit.

Figure 2.4: Blending the sacred and the profane.

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The intended humor, some of whom took it as blasphemy, stems from the turning a part of the whale’s anatomy (considered profane to some believers) into a material artifact interpreted functionally as an apron useful for protecting the Mincer from hot splattering fat. At the same time, it represents priestly vestments (this iconic relationship is the source of the mappings between presentation and reference spaces diagrammed in figure 2.4). The incongruity between the lowly, profane fabric of these vestments and supposed sacredness of the office these vestments represent is not lost to most readers. The whalers themselves, Ishmael intimates to us, were well aware of this penis-apron-holy vestments blend as they cry up to him “Bible leaves! Bible leaves!,” an admonishment to make the slices as thin as possible. The Mincer’s apron is a message. It is one which the medium plays a determining role. The focus of attention is on the quality of the sign vehicle, which happens to stand in iconic relation to a priest’s robe, which in turn stands pars pro toto for the entire priestly office and church hierarchy. It is this chain of signification that leads to the Virtual scenario of the Mincer as “bishopprick,” no doubt identified by his unique penile cassock. It is plausible to reconstruct these thought processes as moving along a hypostatic, hypothetical, and hyptotyosic spectrum: “It is the case that this material shields the Mincer from splattering hot fat, so what would happen if you fashion an apron out of this material and comport yourself as if you were a devout priest carefully paginating the pages of Holy Scripture upon the alter?”33 Melville’s novel is replete with such anecdotes of the strange life-world aboard the Pequod. This one places thematic focus on the sign vehicle as richly symbolic and thereby putting on display the pliability of cultural patterns that make life rich and problematic, all within the greater narrative of high-seas adventure and tragedy at the hands of a maniacal captain.

Landing an MD-80 Aircraft: Distributed Attention Influential in the field of distributed cognition, anthropologist Edwin Hutchins has given the cognitive science community compelling reasons for extending the unit of analysis beyond individual minds to whole activi33 I avoid ascribing specific agents of thinking in this analysis, but if we are to believe Ishmael, then the meaning of the Mincer’s machinations are apparent to many of the whalers aboard the Pequod, although it is possible to read this as Ishmael’s own conceit opaque to the rest of the crew.

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ties distributed among agents in a socio-technical environment. Perhaps his most widely recognized case of distributed cognition is his ethnographic accounts of navigation during take offs and landings of commercial airliners. His detailed account of behavior in the airline cockpit (1995) teaches us that instruments and other artifacts are not just things but, under particular conditions, bearers of conceptual structure. More recently, Hutchins (2005) has taught us that many of these artifacts are the basis for performing conceptual integration. I wish to take up this case of landing an MD-80 aircraft as the basis for my own semiotic integration analysis. Hutchins’s own analyses of artifacts as “material anchors” for conceptual blends is piecemeal, intended to emphasize the general argument that complex reasoning more often than not necessitates stable representations grounded in the means and manor in which human agents make use of tools. Hutchins uses Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) framework to discuss several disparate types of artifact for studying how we routinely extract conceptual structure from material structure. He does not, however, present an extended and semiotically inflected analysis of how the airplane cockpit “remembers its speed” during landing, as I do here, nor does he frame his analysis explicitly in terms of attention. Mine will be such an attempt. (Caveat: the analysis presents but one small slice of the many simultaneous activities involved in completing this task, and thus should not be taken as a complete account of landing a commercial aircraft.) Hutchins’s account focuses on how pilot and crew use the instruments to determine proper air speed relative to wing spread on landing. In his cognitive description of memory for speeds, Hutchins describes a system for coordination of airspeed with wing configuration. Through a process of pattern matching, the pilot responsible for controlling the plane (pilot flying, or PF) imposes additional meaning on the instrument known as an Air Speed Indicator (ASI) based on communications with the pilot responsible for controlling aircraft systems (pilot not flying, or PNF). The airplane cockpit and the divisions of labor within it constitute a distributed, socio-technical system, a Grounding space for semiotic integration.34 In this sense, cognition is not the sole property of individual agents, but between agents interacting with artifacts. Therefore, the mental space network described below 34 A semiotic integration is distinct from a conceptual blend insofar as the integration is taking place not among disparate scenes and scenarios – as we see with the other examples – but within the same scene or scenario.

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is not solely in the head of an individual pilot but is distributed between two pilots, a suite of technical devices, and air traffic control. The specific, and crude analysis, will reflect the two pilots endeavor to set and maintain the proper landing conditions for an MD-80 aircraft. The first of many instances of determining a navigational standard, probing the actual state of the aircraft, and calibrating the actual state to that standard. For simplicity’s sake, the following analysis will assume that the PNF has already determined the gross weight of the aircraft at the projected time of landing already a complex mental simulation of future landing conditions involving a suite of tables used for reckoning the optimal landing configuration. We pick up the story where he chooses the proper table of speeds, which tells him what the preferred airspeed should be upon landing relative to gross weight. Figure 2.5 presents the mental space diagram for this semiotic integration. The content of these mental spaces are shared among the PF and PNF but their attention to specific artifacts and information governed by these mental structures is highly variable. PNF must attend to information that will present to him the truth about what should happen, while the PF must attend to information that will present to him the truth about what is happening. The Presentation space integrates sign relations that determine the optimal landing configuration, understood here solely as air speed and wing extension. The indices comprising this scene include a salmon bug (pinkish needle) on the Air Speed Indicator (ASI). This stationary needle indexes the desired approach speed of the aircraft, which is symbolically rendered as numerical points on a graduated scale: 140 knots. An additional index is the set of numerical figures for degree of wing flap extension taped to the perimeter of the ASI, thereby correlating airspeed with wing flap extension: 28–40°. Semiotically, the presentation dimension of this sign is conventional, meaning that it is the agreed upon landing configuration among PF, PNF, and Air Traffic Control (or ATC). This space presents the participants with a normative cynosure of what should be the state of the aircraft as it approaches the landing strip. It is hypothetical in the literal sense of being an hypothesis: “we predict that this configuration will result in a safe landing.” In this space, the salmon bug is of key importance and attracts the attention of the PF, such that we can assume that he regularly foveates to it. The Reference space integrates sign relations for determining the actual state of the aircraft. The key material anchor for this space is the Air Speed Indicator needle, a black arrow measuring the actual moment-by-moment speed of the aircraft. Semiotically, the sign relation is indexical as well, but

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Figure 2.5: An “inter-mental” spaces model of landing a MD-80 Aircraft.

with the key difference being that the presentation dimension functions existentially, not conventionally. It signals to the PF what is the case now. Information from this space is interpreted as hypostatic: “Right now, we are traveling at such and such speed, but we need to be traveling at this other speed.” (In this respect, the Reference space is taken to correspond to physical reality.) It allows the PF to assess the state of the aircraft. All this activity comes together in the Virtual space, where the PF performs invigilate monitoring of the ASI needle in relation to the stationary salmon bug. The semiotic integration here is to probe the actual state of the aircraft, evaluate it in relation to the optimal state, and, if necessary, manipulate the throttle to bring the actual and optimal states into as close alignment as possible, in effect turning a conventional presentation condition (optimal airspeed and wind extension) into a existent referential condition at the right time. While the attention of the PNF is on his charts and tables for determining optimality, the visual attention of the PF trains on the two needles on the ASI as he manipulates the throttle and wing

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flaps. In this semiotic integration, the complex of mechanical relations that hold the plane aloft are compressed to this small suite of artifacts, so that the object of aligning two needles (one stationary, one dynamic) and keeping them aligned is the primary focus of attention. This simple procedure performed by the PF keeps the plane aloft and is taken to ensure a happy ending. This account brings up another point often missed in the literature on conceptual blending. Conceptual blends, especially action blends for everyday or habitual operations, are rarely if ever end products in themselves; that is, the reason for the blending operation is not represented in the Virtual space. So, while the Virtual space is indeed the locus of important conceptual operations (often taking on a life of its own) it is seldom the locus of an outcome itself. The end product is for the PF to match the real and the preferable; to integrate them by attending to specific sign relations thought to correspond with brute physical reality.

Extended Case Study: Auto-Ethnography of the Cleveland Zoo’s Rainforest Exhibit Attention Structures of the Cleveland Rainforest Exhibit My family regularly visits the Cleveland Metropolitan Parks Zoo, an institution exhibiting, among other attractions, a self-contained, state-of-theart rainforest exhibit. On one notable occasion as we worked our way through the “Lower Rainforest” exhibit, we passed the case housing the Borneo Reticulated Python. Expecting to see a specimen lying therein, we saw instead a sign reading (4) OUT OF ORDER SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE ENJOY YOUR DAY AT THE ZOO My immediate reaction was to repeat the phrase in an incredulous tone, followed immediately by my youngest child placing his index finger on the glass an intoning monotonically, “Snake’s broke,” a reply which drew laughter

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from a nearby patron. The sign remained the next week, but the week after a new sign reading Off Exhibit had taken its place.35 I mention these incidents because they draw attention to the conflicting meanings of a zoo experience. On the one hand, the zoo is supposed to put patrons in touch the “the wild” and raise awareness for the plight of indigenous animals, ultimately to gather support for global conservation efforts. The exhibit is intended to draw attention to several hypostatic abstractions, namely “these species of animal are endangered,” “they are vanishing,” and “their habitat is disappearing,” that in turn focus attention toward a problem: extinction. The exhibit defines the field of attention with extinction as the prevailing idea – we detect exotic animals and interpret their appearance in the building as a sign for immanent extinction, as few of the exhibited animals are purported to be plentiful in the wild. Zoological exhibits such as this one constitute complex activity systems designed “to increase awareness of the value of these precious sanctuaries of life and the urgency of their protection” (Mission, n. d., §4). These efforts are ideologically consistent with the Cleveland Zoo’s mission to create and sustain a culture of conservation. On the other hand, the modern zoo carries with it vestiges of a long history as an institution catering to the recreational desires of its patrons, not to mention longer cultural historical association of zoos and menageries with empire, colonization, and acclimatization (cf. Kohlstedt 1996). By paying an entrance fee or membership fee, patrons expect to be entertained through an encounter with “the exotic.” They are institutions designed to serve a recreational function. The appearance of this sign calls attention to the zoo’s status as an institution of display, as an institution charged with catering to human wants at precisely those moments when the intention is to deflect attention away from such local imperatives and toward global, ecological imperatives. The experience depends on narrowing the attention field so that a dramatic asif experience can be sustained for several moments, long enough to see these tropical rainforests as “precious resources in danger of disappearing.” Their value becomes intrinsic, if not integral to human existence. The presence of the “Out of Order Sign” threatens to train attention on a rhetorically extraneous topic: the exhibit as exhibit. 35 My first encounters with these signs occurred during the week of January 18, 1998. My first attempts to gather evidence systematically occurred during the week of March 22, 1998. Unfortunately, I did not possess the forethought to document the existence of this particular sign, so I share this incident with the reader aware that its factual existence may be contested.

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Despite such instances of “semiotic vertigo,” the visit was compelling and instructive. As with all my visits to the Cleveland Metroparks Rainforest, I felt at times as if I was really walking through a tropical rainforest – in hypotyposic interaction with a distant and exotic land. These visits have taught me what rainforests are, how they function ecologically, and, most importantly, how human needs, wants, and desires affect them. Hence, my experience matched the intentions of the exhibit. This positive assessment is not a ringing endorsement of zoos in general, however. I do not intend to offer an apology for zoos nor do I intend to propose how to reinvent them, as does Croke (1997) and Hancocks (2001), and I certainly will not present a wholesale critique of them, as does Malamud (1998). Neither am I to offer an exhaustive analysis of zoo culture, as does Mullan and Marvin (1987); nor am I to present an extensive history of menageries and zoological gardens in the Western world, as does Loisel (1912) and their influence on literary production, as does Koenigsberger (2007). Though worthy, these enterprises are not my own, in part because I am yet unable to comprehend adequately what would constitute “good practice” of developing and sustaining a culture of conservation. This case study has a narrower but no less important agenda: to use my experiences as a zoo patron to occasion discussion of how Westerners make meaning in such spaces. Paradoxically perhaps, human beings act most naturally in artificial settings. As the previous case study suggests, Human cognition is situated and, therefore, human meaning making cannot be understood when isolated from the institutional and interpersonal contexts in which these activities take place (cf. Clancey 1997). The exhibit seeks to direct attention to the impending demise of these lands and to get as many patrons as possible to contemplate the consequences of anthropogenic activities. Accounting for how complex and multilayered settings provide scaffolds for adults and children alike to conceptualize the seemingly hard to perceive negative effects individual human behavior has on the ecosystems of tropical rainforests is the primary goal of this case study. A general semiotic of attention may lead us to a better understanding of how knowledge and belief emerge through signification. As the analysis shows, the processes of learning about complex and counterintuitive systems of thought (as epitomized by evolutionary biology and ecology) seem to depend on artificial exhibition spaces designed to inveigle the non-specialists to imagine an external reality far removed from their perceptual and conceptual here-and-now. We could say that their ultimate mission is to generate hypothetical inferences, such as “What will happen to the natural

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world if deforestation continues at its present pace?” My experiences as a patron of this exhibit leads me to conclude that the institution satisfies its mission most successfully when patrons must become ontologically amphibious – creatures halfway between “patrons” and “world explorers” in a habitat halfway between the perceptual “here-and-now” and the distant, exotic “there-and-then.” The fact that destruction of tropical rainforest may be one of the most pressing problems facing humanity in the next fiftyyears lends urgency to the study of the dynamics of human meaning making in these synthetic environments.

Agenda After providing a brief overview of the exhibition major constituents, I will provide a semiotic analysis of how one can alternately experience the exhibit as (1) a “real” rainforest, as (2) an exhibit, and as (3) a physical location unrelated to tropical rainforests altogether. Human beings oscillate among these three meanings. The next step in the analysis is to zoom in on specific expressive phenomena encountered in the exhibit. The second of the two micro-analyses calls attention to a peculiar but widespread fact of human cognition: topics such as the environmental and climate change, deforestation rates, and extinction operate on a scale too large for human beings to conceptualize easily, hence the tendency to create representations that compress such complex processes to a human scale.36 The integration of multi-modal signs and sign systems into hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic scenarios requires compression of vital relations of time, space, identity, and causation that allows human beings to see in wider vistas the consequences of immediate, local, and individuate actions.

A Guided Tour of the Rainforest Exhibit A canonical visit to the rainforest exhibit proceeds as follows: you enter the building, directly in front of you is a massive Mayan waterfall flanked by several exhibit cases, each housing a distinct species of tamarin. Upon entering you progress to your right, passing the cases for Geoffrey’s and Golden 36 For a detailed account of compression to a human scale, see Fauconnier & Turner (2002: passim).

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Lion tamarins and following a winding garden path through a mix of real and artificial tropical flora until you come either to an elevator or to the replica of very large tree trunk, an arborescent spiral stair case. You ascend to the second level and enter a replica of a science station somewhere in the tropical rainforest, pass through it to several open-air exhibition spaces populated with arboreal and land dwelling species of animal, such as porcupines, anteaters, sloths, parakeets, and tapirs. You pass through to a series of glass encased exhibits featuring leopards and other predatory felines, a family of François monkeys, a family of Bornean orangutans, and a pair of south Asian otters. You then exit the upper rainforest, descending a set of stairs that takes you past a large lighted map displaying the gross acreage of Rainforest in the nineteenth to late twentieth century. You enter the lower rainforest, a dark cavernous expanse peppered with glass cases displaying poisonous frogs, Egyptian fruit bats, pythons, turtles, an assortment of reptiles, an exhibit of ants, cockroaches, spiders, and other invertebrates. You see a small aquarium filled with crocodiles and fish, and an open air exhibit housing porcupines and other land dwelling animals, simulating a tropical thunderstorm every fifteen minutes. Just before you exit the lower rainforest (with gift shops and concession stand greeting you) you will see an interactive exhibit. At the touch of a button a once pristine patch of tropical rainforest gets slashed and burned before your eyes. Directly above this diorama of deforestation appear two counters, one representing the escalating world population, the other representing the diminishing rainforest acreage. You are met at the exit by a large plaque titled “12 Ways You Can Help Save the Rain Forest!” offering such suggestions as “join your local zoological society,” avoid “purchasing beef produced in countries where tropical rainforests are being systematically destroyed for pasture,” and “build a back yard wildlife refuge.” Waiting to greet you as you exit the lower forest exhibit is an information station devoted to conservation efforts flanked on left by a gift shop and on the right by a concession stand named “Crocodile Cafe.” Plate 2 below presents snapshots of the rainforest exhibit. (From left to right: outside entrance; inside entrance; François monkey case second floor; and exit from ground floor exhibit.) Plate 3 presents snapshots of the deforestation diorama, before and after.

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Plate 2: Snapshots of the rainforest exhibit (photography by Todd Oakley).

Plate 3: Snapshots of the deforestation diorama, before and after (photography by Todd Oakley).

The Architecture of Attention The spatial organization of the rainforest exhibit projects a particular manner of attending that can be modeled as networks of mental spaces. This section focuses its analysis on the meaning of the exhibit, the subtle shades of which determined by the allocation of attention to versions of a Presentation, Reference, and Virtual spaces emerging from and feeding back into a Grounding space. Figure 2.6 presents the mental space delegations for how attention is being directed in the rainforest exhibit. The Grounding for the network once again consists of three concentric rings of participants, situation, and setting. The setting is a two-story, climate controlled building, an architectural feature that becomes meaningful as the tour progresses. The situation is the shared understanding that the exhibit fits within the larger “ecology” of a modern-day zoological park, where patrons enter the park expecting to see species of animal from around the world. (This is not a regional zoological park dedicated to the presentation of animals indigenous to Northeast Ohio.) The Grounding space models the range of information that persons can be alerted and oriented to, everything presented in the zoo is designed to train patrons’ attention to the flora and fauna in the natural world.

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Figure 2.6: A mental spaces network model of attending to a zoological exhibit

Figure 2.6: A mental spaces network model of attending to a zoological exhibit.

At first glance, it appears as though the Presentation space is merely a recapitulation of the Grounding space, but in this analysis, the Presentation space corresponds to the gross structure of the exhibit as a set of sign vehicles. More to the point, the Presentation space is the mental configuration of the canonical tour itself and is related to its ground by mereology. It signifies the structure of attention in the space as well as the behavioral routines that count as proper zoo-going demeanor. It therefore represents human beings harmonizing attention to the same objects in habitual fashion. It does not take long for patrons to internalize this structure: one begins at the ground floor, proceeds to the second floor, and concludes again on the ground floor. One can be intensely aware not only of the animals but of the other patrons occupying this space (especially when crowded), if for no other reason than patrons have to negotiate viewing space with one another. At some moments, zoo patrons are only dimly aware that they are in Cleveland, Ohio, that they are inside a building, and so on. At other mo-

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ments, they become acutely aware that they are in Cleveland, Ohio, and that the climate of Northeast Ohio is radically different from the tropical climates where these animals roam. Cleveland is famous (or infamous) for its long, snowy winters and relatively mild summers, although it does get hot and humid, particularly from late June to mid-August. A two-story, smoky gray glass building that, from the outside, resembles an office building but with a distinctive geodesic dome at the center, insulates animals and spectators from such climate fluctuations. Inside, the architects sometimes went to great lengths to conceal mechanical and structural systems, painting them as brush and trees, camouflaging beams to resemble banyan trees; at other times they left the mechanical systems exposed. Once inside, patrons can hear sounds of the rainforest via a long running, non-redundant recording of sounds at different times of the day. The Presentation space is significant for revealing to us the terms of our interpersonal engagement with the habitats this exhibit attempts to signify. Consider now the Reference space. This space signifies the natural habitats of the tropical rainforests. We think in scenes and scenarios (c.f. chapter 1), and this mental space collects revisable conceptualizations of the zoo patron’s extant knowledge of the tropical rainforests of Africa, Asia, and South America. Similarly, at one moment, the Reference space operates at the level of explicit attention (typically when the location space is concomitantly occupying subsidiary awareness) when the patron is thinking about tropical rainforests and the flora and fauna therein, when she is thinking about deforestation, extinction, and human encroachment. When patrons see an animal on display, they take that animal to designate a type of species found in this distant environment, this despite the fact that most of the species on display were born and bred in captivity. Now we are in position to consider the third space in the mental space: the Virtual Being space. This space captures the experiential state of the zoo patrons: they are conscious of the present perceptual situation (presentation space) as they simulate and imaginatively project themselves into another space, drastically different from where they are now. This space models the hypotyposic experience whereby one’s experiences the exhibit as if one were really walking through a tropical rainforest. The animals on display are really animals of the tropical rainforests of Africa, Asian, and South America. The setting gives to us the impression (easily defeasible) of their niches, enough to simulate what it must be like to come upon them in the wild. As with the other examples discussed in this and the last chapter,

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this hypotyposic scenario is only fleetingly sustainable. Extrapolating from Pöppel’s (1985) studies on the duration of conscious awareness, a reasonable speculation can be advanced, namely that the typical patrons rarely sustain attention to this dramatic scenario for more than 3–6 six seconds at a time. An important feature of the virtual rainforest experience is that it unfolds in a far more orderly procession than any bone fide entrance into the real rainforests could ever provide. For instance, blending the structure of the Presentation space with the token animals from the Reference space leads to an experience of the rainforest as an orderly progression from the tree tops to the ground. Hence, we first attend to an aggregate of arboreal niches before attending to an aggregate of terrestrial niches.37 This suggests in turn that the virtual rainforest experience is taxonomical with each individual case orienting our attention to only a few species at a time. In summary, zoo patrons “live” in the Virtual rainforest when they experience this planned physical space as a natural rainforest populated with exotic species of flora and fauna. Living in this space also allows the patron to experience the forest and species therein as “endangered.” The plaques with alliterative slogans like “Jungles in Jeopardy” and “Paradise in Peril” peppering the site can serve as memorable cues for emphasizing the fragility of the real forest, leading patrons like me to hypothesize: “What will happen if we lose the rainforests?” The Virtual rainforest space is loosely layered and fragile structure, for the patron’s attention oscillates between the contents of the other two mental spaces. As patrons experience the climate and flora and fauna of the rainforest, they quickly come to realize that an actual experience would be quite different: patrons would not parachute into the forest, examining the arboreal species of animal from the tree tops and moving down to the forest ground where they examine ground dwelling mammals and invertebrates. Nor would they encounter each species of animal in its own taxonomically partitioned case. Local ecosystems intermingle, and the forest does not come pre-categorized. In this respect, the experience is evaluated as artificial, the result of undisclosed agents directing our attention.

37 This is only a general trend, as there are some terrestrial species presented in the second floor (e. g., capybaras) but this division remains the dominant impression.

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Nevertheless, the material structure of a two-story building, which itself does not come structured according to an arboreal-ground dwelling taxonomy, can be easily exploited for such purposes to give a coherence structure to the virtual experience long enough to make several forceful points about the beauty and fragility of these tropical ecosystems.

Infelicitous Apologies and Felicitous Human Scale Reasoning in the Rainforest Exhibit Apologizing. Let us zoom in for closer inspection of the opening example, a sign expressing three types of speech act: an assertive, an expressive, and a directive. (4) Out of Order. Sorry for the Inconvenience. Enjoy Your Day at the Zoo. The first assertive speech act is well known to speakers of Standard American English for indicating a broken mechanical device (e. g., a vending machine, toilet, elevator, etc.). The second is an equally well-known formula for apologizing based on the assumption that the addressee has been needlessly aggravated. The third is a variation or elaboration on a familiar salutation directing the addressee to take pleasure (more an expression of a wish in the form of a directive). It is the first speech act that deserves extended attention, for it blends two incompatible scenes. The mental space network for (4) fits the same four space delegation of Grounding, Presentation, Reference, and Virtual spaces. In the grounding space, we have a “zoo patron” who pays an “admission fee” for the purpose of seeing “wild animals.” The Presentation space elicits a scenario of mechanical failure. Specifically for this patron, a scenario of a vending machine incapable of distributing goods was the immediate association. In the Reference space, we have species of snake as a focal element in the frame for organisms indigenous to Austral-Asian Rainforests (viz., the entity is construed as having the properties of the exotic, dangerous reptile found in a geographic and geothermal topography remote from Northeast Ohio). The Virtual space integrates the notion of a machine serving human wants and needs, and these human want and needs can be specified as eatable commodities, such as soft-drinks and snack foods. The relevance of this sign comes into play in this space in that these words, when

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posted on the machine, informs the customer of the condition of the machine. The indexical relation between the sign and the vending machine in the Presentation space is the conceptual prerequisite for establishing analogical mapping between social roles of being a patron and a customer, which may elicit the notion of a mechanical snake providing goods and services, or alternatively, may elicit a mapping between snake as the commodity, or both. My son’s reaction (“snake broken”) suggests the latter, where the good is entertainment. The virtual scenario can exploit both mappings if we construe animals on exhibit as bought and sold commodities whose behavior provides the amusement we desire. Figure 2.7 presents the mental space delegations for interpreting expression (4) as an infelicitous apology.

Figure 2.7: A mental spaces network for the animals-as-commodities blend.

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While conceptual structure in the spaces comes from the disparate domains of indigenous animals and mechanical devices, the Virtual space includes partial structure from each of the inputs as well as emergent structure of its own. In the Virtual space, the absent Python is equivalent to either a vending machine unable to render its services, or a commodity (e. g., soft drink) unable to satisfy the patron /customer. They experience an inconvenience, for they are not getting what they are paying for. Notice the contrast to the scenario from the Presentation space, where an Out of Order sign prevents the customer from spending her money in the first place, whereas in the Virtual space the financial transaction has already occurred. In the Virtual space, the goods are wild animals from exotic places. Consumption entails visual accessibility. The purpose of an “Out of Order” sign on a vending machine is to alter the customer’s actions and expectations. In the Virtual space, however, the patron has already paid the park entrance fee, therefore, the addition of the apology acknowledges that whatever obligations the zoo has towards its paying patrons with respect to this particular exhibit have been overridden by competing obligations to ensure the welfare of the animals. It is in the Virtual space where tension becomes manifest in the form of incompatible social roles: a zoo visitor and a customer. Thus, reference to the Virtual space occurs if the patron comments that “I’ve paid good money to see empty cases?” At the same time, this attitude is incompatible with the social roles implied in the Grounding and Reference spaces, where zoo patrons are paying to support the mission of Cleveland Zoological Society, where patronage does not carry a guarantee of entertainment. The fact that the authorities issued an apology testifies to the inherent tension between a zoo patron as conservator and the zoo patron as paying customer. The motivation behind the sign is to acknowledge their expectation to see exotic animals, to apologize for upsetting those expectations in the hope that they will continue to support the zoo, the pragmatic implication behind the chain of speech acts. Replacing the original with “Off Exhibit,” though semantically less juicy and interesting, is the more appropriate message, as it does not call attention to the customer dimensions of patronage, semantic dimensions that conflict with the general rhetorical stance of the exhibit itself: human beings need rainforest exhibits precisely because the real ones are vanishing, and the key cause of their disappearance is commercial interests.

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Human Scale Reasoning. The stated purpose of the rainforest exhibit is to persuade patrons about the need to preserve the rainforests of Africa, Asia, and America. Therefore, one part of satisfying their mission to depict the amazing diversity of the world’s three major rainforests is to present in intelligible, vivid, and memorable ways the effect human beings have on these habitats. Since many environmental problems (e. g., deforestation, pollution, extinction, and climate change) are large-scale phenomena with diffuse patterns of cause and effect, they are difficult to represent vividly. For instance, representing an SUV as safe-means-of-travel is conceptually easier than representing how it contributes to global warming, let alone conceptualizing what the consequences would be if the average global temperature increases 80° Fahrenheit. The challenge for ecologists in general is to present a persuasive case for what is the case and what will be the case. Doing so works optimally when these scenes and scenarios are brought forcefully and vividly into view. Human beings have natural and comfortable ranges for perceiving, conceiving, interpreting, and dealing with reality. Certain ranges of temporal duration, spatial proximity, and cause-and-effect fit within this comfortable range. Often attempts to deal with reality on different scales means representing that reality within the “human-friendly” ranges. Environmental and climate change, deforestation rates, population growth, extinction rates operate on a scale to big for comfort, while physical and molecular phenomena operate on a scale to small for comfort. Conceptual blending seems to work best as a means of integrating conceptual structure so as to achieve this human scale, as argued by Fauconnier and Turner (2002: passim). The “Out of Order” compresses a complex and diffuse intentional relationship and interpersonal conversational turn, however infelicitous. This is true for its “Off Exhibit” replacement insofar as it represents the final result of a decision rather than the complex reasoning process involved in making that decision and acting on it. The examples I am about to canvas do a particularly vivid job of representing complex environmental phenomena by compressing relations of time, space, identity, and causation operating at a scale too big for normal human observation to a human scale. Consider these examples: (5) In the time it took you to watch this video, five hundred acres were destroyed. (6) Twenty species of animal dies today. Twenty more will die tomorrow. Extinction is irreversible.

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(7) Progress has moved into their homeland with little regard for habitat. Each one builds on the Grounding and Reference spaces outlined in figure 2.6, with utterances 5 and 6 prompting virtual scenarios in which two disparate events are experienced simultaneously and with utterance 7 prompting a virtual scenario in which multiple agents, agencies, and processes are to be understood as a single destructive force. Each mental space network selects for attention a facet of the Reference space: deforestation, extinction, and urban development. The different Presentations provide the mode of signifying abstractions concretely and intuitively. In (5), the experience of watching a ten minute video tape comprises the basis for conceptualizing deforestation. Innumerable instances of deforestation are compressed to very familiar time scales. In the Reference space, the deforestation is measured in acres and develops over time scales of years and decades. The effects of deforestation develop over a time scale of years and decades. In the Presentation space the phenomenological time operates in seconds and minutes. In the Virtual Comparison space, rates of deforestation and its global effects unfold on a phenomenological timescale. The patron is being asked to conceptualize trees being cutting down at a rate of five hundred acres every ten minutes: two distinct dimensions are integrated so that an intuitive temporal scale indexes a spatial scale which cannot be directly apprehended. Figure 2.8a presents the mental space network for this utterance.

Figure 2.8a: Deforestation at human scale.

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The effect is to produce a sense of urgency by “speeding up” the bad consequences associated with deforestation. An instantiation of the rhetorical figure isocolon, example (6) asks patrons to map by analogy their culture-specific experiences of a succession of days onto a biological conceptualization of species extinction. As figure 2.8b depicts it, the Presentation space takes the easily accessible concept of a single day and blends it with the facets of an extinction scenario in Reference space to create a Virtual space in which “forty species die in two days.” The blend creates a “snapshot” of the rainforest and its wild inhabitants at twenty-four hour intervals. As we go about our days, the planet loses twenty species. Notice as well that the very notion of a species is a compression of identity such that any token representation stands for all current manifestations thereof. Each token species presented in the exhibit stands for an existing type in the natural world. By compressing the extinction process to a familiar temporal range, the scene represented in the Virtual space coincides meaningfully with the manner with which zoo patron’s live out their days. The simultaneity of events occurs by integrating the temporal dimensions of a single day with the numerical dimensions of known species in the wild. An emergent property of the Virtual space is that extinction is a consistent and uniform unfolding – the same numbers each day. Though factually dubious, for extinctions rates are not uniform, it is nonetheless effectively heuristic to conceptualize them as such, to understand extinction rates statistically as a numerically identical process.

Figure 2.8b: Extinction at human scale.

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Using the time scale of a succession of days may in fact create the conditions for patrons to view extinction according to the landmarks that define a day. For instance, I can extrapolate from four extinctions occurring between breakfast and lunch. Although I have no evidence that other patrons extrapolated such, my own ability to do so on the spot without much effort suggests that compression to a human scale provides an intuitive means for focusing attention of complex and diffuse cause-effect cycles that are otherwise difficult to reason about. Utterance (7) gets its hypotyposic force from a compression of identity in the Presentation space that then gets selected and exported to the Virtual space. “Progress” stands for the export of Western developed economies to other parts of the world. It is not one thing but a host of diffuse acts, events, and identities occurring over months, years, and decades. More specifically, progress stands for destruction of habitat and subsequent urbanization, as is testified by the presence of several iconic and indexical signs of skyscrapers, bulldozers, and human population growth.38 The Reference space, on the other hand, focuses attention on the original, pristine condition of the rainforest and its native inhabitants. The verb phrase “has moved” is critical for this compression, for it schematizes the grammatical dative, “homeland,” as a location and the grammatical subject, “progress,” as a single moving entity, thereby providing the network of mental spaces with its basic image schematic structure (specified diagrammatically as a relevance schema projected to each space in the network). The sign relations in the Presentation and Reference signify conditions in the distant or recent past, with the Presentation space focusing attention on the process of becoming an industrial, urbanized economy, and the Reference space focusing attention on the desire of a people to maintain their traditional way of life, including their own habitat. In the Virtual space, progress becomes a singular destructive and unwelcome force, one that is too powerful for the inhabitants to resist. The final prepositional phrase confers and unethical inflection to the idea of progress. It is now a singular force operating without appreciating or caring about the consequences of its own actions. Figure 2.8c presents the mental space network for utterance 7.

38 The deforestation diorama previously referenced is a vivid example of multimodal hypotyposis.

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Figure 2.8c: “Progress” as dysphemism.

The schematic imagery of object motion distills the complexities and diffuse relations of developed economies into one tight hypotyposic scene: indigenous lands are being bulldozed, leading to the hypostatic abstraction that, “Urbanization and other forms of human progress are deeply unethical.” To summarize, utterances (5) and (6), create meanings that focus attention on two types of events unfolding along radically different dimensions with one event understood in terms of the other, thereby creating vivid dramas for otherwise abstract and diffuse processes. Patrons can use their own “lived” time scales as a basis for grasping the magnitude of ecological changes, thereby emphasizing the destructive power of these daily practices. Utterance 7 renders “progress” as a complete, self-contained agent, but at the same time it invites patrons to “decompress” that entity into many small actions, so that one sees human activities as contributing to this larger corporate destructive force. In the Virtual space, progress is a sentient agent acting irresponsibly. By implication, the zoo patron, as someone who has and continues to benefit from urbanization, can begin to regard his or her actions as a contributing cause.

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Chapter Summary A theory of semiotics based on attention fits with multiple semiotic theories that see thinking in general as a semiotic activity (Peirce and the epistemologists), and which studies signs as the constituents conscious embodied experiences (Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenologists). Likewise, an attention semiotic considers signs in terms of cultural patterns deeply engrained in human life-worlds (Saussure, Hjelmslev and the structuralists), and ultimately seeks to explain the origin of sign relations led by biological, neuroscientific, and evolutionary anthropological theories and methods. More specifically, an attention semiotic sees the three dimensions of the sign – presentations, representations, and interpretations – as being enabled by the greater attention system specifying the range of what and how human beings attend to their world and to others. Presentations depend on signals, signals function as representations only if they are selected as such, and representations function to direct thinking and communicating only if attention can be harmonized among individuals within a community. These basic tenets of this general semiotic point to the need for a method of analyzing the products of meaning in its diverse vestiges that can probe systematically the ways overlapping sign systems conspire to generate, integrate, and allocate attention among different and sometimes divergent scenes and scenarios – for we think in signs packaged as mini-dramas. The cases presented in this chapter run the gamut of human signification in three modes of hypostasis, hypothesis, and hypotyposis: from the everyday to the bizarre, from the pragmatic to the purely aesthetic and several points in between. The next chapter narrows the semiotic field to focus specifically on language structure and use in discourse contexts.

Chapter 3

Attention in Language and Discourse

Language Language has two characteristic functions: semiotic and interactive. Language functions as a semiotic system for initiating and maintaining symbolization of thought by means of sound, gesture, and inscriptions. Language is perhaps the preeminent system for disclosing hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic scenes and scenarios to ourselves and others. This chapter explores the possibility of theorizing language as being both conditioned by the greater attention system and as a means of continuously adjusting the capacity to detect, sustain, control, harmonize, and direct attention. Language and attention mutually determine each other, for there must be pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic systems leading to symbolization. Symbolization remains dependent on this lower stratum but contains causal powers of its own that reciprocally affect the pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic systems. Candidates for the grounding symbolization include the basic biomechanical architecture of kinesthetic experiences – i. e., exteroception (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory) and proprioception (perception of spatial orientation, postures, and movements of one’s own body) – and emotional resonances – i. e., interoception (pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, desires, passage of time, feelings, moods, and temperaments). Another candidate is primordial social pragmatic experiences of sharing and harmonizing attention with others within the larger ecology. The dual grounding (cf. Sinha 1999) of language in body and social environment implies the nascent existence of a signal system ready to be tuned and adjusted, a selection system for detecting meanings important to bodies moving in space and through time, and an interpersonal system for calibrating those meanings with other bodies moving in space and through time. As beings continue to function in successive generations of cultural niches – with increasingly complex patterns of behavior – the symbolic routines inherited by successive generations feed back to the three attention

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systems. Languages and language families develop and maintain their own specific signal systems; they develop and maintain classes of items for selecting, sustaining, and controlling attention; they develop and maintain classes for harmonizing and directing attention in others – symbolic routines for communicating. Language marks an apotheosis of the human propensity to convert an object of attention into an intention and then convert that intention into an object of someone else’s attention. It ensures a continuous dialectical interplay of attention and intention, a dialectic initiated between two or more people and only later, with time and practice, becoming internalized and “autopoetic.” Such is the general view of language pursued in this chapter, with the goal being to describe language structures and use under a unifying system of attention.39 This chapter explores the relationship between language, discourse and attention, and takes its place programs in Cognitive Linguistics, such as Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1987, 1991, 1999) and Talmy’s Cognitive Semantics (2000a–b), both well developed theories of linguistic form that presuppose attention and conscious experience as a determining factor in the acquisition and use of language. Both cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics postulate grammar as conceptualization, meaning that: to know a language is to have at one’s disposal a distributed set of “construal operations” for tailoring conscious experience. For Langacker, construal operations entail “focal adjustments,” which include figure / ground alignment, perspective and viewpoint, selection, scalar adjustments (coarse-grained versus fine-grained), active zones, and subjectification. For Talmy, construal operations entail a set of schematic systems that likewise include perspective, structural schematizations, force dynamics40, and distribution of attention, which in its current state of development consists of four levels, ten categories, and fifty factors as means of assigning variable degrees of salience to forms in a given speech situation. Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces Theory ([1985] 1994) and Fauconnier and Turner’s Mental Spaces and Blending framework likewise see language and conceptualization as determined by 39 The phylogenic and ontogenetic arguments for this view of language will not be discussed in detail here, as the goal of this exploration is more descriptive than explanatory. Sustained arguments for the social pragmatic origins of language from an ontogenetic perspective can be found in Sinha (1999); Sinha and Jensen de Lopez (2001), and Tomasello (1999; 2004). Sustained arguments for a phylogenic and comparative account of a social pragmatic origins of language based on bodily mimesis can be found in Donald (1991; 1998) and Zlatev, et al. (2005). 40 Force Dynamics will receive extended treatment as a rhetorical category in chapter four.

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other cognitive processes, including attention. As suggested in the previous chapters, the basic idea that meaning construction occurs within, among, and across mental models of scenes and scenarios (sometimes blending them for specific semiotic purposes) presupposes a cognitive system for signaling, selecting, and sharing attention. A fourth relevant research program is Chafe’s approach to discourse (1994). For Chafe, discourse management is really about managing the attentional dispositions and flow of conscious experiences among the participants – be they speakers, listeners, writers, or readers. In his view, the great error of contemporary linguistic theory (the formal orientations of Generative Linguistics being a prime example) lies in their factoring out conscious experience (and by implication attention and other relevant cognitive operations) from any theory of linguistic competence. Finally, a group of scholars originating in Urbino, Italy are formulating their own research program of attentional semantics (see in particular Marchetti 2006a), based on the idea that the meaning of words are “condensed instructions on the attentional operations one must perform” in order to convey meaning (Marchetti 2006b: 12). This exploration intersects with each of these programs and reference to them will appear throughout the course of this chapter; however, I will avoid making extensive connections and commentary on them in favor of presenting my own ideas, leaving it to others to compare and contrast.

The Greater Attention System and Language While this exploration takes its place alongside these other research programs, and borrows from each a selection of analytic protocols, it is nevertheless a distinct enterprise with its own goals. In contrast to Langacker’s and Talmy’s accounts, the Greater Attention System account is more capacious than theirs. Attention is equated with conscious experience along a salience-non-salience continuum, with the focus of analysis remaining at the level of the clause and sentence. The Greater Attention System strives to describe the broader phenomenology of attention than is explicitly acknowledged in Langacker and Talmy, and the objects of analysis scales up and down the linguistic cline but with an emphasis on discourse practices, as will be evident from the two extended case studies concluding this chapter.

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In contrast to Fauconnier and Turner, the objective is not to establish conceptual integration and blending as a basic cognitive operation underlying thought and language but to use insights and analytic protocols developed within this framework to focus more narrowly on mental spaces and blends as manifestations of attention in specific discursive situations. Although Marchetti and his Urbino Group similarly regard attention as the unifying principle of language, theirs is still a broad philosophical program without systematic investigation of attested data. Of these programs, Chafe’s is the most consanguineous insofar as it takes the analysis of spoken and written discourse as its primary object and folds details of the discourse context and conditions of production into the analysis. It contrasts with Chafe only to the extent that it does not equate attention with consciousness but treats it as an enveloping system for managing situations and contexts. Attention determines how and why certain ideas enter the “theater” of conscious experience in addition to how the attention system directs them once we enter that theater. The distinct feature of this theoretical framework is its systematic treatment of language as part of the semiotic signal system, as a function of the selection system, and as motivated, calibrated, and controlled by the interpersonal system.

The Signal System With respect to language structure, use, and acquisition, the signal system corresponds most directly to the range of detectable sounds and letters that count as a sound and letter in a semiotic system. Alerting Alerting, you recall, refers to an individual’s general readiness to process incoming or new information based on stimulus intensity. Alerting phenomena originate exogenously in most instances and thus are functions of exteroception; however, they can originate endogenously on occasion, as when one suddenly feels a sharp pain with no perceived external cause. With respect to language, alerting points to the primordial role in human speech plays in the sensorium. In any given situation, we are primed to recognize incoming sensations of human voices, regardless of the language (see Ramus, et al. 2002). Prosodic features of intonation and stress are prime

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examples of alerting. For instance, yelling is a blunt instrument for alerting attention and it also has the effect of magnifying the qualities of one’s voice. Whispering, in contrast, hides the qualities of one’s voice. The general correlation of loudness with greater attentional salience is defeasible, as it is possible to imagine situations wherein salient attention affords the soft spoken person. In the structuralist tradition of Hjelmsev, alerting is compatible with expression-substance (1961: 56–58): particular acoustic features of pronunciation, especially those features marking idiolectical and sociolectical variation. In the discourse analysis tradition of Chafe, alerting is compatible with exaggerated pitch contours, as might be the case with an overemphasized rising contour useful in the expression of incredulity (at least as it pertains to varieties of English) and other vocal prominences, such as vowel lengthening (1994: 58–59). As regards gesture, alerting also correlates with demonstrative hand waiving, as when one tries to flag down a cab or gets the attention of a friend amidst a crowd. Orienting Orienting, you recall, refers to an individual’s disposition to detect particular kinds of information over other kinds of information. In the tradition of Hjelmslev, orientating is compatible with expression-form: phonemic distinctions and the application of phonological rules are prime examples. Phonotactic constraints – restrictions on the kind of sounds and sound sequences possible – are functions of orienting. For instance, English and German favor consonant-first syllables and allow up to three consonants at the onset and coda segments of a syllable. They are CCCVCCC type languages. Finnish and Japanese, in contrast, only allow CVC types and thus either have to eliminate consonants or insert vowels within consonant clusters when borrowing words from consonant cluster languages. Finnish speakers tend toward the elimination strategy, with the borrowed German word /strænd/ “strand” (beach) becoming /ranta/. Japanese speakers tend toward the insertion strategy, with the compound /b‹rθ/ /k‹ntrol/ (“birth control”) becoming /ba:su/ /kontoro:ru/. Phonemic recognition and phonotactic constraints play a determining role in how we attend to expressive form (cf. Cipollone et al. 1998: 125). The fact that speakers of a language are predisposed to recognize certain structures over others has important implications for theorizing language change as well. Fennell (2001: 6) argues that one internal factor in English’s historical emergence as an analytic language is that speakers developed a

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fixed stress on the nuclear syllable, drawing attention away from the final syllable and ultimately bringing about the loss of inflectional endings. In contrast, languages within the Indo-European family that allowed major stress on any syllable preserved their inflectional characteristics. Over generations, English-acquiring speakers automatically began to orient attention on syntactic placement when surveying the linguistic landscape, because word order became for them the primary means of determining grammatical relations. That is to say, orienting attention to the nuclear syllable of a word meant being alerted to changes in syntax rather than changes in morphology. A polysynthetic language like Siberian Yupik (Eskimo) contrasts markedly with English in that attention to word order does not appear to be a viable disambiguating strategy, because one lexical morpheme often incorporates a complete English sentence. Consider this sample from Comrie (1989: 45): (1) Angya-ghlla-ng-yug-tu Boat-AUGMENTIVE-ACQUISITIVE-DESIDERATIVE3PERS SIN Boat-big-acquire-wants-he ‘He wants to acquire a big boat.’ The expression contains only one lexical item, angy (boat), followed by a series of grammatical suffixes: ghlla (an augmentive), ng (an acquisitive), yug (a desiderative), and tuq (a third person singular pronoun). The Eskimo-acquiring speaker is alerted and oriented not to word order, per se, but to word-internal components that reflect pragmatic order rather than grammatical order, the object itself becomes the reference point from which meaning develops, as compared to the English translation which builds meaning relative to a volitional agent. In summary, the signal system can be tuned according to global disambiguation strategies that speakers of a language employ as part of acquiring a language. Bates and MacWhinney (1988) offer ample evidence in my estimation for the claim that English is unusual in the extent to which word order has become the primary interpretive strategy. Among the world’s languages, including other Indo-European languages, inflectional morphology is the prevalent strategy. But there are several less global means by which expression forms perform orienting functions. I will outline three: intonation units, gesture, and perspective taking. In the discourse analysis tradition of Chafe, orienting correlates with the form and function of whole intonation units: spurts of speech articulated and experienced as a whole and that, with a mean length of just under

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five words, take approximately two-three seconds to produce (1994: 64). In discourse, English speakers (at least) exhibit a disposition to focus attention as a series of small chunks. These chunks are either substantive (presenting one new idea) or regulative (devices for managing the flow of information), or fragments (false starts, floor holding or floor claiming techniques). In written communication, it is likewise tempting to suggest a typographical equivalent to the intonation unit, as Chafe does in his discussion of the punctuation unit (1994: 291). Intonation units manage the flow of information as we talk and listen, write, and read. Another feature of orienting is the presence or coexistence of gestures in correlation with spontaneous spoken discourse, as studied extensively by McNeill (1992). For instance, spoken utterances may co-occur with indexical and iconic gestures as well as with beat gesture, usually one gesture per clause. Gestures in concomitant variation with verbal signs may function to orient attention to particular facets of language as the speaker’s center of attention. (It is an open question whether spontaneous gestures function as communication devices or function as a means of helping speakers think and speak. In either case, the gestures can be regarded as attention orienting structures either on the production or comprehension end.) Perspective is endemic to language, a topic systematically probed by MacWhinney (2005). According to MacWhinney, languages predispose its speakers to construe events from different perspectives, and indeed, languages vary greatly with respect to the kinds of perspectives its speakers normally take. The perspective system underlying language can code for direct experience, construal of space and time, plans, social roles, and mental acts. Languages orient attention by mapping direct experience onto open class items, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The specific content of mappings is not to be understood as part of the orienting system; rather, the orienting of attention ensures that open class forms enjoy salient attention, all things being equal. It just so happens that the lexicon encodes direct experiences, as direct experiences with objects and others in an environment is revised through mental imagery, a position consistent with Barsalou’s theory of simulation semantics mentioned in chapter 1. For instance, when we imagine actions elicited by the verb “to paint,” we activate the same neural circuits used in direct perception and action (cf. Barsalou 2003) and we seem to be doing something similar for abstractions such as “truth” and “justice,” whereby we imagine ourselves and others in concrete situations and scenarios with these concepts play defining roles (cf. Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings 2005).

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Meaning takes place along from three possible frames of reference: the egocentric, the allocentric, and the geocentric (MacWhinney 2005: 6–9). An egocentric frame of reference uses the position of the speaker as the point of reference. Thus, languages with relative coordinates allow speakers to construe events, objects, and states in egocentric terms, as in 2a: (2a) Holbein’s portrait is to my left. The same frame allows one to construe the same situation as being near or far from the speaker, as in 2b–c: (2b) Holbein’s paintings are over here. (2c) Holbein’s paintings are over there. Languages with intrinsic frames of reference allow speakers to take an allocentric, or object oriented frame of reference, thereby using properties of inanimate objects or other beings as landmarks for drawing attention to something else, as in 3a–b: (3a) The front entrance of the museum faces Central Park, (3b) The gallery is straight ahead in front of that mounted policeman. Languages with absolute frames of reference allow speakers to guide attention according to a geocentric frame of reference based on fixed landmarks, such as the North Star, mountain ranges, or cardinal directions. Absolutive languages, such as Guugu Yamithirr, do not appear to allow for any other frame of reference than the geocentric one. In other words, the language lacks expressive forms for relative and intrinsic reference points. A speaker of Guugu Yamithirr would, therefore, say something roughly equivalent to 4. (4) Thomas More hangs Northwest of here, while Thomas Cromwell hangs Southwest of here.41 English provides expression forms for expressing all three types of deictic spatial relations, and in similar fashion, speakers of English can likewise 41 Experiments by Levinson (2003) and his associates suggest these linguistic feature affect non-linguistic spatial memory.

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create three distinct temporal frames of reference. We can direct attention to events and states in relation to the speaker’s time, or coding time (CT), or in relation to reference time (RT), as in 5a–b: (5a) I tell you, the gallery closes at five o’clock (CT), or (5b) I told you the gallery will close at five o’clock (RT). English in particular uses a combination of inflections and modal auxiliary verbs to code for tense, which is designed to place events and states in time. Other languages use different means of temporal orientation. Likewise, all languages also orient attention to specific temporal qualities of events and states. Thus, the orienting of attention forms a unifying principle for understanding aspectual phenomena, such as whether we are dealing with a completed event, an ongoing event, an enduring state of affairs, a habitual or intermittent occurrence, as exemplified in sentences 6a–e: (6a) Holbein painted More’s portrait in 1527. (6b) Holbein was painting More’s portrait during his first extended trip to England. (6c) Frick admires the European masters. (6d) Henry VIII would sometimes execute his advisors. (6e) Holbein would paint an English dignitary every few years. English has myriad of construction types in which the same events can be construed from different perspectives. One of the functions of orienting attention is to set the “scope of attention” – setting the “periphery of consciousness” where entities or relations are detectable. Such techniques include passivization, coreference, reflexivity, clefting, nominalization, relativization, subordination, pluralization, just to name a few. These are not to be considered semantically equivalent because each builds the ostensibly same state of affairs from different perspectives. Passives, for instance, use the affected entity as the original point of reference rather than the agent – attention is oriented from effect to cause (if cause is at all specified). Cleft sentences are an interesting case, because they use a dialogic frame as their reference point. Thus sentence 7, (7) It is Johannes Vermeer whom I admire most of the Dutch Masters,

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advances a claim but only after embedding it in a presentational syntactic formula (cleft), as if the speaker were responding to the question, “which Dutch master do you admire most?” Although clefts do not have to follow direct questions, their presentation structure takes the basic turn-taking structure in spontaneous dialogue as a point of orientation from which to make a claim. Speakers are invariably calling attention to a common dialogic structure. Tomlin (1995, 1997) provides psycholinguistic evidence that passives reflect how speakers orient to perceived events. In particular, he (1997: 167) proposes the following hypothesis for the function of the subject in English: at the moment of utterance formation, the speaker assigns the referent in the current representation which is currently detected as the syntactic subject of the utterance. He argues that when speakers report on observed visual events, a nonlinguistic representation of the activity witnessed exists just prior to attempts to describe the witnessed activity. These representations, in turn, channel the precise linguistic format of the description. The transition from nonlinguistic to linguistic representations means that the perceived events are already detected and participants are to choose the expression-form whose semantic structure best fits the presented scene. We are predisposed to choose one construction over another, and the choice is not arbitrary. Orienting attention may be fundamental in the transition from non-linguistic representations to linguistic representations. To test this hypothesis, Tomlin developed the following experiment. Twelve native speakers of English viewed two kinds of scenes on a computer. (Tomlin also conducted these experiments cross-linguistically, using Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian speakers among others.) The first experiment is with a visually presented event in which multiple concrete objects interact for a brief time. For instance, Tomlin has his participants look at a screen saver program of a repeated scene in which two fish, one light the other dark, approach each other until, in an instant, one fish swallows the other and continues on swimming. Tomlin asks, “How is that brief scene represented conceptually, and on what sort of conceptual representation does the language-production system operate?” (1997: 168). To answer this question Tomlin devised and experiment where he asked participants to view the fish-swallowing event and verbally report what they had seen. Attention is cued by a flashing + sign or flashing arrow in the place where one of the fish (predator or prey) will appear 150 milliseconds before the presentation of the swallowing action. At 500 milliseconds into

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the trial, a mask is presented on the screen that covers the cue, after which subjects produce a report. If the cue appears on the display 75 milliseconds before event onset, the prediction was that speakers would produce passive constructions (e. g., “The yellow fish was eaten by the blue fish”); if the cue was on the predator 75 milliseconds before event onset, the prediction was that speakers would produce active constructions (e. g., “The blue fish swallowed the yellow fish”). Ten of the twelve subjects performed as predicted. Tomlin’s experiments successfully predict that grammatical voice cue for complementary distributions of attention to semantic agents and patients, thus suggesting a causal relation between grammatical voice and the way we remember and represent events, actions, and situations (1999: 178). In addition to locating events and states in space and time, languages can orient attention to social reality of interpersonal actions and interactions as well as orienting attention to the mental states of such actors. Again, the orienting system is not concerned with organizing the precise content thereof, but seems only concerned that languages provide sufficient means of ensuring that some categories of being and some categories of thinking are made available for construing events and states from the some socially and cognitively privileged point of view. Modes of address have the effect of prescribing certain relationships between language users and their subjects from the moment verbal exchange begins. For instance, it matters greatly whether one refers to Thomas More by means of sentence 8a or 8b: (8a) Thomas More admired Hans Holbein’s portraits, or (8b) Thomas More admired Erasmus’s friend’s portraits. The choice of epithet in sentences 8a and 8b does not change the truthfunctionality of the claim and does not change the referent either. But the former refers to the person through the role of “portrait artist,” while the latter refers to the person through the social role of “friend” (implying greater empathy for Erasmus than for More). The expression forms of language provide speakers with an extensive range of appellations, titles, pronouns, and kinship nomenclature to characterize social roles. What is more, the presence of absence of social roles has a determining effect on our dispositions toward the value of that role (a point discussed at length in the next chapter). Lastly, language affords the means of expressing mental acts, particularly mental acts attributed to others. Hence epistemic verbs such as “think,”

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“believe,” “conclude,” and “surmise,” permit speakers to characterize the mental states from either an egocentric or allocentric perspective. To summarize, the signal system encompasses the semiological categories of expression-substance and expression-form as a basic outline of the manifestations of stimuli and the categorical intuitions such instances license, the former being a property of alerting the later a property of orienting. Of the two elements, orienting attention plays a determining role in language structure, as the substances that speakers can spatially and temporally orient to, or “frame”, delimits the categorical range of linguistic forms. I argue that a linguistic theory based on attention will necessarily admit as basic to any language system properties of intonation units – particularly the onenew idea constraint proposed by Chafe – and levels of perspective taking as it pertains to exteroception, proprioception, and interoception, space and time, event construal, social roles, and mental acts. In addition, I suggest that languages vary greatly in the range of perspective taking available to its speakers. These expression forms must exert reciprocal effect on the means and manner in which we attend, perceive, remember, learn, and act.

The Selection System The selection system of attention correlates with the semiological categories: content substance and content form (cf. Helmslev 1961: 51–52). When we speak of grammar as part of a conceptual system, we mean at once a set of open-class and closed-class forms that determine the means and manner by which we select and train attention onto meaningful events and states worthy of communication. Open-class items correspond to classes of morphemes whose membership is large and non-exclusive (e.g., root forms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives); closed class items correspond to classes of morphemes whose membership is by comparison small and exclusive (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, tense and aspect markers, other derivations and inflections, determiners, and conjunctions). It bears repeating that the linguistics of attention broadly outlined here presupposes that the distinction made between open- and closed-classes cannot be made on the basis of form alone, as all linguistic forms are inherently meaningful. But it is fair to assume that open-class items presuppose greater attentional salience and finer details of semantic content than do closed-class items. Talmy (2007) argues that openclass items facilitate detection over their closed-class counterparts, and that language users are more readily able to introspect accurately on the meaning

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of open-class in comparison to closed-class items. Talmy further speculates that human beings are more attentive to open-class forms because it aids language acquisition. This answer seems at best only partially right. The selection system in general is attentive to those forms providing greatest access to the norms of thought and action that allow speakers to share an environment and to coordinate their activities. We attend to lexical items because they are normatively weighted. Of course, this general rule is defeasible, as when the prosodic features of an utterance place greatest stress on the preposition or when the speaker compares two utterances, the only difference between them being a single grammatical form. In its broadest characterization, the selection system can be viewed as a repository of open-class and closed class content forms repeatable from situation to situation, with aspects of semantic structure remaining invariant across situations. But an account of the selection system would be incomplete if we were to ignore the role content-substance plays in giving shape to the inventory. Every linguistic form has its origin in use.42 And astute observers of language-in-use can point to occasions of linguistic novelty in which a new usage enters conscious awareness and, subsequently, is added to the inventory of grammatical resources. An account of just this instance will set the stage for exploring the influence of the selection system on the structure of language and discourse. The setting is a hot summer day in the middle of July. My youngest son, Simon, comes into the kitchen and asks me for a Popsicle® (frozen juice on a stick). He then takes it outside to eat it as he plays in the sandbox. Several minutes later, he comes inside with the stick and sticky cherry-flavored syrup running between his fingers and down his palms. The next day, he comes into the kitchen and asks me for a “lick-it-quick.” Initially nonplussed, I soon realized that he is pointing to the freezer, and I determine that he is referring to the same things he had called “popsicle” the day before. I give it to him and he goes outside to eat it, returning only a few minutes later with an empty stick and (comparatively) clean fingers and hands. Why this inventive naming? Surfaces and substances in our immediate environment produce sensations in the individual that may play a significant role in generating mental models. This instance illustrates the role these sensations play in shaping, at least momentarily, the structure and use of language. It evidences content-

42 This is true even for formalist theories, where instances of speech “trigger“ latent mental categories.

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substance in the sense that it is traceable to the instance when it enters my own inventory of form-meaning pairs. The actual circumstances of its production are integral to its meaning and function, such that I cannot help simulate the idiosyncratic communicative situation of its initial utterance. That particularity is a part of its meaning. It also evidences a potential for content form, insofar as this phrasal noun can become a commonly held idiom, and it did flirt with commonality for a time as family members routinely referred to these frozen treats as “lick-it-quicks.” As near I can tell, this content form never extended beyond members of the immediate family, and presently has fallen out of use entirely in the Oakley “nucleolect.” It is now an historical artifact; a piece of fossil poetry. Detecting Detecting, you recall, refers to initial assignment of an item or items from perception or from short-term and working memory into the attentional field. Detection refers to incoming information, a participant, a role, an object, artifact, event, action, or abstract idea, and as suggested above, is entirely dependent on orienting. Proper nouns, common nouns, verbs and other linguistic foci (e. g. adverbial and prepositional phrases) are typical elements of linguistic constructions designed to detect entities, objects, and relations for further processing. It is the semantic side of event construal in the orienting of attention. The combination of open-class and closed-class forms combine in lexical and grammatical complexes for the purpose of presenting or suppressing the detection of one idea to the exclusion of related but competing ideas, or of rendering one idea more salient than others, and so on. Position of emphasis in clause and prosodic features of an intonation unit are phonological means of accomplishing this, but the mere presentation or suppression of content-form in discourse also needs to be taken into account. The selection system comprises those content-forms that pick out parts of our experiences that are relevant for building a mental space, defined previously as a dramatic scene or scenario created as we think and talk. Languages provide us with multiple means of construing the same situation. For example, given a motion event with a conceivable image-schematic components of initial, medial, and final points the options available to discourse participants are three-fold: presenting all three image schematic components, presenting two and suppressing one, or presenting one and suppressing two.

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Consider sentence 9a: (9a) We went to the Frick Gallery. This version of events presents the final point and suppresses the initial and medial points of the referent scene and does so from the egocentric perspective of the two agents – this clause ensures that the agents and the destination will be detected over, say, the path and origin. Alternatively, the same event could be framed this way: (9b) We left our hotel and came to the Frick gallery. In contrast, this version of events presents the origin and the destination while suppressing most everything in between. What is more, it construes the point of view allocentrically, prompting the interlocutors to imagine (if only briefly and coarsely) the scene from the perspective of the destination rather than the travelers, ensuring that the noun will be detected and brought into conscious awareness as a destination. Finally, the same event could be construed so that all three image-schematic components of volitional motion claim center stage, as in 9c: (9c) We came upon the Frick Gallery while walking from our hotel, through Central Park and onto 5th Avenue. This version presents the destination, origin, landmark and secondary destination through a series of four intonation units, each of which presents one new detectable idea from allocentric, then egocentric, then geocentric spatial perspectives. (Parsing this sentence also entails sustaining attention and, thus, will be analyzed again in the next section.) In addition to image schematic structure, semantic domains are another means of licensing and constraining linguistic meaning. A domain – a spatial metaphor for capturing the idea that anything meaningful is meaningful in a specific context – is central to the Cognitive Semantics enterprise, for it emphasizes the essentially encyclopedic nature of linguistic conceptualization.43 It is also not a mere matter of coincidence 43 Cognitive linguists consider the term domain equivalent to Fillmore’s “frame” – “a system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the structure in which it fits” (1982: 111).

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that Croft and Cruse (2004: 51) first introduce the idea in their influential textbook during their discussion of the attention, suggesting that semantic domains may be critical features of the selection system. Detecting attention in essence means fitting a particular semantic “profile” in a relevant set of contexts that structure and stabilize meanings. A structured set of semantic domains exist for detecting, sustaining, and controlling attention – and for doing so in harmonized synchrony. Unfortunately, the concept of a semantic domain as a theory and method of language analysis has developed over the years a certain ad hoc and unsystematic flavor to it. Aside from the consensus view that semantic domains are grounded in bodily experience and that these basic domains allow for both configurational and locational profiles (see Clausner and Croft 1999), few attempts to present a theory of domains grounded in the layers of phenomenological engagements in the life-worlds we construct have been presented.44 The present discussion of the types of conceptual and practical behaviors that limn the detectable limits of conscious experience takes its lead from Brandt’s description of the “architecture of semantic domains” (2004: 33–66). Brandt’s “geography of the life-world,” in my opinion, is best understood as forming stable lexical realizations of human attention. The orderly unfolding of our semantic architecture begins with the gesture-based domains of exteroception, proprioception, and interoception in accordance with the primordial forms of socialization. From these few basic domains arise another set of action-domains, and from this practical set of domains emerges a set of exchange-based, then discourse-based, then knowledgebased domains. I will now discuss each set of domains in detail, a task that should give a fairly global view of the types of stable contexts over which the selection system operates. The focus here will be on naming and exemplifying the major types of semantic domains, later sections will focus more precisely on the role domains play in the other elements of the Greater Attention System. The first set of domains defines basic personal and interpersonal experiences. These are gesture-based domains in that they give coherence to the primordial, face-to-face social cognitive operations. The first domain, physis (D1), covers attention to external physical existence, or more specifically the feelings and reflections of having a body affected by external forces. Image schematic structures of forces and barriers 44 Langacker (1987: 148) distinguishes between basic and abstract domains but does not provide an inventory of either.

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to motion along paths, and so on, are thought to emerge from experiences encompassed by this domain. Items keyed to this domain are exemplified by verbs “be,” “push,” “pull,” “cause,” the auxiliary verb “keep,” adverbs “let” and “despite.” The second domain, demos (D2), comprises the collective intentions and actions, where attention focuses on the social reality. It is in this domain that basic moral postures and obligations become meanings. Grammatical forms keyed to this domain include pronouns “us” and “them,” “we” and “they.” The third domain, psyche (D3), turns the aperture of attention inward to focus on the epistemic flow of experience, of thinking. Conceptual Metaphor Theory posits the systematic transfer of structure from physis to psyche, such that we use the domain of physical existence to structure the domain of thinking, which allows us to think of mental states (including emotions) as analogues of extero-, intero-, and proprioception: KNOWING IS SEEING; ANGER IS HEAT; HAPPINESS IS UP; and so on. Grammatical forms keyed to this domain include mental state verbs “to think,” “to know,” “to believe,” and “to conclude.” The fourth domain, logos (D4), focuses attention on the relationship between utterances and actions, also known as speech acts. This domain trains us to see certain forms of speech as altering social reality, as such this domain can only emerge from the first three. Forms keyed to this domain include verbs “to pronounce,” and “to name” and “to proclaim.” These four domains are grounded in bodily gestures and interactions with others in the lived environment. The principal feature of these first four domains is that they comprise the phenomenological building blocks of consciousness that include attention to perception and patterns of causation and intelligible causality. A second set of “satellite” domains emerges from the first four by means of semantic integration. These domains constitute a basis of a social ontology, for they offer a set of culturally meaningful types of reality that all members of a society must sufficiently recognize in order to function in the wider vistas of activities that characterize a person’s life. The three practical domains, Brandt argues, give coherence to our moment-by-moment realizations of work, love, and worship (2004: 53). The first (physis) and second (demos) domains integrate, engendering a reality of polis (D5). This is the fifth domain of “place,” of an inhabited territory or “land,” and of people “doing things together.” Attention in the domain of polis brings to the fore ideas of being part of a large, diffuse, and impersonal collective of “We, the People.” The second and fourth domains integrate, giving birth to the reality of oikos (D6), or “household” (a microeconomy). Attention

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in this domain focuses on the experiences of goal directed activities and expressive exchanges between intimates or like-minded folk, be they “lovers,” “relatives,” “colleagues,” “comrades,” “friends” or other intimate coagents. Domestic life being a prototype, attention at this level of reality is often emotionally intense (both euphoric and dysphoric) and “tribal.” A progeny of the first and fourth domains is the reality of hieron (D7), the domain of the sacred. This layer of social reality encompasses experiences associated with rituals, “motivated by empathic interactions with ‘othersas-everybody’ in a setting of worshipped nature,” as Brandt characterizes it (2004: 54). This domain appeals to the sense of invisible (perhaps divine) causal forces acting on us, but it can even encompass “institutional forces” greater than ourselves but often invested in select individuals. The investiture ceremony for a president of Case Western Reserve University is one secular manifestation of this reality – for universities are nothing if not hierarchical. These practical domains frame most of what can be termed institutional reality (cf. Searle 1995: passim), and thus frame how we attend and intend during acts of meaning and communication. Consider the following claim in 10: (10) Neither More and nor Cromwell survived Tudor England, It presents its two grammatical subjects in relation to a vast but nevertheless historically specific political reality. The noun “England,” brings into conscious awareness the larger political reality of the time. The key is that we focus on their fate in terms of the larger, necessary conditions of a geographically delimited sovereignty. Likewise, the modifier, “Tudor,” has the effect of bringing into conscious awareness the kinships and loyalties associated with a family name; it is at once a small group, a household (i.e., The house of Tudor) that wields sovereign power over a vast land, and it calls attention to the dramatic tensions among members of that household. Sentence 11, (11) Thomas More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, emphasizes a hierarchical reality, or, more specifically, the non-occurrence of a ritual act the meaning of which is ambiguous, with More claiming that his silence on the matter signals tacit consent and with Henry and his minions claiming silence signals dissent. In either case, the meaning of the re-

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fusal plays out against a background of warring interpretations over the significance of a ritual act. These gestural and practical domains need to be in place in order to construct “higher-order” and indispensable concepts of “wealth,” “beauty,” and “justice” (Brandt 2004: 56), the meanings of which depend on interpersonal, dative exchange. An explanation of interpersonal exchange recommends a semantic theory of attuned attention to intersubjective and intentional practices, thus the semantic results of the interpersonal attention system (see below). As Brandt argues, the basis for all exchange domains comes from the primordial dative: the intended act of transferring and object from person 1 to person 2 followed by the inverse operation of person 2’s response to person 1’s intention. The fifth and sixth domains integrate into domain of economy (D8). If we detect that person 1 is “in” a polis and also “in” oikos and, in addition, we detect an object, then we have the semantic basis of distribution of goods, services, tools, weapons, and other markers of wealth. Domains of oikos and hieron combine to form the domain of aesthetics (D9). A participant simultaneously in oikos and in hieron, say an artist or some person of authority, can act in such a way that the exchange is ritualized and the result is in some measure made sacred, which can entail a product – a painting, a building, a religious amulet – acquiring a “surplus” value over and above its functional value. The domain of politics and the sacred combine to form the domain of jurisdiction (D10). Acts detected in polis can be compared and evaluated as good or bad relative to standards detected in hieron to give us right and wrong. Some acts become obligatory, some criminal, others permitted but debased according to an agreed upon codex, or Law. The visit to the Frick Gallery is meaningful in relation to domain eight if attention focuses on the exchange between the individual and the museum and expressed as “price of admission.” Recall that just such a relation came to the fore during a visit to the Cleveland Metropark Zoo (as recounted in chapter 2). The same event is meaningful in relation to domain nine if attention focuses on intrinsic properties of the objects on display. Examining the detail in Vermeer’s genre paintings or Rembrandt’s mastery of chiaroscuro techniques occur at this ninth domain of reality. Likewise this event will take on an entirely different tincture if attention settles in domain ten wherein topics of justice, right, or wrong are detected. Judicious hypostatic abstraction can be fairly trivial in terms of right and wrong artistic techniques, such as, “this painter is better at portraits because of x,” to grand pronouncements, such as, “Henry VIII was a tyrant.”

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The next set of domains is necessary for metalinguistic and metacognitive activities, as they limn out symbolic assemblies, realities especially important in literate societies. The third generation of satellite domains gives us three fundamental discourse types: description, argument, and narrative. When interests from an economic domain (D8) mix with interests from the aesthetic domain (D9) we get descriptions (D11). In this domain, human beings attend to something with the attitude that anything observed by one mind can be observed by other minds with the same attitude. One mind can direct other minds to facets of reality in harmonized synchrony and sustain attention on it for some time. The object of description is exchangeable as long as one discourse participant places other participants in the right position to “see” it. Hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic scenes and scenarios may function as descriptions and can be lexicalized as acts of “showing,” “explicating,” “analyzing,” and “inspecting.” A hypotyposic exclamation in the descriptive domain is as follows: (12) Holbein is staring at More! When interests from the aesthetic domain (D9) – of stylized modes of self-presentation and social interaction as “staged performances” – mix with interests from the jurisdiction (D10) domain, we get arguments (D12). In this domain, aesthetic values associated with form and play combine with conceptions of right or wrong and virtue or vice in which the participants in a dialogue or a participant in a monologue convert drama into debate. Hypostatic, Hypothetical, and Hypotyposis scenes and scenarios function as staged debates and are lexicalized as acts of “arguing,” “proving,” “disproving,” “persuading,” “cajoling,” “intimidating,” “convincing,” and “reasoning.” A hypothetical statement in the argumentative domain is as follows: (13) If Thomas More would have persuaded King Henry VIII that his silence meant consent, he would have outlived his rival, Sir Thomas Cromwell. When interests from the jurisdiction domain (D10) mix with interests from the economic domain (D8), we get narrative (D13). The modern journalistic enterprise depends on a narrator who positions “other minds” toward events concerning relationships between wealth and conduct, as in crimes, and other legally challenging activities and circumstances. Narratives be-

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come valuable “commodities” for a public because they dramatize problematic actions and conflicts, and human conflict is intrinsically interesting. Hypostatic, Hypothetical, and Hypotyposic scenes and scenarios may function as narratives and are lexicalized as acts of “informing,” “telling,” “reporting,” “revealing,” “divulging,” “leaking,” and “testifying.” A hypothetical statement in the narrative domain is a follows: (14) Soon afterwards, his life took a turn for the worse. The King invited him to the marriage with Boleyn. More chose not to attend and the King took this as a great personal offence. Had More attended, perhaps the king would not have overreacted by instituting the Act of Supremacy. Linguistics is at base the study of discursive agents, with keen interest in describing and explaining how H. sapiens evolved into discursive agents, how toddlers develop (or sometimes fail to develop) into discursive agents, and how symbolic systems are structured and how they serve manifold agentive functions. Linguistics operates in knowledge-based domains, the fourth level of social reality comprising the “genres of knowledge.” When the interests of systematic and controlled descriptions (D11) intersect with interests in claims about what did happen, what is happening, and what will happen (D12), a mode of knowing often called science emerges (D14). The scientific domain integrates empirical investigation with speculation. When talk focuses on evidence and hypothesis, the conversation operates in the semantic domain of science, where hypostatic abstractions and hypothetical descriptions are the primary focus of attention. When interests of systematic argumentation (D12) and interests in narratives of experience (D13) intersect, a mode of knowing called philosophy emerges (D15). When talk focuses on what is to be believed and what is to be doubted, on the conditions necessary for belief and doubt, and when the means of substantiating these arguments are narratives of situations where believing and doubting are the center of interest, it operates in the semantic domain of philosophy, where again hypothetical narratives in the form of Gedanken experiments prevail. When interests of narration (D13) and description (D11) intersect with concepts of change, cause, and contingency, a mode of knowing called history emerges (D16). When talk focuses attention on descriptively relevant changes through time, and when the means of relating those descriptions take the form of a diachronic story or set of stories, it operates in the do-

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main of history, where hypostatic scenarios (descriptive narratives of what was the case) prevail. Of course, science, philosophy, and history, as discourses are continuously cross pollinating. When talk in history focuses on arguments and evidence, it operates in a scientific semantic space, but typically for purposes of evaluating (jurisdiction) or assessing the merit of the descriptive narrations produced. When talk in science focuses on dramas of discovery or the social and political impediments to discovery, it operates in an historical semantic space, often for purposes of “humanizing” the scientific enterprise. When talk in philosophy settles on minute descriptions of phenomena, it operates in a scientific semantic space, but it should be noted that descriptions are not systematic and sustained as they are in scientific disciplines. Neurophysiological descriptions almost always serve grander speculative and programmatic ends in philosophy than in neuroscience proper, a source of tension between the two disciplines. Brandt’s sixteen semantic domains, presented at a glance in table 3.1, offer a more systematic account of semantic structures. Gesture

Practical

Exchange

physical (D1): a body moving in space and meeting resistance from other bodies political (D5): many persons living and striving together (D2+D1) economic (D8): attention to status by means of the industrial arts (D5+D6)

Discourse descriptive (11): attention to form and status (D9+D8)

Knowledge science (14): attention to the description of phenomena in the service of an argument (D11+D12)

social (D2): bodies interacting in space

mental (D3): a cogito – attention to the thoughts, feelings, moods, and dispositions of ethnic (D6): identity of sacred (D7): attention to intimates and other that which inspires awe smaller affiliations via and which carries shibboleths (D2+D4) ultimate value (D1+D4) aesthetic (D9): attention judicial (D10): attention to form and sensual to the restoration of the features of artifacts “good” (D5+D7) (D6+D7) argumentative (12): narrative (13): attention attention to speaker to the relationship attitude and involvement between ethically in a debate format problematic scenarios (D9+D10) and the status of participants therein, with a focus on change (D8+D10) philosophy (15): history (16): attention to attention to the description of something evaluative narrative of and to its relevant changes a situation in the service through time (D11+D13) of an believing and doubting (D13+D12)

Table 3.1: Brandt’s sixteen semantic domains.

speech act (D4): symbolic action – doing things with words and other symbol systems

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In the present study, these sixteen domains limn out a range of detectable events and states comprising the selection system. It also has the virtue of allowing semio-linguistic analysis to pin point the relevant granule of analysis, be it the word, the phrase, the clause, turns, or whole discourses. I also believe Brandt’s classification is sufficiently comprehensive, although further investigations may necessitate the positing of new semantic domains, but the method of proliferating domains should not be arbitrary. Take as a final consideration the possibility of a new semantic domain, the military. Image schemas for force, counterforce, balance, and barriers; adverbials such as “against,” nouns like “enemy,” “civilian,” “campaign,” “sortie,” and “weapon,” verbs such as “fight,” “kill,” “combat,” “annihilate,” partitives such as “rules of engagement,” “chain of command,” and “code of conduct,” phrases such as “follow orders,” “kill or be killed,” “collateral damage,” “acceptable losses,” and a host of other items can function as contentforms and constructions in a military register. What domains might have given rise to it and where in Brandt’s series of satellites might we place this semantic domain? Militarism issues from the intersection of polis and hieron. Soldiers are constituted within a polis, a large and diffuse collective organized around common goals and/or enemies. They are also constituted with a hieron, a hierarchy constituted and maintained through rituals and ceremonies under motivated by an external force (be it temporal or spiritual or both) to which members internalize as real, true, and right. Soldiers are decidedly not individuals, but functionaries in a chain-of-command. The polis they serve may take individualism as a basic organizing principle, but that principle only defines the external force motivating the creation of the military institution and does not affect any internalized existential condition of being a soldier; hieron contributes the internal existential order of a soldier’s life. The answer I am about to provide to the second question may seem counterintuitive. The intuitive answer is to define this semantic domain as action-based and practical, after all soldiers returning from combat are said to have “seen action.” I think this is the wrong answer, however. A more accurate way to understand militarism writ large is as an exchange-based domain, for a common denominator among this set of domains is the interactions between diffuse or dissimilar groups, be they poleis (external) or oikoi (internal). The economic domain, for instance, focuses attention on exchanges that extend well beyond subjects in the same polis (i. e., trade); jurisdiction focuses attention on conflicts between subjects by instituting modes of exchange for their settlement, and these modes of exchange can

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and do extend beyond the polis. Aesthetic exchanges based on notions of beauty can expand or contract accordingly. The military exchange, as with jurisdiction, is defined around conflict, but the conflict is not so much among subjects in a single polis (be it a nation, state, or empire) but conflict between poleis.45 The upshot of this discussion is this: the architecture of semantic domains, as developed by Brandt, allows for a more systematic investigation of kinds of attention-structures to which human beings are semantically attuned than do the standard ad hoc accounts of domains in the cognitive linguistics literature. Sustaining Sustaining, you recall, refers to the narrowing the attention aperture on an entity, event, action, or relation, so as to conscript multiple resources, particularly from long-term procedural, semantic, and episodic memory in order to recall, reason, plan, and decide. Sustaining attention means adding new closely related information to the mental spaces currently online. As it pertains to language and discourse, sustaining attention follows the rhythms of topic and comment, or old and new information. In the tradition of Chafe (1994: 140–145), sustaining attention corresponds to his notion of “center of interest,” an accumulation of multiple substantive intonation units on a single topic. If the empirical mean length of substantive intonation units measures out between two-three seconds, then we can surmise that sustaining attention in language approximates a temporal duration greater than three seconds. Pronouns, reflexive pronouns, appositives, restricted relative clauses, prepositional phrases, definite articles (among other devices for achieving cohesion and coherence) are elements of linguistic structure made for sustaining attention by focusing in and elaborating on a center of interest. For instance, the speaker introduces the addressee to a third party, thereby attracting his attention to a new being in the conscious present. Together, detecting and sustaining of attention constitute the attentional field as it composes, completes, and elaborates a network of discourse topics and foci. Consider once again sentence 9c: (9c) We came upon the Frick Gallery while walking from our hotel, through Central Park and onto 5th Avenue. 45 “Juntas,” notwithstanding.

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My own repeated attempts to find the most fluid enunciation pattern for this sentence leads me to posit four intonation units, the first with emphasis on “Fríck Gàllery,” the second with emphasis through vowel lengthening on “wa:lking,” the third with a rising intonation of the “^through,” and the fourth with similar rising intonation of “^onto.” The prominence of the location in the first IU sets the stage for focusing attention on the other landmarks selected in the last two IUs, but the prominence in the second IU on the co-agents’ action recalibrates the orientation to an egocentric frame in order to stress momentarily the fact that the geographic landmarks are landmarks for someone. The subsequent chain of prepositions and their corresponding prosodic stresses refine attentional awareness according to a series of precise relational landmarks against which cognizers conceptualize the actions of the protagonists. The mental space of finding a location and retracing the path to that location is the scene that is unfolding, and it takes several phrases to establish it. In contrast, sentence 9d, (9d) We came upon the Frick Gallery, compresses the whole event complex into a single IU (on my pronunciation). In this utterance, attention to the means and manner of arrival is accessible but not salient, and thus not of primary interest in the discourse, neither is the identity of the agents, which we assume corresponds to the speaker and her companion. The key notion here is that the closed seriatim presentation of three prepositional phrases headed by “from,” “through,” and “onto” function as forms for sustaining attention to a mini-travelogue in which the origin, path, and destination landmarks are equally important. Controlling Recall that control refers to the ability to perform two tasks simultaneously (dividing); or, to start one task, put it on hold for something else while attending to something else and return to the primary task (switching); or, to fluctuate (oscillate) between two or more facets of the same scenario. Language has little relevance to the first manifestation of control, for it is impossible to divide full attention among two linguistic tasks simultaneously. Close examination of spoken and written discourse reveals successful and unsuccessful attempts to control information flow. Discourse markers (e. g., “now,” “anyway”), adverbial phrases and nonrestrictive relative clauses used

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as asides, complement clauses following epistemic and speech act complement-taking verbs (e. g., “I presume that …,” “I propose that …”) instruct recipients to oscillate attention between epistemic grounding of speaker attitude and the content of the message. Register shifts within discourse prompt participants to attend to a new discursive grounding within a single conversation. Deictic and iconic gestures can be used to oscillate attention between objects of conversation within the same scene or scenario. A dramatic example of this phenomenon is reported by Müller and Tag (2007), in which a native German speaker retells a story from childhood in which his mother ran after the school bus waiving his lunch bag. When the narrative focuses on the bus driver’s action, the speaker makes a gesture on his left imitating hands on a steering wheel. The gesture is both clear and prominently enacted at or near eye level. When the narrative shifts to the mother running after the bus, the speaker’s left hand drops down to about belt level and the articulation of the same iconic gesture persists in attenuated form just as his right hand rises in a grasping posture as if holding a bag, which he then proceeds to wiggle demonstrably. Here we have a nice example of iconic gesture complexes that appear to be guiding attention to different facets of the same scenario. Other expressive devices for controlling the flow of information when speaking and listening, writing and reading include verbal asides, parenthetical remarks and footnotes, all of which are particularly good for oscillating and switching attention. English has several prepared phrases for performing regulatory functions within discourse. Here is as small sample: (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21)

anyway …46,

as I was saying, getting back to the previous point, returning to the last subject, to make a long story short, [shifting attention to story’s end] now onto the next issue.

As these examples demonstrate, control of attention governs the switching and oscillating of topic and comment at the phrasal, clausal, sentential and 46 This first example may be opaque to non-native speakers. It is a common adverbial used during spoken conversations when the topic has drifted and one of the interlocutors wishes to return to the established principal topic. Pronunciation occurs with a sing-song pronunciation (noted with  before the word).

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discourse layers. Linguistically, devices that comprise regulatory IU’s and punctuation units in the tradition of Chafe are perhaps the clearest manifestation of these attention structures (except agreement markers, such as “mhm,” used to sustain attention). Deictic and iconic gestures and gesture complexes are particularly useful for differentially marking for salient attention to facets of the same scene or scenario within a discourse topic. At this point, an objection may be raised that these controlling devices are as much (if not more so) a function of the interpersonal system as the selection system and thus should be treated therein. I concede as much, but this is true of virtually every aspect of language. The description of the language functions within the Greater Attention System is only meant as a unifying heuristic for exploring the multiple dimensions of meaning construction taking place at one time and is not meant to be a description of discrete category sets intended to carve up of language “at the joints.”

The Interpersonal System One acquires language in a macrosocial environment. An attention based theory of language then must place heavy emphasis on the role of the interpersonal system in language acquisition, structure, and use. Although the interpersonal system influences virtually every aspect of language structure and use, it bears special relevance to topics discussed in linguistics and discourse analysis that fall under the headings of sociology of language (i. e., how conventions associated with social situations influence the structure of language) and the linguistics of society (i. e., how language behaviors mark group membership and identity). With respect to the former category, the study of turn-taking characteristics in different ethnic and geographic groups, such as high occurrences of cooperative overlaps among speakers of Eastern European Jewish descent, as well as gender-variable usages (i. e., different patterns and pronunciations whose statistical variations run along gender lines), and gender-exclusive markings within languages (as in the case of the gender-based enclitic markings of Lakota verbs) are of chief interest. More generally, the sociology of language concerns itself with matters of solidarity and power in language and encompasses variations in politeness phenomena and forms of address. With respect to the latter category, the study of dialects and vernaculars, the study of variations in language attitude among groups (i. e., the extent to which specific populations of speakers exhibit “linguistic insecurity”), and debates on the

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status of official versus non-official languages and language planning are of chief interest. I leave it for another occasion to mine the rich vein of sociolinguistic data for evidence of the interpersonal system in favor of a briefer and narrower sample of English constructions with interpersonal meanings. One final generalization before proceeding is in order. The interpersonal system has special bearing on the architecture of semantic domains, for without the ability to calibrate and attune attention there would be no ability to extend beyond the first domain of physis. Sharing Sharing attention means being aware of the presence of others as occupying the same space but without regard to their status as intentional agents. For instance, one might be standing in line and focusing attention on a particular task all the while being dimly aware of that fact that you are one of several persons comprising the cue: you are not, however, focusing on what the other persons are thinking or attending to but only on your narrow selfinterests. There are few if no instances of sharing attention relevant to language structure and use. The only thing to be said about sharing attention is that it is a necessary condition of interacting though discourse. Sharing attention, or the inability thereof, may be critical element of attention to focus on theories of psycho pathologies that manifest language deficits, such as autism and schizophrenia, or sociopathic and psychopathic disorders. But these are broad speculations beyond the scope of this exploration. More germane, however, is the fact that when we share a common space, we conform to culture specific norms of behavior that presuppose the presence of others and we calibrate our actions accordingly. With respect to semantic domains, the ability to share attention structures our basic experiences of sociality (D2). Harmonizing Harmonizing occurs when two or more people train attention on a common object (broadly construed). The importance to harmonic (or joint) attention for language structure, use, and acquisition is self-evident to linguists, particularly of cognitive and functional persuasions. Tomasello (1999), for instance, places the “joint attentional scene” at the very heart of language acquisition, and even David Lightfoot (1999), who otherwise assidu-

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ously avoids mingling explanations of language acquisition and language change with general cognitive operations, still must invoke joint attention as a trigger for the expression of innate syntactic categories. In many respects, all linguistic structure can and should be understood as the harmonizing of attention. It is nevertheless analytically useful to suggest that certain linguistic structures perform harmonizing functions. I will rehearse a limited sample. Exclamations, for instance, can harmonize attention along an alerting dimension, insofar their initial articulation can arouse the attention in others. Phatic utterances can function as harmonic sustainers of attention. On the listener’s side, agreement markers, like “uh huh,” allow the speaker to proceed with her or his turn. On the speaker’s side, periodic queries, such as “you know what I mean?” or “do you follow,” solicit permission to proceed with the turn. With respect to semantic domains, harmonizing attention may be considered a cognitive prerequisite for all action-based and exchange-based domains. Directing Harmonized discourse participants enjoy the privilege of directing one another’s attention. Language may in fact be broadly defined as the symbolic means of directing attention. Within this broad definition of language sits a narrower set of devices for performing directive functions, not the least of which being grammatical mood, as manifest in imperatives and optatives exemplified in sentences 22 and 23: (22) Look at that painting! (23) Would that Thomas Cromwell suffer the same indignities as More did! Imperatives are useful for directing interlocutor exteroception, while optatives are almost exclusively useful for directing an interlocutor’s interoception. Aside from mood, there are several constructions useful for directing attention in particular ways. For instance, English provides verbal recipes for directing spatial orientation: (24) That Holbein portrait over there.

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In addition to spatial deixis, English provides recipes for directing temporal orientation, or when to attend: (25) You can see the two Holbein portraits now. (26) The train will be coming by in a few seconds. There are verbal recipes for directing the length and intensity of attention: (27) Look closely at the Holbein’s painting for a few minutes and you’ll begin to see stubble growing on More’s face, as if he had neglected to shave that morning. There are verbal recipes for viewpoint: (28) Step back ten feet into the center of the room and look on each side of the fireplace. What do you see? There are verbal recipes for manipulating the scope of attention: (29) Listen only to the voice on the Artphone Commentary, ignoring everything else. Finally, with respect to semantic domains, directing attention may be considered a cognitive prerequisite for discourse-based and knowledge-based domains Table 3.2 presents a broad outline of mappings between language structures and the greater attention system. Elements

Signal System Alerting Sensitivity to the intensity of stimulus Expression Substance Prosodic features of intonation and stress: yells vs. whispers (yells magnify idiosyncratic features of speech; whispers suppress idiosyncratic features of voice) Gesticulation, waving

Selection System

Interpersonal System Sharing Sensitivity to the presence of other beings as self-propelled, “mechanical” agents without attending to them as intentional agents Semantic domain: social Perspective: social roles

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Detecting

Harmonizing

Spatial, temporal, and cultural disposition to attend; based on cultural frames of reference

Conscious recognition of something as relevant to the performance of a task; identification of a task

Expression Form

Open class items

Sensitivity to the intentional states of other agents toward a common object of interest (i. e., joint attention); the feeling that the other is attending to the same thing as you; refracting attention occurs when one person makes another person the object of her attention as that other person attends to something else

Intonation units

Semantic Domains: Gesture-based, physical, social; mental; speech act: Action-based, politics; oikos (tribe); heiron (theology): Exchange-based, economy; aesthetics; jurisdiction: Discourse-based, (theatrical): description; argumentation; narration: Knowledge-based, science; philosophy; history Gestures: indices, icons, beats

Phonemes and other categorical sounds; Perspective in language: Direct experience; Space; Time; Events; Social Roles; Mental Acts

Content Form

Semantic domains: all action- and exchange-based domains Perspective: social roles; mental acts Clefting Indexical gesture with concomitant eye contact

Gestures indicative of speaker perspective and involvement, either as a participant in the represented scene (i. e., route) or as an Olympian observer of the scene (i. e., survey) Sustaining Concentration of mental resources on something; the feeling of narrowing the aperture on “zoom lens” of attention Content Substance Closed class items Pronouns, anaphora, relative clauses, cohesion Subsequent gestures on the same topic Controlling

Directing

Switching attention between two The ability to manipulate the attention heterogeneous tasks; oscillating between of other agents; the feeling of being two aspects of a single object or task manipulated by some other agent or agency Topic shitting Semantic domains: all discourse- and Adverbials such as “anyway” followed knowledge-based domains by a recapitulation of an old topic Where, when, how long, viewpoint, intensity, scope

Table 3.2: Mappings between language structures and the Greater Attention System.

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Overview To illustrate the linguistics of attention more precisely, consider fabricated examples 30–35 inspired by the opening story.47 (30a) (30b) (31) (32)

he’s !staring at him. he’s staring at him. look. it’s the portrait of Thomas Cromwell I was talking about. look.. Frick was the best connoisseur of Renaissance painting in America. (33) see … I told you Frick was an astute collector. (34) this solemn figure never took the Oath of Supremacy. (35) anyway … that solemn figure never took the Oath of Supremacy. Utterances (30a–b) appear identical but, in fact, may elicit functionally distinct interpretations when one considers intonation and gesture. Both instances exemplify Chafe’s (1994: 85) notion of the light subject constraint, in as much as the use of a third person pronoun suggests a lighter information load, because the speaker assumes its referent as given information. It is the exact nature of how each referent is being construed that marks the difference. Suppose that my companion utters (30a) standing next to me. Prosodic emphasis on the verb signals the attentional sustain if we remember that the topic is already active in the conversation. Thus, prosodic stress characterizes the precise nature of the encounter rather than focusing attention on the mere fact of an interpersonal encounter between the two historical figures represented therein. Utterance (30a) is particularly useful in situations where the hearer is already aware of the scene evoked by the portraits but may not be aware of the precise characterization thereof. If (30a) suggests an anaphoric use of the third person pronouns (i. e., reference to represented men as topics of an ongoing discourse as opposed to new objects in the perceptual environment), utterance (30b), with prosodic emphasis on the two pronouns suggests a deictic use of these third person pronouns.48 Such deictic usage implies attentional directing with the speaker instructing the hearer to focus attention on the historical 47 notes increasing loudness; colons indicate vowel lengthening; and multiple periods mark discernable pauses. 48 We can the speaker coordinating this utterance with a sweeping deictic gesture from left to right.

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figure of More as the object of Cromwell’s gaze. (In this case, the scope of attention takes place inside the blended mental space of fictive surveillance, whereby the two personages of More and Cromwell interact in the perceptual here and now.) Utterance (31) is an explicit example of directing attention by alerting, given prosodic emphasis on the initial verb. Directing leads to harmonic attention, to an already established reference. The subsequent utterance following the imperative functions as a metalinguistic control structure, effectively reorienting the hearer’s attention to a previous discourse topic. Contrast utterance (31) with (32). The presence of the same imperative verb with considerably less intonation intensity exemplifies a different attention function: it orients and harmonizes for a different relationship (or “footing”) between speaker and hearer. The speaker already assumes the undivided attention of the hearer but does not assume that he shares the same perspective. She is trying to persuade him rather than command him, and look orients the hearer toward such a footing as it relates to the current sensorial and intellectual field. Utterance (31) harmonizes by directing; utterance (32) harmonizes by orienting. Utterance (33), on the other hand, differs from (31) and (32) with respect to detecting, if we assume that both speaker and hearer are standing in front of the two Holbein portraits. The speaker selects the entire Frick collection as the intellectual object of attention (with the two portraits as immediate instances). This utterance performs an interpersonal function by focusing on the interpersonal relationship, or “footing,” between the two participants. In my dialect, the pre-posed verb “see” with vowel lengthening and loudness focuses attention on speaker attitude, in this case an attitude approaching condescension. A potentially hostile or otherwise adversarial relationship seems to be developing between the discourse participants. Suppose that utterance (34) picks up on a previously established notion that the portrait of Sir Thomas More renders him a solemn figure. The speaker then uses the portrait as a reference point for discussing an historical fact about the man depicted in the painting. (Solemn, indeed, for he was executed!) Now let us assume that the actual utterance in the same circumstances was exemplified in (35), with a rising-falling pronunciation of “anyway.” This utterance exemplifies a form of attentional control. The adverbial instruction projects back to a previous discourse topic, and the demonstrative pronoun construes the topic as conceptually removed from the current discourse space, such that the discourse participants have to “get back to” the topic.

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Mental Spaces and Attention What is the relationship between the attention structures of language and mental spaces? To review, a mental space is a scene or scenario, dramatically structured around agents, objects, relations, states, and processes dramatically structured from various viewpoints. Only a single mental space or facet of a mental space can be salient in conscious awareness at one time, and language and discourse provide symbolic routines for allocating attention, and hence, consciousness, toward these scenes for specific expressive purposes. What is more, all mental spaces are structured by one or more semantic domains. Before beginning the analysis, let me present some general characteristics of mental spaces as a phenomenon of attention. First, any notion of common ground or grounding suggests in it the potential for interpersonal engagement. The analyst’s procedure for positing a grounding structure (common ground) highlights the fact that language and discourse is communicative and distributed among different individuals. Thus, when two or more people speak to one another, or when one reads a text, there is the presumption of interpersonal engagement, the possibility of empathy, sympathy, or hostility. One’s attention is drawn to an intention. Second, the construction and maintenance of Presentation, Reference, and Virtual spaces entails the existence of a selection system and it is only through these mental spaces that specific phenomena can be grasped. Detecting attention and sustaining attention are in evidence whenever one feels language and thought “lingering” over a particular scene or scenario. Controlling attention is in evidence whenever one feels her or his attention “hovering” over two distinct types of mental spaces, as is the case with switching attention, or two distinct features within a mental space, as is the case with oscillating attention. Sharing attention is in evidence anytime one is sensitive to the presence of other voices, regardless of what they are saying, as is the case with the cacophony of voices upon entering a crowded room. Harmonizing attention is in evidence whenever one feels that she and another are using language as a means of calibrating each other’s conscious experiences, such that each one knows the other to be attending to a common object. What is more, it is possible to use language to refer to past, future, possible, or impossible situations that are conceptually structured around a joint attentional scene, as would be the case when one reports what so-and-so said to such-and-such person. Finally, directing attention is in evidence anytime we feel as though we are using language to guide the

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conscious states of another, or when one feels as though one’s own consciousness is being guided by some other language user, present or not. These elements of the interpersonal system can be manifested in either the grounding space (e. g., remembered present) of a current communicative situation, or they can become the content of a mental space proper, as evidenced in cases of reported speech.

Case Studies in Language and Discourse This section presents the analysis of single sentences and snippets of discourse gathered from writings about architecture and design, an audio presentation addressed to young museum patrons, and a recording of a philosophy review session (see last chapter). All these examples allow for the integration of different modes of analysis under the umbrella of the Greater Attention System in part because each example reveals the subtly different means by which language structures conscious experience through the construction of different mental spaces. These examples also put on display the currently popular topic of investigation among cognitive linguists known as “fictivity,” a phenomenon with a provenance dating back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, who called in variably hypotyposis or enargeia, and which entails fictive structures as means of gaining mental access to factual states of affairs. For instance, sentence 36, (36) The kettle is boiling, is factually untrue but exploits the existence of the kettle – the static entity directly perceived – as a means of expressing the dynamic but visually occluded process occurring therein. More dramatically, middle voice constructions (as they are sometimes called) construe spatially extended objects in terms of a traversed path that is coextensive with the object, as exemplified in sentence (37): (37) The highway winds along the canyon. Known in the literature as “fictive motion,” these constructions are of interest because they bring before us scenes in which static relations are being

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construed dynamically (see Talmy 2000: 99–175). Pascual (2002) provides ground breaking work on “fictive interaction” in which non-dialogic situations are construed dialogically, and that the inherent dialogic and interpersonal nature of language and discourse provides speakers with “prepackaged” representations of interaction ready for use. The debate with Kant example discussed in the previous chapter is a prototypical case of fictive interaction.

Fictivity and Aesthetic Perception The present case study examines the May 2005 issue of the magazine Architectural Digest: The International Magazine of Interior Design. Writing about architecture and design makes frequent use of the middle voice, the general morpho-syntactic category comprehending most instances of Fictivity in English.49 According to Kemmer (1993), the semantic property common to all manifestations of middle voice, regardless of language, is that of “subject-affectedness.” In the samples comprising this study, subject-affectedness manifests itself less in the canonical sense of a clausal subject than as a special sense of allocating attention to a projected ego within the depicted scene.50 By reversing the canonical figure/ground alignment, these constructions treat stable, stationary, structurally complex, erstwhile backgrounded features as salient objects of attention through a construal operation in which the affordances associated with objects in question take center stage. The single issue of Architectural Digest, which is representative of architectural writing generally, exhibits several types of fictivity. The small corpus evidences fictive enunciation, orientation, action, barrier elimination, motion, manner, and attribution. In addition to these forms of fictivity in architectural writing, an example of fictive contact from a curatorial presentation of a painting will also be discussed in this section. Permit me to set the stage for these analyses by saying a few words about the aesthetic perception in relation to the signal and interpersonal systems. Aesthetic engagement with these architectural spaces happens through a 49 I also found evidence of the extensive use of middle voice constructions in the writings of architecture critic Hugh Pearman and philosopher Alain de Botton. These data are being used by Oakley and Kaufer (In preparation). 50 It is tempting but wrong to characterize the underlying semantics of these constructions as prosopopoeia, or personification metaphor, for we are not treating these forms as though they have human characteristics.

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combination of words and images. Readers of Architectural Digest expect to see glossy photographs with each article, with space zoned for photography and captions proportionally outstripping that zoned for verbal text. It thus is no surprise that many readers only look at the pictures and captions, foregoing the text altogether. In other words, the intensity of the image outstrips the intensity of the written word. A general trend in these feature articles is to use photographs to create an external to internal orientation: the splash page of each feature presents an exterior view of the structure (either in part or in whole) or it features a more prominent external view next to a less prominent internal view. This pictorial orientation stands in iconic relation to a canonical visit, in which the perceiving ego inspects the exterior before the interior. Note, however, that once this initial exterior → interior perspective shift takes place, any number of variations of external and internal shots can be presented in any order (e. g., one article presents all but one set of photographs according to an alternating external and internal pattern).51 Each feature article discloses the identity of the author(s), the photographers, and (in most cases), the architects and designers, each of whom often appears as protagonists in the text and captions. The authors do not disclose the identity of the owners of the house (except in cases where the status of the owner is the selling point of the feature), choosing instead generic role assignments as “the husband,” “a couple with two teenage boys,” “the wife,” “the owners,” and the like. Thus, readers can feel their attention being directed by real writers and photographers and feel their attentional states being harmonized with the imagined occupants of the house; their virtual tour through the space is functionally and aesthetically consubstantial with its occupants. The discussion will focus on eight types of fictivity selected for in the AD corpus in addition to a set of fictive complexes, or the combination of two types of fictivity in contiguous clauses. These varieties of hypotyposis generate scenes and scenarios involving a projected ego, a being moving about in the discursively delimited space. Exteroception, interoception, and proprioception are all active or salient facets of the selection system. The selection system presupposes a semantic domain structure in which the four gesture-based domains integrate conceptualizations with the domains of oikos and aesthetics. While other semantic domains influence meaning con51 See Joseph Giovanni and Mary E. Nichols, “Singular Vision,” in Architectural Digest (May) 2005: 200–213.

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struction in specific contexts, these two semantic domains are the most prominent, with attention oscillating between profiled conceptualizations relative to either of these two domains. When writers focus attention on the structure as private residence and the activities therein (e. g., where occupants eat or sleep, or places used for entertaining friends and family), the active domain is oikos, when, however, writers focus on the qualities of an extended space (e. g., reference to an oak paneled office), or when they link the referent house to a particular style (e. g., Spanish Colonial Revival, Shingle Style), the active domain is aesthetics. As the examples will show, the openclass items of a language select attention to these two domains, but they do so in terms of the gesture-based domains of physis and psyche.52 The delegation of mental space types governing these hypotyposic scenes are as follows, as depicted in Figure 3.1. Grounding diagrams the analysis above, specifying participants, situation, and setting as it pertains to current discourse situation. The Presentation space represents an ego moving and acting in space: the canonical figure in a figure /ground relation. As with canonical figures, the ego is animate, mobile, self-propelled, structurally compact, and volitional. (The humanoid figure in bold represents the attentional structure of this mental space, with salient attention conferred on ego’s conscious, intentional, and volitional states.) The Reference space represents architectural structures or extended architectural features of a structure: the canonical ground in a figure /ground relation. As with canonical grounds, the referent is inanimate, stationary, large, structurally complex or distributed, and part of the setting. It contrasts with the presentation space in allocating attention to that which canonically occupies the background. (The bold boxes represent in iconic format the attentional structure of this space, with salient attention afforded to features in the setting.) The morphological and syntactic organization of these middle voice constructions instruct readers to build a virtual space that recruits the ego from the presentation space with specific stationary objects from the reference space, but in doing so reverses the canonical figure/ground alignment, in essence figuring a stationary object while backgrounding the animate figure. The new conceptual structure emerges, namely an implicit projected ego moving and experiencing the space. In the Virtual space, canonical grounded objects get 52 The morphological and syntactic “anatomy” common to all the samples consist of a verb phrase headed by an active present tense verb in the imperfective aspect, which is itself governed by a noun phrase headed by an inanimate object.

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Grounding

Presentation space

Reference space Architecture

Ego Participants

Whole structures/extended architectural features: stairways doors entrances Driveways

Properties: animate mobile structurally t t ll compactt self-propelled volitional

readers, writers, photographers, editors Situation

Domains: physis, psyche

Domains: oikos, aesthetic oikos

Setting Fictivity Directing the reader’s attention to architectural details

Texts on glossy paper with multiple photographs

Situational relevance

Static entities are singled out for attentional focus Projected Ego becomes part of the setting

Virtual space 1

Domains: physis, psyche, oikos, aesthetic

Conditions of Attention

Fictivity

Pragmatic g implication: p Reader vicariouslyy experiences p the sensual pleasures of archiectural design

Projected Ego interacts with an extended form as if she were perceiving, moving, and interacting in that space

Virtual Space 2

Figure 3.1: Standard mental spaces network for the middle voice constructions in architectural writing.

singled out for attentional focus but with an animate, volitional cognizer as an accessible background entity, such that the foregrounded objects elicit specific dynamic modes of action, motion, and interaction from the unnamed cognizer. Thus the projected ego interacts with extended architectural forms as if she were actually perceiving, moving, and interacting in that space. (The bold box containing a humanoid figure in the background and bolded square in the foreground represent in iconic format the attentional structure of this space, with salient attention afforded the inanimate object but only in relation to the potential for human perception and action.) All the samples from this corpus conform to this general mental space format. Enunciation With fictive enunciation (a species of fictive interaction), a generic scenario of one person broadcasting a message to others frames the presentation of

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static structures as if a projected ego as listener within a scene of the referential object. Here is an example 38: (38) Their house would not be replicative but would articulate, in the clearest and most functionally straightforward terms, only the present. (118) The verb plus adverbial phrase conspire to create an effect in which the reader imagines herself standing nearby as the house “expresses” its form as a manifestation of a “presentist” aesthetic, a structure “claiming” no tradition. The Virtual space construes a scenario of a projected ego interpreting the house as one interprets an expressive piece of writing. The domains of logos and aesthetics form the selected domains against which meaning is construed. We attend to some inanimate object and confer onto it a logos; it speaks to us. But this analyst would not go so far as to call this a personification of the house. Even though the focal scenario is framed in the logic of a dialogic encounter, the encounter itself fits squarely in the common asynchronous framework of written communication with the house as a text – the adjective “clearest” and noun “terms” are equally at home in written as in face-to-face registers. Orientation With fictive orientation, the grammatical subject specifies a landmark from which projected egos are to orient themselves within the site. The verb “to mark,” the verbal “faces,” and verb phrase, “sits far back” exploit image schemas for BOUNDARY, FRONT-BACK, and NEAR-FAR as means of orienting readers to features in the site. Here are two examples: (39) A steel canopy marks the invisible entrance door … (40) The secondary wing, which faces the driveway and street, has a three-car garage, with two guest rooms, a bath and exercise room above. With sentence (39), the finite verb “marks” creates a boundary, effectively orienting the reader outside the structure. With sentence (40), the relative clause makes use of an intrinsic frame of reference, so that the projected ego takes the perspective of the wing, thus lining up with the front of structure of the house, as if the ego were inside looking out. In the Virtual scene, an

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object becomes the focus of attention as a means of orienting a virtual being therein. The orientation in physical space (i. e., inside or outside a structure) determines the mental disposition of the ego to have one sort of experience or another. Action (non-translocative motion) With fictive action, the grammatical subject specifies a patient of an act that takes the form of non-translocative motion, specified as an action within one of the components of a SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema. Sentences 41 and 42 present instances of action within a restricted radius of opening and closing, or the removal of a barrier that affords the projected ego a line of sight to something else. The present tense of the transitive verb “to open” accompanied by an adverb and directional prepositional phrase, creates the fictive experience having one’s visual attention guided along a transverse axis. In sentence 41, the main action is the removal of a barrier permitting the ego to see one space from the vantage point of another. In sentence 42, the main action is an agency that helps the ego along a transverse axis. A staircase is literally res extensa anchoring the activity of res cogitans. (41) […] the entrance hall opens directly to the living/dining space and beyond to the porch and view. (42) An open-sided staircase leads down to the living spaces on the lower level, where the interior fells almost as airy as the terrace. Glass pocket doors open two sides of the trapezoidal living room to the angled deck and an infinity-edge pool that merges into the expanse of ocean. Just as one can conceptualize a scene of an ego scanning a horizontal trajectory precipitated by an action (e. g., “to open,” “to lead”), one can conceptualize a similar scene of an ego scanning a vertical trajectory precipitated by a similar action. This is the case with these examples: (43) Two wide chimneys – clad in copper in a pattern that evokes massive masonry – rise to define the rear façade. (44) The house’s other stair, at the center of the shorter wing, rises from a family room adjoining the pool terrace to reach the quest rooms above. (45) The houses mushroom out of the land in organic flows.

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Sentences (43) and (44) accomplishes this with the verb “to rise,” an action that, when applied to stationary objects, produces the effect of virtual extension along a vertical gradient. Sentence (45) coerces the noun in the verbal position such that the stationary object is seen to emerge vertically from the ground. In all cases, static structures are the focus of attention, but they are being attended to in terms of an ego’s experience of object extension, while rooted in one spot. Barrier Elimination Similar to fictive action, the Barrier elimination types of this construction create scenes involving the removal of an impediment. The verb to allow brings in the force dynamic schema of onset letting, where a stronger entity removes a barrier than keeps something from moving. (46) It [shingle style] remains popular today among eclectic architectural firms like Shope Reno Wharton because the style itself, unlike Georgian, allows so many variations in plan and form. With the above sentence, a style of architecture (Shingle) functions as the entity that “allows” the other entity (architect) to realize a tendency, which is construed as freedom to experiment with various forms, presumably other styles do not permit such experimentation. The same is also true for sentences (47) and (48): (47) A unifying device, the clerestories allow even the areas where this is mostly solid wall a natural, diffused glow. (48) Lit on six sides and shaded by pin oak, this is the hub of the house in plan and in action – a space where family members gather to live the life that the house, by getting out of the way, allows them to live. Sentence (48) differs from the others in that meaning is being construed relative to the oikos rather than the aesthetic domain. Motion Fictive motion constructions exemplified in this corpus focus attention on static architectural features as reference points for scanning a site. Unlike fictive action, however, the pathway itself is not the focus of attention but

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an object or set of objects moving along the path. Sentence (49) construes stationary works of art as if they had moved from public to private spaces. (49) With ever more pieces necessitating more wall space, museumcaliber art migrated from the main formal rooms into the corridors, back bedrooms and baths. The fronted adverbial phrase construes a mental space in which migration is the consequence of a slow accumulation of discrete objects and not to be understood as actual volitional movement of objects from one place to another. The result is a sense of fictive change in the space itself. The ego is not only projected in space but in time, as he is supposed to experience the space in relation to a past state. The Virtual space for this construction has the projected ego comparing two states of the same architectural space, past and present. Sentence (50) construes a fictional trajectory in which multiples of the categorically identical entities are treated as a continuous mass, a process referred to in the Cognitive Linguistics literature as a mass-multiplex image schema transformation (see Lakoff 1987: 440–444): (50) Rocks cascade a hundred feet into the Pacific … The semantics of “cascade” apply typically to mass rather than count nouns, (e. g., “cascading water”, “a cascade of melted chocolate”). In this sense, the rocks define a path from the house to the ocean, but the motion comes from a cognizer’s saccades over a set of discrete stationary objects. In this case, the rocks themselves are not moving; they defy gravity and in their defiance move the eye down the slope. Ego’s eyes saccade down the slope with each rock. It is implied motion of the perceiver’s gaze elicited by the static object that defines fictive motion scenes. Manner Fictive manner constructions in this corpus produce the same scenario as fictive action and motion but with the added structure associated with the qualitative physics of action or motion. Verbs such as “to climb,” “to wrap” and “to nod” appear in examples (51) and (52). In each case, the background meaning of each verb has certain proprioceptive experiences as its base. Climbing evokes a sense of effort and resistance, as if one’s limbs had to exert noticeable effort (this in stark contrast to “ascend”). In sentence (52),

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the verb “nod” evoked a particular body expression (and is thus a form of enunciation), but the principal focus of attention is to the manner of a discreet and understated expressive gesture. (51) For the Nashvilleans, seven joined pavilions climb the hill together. (52) Though the house does nod to a local farmstead vernacular, there is the emergence of one of Graves’s old demons – his fascination with rustic Mediterranean elegance. With fictive manner constructions, a projected ego interacts with a static entity in a qualitatively specifiable manner. In some respects proprioception – knowledge of bodily movements – are imputed onto an inanimate object as if the projected ego were acting or moving in a particular manner in that space. Attribution With fictive attribution, inanimate objects are construed as possessing personal characteristics, as with sentence (53): (53) The Selldorf sofa, which she pictures ideally in cotton velvet, has a sensibility nicely matched to the current mid-century-modern madness. In this example, the noun phrase “sensibility” applies factually to the affective states of an ego, but it is the sofa and its upholstery that forms the sensual basis for this state. Table 3.3 presents summarizes the seven distinct types of fictivity found in the corpus. Enunciation Orientation Action Barrier Elimination Motion Manner Attribution

An inanimate object “speaks” to the projected ego An inanimate object orients the attention of the projected ego within a scene An inanimate object indexes an action witnessed by the projected ego An inanimate object implicated in removing an impediment on projected ego The projected ego mentally moves through space using an extended object as reference point Features of an inanimate object elicit qualitative physics of an action or motion event Inanimate objects take on personal attributes

Table 3.3: The seven types of fictivity.

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Fictive Complexes The above examples exhibit only one variety of fictivity; however, it is often then case that the attention system can shift among two or more types of fictive constructions among contiguous clauses. The verbalization of the adjective “curve” in sentence (54) allocates attention to manner of motion followed up with the verb “to become” to create a blended scene in which motion results in change. The projected ego moves and in so moving experiences a change of scenery. (54) To one side, a staircase with a rope-twisted newel post and balusters curves as sensuously as a snail’s shell to become a gallery overlooking the living room below. In addition to the manner-change complex, we have in sentence (55) an orientation-manner complex, where the projected ego orients itself to a vertical incline (“valley floor”) and then follows a tortuous route upwards to a cardinally oriented structure. (55) Straddling a north-south ridgeline at the end of a mile-long private road that wends its way up from the valley floor, the neutrally hued structure, massed as two single-story volumes delineated only be a clerestory and fascia, is fairly inscrutable upon approach. With sentence (56), manner of motion (“float”) combines with action (“opens up”), once again so the projected ego senses a smooth transition from one room to another. (56) Softly curved furnishings appear to float across the polished floor of the lofty great room, which opens up through a pivoting glass door to the pool terrace. Manner entails motion, and sometimes these two dimensions of the same event can be separately attended, as in sentence (57), (57) One unifying decorative element is the wood paneling – tongueand-groove boards as polished and neatly fitting as a sailboat’s hull, which follow sharp angles and curves with equal facility.

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This motion event prompted by the relative clause is elaborated as manner of motion in the predicated conjunction of noun phrases (“sharp angles,” “curves”) so that a projected ego follows a trajectory that oscillates between jagged and smooth movements through the space. (58) Running the full depth of the house, the lofty space allows fresh breezes from the bay to blow through. Our final example combines motion with barrier elimination, with a gerund (“running”) setting up a mental space of horizontal motion in the dependent clause and the finite verb (“to allow”) implying the existence of a barrier for which its noun phrase head (“lofty space”) effectively removes. With this sentence, the gerund phrase creates a dynamic scene of projected ego scanning the length of the room. Attention is initially drawn the room’s spatial dimensions, and subsequently oscillates to the things that happen in it (“fresh breezes from the bay”), the condition of attending focuses on the lofty space as an agent removing a barrier, and so removed the counter agent, “fresh breeze,” is free to “blow through.” Each of these fictive complexes sustains attention on the projected ego interacting with the represented architectural space. Motion and manner of motion can integrate easily with orientation, change, action, and barrier elimination because they all entail a body moving in space. Bodies have to orient themselves to a frame of reference; bodies in motion witness changes in the sensorium, bodies in motion engage in other actions coextensive with motion (such as opening doors), and bodies frequently encounter obstacles. Each type of fictivity makes use of a body moving in space to gain mental access to objects and states that are not themselves in motion by predicating the volitional characteristics of human beings onto the figured objects themselves, such that predication only make sense against the backdrop of a projected ego ready to experience the referenced features of architecture. Extended Analyses Two extended analyses punctuate this case study of fictivity in aesthetic perception. We will consider first the opening paragraph of the article “Singular Vision”. One Man’s Passion Yields a Distinctive Collection of 20thCentury Works.” It reads as follows:

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Like film directors, architects often set the scene with an opening shot, and in vintage California houses of a certain era, the front door gives onto a gracious hall whose back doors frame a view of the garden beyond. But the front door of one prominent Spanish Colonial Revival house of a terraced hillside estate in Los Angeles opens straight onto a work by Sandro Chia, centered on a figure so robustly painted that it seems to burst into the entrance hall. The establishing shot announces that the house no longer looks out so much as in, that its object of contemplation is not the garden but the art. The eye wants to stay inside.

Let us first account for the delegation of mental spaces that become active in conscious awareness and working memory when reading this introductory paragraph. Bearing in mind the common ground of reader discussed above, the network of mental spaces includes a Presentation space of directorial techniques. In the Presentation space, a generic director guides the attention of the viewer through a set of establishing shots. The initial adverbial phrase makes this mental space salient. The ensuing dependent clause accesses the reference space for Architectural Design, a type of mental space presumed to be always accessible to the implied reader. In this particular version of the Reference space of a generic architect designs California houses. The prepositional phrase, “of a certain era,” references nonspecifically a past time-span characterized by particular circumstances, events, and personages. The third mental space integrates these two scenes, such that the practicing architect of a certain era of California architecture draws from a set of design techniques for introducing visitors to a house. In this Virtual space, the architect “sets the mood” for what is supposed to happen on site. This mental space is a loosely layered analogy in which an architect is a director and the projected ego (visitor to the house) is a film spectator. As with a director, the architect draws from a set of conventional designs for opening a scene, so that every view of the house experienced by the ego is structurally equivalent to a camera shot. We learn, for instance, that there is a canonical sequence of establishing views that begins with the entrance, followed by the foyer, a back door, and ending at the garden. The projected ego approaches the house and sees through it to the rear garden. That is the genre of “vintage California” architecture. Figure 3.2 presents the mental space delegation for the first full sentence of this paragraph.

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Figure 3.2: Mental spaces network for the Film Director /Architect blend.

The last three sentences sustain attention on the conceit through a form of oscillation. The coordinating conjunction (“but”) generates an expectation of rebuttal. Here an updated version of the Reference space acquires specific object, “one prominent Spanish Colonial Revival,” becomes the new object of attention, one conforming to the typical entrance → garden sequence. As Figure 3.3 depicts it, the object of attention in the Reference space is recruited to the Virtual space as a generic exception to houses of its era. The “opening shot” asks that the ego spectator to look in rather than through the house, thereby establishing an altogether different mood for this genre of architecture. This mental space focuses attention on the contrasting viewpoints the projected ego is invited to entertain. These three sentences direct the reader to allocate attention among three distinct scenes corresponding broadly to film art, architectural design, and architectural design as film art. The design of entrances produces cinematic effects. The analogy is readily apparent and easy to maintain, given that both film and architecture fit comfortably in the same semantic domain of aesthetics. Add to this the common background knowledge that most occupants of these California houses were themselves in the movie business. Where does fictivity fit into this analysis? First, the reader is asked to take on the perspective of a film spectator, allowing her attention to be directed by the architect’s design, and within

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Figure 3.3: Completed mental spaces network for the Film Director/Architect blend.

the general framing of conscious experience, the language invites the projected ego to five discernable types of indirect mental contact with this space, each of which is keyed a particular verb. The first form of fictivity, barrier elimination, is prompted by the use of the simple present tense of “to give.” In contrast to the canonical ditransitive construction schema of “X gives Y to Z,” this usage elicits a force dynamic construal in which the noun phrase head (“the front door”) accedes to an unnamed agent’s desire to see what lies beyond, hence the replacement of an object and recipient roles with a location role for a non-canonical use of a ditransitive verb in a transitive construction. The writer construes the relationship between front door and projected ego force dynamically in terms of barrier elimination.

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The second instance of fictivity applies the same force dynamic situation to the subject house, as is evidenced by the many variations on of verb phrase headed by “open” throughout the corpus. In this case, the verb phrase, “opens straight onto,” implies similar barrier elimination, with the adjective “straight” adding the component of immediacy to the scene. The third instance of fictivity adds a manner of motion to the scene, whereby the object at the end of the projected ego’s line of sight, the painting, is construed as “bursting” into the space. Let us try to understand this instance in mental spaces terms. A component of the Presentation space of film art, mise-en-scène, refers to the director’s attempt to arrange scenery, actors, and props, including the means and manner in which actors enter or exit the setting. Hence, it is possible for someone or something to enter a scene abruptly or slowly, loudly or quietly, and so on. It is likewise possible to use such schematizations when describing the effect inanimate objects produce on the beings viewing them as they enter or exit. In the factual world, a person approaches a stationary object. In the fictive world, a projected ego’s attention is being captured by the object, its objective properties and its spatial location make it attentionally salient, effectively “bursting onto the scene,” so to speak. The next instance of fictivity construes the ego’s engagement with the space in speech act terms. The blended concept of an “opening architectural shot” makes an announcement. It announces the intentions of the design. The whole entrance design refers metonymically to the architect’s vision, and that vision is being construed in speech act terms, with the projected ego as the listener. The final instance of fictivity, prompted by the ensuing relative clause, focuses the reader’s attention on the content of the speech act. The verb particle “looks out” and its elliptical antithesis “looks in,” both headed by the noun phrase “the house,” can be characterized as a form of intrinsic fictive orientation with the verb “look,” an idiomatic extension of the other common present tense verb, “faces.” If an object faces a direction, it logically looks in that direction. But again, the inference here is that the house is not the actual gazer but is rather the structure that orients the gazer. In some respects, the use of these middle voice structures depends on the common metonymic inference that reference to the house presupposes the existence of sentient beings occupying it, be they owners or visitors. The five forms of fictivity exemplified in this paragraph focus a reader’s attention on specific aesthetic forms as if that reader were moving through that space. The there-and-then of these architectural scenes is construed in

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terms of the here-and-now of the reader’s conscious awareness: hypostasis (i.e., what is the case there) turns into hypotyposis (as if it were the case here). The language guides the reader in this endeavor, sustaining her attention to the cinematic experience of this space, and within these sustaining moments, invites her to oscillate attention between it and the countervailing cinematic experience of other typical exemplars of this style. I conclude this discussion of fictivity in language by looking at a related form of aesthetic perception from a different source. The paragraph sited below was taken from the text version of an oral presentation provided to patrons at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The discourse grounding is as follows: patrons walk through the Museum’s permanent collection, itself organized by art historical periods. Prominently displayed in a room housing 19th century salon painting is William Bougereau’s Rest (1879), a tableau representing a mother and her two children resting under a tree along a pebble-strewn path, with St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the background. Just below the placard is an icon for headphones and stick figure icons of a nuclear family followed by a number. Patrons with the museum’s CD-ROM can press corresponding number on the keypad (576) and hear a female voice speak about this painting. Oakley (2002) provides an analysis of the entire presentation, but for our purposes, we will focus attention on the final seven utterances: The artist, Bougereau, helps our eyes move around the painting by the way he poses the figures. Start with the sleeping boy’s toes. Glide your eyes along his body to his mother’s feet. Trace her red skirt to her lap where she hugs the younger one. Look down at her green apron with the flowered border. Slide around her head and shoulder to the tall trees. There, through the gap in the leaves, you’ll see the city of Rome. What a lovely spot to rest!

The mental space delegation for these sentences is as follows. Consider first the already salient reference space corresponding to the scene presented in Bougereau’s painting. The speaker’s utterance of the verb “glide,” builds a mental space of frictionless motion. In this scene an entity is in continuous motion along a surface. The clausal subject, “your eyes,” grounds this utterance in the current discourse space, identifying the patron as the projected ego. This first instance of frictionless motion contact verb in the imperative mood creates a virtual scene of fictive contact. In the virtual space, the projected ego (explicitly identified with the addressee) examines static features of the two-dimensional tableau as if they were landmarks along a threedimensional scene beginning at the “sleepy boy’s toes” and ending at “city

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of Rome.” The addressee, who is factually at a distance from the surface, morphs into an agent in sensual contact with the surface. Vision becomes touch, as depicted in figure 3.4.

Grounding

Presentation space

Participants young patrons; family; W it /S Writer/Speaker k (female)

Reference space

Frictionless Motion

Painting

Continuous movement along g a surface

Domestic tableau: three human figures g resting g along g a path near Rome Artists: William Bougereau

Situation

Setting Contact

Cleveland Museum of Art: Permanent Collection; CDROM

Exhibitory Condition

Examining works of art from a distance

Static features in the tableau become landmarks on a surface

Virtual space 1

Projected Ego: scans extended objects along a trajectory

Situational relevance

Contact Projected Ego interacts with two-dimensional tableau as if she were touching it.

Pragmatic g implication: p Patron experiences p the sensual pleasures of aesthtic form from a distance.

Virtual Space 2

Vision becomes touch

Figure 3.4: Mental spaces network for fictive contact.

The language directs the attention of the young patron to “cut” a path through the two-dimensional scene, with the artist himself as the primum mobile. The alteration between frictionless motion verbs (“glide,” “trace”), followed by an sense perception verb particle (“look down”), then frictionless motion again (“slide”), ending with a deictic locative and sense perception verb (“there” and “see”) correlates with the Greater Attention System. First, we should note the prosodic emphasis placed on the frictionless motion verbs. The quiet female voice makes use of vowel lengthening to achieve this

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emphasis, thereby mimetically enacting the quiet scene depicted therein (also, perhaps, propaedeutic for patient and attentive art appreciation at a distance), at the same time that the vowel lengthening technique alerts the addressee’s attention to the quality of the act. The two contiguous clauses headed by the frictionless motion verbs sustain attention to the quality of interaction with this familial tableau. The next utterance controls attention through switching. This form of control is consistent with the typical scenario of purposefully moving along a trajectory, stopping at some point to inspect something of interest along the way, before moving on, as prompted by the next utterance. The final utterance directs attention to the end-point of the journey, allowing the young patron to detect the final landmark, perhaps the final destination of these travelers. As above, this text is exemplifies the role of fictivity in creating hypotyposic scenes through a symbolic medium in relation to a shared visual field. Viewers make mental contact with aesthetic forms as if they were making sensual physical contact with it. On the Psychological Reality of Fictivity The above analysis supports the contention that hypotyposis in aesthetic perception involved the background presence of a projected ego scanning the represented space along vertical and historical axes: “offline” imagination simulates online perception and action. But is there any empirical evidence to support this conjecture? Recent experiments measuring eye movements in language and cognition offers preliminary support for the notion that offline simulation based on attention, memory, and reasoning employ the same “mechanisms” as online perceiving and acting in the word. In other words, simulation of a projected ego moving in an imagined space produces neural correlates of a real ego moving and acting in a real space. One particularly interesting experiment conducted by Spivey et al. (2000), employing a head-band mounted eye tracker, recorded participants eye movements as they faced a white projection screen and listened to spoken descriptions of a dynamic scene. Instructed to imagine standing across the street from a 40-story apartment build, participants then heard the following description: At the bottom there is a doorman in blue. On the 10th floor, a woman is hanging her laundry out the window. On the 29th floor, two kids are sitting on the fire escape smoking cigarettes. On the very top floor, two people are screaming (qtd. in Richardson et al. 2007: 328).

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According to Spivey and his associates, participants’ saccades were reliably in the upward direction in this description. What is more, they found an inverse bias for downward saccades in descriptions of the same apartment building construed in a downward direction. While imagining a building via discourse, participants directed their attention to a point in the physical world as if they were directing their attention to an actual building. The language instructed them to project an ego scanning a real object onto a two dimensional plane. It is, therefore, empirically plausible to suppose that the above types of fictivity direct the attention of a real ego to behave as if she were actually interacting in an imagined space. The same perception action mechanisms enable her attention to be so guided.

The Prosody of Attention In the previous chapter, I presented a discourse scenario of a graduate student invoking the presence of Emmanuel Kant, animating him for several moments, for the purpose of laying bare the structure of a transcendental argument. Figure 3.5 reprints the mental spaces network presented previously, modeling the basic mental architecture of the exchange. This time, however, our focus will be more narrowly discursive, covering select passages from the three-hundred-and-fifty-eight line transcript (presented in its entirety in the appendix). More specifically, this case will focus on what discourse analyst Wallace Chafe calls Intonation Units (IU’s), the prosodic features of which reveal the greater attention system’s role in the construction of meaning. Preservation of the prosodic features of spoken discourse permits analysts to focus productively on the relation between the three attention systems from the speaker’s perspective. Before analysis proper begins, it is worth while reviewing the basic anatomy of an intonation unit. Chafe’s (1994) principal contention is that spoken discourse is produced and comprehended these prosodic “spurts.” These units guide meaning construction because they possess prosodic instructions for understanding what information is prominent in the speaker’s consciousness at any given moment. Hearers then unpack that information according to the prosodic guidelines of the perceived speech. On the production side, intonation units manifest a speaker’s momentary center of interest; thus, the analysis of these units promises to reveal the time-locked relation between thought and expression. A notable finding is that intonation units obey the one new idea

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Figure 3.5: Animating Kant in the classroom.

constraint, suggesting a stable rate at which new information becomes active and salient in conscious awareness in mental spaces (see Chafe 1994: 108– 120). What is more, the existence of prosodic stresses and prominences presupposes attentional functions of alerting, orienting, directing, and harmonizing. For on the reception side, prosody is one of the objective means by which discourse participants come to share common ground. The specific view taken in this study is that an IU helps discourse participants to construct mental spaces and mental space networks that are sufficiently similar across participants in their semantic and pragmatic facets. There are three types of intonation units: substantive, regulatory, and fragmentary (see Chafe 1994: 63–65). While substantive units present ideas, states, and referents, regulatory units perform discourse functions such as taking the floor (e. g., “uh” and “well”), holding the floor (e. g., “um”), signaling agreement and permitting continuance (e. g., “mhm”). Fragmentary units are essentially “false starts,” aborted attempts by the speaker to create

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a substantive IU. All three types are in evidence during the philosophy discussion, but the paucity of regulatory and fragmentary units in proportion to substantive units, as compared to a more equal distribution characteristic of spontaneous conversation, is itself noteworthy, for it suggests strongly that 1) the content is well rehearsed and 2) the division of verbal labor is already well established. The regulatory units in this discourse function less as interpersonal floor holding devices than as ways of controlling and directing attention to different centers of interest within the discussion. Beyond this generalization, however, there is no on-to-one correlation between an IU type and an element of attention, for all IUs activate facets of all three subsystems simultaneously. The present analysis will unpack only some of the possible relationships between vocal prosody, mental spaces, and the greater attention system and does not pretend to present a comprehensive account of their manifold interactions. The transcription in the appendix breaks up the spoken discourse into intonation units based on Chafe’s criteria for a coherent IU (1994: 60). A coherent IU includes perceptible pauses preceding and following a string of words, a detectable pattern of deceleration and acceleration within a string of words, an overall decline in pitch level, the falling or rising pitch contour at the end of an utterance, or creaky voice at the end of a string. There is no set length to a substantive IU. According to Chafe, however, the mean length is around five words but can be lengthened extensively with acceleration, as is indeed the case with several of the graduate student’s utterances (indeed, there are probably many more longer IUs in this discourse than in spontaneous conversation). In this excerpt, beginning 1:15 into the discussion when the participants decide to focus on Kant’s philosophy and ending 15:28 with Kant’s death, the graduate student (hereafter S1) is the primary speaker, so much so that the event can be more accurately described as an interactive monologue than dialogue (excepting, of course, the exchange with S3 at the end). I would like to focus on particular qualities of S1’s voice, most of which are idiosyncratic to her, categorized structurally as expression-substance. These prosodic features are not willy-nilly happenings that just identify this one female speaker as a singular being. On closer inspection and in the context of the entire exchange, systematic functional properties of these features begin to emerge, functions of which the discourse participants are at best only dimly aware. The following analysis focuses on five prosodic features of S1’s voice: vocal deceleration, sing-song pronunciation, intonation peaks, stop-clipped terminals, and creaky voice.

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The first prosodic phenomenon under discussion is deceleration. I define deceleration as a noticeable slowing down of speech relative to a baseline prosodic momentum to which interlocutors are already attuned. This baseline momentum is not a quantitatively established average, but an intuitively established sense of the S1’s speed. S1’s speech can be characterized as fluid but not particularly fast; therefore, moments of verbal deceleration stand out in basrelief. The first instance of deceleration occurs in utterance 5 as a completion of a yes-no question(noted as >> >Kant today?>the rules unify the gameour consciousness effect occur

Causative Weak Despite Strong Despite Hindrance Shifting Impingement Shifting Balance Onset Letting Extended Letting

+ + +/+/-

+ + -/+ -/+ + +

>

• •

•

> >

>

• •

> >

•

/> •/> •/> > •

Table 4.1: The eight force dynamic patterns.

Talmy (ibid.: 464 – 467) also identifies patterns of introjection and extrajection. Introjection entails dividing a single referent into separate AGO and ANT sub-parts, a common tactic for dramatizing internal conflict, as exemplified in (10) above and (11) below. Extrajection entails integrating separate scenes into a single AGO /ANT relationship and is typically used for structuring abstract events not intrinsically understood in terms of force dynamic resistance, as exemplified in (12). (11) The young Confederate soldier could not bring himself to fire on his Union brother. (12) Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1865.

Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Construal Talmy himself (ibid.: 452–455) anticipates the general application of force dynamics to the study of rhetoric and argumentation in the domain of discourse, when he suggests that languages possess a specific range of closed-class expressions and constructions for construing “argument space.” English, and presumably all other languages, possess force dynamic “logic-gaters” whose functions are to “limn out the rhetorical framework, to direct illocutionary flow, and to specify the logical tissue” (ibid.: 452). Relevant expressions in English include “yes, but,” “nevertheless,” “granted,” “on the contrary,” all of which can function as means of concession and refutation in discourse, each of which exploits the shifting-balance-of-strength pattern.64 64 The precise role logic-gaters play in Bush’s “Preface” will be folded into the analysis as need arises rather than treated separately.

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Talmy claims that force dynamics ‘limns out’ argument space relates semantics to the rhetorical tradition. For Cognitive Semanticists, construal is a principal function of language, and grammars provide resources for mentally construing situations in alternative ways (cf. Langacker 1987: passim). Rhetorical theorists, such as the Belgians and Burke, likewise focus on construal, as they place equal if not greater weight on how a speaker or writer expresses an idea or argument.

Force Dynamic Analysis of the Preface to Bush’s National Security Strategy Fifteen of sixty-six sentences comprising the Preface signed by President Bush65 appear to rely on facets of the force dynamic system. Taken individually, each sentence analyzed below exploits a force dynamic pattern operating in the gesture-based domains of physical, psychological, social, and speech act domains and their extensions into the practical-, exchange-, and discourse-based domains; that is to say, the bodily experience of force and counterforce frames the way we attend to, become conscious of, and remember extra-corporeal and collective experiences of social drives, powers, compulsions, repulsions, constraints, and the like. These force dynamic effects are instrumental in presenting the current global situation in terms of good-versus-evil, with the United States government and citizenry as agents of good. The goal is to articulate a foreign policy and stance mirroring this situation. The argument in the Preface follows an seven step trajectory: First, Bush argues for the emergence of a victorious single example for all nations to imitate, an “argument from the model” (see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 362–365); second, he claims the United States’ preeminent position as democratic hegemon, an argument from authority (ibid.: 305–310); third, he names global terrorists as the current threat to the United States and other “freedom loving” peoples, the necessary complementary argument “from the anti-model” (ibid.: 366–368); fourth, Bush discusses the means by which terrorists seek to do harm and calls on the great powers to stand united against “enemies of freedom,” an argument of inclusion of part into whole (ibid.: 234–241); fifth, he argues that the United States should “extend” the benefits 65 I will refer to Bush as the “agent of persuasion.” This is licensed by the fact that “Bush” functions as Goffman’s (1974: 516–524) “principal,” the person responsible for the content of an utterance or text, even though he is probably not its “author.”

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of freedom across the globe, an argumentative technique known as “an argument of unlimited development” (ibid.: 287–293); sixth, he calls on all free nations as accountable and responsible for stopping terrorists and weapons proliferation, an act and essence argument such that doing X reveals one’s essence (ibid.: 327–331); and seventh, he embraces international alliances by tapping “freedom” as the ultimate defining and necessary value, the rhetorical tactic extensively commented on by Burke as the deployment of “terms of ultimate identification” (1996 [1945]: 328–333). Before excavating into the sentence structure of this document, we need to take a quick survey of the semantic site, with the Belgian’s doctrine of presence as our initial tool. Recall that they cite epithets as a conspicuous verbal device for signaling interestedness and point of view (i. e., Orestes as “mother slayer”). When one comes upon the Preface, the first thing likely to attract attention is the sheer number of times Bush employs the appositional phrases, “forces of freedom” and “enemies of freedom,” along with the epithets, “freedom,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “tyranny,” and “totalitarianism,” as agentive noun phrases. (This in contrast to earlier NSSRs by Clinton, Bush I, and Reagan.) Taken collectively, these epithets bear some resemblance to McGee’s notion of the ideograph, a “higher order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal” (1980: 16). In this document, these entities more often than not align with ANT and AGO roles in a force dynamic relationship, the affective result of which may be to focus reader’s attention on the euphoric and dysphoric facets of national identity and international conflicts and alliances, serving as warrants for the exercise of power that may otherwise and in other circumstances seem overly aggressive or even iniquitous. An exhaustive sentence-by-sentence analysis of every force dynamic pattern would take up too much space. Therefore, I will limit the analysis to seven instances that correlate with the seven parts of the argument just outlined. With the opening sentence, Bush makes this good-versus-evil axiomatic system present with reference to the recent “great struggles.”66 [1] The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with the decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. 66 Italicized type highlights force dynamic properties and sentences in square brackets are numbered according to the order of appearance in the original. See appendix.

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Bush sets the stage by using the schematic struggle between the United States and its principal enemies in the previous centuries’ wars: Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet expansionism. The results of these struggles become a conceptual template for subsequent articulations of present-day foreign relations. Several things are worth noting. First, the phrasal subject, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism,” acquires its meaning from a series of punctual events involving two opposed entities. Covertly, one of the participants maybe identified with the present “speaker” in the discourse grounding space and the “victor” in the topic Reference space, with selective projection of finite struggles from a force dynamically inflected Presentation space into a Virtual conflict space. More specific to the force dynamic analysis, the composite nature of this event frame highlights a secondary steady-state pattern of Shifting Balance of Strength, with the plural “great struggles” implying many stalemate contests between two entities until one gains enough strength to overcome the other. In blending theory parlance, this force dynamic pattern provides the frame for the emergent structure of the Virtual conflict space that likewise sets the semantic conditions of the geopolitical narrative favored by the present administration: the United States emerged as the single remaining superpower. Readers easily identify the two entities in conflict through their euphemistic and dysphemistic designations; however, the technical designations as AGO and ANT remain ambiguous, as both entities figure prominently in the clausal profile. If grammar be our guide, then one can designate the nominalization “great struggles” as the AGO , manifesting an inherent tendency toward action, with the ANT remaining implicit as some unspecified entity that stops the AGO from realizing its tendency. Specification of the ANT and its role in the shifting balance of strength scenario is irrelevant, as attention focuses on the end-state of affairs. Further analysis of the semantic force dynamic meaning of “liberty” and “forces of freedom” does bear comment as précis to additional analysis. In almost every instance under analysis in this document, save perhaps one, the schematic meaning of meaning “liberty” entails that (sets of ) entities manifest a desire to be ‘free from external control’ (also known as the doctrine of “negative liberty”). Politically, the instantiated meaning implies that governments intend to ‘refrain’ from controlling its citizenry. What is more, this term is often used as the name for the underlying principle of government. These profiles provide semantic and pragmatic motivation for assigning “liberty” the ANT role, manifesting an intrinsic tendency to block

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an AGO . It is, therefore, possible (and I would argue preferred) to construe “totalitarianism” as an agonist being perpetually encountered by the antagonistic forces of “liberty,” in effect foregrounding the ANT as a protective barrier. In essence, a Hindrance force dynamic pattern applies to the openclass terms but rides piggy-back on the Shifting Balance of Strength pattern governing the entire clause. This opening sentence evidences a force dynamic ‘microcosm’ of the ‘macrocosmic’ structure of argumentative space. The initial role assignment of totalitarianism as AGO and United States as ANT fits with the traditional defensive ideology, hence also fitting with the rhetorical expectation that the United States construes itself as a peaceful nation, willing to defend itself and its allies. The second role assignment of the United States as AGO (leaving the ANT role unspecified and open to interpretation) prepares the way for justifying a policy shift that is prima facie offensive, namely that the United States should act as a force for the good (i. e., freedom, democracy and free enterprise), an implicit gesture toward the doctrine of “positive liberty.” And it is imperative for Bush’s purpose that readers first conceptualize the defensive (antagonistic) posture before conceptualizing any offensive posture, as ‘liberty’ (i. e., governments that refrain from control) is being construed as an end (cf. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 273–291). An offensive (agonistic) posture of United States foreign policy can only be justified as means to this end. The altruistic end, however, is the subject of the next very next sentence. Sentence [2] evidences two patterns in sequence, beginning with Hindrance and ending with Onset Letting, in which a stronger ANT permits a weaker AGO to realize its intrinsic force tendency. This complex of patterns is particularly useful for construing an idealized relationship between governors and governed. [2] In the twenty first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. Bush construes “the nations” as protectors. On analysis, the ANT blocks (hindrance) an unspecified AGO who wishes to destroy human rights, and political and economic freedom. Bush ends this sentence by construing “nations” as ideally those that allow their citizens to engage in free enterprise. In analytic terms, “nations” is being construed as an ANT that engages

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in onset letting, as prompted by the verb “unleash,” such that enactment of political and economic policies (typically conceptualized in durative an ongoing) prompts readers to conceptualize them as punctual and immediate, something akin to the release of potential energy in the AGO, “their people.” Thus, good nations protect their people against external harm but do not do anything to hinder industry. This argument also depends on extrajection – of dividing a whole nation into constituent parts: “government” and “people.” This analysis leads me to conjecture that the Hindrance pattern itself constitutes one of the dominant modes of conceptualizing national sovereignty. Bush begins the second paragraph of the Preface touting the United States’ preeminent position in the world, but immediately after claiming such power in sentence [5], claims an inherent disposition against using it, a brand of argument of essence outlined in The New Rhetoric (1969: 327– 331). The analysis suggests that a force dynamic pattern of internal restraint signals an altruistic intention governing the exercise of power, as becomes evident in sentence [6]. [5] Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. [6] In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. Here a single referent, the United States, divides into two entities: the AGO possessing the desire and power to “get what it wants” and the ANT possessing the necessary strength to restrain the weaker AGO from wielding that power, a classic Hindrance pattern common to intra-psychological expressions of personal restraint extended to the geopolitical domain. Framed by the idiom “in keeping with,” the ANT role, identified with “our heritage and principles,” blocks the US from using its power inappropriately. It blocks unjust actions, calling attention to the referent’s inherent moral purity. It makes sense that Bush wishes to connect and explain any exercise of power as a manifestation of “our heritage” and to deflect attention away from the selfish tendencies of the AGO. Bush construes the United States as the most powerful nation among lawful nations, with the benevolent United States figured against the rest of the world, allies or enemies. The next sentence is probably one of the most noteworthy and controversial, as the italicized phrase is used again in the preface and repeated throughout the entire document, and furthermore taken up in speeches by

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administration officials and Bush himself during the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq war. It reads: [7] We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. Bush argues for a foreign policy situation of “balance,” a steady state opposition of forces signaling stasis. The notion of balance in this social-political context typically entails the United States and its allies keeping in constant check the agonistic forces of its enemies. It is this vigilant opposition to these “challenges” that guarantees political and economic liberty. At least this appears to be the intended reading. Bush seems to be arguing that nations need to establish a “balance of power” as a precondition for human liberty. The reasoning in [7], then, is similar to that of the “protecting” and “unleashing” force dynamic pattern, only that the two patterns of blocking and letting are construed as co-extensive and durational, as evidence by the consistent use of the simple present tense throughout. Instead of a punctual temporal event, a steady state balance is construed as a condition necessary for and coexisting with the activities falling under the heading “human freedom.” Should the balance of power shift to the enemies, human freedom will cease to exist, thus permitting the use of force to “create” a balance of power, here the superposition of a Causative pattern in which the subject, “we,” brings into existence the conditions of freedom. This force dynamic pattern may underlie the semantic structure of so-called “positive liberty,” a political doctrine in which citizens’ actions create the conditions for their own governance.67 Recall that Bush began the preface by identifying our past enemy, totalitarian regimes, as a point of contrast to the present-day enemy. Sentences 13–15 characterize the present-day enemy, with the aim of redefining the very nature of the present threat. [13] Enemies of the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. 67 It may strike some readers as noteworthy, even surprising how easily it is to extend this doctrine to the actions of governments themselves, but it is really a straightforward case of semantic extension.

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[14] Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. [15] Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us. With the events of September 11, 2001, firmly planted in the audience’s mind (later to be explicitly invoked), readers have little trouble inferring the plausibility of this kind of threat. Sentence [15] stands out in bas relief for the conspicuous way it presents readers with a semantic anomaly: coupling the object noun phrase “open societies” with the nonfinite verb phrase “to penetrate.” The object of penetration implies force dynamic resistance, which the adjectival noun modifier “open society” ostensibly belies. It may seem odd for terrorists to have to do anything special to penetrate something that is “open.” The essential feature of the United States is to be open, not to erect barriers for the free movement of individuals within and without (this in contrast to the hindrance model of sovereignty). Read this way, the Bush administration wants to argue for a new situation in which an essential characteristic of the United States (its openness) leaves its citizens vulnerable. On analysis, ANT puts up no resistance to AGO. The final clause, “to turn the power of modern technology against us,” depends on the integration of two patterns: Shifting Balance of Strength and Strong Despite. In this scenario, a weaker AGO gains strength directly from the ANT and uses that strength to overcome it. “Shadowy networks” and “terrorists” is the AGO pitted against the ANT, now identified with “open societies” and “America.” Bush stresses from the beginning that the United States is the world leader in modern technology – especially in matters military – but in this case technological advancement is predicated as an essential property of open societies generally. Bush is safe in assuming that most readers would assent to the factual accuracy of this notion; hence, it is a powerful starting point for establishing this new condition where the weak can become the strong. This sentence cluster prepares readers for the explicit argument advanced in [45]. [45] The events of September 11, 2001 taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. [46] Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers.

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[47] Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders. The warrant for the claim in [45] derives directly from the force dynamic logic of [13]–[15] in which “shadowy individuals” from weak states penetrate open societies and uses their technological superiority against them. Notice, however, that Bush does not want readers to assign too great a causal role to poverty. Thus, he explicitly denies any direct causal link between poverty and terrorism. However, Bush is also aware that it would seem unreasonable to deny the connection altogether. The relation between sentences [45] and [46] exhibits the kind of meta-discursive move outlined by Talmy (2000a: 452– 455), with “yet” performing the logic-gater function of conceding-the-point. Therefore, the denial can be glossed force dynamically as ‘I want to deny a direct link between X and Y, but the force of reason dictates that an indirect causal connection exists between X and Y.’ Bush then construes the indirect link between the effects of poverty of the state with sentence [46]. Here our force dynamic analysis begins with the verb phrase “can make.” The combination of modal auxiliary with causal verb profiles the ANT of “poverty,” “weak institutions” and “corruption,” acting against the AGO, “weak states” whose intrinsic tendency is for stasis (read as stability). The result is the “weak state” is left having to accept that which it would deny, given the presumably universal appeal of freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. The present analysis cannot pass over comment on the rhetorical presence of adjective “vulnerable” as epitomizing the condition of weak states. In fact, sentence [46] presents us with an idiosyncratic meaning of “weak.” It simultaneously characterizes (through introjection) an intrinsic quality of certain states (e. g., Afghanistan) and (through a subsequent extrajection), a resultant state of vulnerable nations. They are weakened internally by a corrupting ANT force and subsequently weakened by corrupting external AGO forces (perhaps of the same kind). If a sovereign fits the profile of a strong ANT capable of hindering the efforts of smaller non-sovereign groups, then it should easily block these destabilizing forces. In short, weak states are not sovereign because they cannot hinder forces from within or without. These sentences shift the focus of attention onto specific nations who seemingly cannot “govern themselves.” Afghanistan notwithstanding, Bush leaves it to the reader to infer the identity of the so-called “weak states.”

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The final objects of analysis focus on Bush’s admonishments to free nations. They read: [52] In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities. [53] Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror. [54] Nations that depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. [55] Nations that seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well spent. [56] For freedom to thrive, accountability must be expected and required. In the fronted non-finite adverbial clause of [52], Bush recapitulates his conception of the balance of power. It recapitulates the present and future conditions for peace. In this group of sentences, a single reference, “nations,” is divided, through introjection, into AGO and ANT sub-parts in four mini-dramas of national security – enjoying freedom, deterring nuclear proliferation, maintaining international stability, and in seeking foreign aid. All manifest a force dynamic tendency toward stasis and stability, but the repeated use of the modal “must” as a series of speech acts bears further scrutiny, for its presence can prompt for two different force dynamic meanings (cf. Mulder 2007: 308). On the one hand, it can take on a compulsive meaning, eliciting a causative pattern that is the underlying semantics of exercitive and other like speech acts; on the other hand, it can take on a directive meaning, eliciting a pattern not fully accounted for in Talmy’s version in which the ANT influences and constrains the range of options (directions) available to the AGO without causing or hindering motion itself. In these instances, the semantic potential of “must” presents readers with two contrasting varieties, each of which is subject to the influence of point of view. The second meaning aligns with the speaker’s perspective insofar as he can deny issuing an order. He is simply influencing but not determining the course of other nations, and this is to be taken as the preferred intentional stance, for he is simply expressing a wish or a desire, not a command; the mood is optative. It may be (and if the general reaction from the foreign press and media is any guide, then the dominant reading) that the dynamics of causation and determination emerges as the dominant interpretation, especially if readers

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take an addressee perspective in a generic speech act situation. Bush, the speaker, is issuing an order; the mood is imperative. Attention oscillates between these two force dynamic meanings of “must” and is contingent on the orienting perspective taken at any given moment. The final interpretation of overall tone of this document hinges on which one gains salience in the public imagination. Whether wish or command, this move seems designed to align nations along a stability axis, with stable nations able to prevent terrorism and weapons proliferation, over against unstable or uncooperative nation states. The rhetorical implication of [56] is that nations may be held “accountable” by several methods, military intervention by “the forces of freedom” being one of them. In any event, the ANT forces keeping the nation stable and whole should come from within but can be imposed from without. Summary: Force Dynamics and the Rhetoric of Argument We have seen that specific force dynamic patterns, some of which entail onset, punctual, steady state events, while others entail extended causal or letting events over great “expanses” of time. These force dynamic patterns create local effects of struggles between “forces of freedom” and its enemies to generate the desired inferences about past National Security policies. A simple register of force dynamic patterns distributed among these seventeen sentences reveals a coherent rhetorical strategy. [1] [2] [5–6] [7] [13–15] [47–47] [52–56]

Shifting Balance of Strength Hindrance → Onset Letting Introjection →Hindrance→Causative (negative) Hindrance [Causative] Strong Despite Hindrance→ Strong Despite Causative ← →Directive

Bush’s “Preface” deploys the semantics of force to generate the strong impression that the United States will not only defend itself against attack but will forcibly engage so-called “weak states” before they can mount an attack. What is more, the motivation for such action stems from a desire to promote democracy and free enterprise. Force dynamic patterns help the administration profile the United States variously as a benevolent causative antagonist, determined preventive antagonist, and, perhaps most contro-

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versially, a well intentioned agonist, whose purpose is to make democracies. As demonstrated in the above analyses, force dynamic patterns perform important rhetorical functions. They are crucial in understanding how the local discourse evokes specific imagery for rhetorical goals, such as terrorists as entities with an inherent disposition to act, or the government as entities charged with preventing certain actions and enabling others, both of which suggest a productive alliance between the force dynamic patterns and a purpose dominated set of motives. Force dynamics is a schematic imaging system for construing discourse actors in relation to one another, and therefore offers a useful perspective and method of understanding how specific linguistic features can satisfy tactical aims of achieving presence and identification. These patterns play a critical role in structuring concepts at the local lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels, which in turn produce strategic effects at the global rhetorical level. To the extent that force dynamic patterns are part of the greater attention system, their use in an analysis of an important document of obvious historical importance is an important first step in understanding the conceptual nature of rhetorical effect. They are key components to a general exploration in the way rhetorical agents direct and harmonize attention.

The Rhetoric of Compliance: The Census 2000 Campaign One day, in the final months of 1999 as I was passing a law office on my way to my favorite cafe, I spied in their window a poster of a large mail-in questionnaire with the Census 2000 logo above it and a superimposed pen poised to fill it out. In large black letters just below the image reads the following message: This is your future. Don’t leave it blank. This was the first of many times I saw or heard this exhortation during the last few months of 1999 and the first six months of the year 2000. The census is now concluded and other events and messages presently invade the semiotic landscape of my hometown, but this one is worth examining for three reasons. First, it exemplifies a predominant rhetorical practice in modern industrialized cultures: the dissemination of the same message over time and across space. Second, its continuous presence suggests that traditional models of the rhetorical situation with their sharply defined sense of

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subjectivity and occasioning are of limited use in a culture where the orator (or “rhetorical will”) proffering the message appears to be both everywhere and nowhere. It is precisely this odd feeling of an omnipresent “rhetorical will” addressing everyone everywhere that epitomizes what it means to belong to the postmodern, Western public sphere. Third, the message itself, a prime example of the rhetorical figure prolepsis,68 captures a general characteristic of the modern rhetorical will as it relates to our penchant for entertaining hypotyposic scenarios. Method The method of investigation is both introspective and archival. The analysis I am about to provide depends significantly on my own encounters with this message as it relates to information gathered from Census Bureau documents about the history and strategy of the campaign. The evidence I offer may be considered weak, insofar as introspection is widely regarded as an unreliable method of investigating specific kinds of cognitive processes. On the other hand, this kind of introspective method has its defenders, both in the social and neurosciences. Within the social sciences, Anthony F. C. Wallace (2004: 17–18) defends introspection as an unavoidable aspect of ethnography. Within neuroscience and neuropsychology, Bernard Baars (2003) surveys recent brain imaging studies focusing on human consciousness that show significant and repeated congruence between fMRI findings and the subjective reports of the subject’s own accounts of their experiences under investigation, suggesting that conscious mental introspection does indeed reveal mind. In addition, there are the many testimonials of linguists who note that introspection is central to language analysis (cf. Talmy 2000a–b). Therefore, introspection and historical reconstruction are legitimate and valuable methods so long as one is cognizant of the limitations. The Census 2000 Campaign Should one have heard the radio announcements, one would know that the arguments advanced for filling out the census is that the information determines the amount of government aid states, counties, cities, and towns 68 Technically, prolepsis is the name of a figure whose function is to foresee and forestall objections (cf. Lanham, 1991: 120–121). The Census2000 slogan fits this definition, inasmuch as the rhetorical objective is to elicit scenarios of foreseeing the untoward consequences of not participating in census gathering.

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receive for federal projects and how many representatives each state can send to the House of Representatives. Hence, failing to fill out the census form may have untoward consequences if the population of one’s region goes unrepresented. During the 6 months or so of the Census 2000 campaign, I repeatedly encountered this message as I walked across Case Western Reserve University’s campus; as I drove my car and listened to the radio; as I watched television; as I read the newspaper. In short, as I selectively attend to the sum total of my lived environment, or “mazeway” (cf. Wallace 2004: 17). The reason I encountered this message so frequently correlates with a 10.5 million dollar investment by the Census Bureau in an advertising and promotional campaign. The Bureau spent so much time, money, and effort in anticipation of a general fear among US residents that the personal information will be made accessible to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their promotional efforts did pay off to the extent that the 2000 Census enjoyed an improved response rate of roughly 2% over the previous 1990 Census (Census 2000 Publicity Office, 2002, § 2). The analysis of this campaign brings into prominent view the processes by which cultures sustain themselves and change themselves by showing how individuals within it might imagine the future. From a rhetorical perspective, these imaginings require constant construction, completion, and elaboration of mental space networks, with some of the specific spaces being “blends” of other spaces in an array of other mental spaces. Alerting & Orienting: Census 2000 Analysis In contrast to a speech in an auditorium, the Census 2000 campaign saturated many public spaces with a short, crisp, and memorable montage of word and image that looks nothing like the extended canonical forms of reasoning alluded to in Aristotle’s theory of civic discourse. If a message or set of relevant messages saturates that landscape, it is more likely to claim the attention (i. e., become active or salient at opportune moments) of those who dwell therein. Recall that alerting refers to a person’s general readiness to process items, while orienting refers to a person’s disposition to select particular kinds of items over others. An internal document describing the media campaign for the Census 2000 reveals that the Census Bureau and their advertisers created more than 250 different TV, radio, print, outdoor, and Internet advertisements in 17 languages, each of which carried some version of the tagline, This is

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your future. Don’t leave it blank. It estimates that individuals read or heard the message an average of over 50 times during the six months of the media campaign – from January 1, 2000 to April 15, 2000. In addition, it estimates that 99% of all US residents had heard or seen the message (Census 2000 Publicity Office, 2002, § 3). The persistent, punctuated appearance of this message created a situation where residents all over the US were continually exposed to the message. The massage invaded their daily existence so that the main slogan became a permanent background condition that could easily become the selected object of attention. My own experience can serve as a guide. I certainly recall hearing the slogan during commercial breaks on all channels, seeing the signs posted on sides of buses as they sped past me, on roadside billboards as I traveled on the interstate highways, seeing posters peppering storefronts and legal offices. Evidence gathered from the Census Bureau’s website strongly suggests that one saw these posters plastered on legal offices, stores, and community buildings in ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods with the same message in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, and Arabic. In short, during the first six months of the year 2000, it was nearly impossible for any resident of the United States not to be exposed to the Census 2000 message. This is not to suggest that everyone paid attention to it; rather, it is to suggest that the material conditions made it likely that a significant number of residents were alerted and oriented to the message. This is especially true of the messages addressed to specific ethnic and national groups, for many would notice that the exhortation was in a language other than English. In a semiotic landscape saturated with English messages, messages in a different language appearing in an advertisement presenting a census form in English are likely to enjoy what theorists of attention call a visual “pop-out” effect: the automatic narrowing of attention to an “oddball” item. What is more, the default message that appears in an ethnic community with many signs in, for instance, Polish, will be marked for attention because the slogan blends with the ethnic semiotic landscape but with the aim of preparing the audience to read a message in English. In addition to the strict controls over the content of the message, there were strict rules governing the presentation of the message. First, the tagline cannot appear without the “form and pen” graphic or without one of the approved versions of the Census 2000 logo. Second, the logo itself can only be displayed in certain colors and the logo may not be less than 5/8" of an inch wide. Any deviation from these rules must be approved by the Census Bureau (Census 2000 Style Guidelines, 2002). Variations in the form do

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occur, as we shall see. Certain posters addressed to ethnic and national groups, such as residents of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, the American Samoa Community, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands contain the form graphic without the pen, perhaps because the dominant mode of compliance for Census canvassers was to record the spoken responses. Alerting and orienting influence what can be selected for focal attention, thereby influencing the kinds of reference points from which addressees will be exhorted to imagine the future ten years from now. Detecting and the Census 2000 Campaign Tagline The above analysis of the semiotic landscape provides suggestive evidence of what messages are likely to “resonate” within a given culture at any time: those messages which repeatedly saturate the public landscape and which are distinguishable from other persistent messages are likely to direct our attention. It is for the purposes of detecting, sustaining and controlling attention that mental spaces and blending framework comes in as a useful analytic model. Let us examine the poster addressed to Rural America and assume that it would have appeared in a small village with little signage vying for attention. Let us further assume that the very first image to catch the addressee’s eye is the painting by J.C. Huntington, where selective attention focuses on images of trains and little red schoolhouses, metonyms of rural life. In addition, let us assume that the addressee subsequently follows a Western reading path from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. It is likely that the addressee will first examine that which appears in the upper left hand corner of the first piece of text, followed by the tagline just below it, followed by the form and pen image. He will then proceed to reexamine the print of “School Scene” and followed by the slogan How America knows what America Needs just below it.69 This initial analysis assumes this general reading path, as described in Kress and van Leuween’s (1996) grammar of visual design. The Grounding space corresponds to the perceptual moment when the addressee sees the tagline and image, where the reader interacts with the text. The icon of the form and corresponding tagline serve as the anchor for the mental space network. Almost instantaneously, the addressee is invited to integrate the concept of a blank form with some conception of the fu69 Images of the Rural America Poster can be retrieved at the Census 2000 Market Posters webpage:

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ture. On analysis, such a conceptualization entails the construction of three different mental spaces in dialectic interaction with the Grounding space, as depicted in figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1: Initial mental spaces network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on virtual space.

From the initial state of the Grounding space issues the Reference space. In this space, the form and pen icon functions as a unit of selection for representing the familiar act of “filling out a Census form.” We can then say that selective attention to the left side of the poster prompts the addressee (me) to construct a mental space for the Census Form. In this space, the addressee becomes a respondent who completes the questionnaire.70 Temporally, this space corresponds to the immediate present or near future. Although variable, the represented temporal duration of this activity is usually imaged in terms of minutes rather than hours. 70 Notice that the scenario attributed to the Reference space in this analysis is essentially the same one attributed to the Grounding space in the analysis of utterance (2). The reason: the analysis of (2) presupposes the scenario as actually occurring in the hereand-now of discourse production as opposed to being represented as part of discursive there-and-then.

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Once constructed, this mental space can be as sparse or as detailed as imagination will allow. The advertisers hope that the mental scenario in the space will be construed as easy, painless, and non-intrusive. Readers can infer this because it is usually a salient part of the situational relevance that the perceived inconvenience of filling out such forms is a prominent reason for non-compliance. The activation of this space corresponds linguistically to demonstrative pronoun “this,” allowing the addressee to apply the new category “future” to it. However, the predicate “your future” prompts the addressee to construct a different mental space, the Presentation space, or the mental scenario through which one comes to understand the reference. At this point in the analysis, all we have is a reference to a Census form and to the vague emotionally resonant notion of “the future.” If we assume that the addressee has working knowledge of the Census as information gathering every ten years, then we can further assume that the meaning of “future” corresponds to the generic scenario about what may happen to the addressee and his community in the next ten years; hence, the argumentative relevance of notions relating to self- and community-interests. 71 At this very moment, however, immediate attention shifts to a third mental space, the Virtual (or Blended) space. Selective attention focuses in less than three seconds – the time it takes to read and understand a clause (cf. Pöppel, 1997; Pöppel & Schwender 1993) – on the Virtual space, which can be classified as a performative blend (L. Brandt: in preparation). Represented as thick black circle to underscore its salience, this space construes the punctual act of filling out the form is endowed with direct causal force. What is, upon reflection, an exceedingly indirect and complex relationship – filling out a Census form and future regional development – is being compressed (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 113–139) into a direct causal relationship, the illocutionary relevance of which is to describe the act in the Reference space, the pragmatic implication of which is that it is a task deserving one’s urgent attention. The completed form represents the respondent’s identity (reference space) and completing the form determines her or his future (virtual space). Now let us examine the second clause. The imperative, Don’t leave it blank, generates an alternate scenario of not filling out the Census form. At 71 This analysis posits an addressee with easily accessible relevant background knowledge about census taking in the United States, namely that the Census occurs every ten years. Voluntary recall of esoteric knowledge, such as the history of census taking in the United States or the specific uses different government agencies put it to, is not assumed.

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this point, the addressee in the Grounding space is cast in the role of the recalcitrant respondent, effectively shifting attention from the performative Virtual space to its negative counterpart in the Virtual 2 space, or the space containing the negative scenario aptly glossed as a “blank future.” In the Virtual 2 space, but not in the other spaces, the person does not exist, because, apropos of in the virtual performance space, one’s existence is assured only to the extent that one provides information to the Census Bureau. This “blank future” blend creates emergent structure, an existing addressee who does not exist according to the Census Bureau. Shifting attention to the Virtual 2 space of virtual negation changes the illocutionary relevance and pragmatic implication of the entire mental space network. As figure 4.2 depicts the current rhetorical situation, attention to a “blank future” alters the illocutionary force of the entire utterance, such that the addressee will likely interpret this slogan as both a request and a warning, with the pragmatic implication that the addressee’s needs, interests, and concerns will go unaddressed in the future.

Figure 4.2: Completed mental space network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on virtual space 2.

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The two states of the mental space network together provide the conceptual basis of prolepsis: they create scenarios that bring future consequences/effects into the present, for purposes of influencing future civic acts. The initial blend has a positive or neutral emotional valence, whereas the second blend has a strongly negative emotional valence because one’s very existence is called into question. What happens to someone with a blank future? The immediate meaning of this slogan is to first construe a typified and mundane activity as a relation of succession (i.e., cause) and immediately metamorphose the same scenario into a relation of coexistence, such that the blank form brought before the addressee’s eyes comes to signify a “blank future.” Rhetorically, the implicit appeal is to a what Black (1970) has termed a “second persona,” a future self who fulfills her or his civic duty by admonishing against becoming what Wander (1984) has termed a “third persona,” a future self who fails to fulfill his or her civic duty. At this point, we have three persons active in the discourse ground: the actual addressee, a potential compliant census participant, and a third, potential non-compliant census participant. Sustaining: The Census 2000 Campaign and Cost Benefits Analysis The message invades selective attention only to the extent that it conveys urgency or obligation to the addressee, providing a vague sense, as the advertisers and bureau describe it, that the addressee has everything to gain and nothing to lose by completing it but has nothing to gain and everything to lose by not completing it. Further imaginings of the desirable or undesirable consequences requires sustained attention, which, in this analysis, means the construction and linking of additional conceptual structure to the Presentation space, which is now the primary focus of attention, as depicted in figure 4.3. Other advertisements made mention of public schools, services for the elderly, roads, and public transportation. Therefore, the Presentation space provides the addressee the opportunity to “flesh out” this nebulous notion of “the future” in its positive and negative versions in the Virtual and Virtual 2 spaces by considering the many events or actions that may happen over the next ten years now causally linked to the addressee’s immediate behavior. On the positive side, an accurate Census could bring more money to public schools, or increased government representation and local, state, and national levels. On the negative side, an inaccurate Census could deny money and resources to public schools, at the same time that it decreases

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Presentation Space

Reference Space

Participants Addressee

Respondent’s Future over the next ten years

Slogan

Respondent is to provide the bureau with information related to socially relevant categories: race, ethnicity, gender, etc.

Situation

Setting

Enlightened SelfInterest and other pragmatic arguments

Citizen noncompliance

Completing the Census 2000 form determines respondent’s future

Virtual Space 1 (performance blend)

Situational Relevance

Argumentative Relevance

A blank future Consequences of noncompliance: no future

Virtual Space 2 (negation)

Illocutionary act: Directive, ”Don’t not do this!”

Pragmatic Implication: Citizen connects the form to his or her future.

Figure 4.3: Elaboration of mental spaces network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on presentation space.

government representation, ensuring that your own interests and the interests of your community go unaddressed in the next decade. If we link this analysis to the poster, the images of trains and schoolhouses presented in Huntington’s painting would prime the activation of these categories. In summary, the Virtual space creates a causal scenario that, with sustained attention, can be elaborated by creating further specifying mental spaces corresponding to representations of future public works. Sustained attention, however, requires an investment in time and cognitive effort that is difficult to maintain for more long stretches of time, if at all. Therefore, I conclude that these ruminations outlined above are rare occurrences among the general population and more likely characterizes the kind of meaning making activities endemic to rhetorical hermeneutics itself. This fact, however, does not invalidate the analysis, for sustained attention builds on the exact same mental space needed for understanding the “gist” of the message. In other words, the meaning of (1) requires the construction of a

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positive and negative version of the same virtual performance scenario, however ‘monochromatic’ and ephemeral it may be. Controlling: Census 2000 analysis This pervasive message was not intended to disrupt daily life, such that addressee’s would be so preoccupied with it that they could not complete other quotidian tasks. My own experience suggests that the optimal persuasive condition that the Bureau could hope for is that addressees connect the filling out of the form to everyday existence. One reconstructed encounter of my own can serve as an example. I encountered this message when walking from my office to a classroom across campus. As I was walking, I saw the sign on the bus and began to think about how public transportation in Cleveland might improve if I tell them how I travel to and from work each day. (Sure enough, question 23 of the long form asks this very question.) Will we receive more funds for public transportation if enough respondents put an “x” next to “bus or trolley bus”? I also thought of what might happen if my fellow patrons of public transportation and I do not answer that question. Would we see a decrease in services over the next ten years concomitant with an even greater increase in automobile commuters? This prompted me to imagine a future scenario of bumper-to-bumper traffic and all the unpleasant associations that follow. I suppose that this thought took roughly nine-to-twelve seconds to complete. All the while, I was able to walk to my classroom and prepare to teach my class, even though I had managed to process this message and think about the ramifications of the Census 2000. I remember distinctly suspending my ruminations to attend to a blaring horn from oncoming traffic, but I quickly recovered and continued my ruminations as I crossed the busy street. This ability to control attention, to carry out one task while attending to another, and to periodically switch between the two seamlessly is a common facet of human cognition of the mazeway. Rhetorical theory needs to account for the control of attention in public spaces. Harmonizing: Reference Point Reasoning The Census Bureau, working in conjunction with the Chisholm-Mingo Group, tested the tagline and found it message effective, but also decided to rework it for specific groups. African-American’s responded even more positively to the message:

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This is our future. Don’t leave it blank. American Indians and Alaska Natives, in contrast to both, responded most favorably to the message: Generations are counting on this. Don’t leave it blank. These variations suggest some interesting prospects for future research in rhetoric and attention in particular and rhetorical theory specifically, for which I can only touch on lightly here. Specifically, it reveals that different groups choose different reference points from which to build representations of a collective identity, even though the scenario is sufficiently similar to that of other groups. These are different units of selective attention activated in harmonic synchrony. With the standard tagline, the unit of selective attention is the individual. Directing attention begins with the individual and his or her own self-interests. That is the reference point from which the reasoning process begins. To the extent that the standard tagline reflects the worldview of a largest cultural block in the United States, one can hypothesize that the reference point reasoning of the dominant culture is typically individualistic. Thus, it takes sustained attention and effort to scale up the representation to the community or group. The rhetoric of the civic-minded individual begins with the individual. With the African-American tagline, the unit of selection begins with the group; thus, the reference point of reasoning for this racial group begins with community interest. Conversely, it takes sustained attention to scale down the representation to self-interest. With the American Indian and Alaska Native tagline, the unit of selective attention is with future generations, suggesting a propensity to project farther into the future as an initial reference point than do populations responding most positively to the standard address. It takes sustained attention to proceed from the future back to present self-interest. The upshot of this analysis suggests that different groups speaking the same language, nevertheless, deploy linguistic resource differently, with forms (such as plural pronouns) where harmonic attention is the default mode of here-and-now, and, consequently, the default point of orientation for expressing the thereand-then. As important as harmonic attention is in these cases, it is nevertheless important rhetorically for the Census campaign to get addressees to focus attention on the individual and his or her answers to the questionnaire, for answering the Census questionnaire is an individual act of civic

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virtue. In all cases, a dynamic tension exists between the individual and the group in which different groups speaking the same language deploy complementary tactics for directing and harmonizing attention. Summary This case study casts the framework with a new empirical imperative: how to deal with messages distributed diffusely throughout a community saturated with other messages vying for the addressee’s attention. How do we pay attention in the world of actuality in order to pay attention to the worlds of potentiality, switching attention back and forth between these two realities? A theory of rhetoric grounded in attention as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon is critical understanding and, ultimately explaining, how human beings construct past, present, and future versions of others and us for the purpose of guiding thought and action. A tripartite system of attention comprised of eight distinct but related elements – alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing and directing – gives us some purchase on this problem. In addition, the mental spaces and blending framework offers rhetoricians a dynamic analytic model of specific rhetorical practices.

Chapter Summary Rhetoricians have long been interested in the strategic and tactical uses of signs with an implicit understanding that the real work is in the structures used to manage addressees’ disposition to attend. It is within those dispositions to focus on signals in interpersonally charged contexts that rhetoric does its work, where rhetors apply their crafts, and where rhetoricians study its effects. But attention has only until recently been framed as an explicit concern among rhetorical theorists, most notably by Lanham. The reason for this is varied and complex, not the least of which being the lack of systematic descriptions of how it might operate in the kinds of environments rhetoricians study. Controlled experiments are quite revealing but difficult to scale up to human behavioral contexts (as discussed in the first chapter). But more pertinent to the present exploration is the fact that rhetoric has been “theorized” since Aristotle as a function of the speaker address-

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ing an audience, with little regard for the media saturated environments themselves. This situation is of course changing as we speak, as more and more rhetoricians and compositionists are studying writing and other practices in situ with a complement of ethnographic methods. Even so, rhetoric is still defined very much along Aristotelian principles, and these principles should not be abandoned, but it should be recognized that for Aristotle, as for Perelman and Burke, the models of rhetorical activity match those exemplified in the first case study, a text that, by virtue of its social ontological status, commands attention. The second case study, on the other hand, fits a different world, one safely ignored or bracketed in Aristotle and anticipated but nevertheless very much on the periphery in Perelman and Burke. The text in question does not command attention as much as it invites attention. This is the world of discourse referenced in Lanham’s treatment of rhetoric. The provenance of the speaker – the Census Bureau – has no discernable embodied character. There is no presidential body speaking. It must compensate for its non-corporeal nature by repeated materializations in different guises within the semiotic landscape. It can at one time take on the voice of an ethnic type, at another time it can be materialized through the voice of a celebrity over the radio. The only guarantor of a substantial audience is sheer repetition and strategic placement. The overarching point is that both case studies represent two competing sides of contemporary rhetorical activities in the public sphere: activities that in virtue of the social ontological status of the attributed “author” guarantees an audience or activities in which there is no immediately attributable “author” and thus only guarantees an audience in virtue of placement. I offer the conjecture that the same attention system underlies both cases but their processes differ. Bush’s “Preface” is a case of a top-down imposition of a singular event – the issuance of an expected report by a sitting president that some are obligated to pay attention to as a matter of duty (i. e., members of Congress and select journalists) that, when aligned with specific historical events involving National Security, guarantees an even wider audience. The Census Bureau’s slogan is a contrasting case of bottom-up imposition of the same message within the larger semiosphere. True, select phrases and passages from the “Preface” get taken up in the same semiosphere to become more or less autonomous items, but they nevertheless retain their provenance as Bush’s own utterances, even as they are uttered by administration officials. The same is not true of the second case. Each case takes a very different voice.

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A fitting end to this case study and this book is to suggest that the movement from attention to meaning in contemporary rhetoric culture follows one of these two paths, with obvious complex peregrinations in between. It may have always been that way, but it has not always been apparently so. The great challenge is not only to understand how these processes operate case by case in all their particulars but to also to understand, explain, and even predict the effects of attention, good or bad, desirable or undesirable. But that is a question for a different occasion.

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Concluding Remarks

Among the cognitive processes implicated in meaning construction, attention is preeminent in determining what we mean, how we mean, and why we mean. These pages have explored the role attention plays in signification, discourse, and persuasion, noting in particular the need for “thick descriptions” of experiences with the various uses of signs and symbols in specific institutional settings and rhetorical contexts – from art and zoological exhibitions, spoken philosophical discussions and written texts of relatively trivial import, to high-stakes rhetorical deliberations – all from the perspective of an ideal researcher-observer. In each case, connecting the world to be represented to the world of representing systems requires the mechanics of mental spaces and the processes of the signal, selection, and interpersonal attention on systems. The greater attention system provides semioticians, cognitive linguists, and rhetorical theorists with a heuristic, or discovery procedure, for describing meaning as hypostatic (what is), hypothetical (what if ), and hypotyposic (as if ) scenarios. Such is the proposed general framework for thinking about meaning. The next step is to take the observations, hunches, hypotheses etc. and test their empirical validity. Such steps would necessarily include taking the attention system into the laboratory through controlled elicitation. Do human participants have a canonical attention set? And can this canonical format be altered, and if so, how difficult is it to achieve alternative forms of attention and for how long? Additional experiments might shed light on what exactly human participants pay attention to, for how long, and in what order, as they experience a walk through an exhibition space. Experimental protocols involving head-mounted, mobile eye trackers among several patrons from different backgrounds may reveal diverging and converging patterns of signaling, selecting, and harmonizing attention. One such study that immediately comes to mind is an intergenerational study of patrons as they experience the same exhibition – is there, indeed, a detectable difference between the current generation of so-called “hyper attentive” youngsters and an older generation of so called “deep attention” oldsters? The examination of saccades may tell us more about the non-conscious processes underlying attention and meaning in designed spaces such as zoos and museums, yet the empirical investigation of attention phenomena still

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needs to find ways to capture the inner experience of many participants. How to capture reliably the contents of conscious experience, and thus see if 1) the contents of consciousness match the hunches about meaning making activities explored in these pages, and if 2) the processes of attention operate in the manner conjectured in these same pages. I will end by suggesting a hybrid of two recent elicitation methods: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). EMA samples experience during specific events and situations, such as multiple visits to a specific exhibition space (see Stone and Shiffman 1994). This method usually samples participants’ inner experiences at regular predictable intervals during well defined events, but the application as I envision it will adopt the random sampling method of DES, the more important and developed of the two methods. According to standard DES protocol outlined by Hurlburt (1990) and Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel (2007), participants are outfitted with a beeper programmed to emit sounds in random intervals while engaging in daily activities. Upon hearing the beep, the participant is to record via language, drawing, or any other preferred modality his or her inner experience immediately preceding the beep. The general instruction is simply to “report anything you are experiencing just prior to hearing the beep.” The researcher then interviews the participant about the content of each beep. The virtue of this method is that 1) the question is not leading (leaving open a range of responses in both content and form) and 2) that the randomness of the sampling ameliorates confirmation bias inherent in most introspective methods, particularly the “armchair observations” of this exploration. Such methods bring about the possibility of genuine thick descriptions of attentional experiences with participants and, quite possibly, sufficiently robust generalizations about the kinds of contents elicited within designed spaces, along with the quantity, quality, duration, and intensity of these experiences across participants, leading to empirically qualified modifications of the Greater Attention System. For instance, we might find that it is indeed very difficult to sustain attention on a specific topic for longer than a few seconds, or that there is a precise and predictable relationship between the “semiotic denseness” of a designed space and participants’ ability to orient to it, or that specific types of signs produce predictable emotional engagements only in precise locations and distances. We may even find that some items designed to be attended to are in fact not capturing the attention in the way one normally thinks, requiring us to rethink heretofore conventional wisdom about meaningfulness. A rich vein of attention research in real world settings awaits us.

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Appendix A

Preface to National Security Strategy of the United States of America [1] The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. [2] In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. [3] People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children – male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. [4] These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society – and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages. [5] Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. [6] In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. [7] We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. [8] In a world that is safe, people will be able to make their own lives better. We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. [9] We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. [10] We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. [11] Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government. [12] Today, that task has changed dramatically. [13] Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. [14] Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. [15] Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us. [16] To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal – military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. [17] The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. [18] America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. [19] And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists – because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. [20] The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. [21] Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn. [22] The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. [23] Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass

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destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. [24] The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. [25] We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. [26] We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. [27] And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. [28] We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. [29] So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. [30] History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. [31] In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action. [32] As we defend the peace, we will also take advantage of an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. [33] Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. [34] Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side – united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. [36] The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. [37] We are also increasingly united by common values. [38] Russia is in the midst of a hopeful transition, reaching for its democratic future and a partner in the war on terror. [39] Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth. [40] In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness. [41] America will encourage the advancement of democracy and economic openness in both nations, because these are the best foundations for domestic stability and international order. [42] We will strongly resist aggression from other great powers – even as we welcome their peaceful pursuit of prosperity, trade, and cultural advancement. [43] Finally, the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. [44] We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. [45] The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. [46] Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. [47] Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders. [48] The United States will stand beside any nation determined to build a better future by seeking the rewards of liberty for its people. [49] Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty – so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity. [50] The United States will deliver greater development assistance through the New Millennium Challenge Account to nations that govern justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. [51] We will also continue to lead the world in efforts to reduce the terrible toll of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. [52] In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities. [53] Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror. [54] Nations that depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. [55] Nations that seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well spent. [56] For freedom to thrive, accountability must be expected and required.

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[57] We are also guided by the conviction that no nation can build a safer, better world alone. [58] Alliances and multilateral institutions can multiply the strength of freedomloving nations. [59] The United States is committed to lasting institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of American States, and NATO as well as other long-standing alliances. [60] Coalitions of the willing can augment these permanent institutions. [61] In all cases, international obligations are to be taken seriously. [62] They are not to be undertaken symbolically to rally support for an ideal without furthering its attainment. [63] Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person – in every civilization. [64] Throughout history, freedom has been threatened by war and terror; it has been challenged by the clashing wills of powerful states and the evil designs of tyrants; and it has been tested by widespread poverty and disease. [65] Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom’s triumph over all these foes. [66] The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission. George Bush THE WHITE HOUSE, September 17, 2002

Appendix B

Transcript from Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English Philosophy Discussion Session April 16, 1998 Participants: 1 female graduate student; 19 undergraduate students Transcription Key .. a brief pause … longer pause , a continuative contour . a terminal contour ? a yes-no question contour -- truncated or fragmentary unit : lengthening of a preceding vowel or consonant > accelerated speech >> >Kant today?>the categoriesa game>the rules unify the gameour consciousnesseffect occurthat it’s us.